I attached my real name to this site. That means that above all, this site must represent me authentically.

Authenticity is why I don’t use any generative AI tools in authoring or editing my posts. Heck, I barely even use spellcheck. The 2006 Adam Sandler movie Click pretty clearly spelled out the risks of letting an AI autopilot your life: Such technology promises to augment the self, but dilutes it instead. I would rather document my ideas, even if they aren’t very good, than some weird average of my thoughts and every Reddit comment GPT has ingested.

Authenticity also requires that I abandon any pretenses about what happens after I inject my thoughts into the world. I don’t use AI, but I don’t use any countermeasures against AI scrapers either, such as blocking OpenAI’s domains in robots.txt. If the scrapers don’t get the text from here, they’ll get it from GitHub, or from someone quoting me on another blog. Although I do not welcome plagiarism, it’s a risk I accept as the price of participating in an interconnected society. (If you want to reuse text from Illusion Slopes, LICENSE.txt gives the terms.)

Finally, on the internet, it appears difficult to combine authenticity with marketing. So, I don’t use Illusion Slopes to try to sell anything, nor do I employ any marketing cookies or user fingerprinting tech to collect statistics about the people who visit the site. Back when I used Blogger, I used to get some “dumb” analytics about post views by IP geolocation, but now that I use a static site generator, I don’t even know which posts are more or less popular. I like it that way; it ensures I am writing for myself.

Putting this all together, I realize that the Illusion Slopes AI policy is really a non-policy. I’m neither for nor against AI; it’s just “there,” a technology that doesn’t have much to do with what this site is about. That could change in the future, as the technology becomes more pervasive and harder to opt out of (and hopefully more useful). But for now, I am happy with the incidental benefits of failing to reposition my website for the AI era:

  • Without AI-generated filler images or heavy JavaScript analytics, the site loads quickly (I hope?).
  • Everyone who wants to read the site, can. I don’t have to worry about an aggressive anti-scraping filter that accidentally blocks legitimate users.
  • If I write something wrong, then won’t have to issue shallow excuses about how “the model told me so.” For better or worse, I own my errors.