I've been wondering lately how much of current online content should be signed not as written by, but as prompted by.
Lord knows all of the code that I write should be at the very least co-authored with Claude or whatever model I'm using that day. So that got me thinking: for things like my tweets and my blog posts, is there an audience I might feel like I owe admitting to, whether I wrote something or whether I prompted it into existence?
I'm old school enough to think that it matters how you assemble words together in your mind. It's a matter of identity, and is in the domain of the neocortex, that which, among other things, makes us uniquely human. *
So if I value that so highly from my side, wouldn't I owe it to communicate it outwardly?
My conclusion is that I'm going to add tags and notices to this blog to show which piece of writing includes me using AI for anything other than spell check and such.
Why now
I briefly wrote before about how there are so many ideas for pieces of writing (also coding) I get that I never materialize. I just switched jobs and I'm trying to bring myself up to speed with all of the pieces of the stack that aren't super familiar to me. somewhere in the codebase I saw a caching solution that made life a lot easier and asked myself: how much caching is actually going on, all the time, between silicon and this javascript framework. I knew the answer was worthy of a PhD dissertation, or, rather, is actually a sizeable stack of them, in practice. Plus I only knew the stack down to a certain point, and it loses opacity quickly below how, say, Redis works. *
So instead of putting a one sentence story idea into my notes app I told o3 to outline it for me, what I wanted it to explain, and out came a really nice outline that... now I want to put on my blog, because I like it? But I can't really sign my name on it, not as author. But as prompter... sure.