Re; On AI in response to: A Positive Technologist Identity (4/4)

(See parts 1, 2, and 3 of my response.)

I conclude my response with a favorable reply to Mr. Powiertowski’s eloquent penultimate paragraph. He includes a general disclosure statement of sorts above all of his blog posts and articles explaining that he uses AI for editing and proofreading his writing, but notes that all thoughts are his own. That statement explains how he uses AI tools. Here he articulates a personal purpose beyond ensuring that his articles are clear and free of the kinds of typos I am surely wont to make. Mr. Powiertowski explains that he is a technologist, not a writer, and that his time to publish writing on the internet is limited by work and having a family. As he explains, AI tools enable him to publish his thoughts on the internet “without giving up time with my family” (I would hope that none of my fellow webmasters out there are putting blogging before family). I like his emphasis on purpose, not just explaining how he uses a tool, but why (far be it from me to make suggestions, but I think he may have a full essay topic here). While I have never addressed these issues squarely in the context of running a website, my appreciation for thinking about why comes through my my essays on An Essay on Productivity, Production, and Productive Leisure and Evaluating Purpose in Organizing Feeds. To put it differently, regardless of whether I or blogger X would personally use AI tools to assist in the editing and proofreading processes, Mr. Powiertowski has thought about the issue in terms of means and ends, and is ends seem well-ordered to me.

I conclude by again noting that I enjoyed both of Mr. Powiertowski’s posts. While my views of the “AI moment” (as I call it) remain largely negative and I do not think AI tools becoming “ubiquitous and pervasive, disruptive to many forms of human activity” (quoting Mr. Powiertowski) has been or will become a net positive for writing on the internet, we can and should evaluate individual articles and websites on their merits and consider that webmasters may have perfectly good reasons for running their own projects in different ways. Were someone to see Mr. Powiertowski’s AI disclosure and closed his two posts without taking the time to read, I fear that person would have missed out on some food for thought.