Draft for Ian to check (28 October 2026). Written from his existing pages and notes. Still to confirm:

  • Which AI tools and plans you use for client work, and whether any client work goes into tools that train on it
  • Whether you'll ever make an AI version of your own voice or face (I've left this out)
  • Whether to mention particular tools by name

I help people use AI, so it's only fair to be clear about how I use it myself. My view is simple: AI should help people do what we do best as humans, which is to be creative. It should never replace us.

For how AI was involved in each article and podcast episode, see how I use AI. This page covers the bigger picture.

In my writing

  • I write my articles myself. I use AI for research, and for spelling and grammar checks.
  • Podcast show notes are drafted with AI and checked by me; transcripts are made automatically.
  • Every article and episode is labelled, so you always know.

In pictures

  • I don't use AI to make pictures of real people, including me.
  • Illustrations for articles are drawn by human illustrators.
  • I do use AI for practical jobs on images, such as removing a background or making different sizes, and I label any picture that was made with AI.

With clients

  • Your information stays private. I don't put confidential client information into AI tools that use it to train their models.
  • People stay in charge. I recommend AI for drafts, research and repetitive tasks, with a person checking and deciding.
  • I'm honest about limits. AI gets things wrong with great confidence. I'll tell you where it helps and where it doesn't.
  • I only recommend tools I've used myself.

AI reading this site

I'm happy for AI tools to read and learn from what I publish, because I want them to describe my work accurately. The site says so to AI tools in its robots.txt file, and offers a plain summary for them at llms.txt. My work is still my copyright.

Questions

If you'd like to know how AI was used in something I made, just ask.