Where and how Artificial Intelligence is used on this site

First off, I would like to state that this is a passion project of mine from both a technical side (I made it more difficult than needed just to try new things), but also from the content side; I have a passion for nutrition and being healthy. Using AI for this type of content feels specifically disingenuous to myself as if I can’t do the research and write what I want to write about then I shouldn’t be preaching it. This being said, this is a hobby project and sometimes in the interest of time I do use AI. Below is a comprehensive list of where I do and do not use AI:

Where I do use AI

The Backend

I have used this in generating code, specifically in setting up the CMS and for general help with coding the site. This has little effect on the text that you see and any text generated is inconsequential to the content’s core. For example, in the footer, most of the text links generated were done through AI and I didn’t personally type “2026 Metadata. All rights reserved” but this type of content to me isn’t worthy of being non-AI so I’m personally ok with not typing things like this out.

Research

I use AI to help with research on topics, usually after I start with a baseline document. This being said, however, I will never use AI as a source. Nowadays AI is decent about providing its sources in its response so if it does give me an area of interest to further research I will go to the source provided.

Proofreading

I like to barf onto the page and edit later. While I do my best to clean it up, I do usually run my documents through GPT just to go over grammar and sentence structure issues that I don’t catch. I like to think of this as a pre-AI level check because it’s suggesting changes like would be done in Microsoft Word- it is not adding sentences or making drastic changes like AI usually does. I always use this prompt when proofreading:

“Do not make any changes to this document; tell me if you see any issues with the sentence structure, syntax or where an area needs clarification. Give me the location of the needed edit in bullet points and I will make them myself. Any other suggestions you can put at the end of this list.”

Some Imagery

Sometimes I have a specific vision for what I’d like to show and must compromise by taking a step off my anti-AI hill. While ideally I would only use photos I’ve taken, or at the very least, real photos, I don’t for two main reasons: time and money. I don’t have the time to take every photo I want to use and using photos from the internet often comes with the drawback of being copyrighted and/or behind a paywall. While I thought about labeling all my AI photos I found that this took away from the immersive experience so if you really care I have kept track of images I’ve generated so contact me. If you really care. You don’t.

Where I do not use AI

Paragraph Text

As for any text you see in paragraphs, this is not AI generated and I hope that comes across in my writing style. Sometimes when I write my articles I use AI to generate talking points and have a few times stolen headings from what it recommends I talk about. This is usually a single word or two and I find this acceptable as a use. As stated before, I sometimes steal heading ideas from AI so I hesitate to say that all the text in my articles is fully mine. I want to be as transparent as possible because I too hate reading articles that a bot has written.

As a source

I don’t use AI as a source of truth- if it provides me with a “fact” I find that fact elsewhere on the internet, usually from a government or an organization's website, and cite it from there. Similar to how our high school teachers told us “Wikipedia is not a source!” I’d say the same about AI. However, like Wikipedia, it’s a great resource for knowledge and provides high quality sources in its citations.

Note

To avoid any confusion, when I say AI I mean LLMs not just grammar tools or really any “AI” tools made before 2020. For the things I do use AI for I generally use ChatGPT and its Codex agent for backend tasks.