“No AI” vs. “Built with AI”: Am I Being a Hypocrite?
As I redesigned my personal blog here in 2026, I noticed something that might come across as starkly hypocritical to anyone reading it without the full picture. So I owe you a clean explanation of what it is all about.
You’ll notice parts of my blog that specifically say “No AI.” Then you’ll notice other articles where I openly disclose that I used AI to help with a project, including helping write code. Stating both on the same site seems contradictory, and I want to clear up the distinction.
The power of AI as a building tool
I have found modern AI tools to be tremendously helpful. Using modern frontier models and advanced coding tools has let me build features and structural pieces of this site that I would never have been able to pull off entirely by hand. The power of these tools is genuinely staggering, and I am impressed with what they make possible.
In short, I have made generous, fully disclosed use of advanced AI tools to accomplish things in a fraction of the time, work that would otherwise have cost tens of thousands of dollars and months of effort with a human team.
That goes for some of the artwork too. A handful of the header illustrations and share-card images around the site were made with AI image generators. When I lean on these tools to build the site, I am happy to say so out loud.
Where “No AI” comes from
The “No AI” label started with an app I built to help people write, called Jamie’s Blue Pencil.
There are a million tools out there now, and large language models (artificial intelligence) are something people use every day to edit their emails, letters, and papers. But I wrote Jamie’s Blue Pencil specifically for people who want an editing tool that helps them fix their grammar and keep a consistent voice without handing their words to an AI to rewrite. That is exactly where my “No AI” stance was born.
Privacy, transparency, and local processing
My other privacy-focused tools, like the Thyroid Journal, work the same way. They do not tap into an AI engine at all. Most of them run entirely in your browser, so your data stays on your device. The few that need outside information, like a weather forecast, only send the minimum required (a ZIP code, for example) and never to an AI engine. Every tool has a clear privacy note telling you exactly what it touches. Some of my tools let you have an account on this web sites server that saves various details, game scores, etc. Important private information is stored encrypted.
If I ever build an app that genuinely uses a neural-net AI engine, I will say so plainly, so you know your data is being sent off the site to be processed. I have done my best to put extremely clear privacy notes and policies on every application so you know exactly what happens with your data.
That kind of transparency is rare in a world where most companies hand you a 5,000-word agreement you accept with one click, quietly letting your data flow from their own systems out to third-party marketing partners.
Analytics and traffic
I do run Google Analytics on the site to see visitor counts, popular posts, and similar metrics, just like almost every modern site. So traffic information is shared with Google Analytics, which is fully disclosed in the site’s privacy policy.
In the future if I add something that sends traffic off site, such as something advertising related or similar, I will let you know.
Please contact me if you have any questions.
