AI Policy

I generally reject the use of generative AI for contents on this website. In particular none of the software that this site runs (possibly with the exception of external dependencies such as Pandoc, Postgress, Python, Python-Panflute, and Python-Quart) use any AI-generated code.

On the content side of things I do not use any AI-generated content as of the time of this writing, but reserve the right to include the following in the future:

• Manually reviewed machine-translations for quotes in a different language than that of the primary post. (This is something that I already have in an as of yet unpublished draft). I have held for a long time that this is an area in which it makes immediate intuitive sense that LLMs could be good at, in which we actually see them being good, and in which there are use-cases where getting 95 % of the way can be extremely useful.

  The use-case that is relevant on this site are texts that are the object of discussion and as such require an accurate and as neutral as possible translation as possible; AI cannot provide the former, but is often a reasonable compromise for the latter; by manually adjusting only the parts that are misleading this can result in a translation that is not just good enough, but often even better than what I’d produce, even when translating between German and English.

• Manually reviewed alt-texts for image galleries. I still believe that there is value in human written alternative texts, but I simply have no interest to repeat the insane effort it took to add alt-texts to the images from my second trip to Japan, especially as the results were at that point not consistently better than what AI was producing. See this thread for more context.

• Manually edited captions for video or audio files: Anyone who has seen auto-generated captions on Youtube knows that they are bad, but I will argue that they are not useless; in a sense they are were machine translation were 10 years ago: Not suitable as reliable translations, but a good starting point for a manual translation, where a lot of the uninteresting busy-work has already been taken care of.

In short: I consider generative AI to be a potentially useful tool to help with tasks that are not-intended to be creative but rather busy work that is needed for accessibility.

I want to be clear though that I don’t mean to say by this, that especially translations, but also alt-texts cannot be creative work, but rather that they are not meant to be in the cases in which I will consider their use.