Minimal AI
NicWeyand.com proudly does not use AI in any writing. However, I use AI as a sounding board for my works sometimes, but never copy and paste anything the AI gives me into my works. This whole site is written by myself, Nic Weyand.
To be clear on any nuances, here's what "Minimal AI" means:
- I use spell checkers, grammar checkers, formatting tools inside of programs like Scrivener, Ghost CMS, LibreOffice etc.
- This is technically AI, and for the sake of transparency, I will state their use, even if it feels obvious.
- I do not prompt ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Llama, etc. to write anything for me. All the writing is my own. I have not, and never will, ask any AI model to write my work. 100% of everything on my site is entirely written by me, Nic Weyand.
- Occasionally I will feed drafts into an Ollama Deepseek R1 model I have running offline to give feedback and opinions. Essentially I use offline models to act as sounding boards.
- I am in no way obligated to use anything they say, its just nice to use as a tool sometimes.
- I have moral and ethical qualms, given these models are all built on plagiarism. My only defense is: they exist, and they are useful. I am uneasy with using them, and frankly they aren't very good as-is, but occasionally when I hit a wall, I can use them for help and they sometimes bring up something I hadn't considered before.
- I have no problem deleting Ollama and the models in question from my computer if this feels like a violation to my users. Given my current feelings of uneasiness, I might do that on my own altogether.
- It is my policy to never copy and paste anything an AI gives me. I would consider doing so "AI writing for me", instead of me doing my own work. If the AI raises a point or counterargument I hadn't considered, I write everything responding to it on my own, in my own voice, and never write what it gave me directly.
- I only use offline models (Currently DeepSeek, IBM Granite & Meta's Llama 4) via Ollama, as I find using online services like ChatGPT environmentally destructive. Moreover, I do not wish to support OpenAI or Anthropic.
- I have had ChatGPT and Claude accounts, and have used these services in the past. I have not, and will never publish anything generated by these platforms here or on any other platform bearing my name, as I see their use mostly as experimentation and getting familiar with what's out there.
- I find Claude to be better at generating code, but it is still AI, and the code is fairly worthless to my projects. It simply doesn't know what I want, or how to build it properly. The lack of full context, even in project knowledge, makes building projects properly impossible.
- Just because it ran in your IDE does not mean it is good code.
- I like programming! And I would rather do it myself, and know every bit myself.
- I think "vibe coding" and similar concepts are antithetical to the artistry possible with programming, as well as the obvious technical skills. I believe this will introduce serious security holes by untrained people merely shipping code "because it works".
- I find Claude to be better at generating code, but it is still AI, and the code is fairly worthless to my projects. It simply doesn't know what I want, or how to build it properly. The lack of full context, even in project knowledge, makes building projects properly impossible.