The Press Room

A series on the mechanics, practices, and polices of The Experimentalist

Jun 27, 2025

AI-generated image of a hand printing press

Writing online faces challenges, as does the reading of the resulting product.

Readers have fair claim to a need to understand where an author is coming from, what their personal or professional stake or biases may be, in order to evaluate the integrity and relevance of the content.
Readers increasingly crave authenticity and less emotional button-pushing than AI-crafted material is often designed for.
Accuracy and research matter, for which AI can be both a support and hindrance.
It is a worthwhile community service with negligible competitive risk to help others see what they might face in their own future literary efforts.

My Biases

My origin begins with family that for the most part got dirt under their fingernails. Growing up was filled with stories of the life and hard decisions forced by the Great Depression. Most of the extended family and friends were firmly blue-collar, some were white-collar middle class, and some farmers were sprinkled into the mix. Politics were varied and not party-affiliated. Family religious views were all over the map: Anglican, Catholic, Mormon, Salvation Army, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Swedish Presbyterian, and over-the-airwaves televangelist; tossed into that I was the lone Daoist/Buddhist-leaning kid who was into martial arts.

One of the things I value about writing is that I usually sound less energetic than what you might hear when my Scottish, Irish, and English roots combine with growing up around teamsters (which I was myself for summer jobs), carnies, bus drivers, and longshoremen, which then later morphed into many years of the Massachusetts experience. If I get up a good head of steam, I fully admit I can give Bill Barr a run for his money. I try to keep a tight leash on that. Nobody needs another Ted sequel. The delete button really, really helps.

I was one of only a couple of family members that pursued a post-secondary education. The results were… mixed. I’d be on the Dean’s honor roll one year, and trying not to flunk out the next. Somehow in spite of that, I ended up working maybe a total of 18 or 19 years within academia. Initially it was just undergraduate rolls in development (fund raising) and cognitive psych research software development, then post-graduation within distance ed, academic computing support, academic administrative computing, and ultimately an affiliated cancer genomics research group. No, I don’t also do juggling and card tricks on weekends at kid’s birthday parties, but it would be an understandable guess since I just summarized only half of the resume.

All of that got tossed into the blender and resulted in valuing progressive goals as an aspiration for individual freedom and opportunity in our shared human experience, fiscal conservativism so there is some thin hope that the money flow alone doesn’t undermine long-term attainment of those aspirations, and I think a pretty pragmatic expectation that the confluence of education, economics, politics, and religion will always combine to make a common meeting of minds very challenging for society.

In short, I’m probably not really on anybody’s team. Y’all get to be equally skeptical of anything I have to say. I’ve never really got the “team” thing, I prefer to dig into each issue as something that has specific context, its own details or history, and I try to accept whatever conclusions the context and data seem consistent with. I also remind myself I usually get three things wrong every day before I’m even out of bed; given time I hope to cut that down to two.

AI Position

Much like I don’t get excessive team tribalism, I also don’t care about fanboys on really any topic. Setting aside the substance of AI, there is a contingent that only cares that you share their emotional energy. The more I see of it, the more I gravitate away since life is rarely lived in the extremes. My position has, very simply, varied over time. I expect it will continue to do so. Some initial reactions were wrong, some so far are not, and time will continually force me to re-evaluate.

Article Content

I do not have any interest in using AI to generate article content for the simple reason that this is what I enjoy. I cannot imagine a more self-defeating behavior than to hand over the thing I like doing, and instead spending more time on other things I don’t like doing. This is not a criticism of other’s use of AI in writing. It is just a personal choice on where my finite human experience will be devoted. I do not view the act of writing as merely a transactional endeavor. For me the process is just as much the point as the published result, and I’m the one and only caster of that particular vote.

What I do use AI for is generating images to establish the mood of each piece. If I had the budget to fund a fractional graphic artist or cartoonist role, I would much rather that. Time will tell if I get there. For now, I value how AI helps me bootstrap a small refinement in user experience.

Advertising

Some acts of publishing words are not the same. Keeping your content visible means navigating through social media algorithms, and authors have no control over the heuristics those services contain. One of the more pragmatic ways to deal with that is to create shorter posts on various sites which function as advertising, redirecting users to the primary platforms: Substack and Medium in my case. I’m not currently using AI for advertising posts, but it is entirely possible that one day I will. Whether you craft advertisements manually or via AI, they are increasingly a highly artificial exercise and there is little point in pretending otherwise.

Research

There are understandable concerns about the accuracy of research done via AI. On that front, I have good news. I’m a digital packrat. If there was a Digital Packrat Olympics I would have a string of gold medals. I’ve been squirreling away links, notes, projects, and dumps of those into Git repositories for years. I add dozens of tidbits every single day. There are even a few boxes of paper reports tucked away in corners, and don’t even get me started on the books which total approximately a half ton by weight. I know because I’ve moved those boxes.

Given the time it would take to write articles on even a tenth of all that, I’ve got a multi-decade head start before I’m exposed to how online content degrades via AI-driven data recycling. If I have a moat for a competitive advantage in writing, information hoarding may very well turn out to have be it. Enjoy. That said, if I ever did use AI to help me with article content, it could be to digest this immense mound of trivia and help me turn it into starting points for code or topics. Once fully incorporated via LLM or RAG, I’d be back to doing my thing my way.

Wrapping Up

I’ll have other posts about the mechanics of newsletter publishing and how some decisions were made. There is also the potential for others to contribute their own articles and so I’ll be speaking to that process as well.