AI Use Policy

It's complicated...

TL;DR: I use AI tools to make illustrated editions possible despite arthritis and carpal tunnel. I don't use it to write my books. The full picture is more interesting than the Twitter argument. Read my complicated, messy 'policy' below:

I don't take a simplistic position on generative AI. I contain multitudes and my thoughts on it are distinctly in the grey area. Yes, I use AI tools as part of my creative process. Primarily for the visual art. I don't find it all that helpful for the vast majority of creative writing.

The technology seemed to blow up overnight, born into an extractive system, trained in ways that often failed to respect the labor and consent of artists and writers. That harm is real, and I grasp the sense of betrayal it creates. Yet I have to ask if our frustration is about the democratization of art, or the effects of end-stage capitalism?

I support strong regulation, meaningful guardrails, and licensing structures that compensate the people whose work made these systems possible. I'm also deeply concerned about the ways chatbots can become substitutes for human attachment, and I believe safeguards against that kind of misuse are essential.

At the same time, the technology exists. There is no returning to a world before it. What remains is the question of relationship.

I use AI as a supportive tool, not a replacement for human work or judgment. In visual art, I begin with my own sketches or photographs and combine them with purchased assets in post-production, editing heavily and composing intentionally. What I create with the aid of the machine IS what I envisioned.

For me, this is also a matter of access. Carpal tunnel and arthritis ended my ability to make art the way I used to. AI assistance is what makes illustrated editions possible at all; it takes some of the physical grunt work out of the process, handling things like backgrounds while I focus on figures, composition, and the creative decisions that are entirely mine. I finish everything by hand in Procreate. Without these tools, those books simply wouldn't exist. I'm not interested in defending that to anyone, but I do think it's worth saying plainly.

My novels are written by me. Entirely. Every word, every scene, every late night argument with a character who refuses to behave. I use AI for research, first-pass editing before my human editor gets involved, and marketing, because I am genuinely rubbish at marketing and the machines are better at pretending enthusiasm and massaging algorithms or whatever. What I don't use it for is the actual writing. The stories are mine. The essays and pieces here are mine. The semicolons are also mine, incorrectly placed; as God intended.

I don't believe AI-generated work is inherently soulless. I experience it as a conversation between human intention and machine process. What people rightly object to is low-effort use: automation without care, authorship without responsibility. AI slop... though to be fair, long before the machines there was plenty of empty clickbait human slop clogging up the internet too. That isn't what I'm interested in making.

Like many technologies before it, AI can either deepen extraction or support creativity, depending on how it's used and constrained. My aim is to remain grounded: to keep agency, meaning, and responsibility on the human side of the screen, while advocating for limits, accountability, and a future where this technology is made safer, fairer, less energy-intensive, and harder to abuse.

This is not an endorsement of unchecked AI. It's an attempt to meet a powerful tool with care, restraint, and intention. You won't find me telling another person how to create. If you use AI, great. If you hate it and want to paint, type, chisel in stone, or construct a Spam sculpture, also great. But I am genuinely exhausted by the drama. Make the thing. Own your process. Be kind to each other about it. That's all any of us can do.