Stop My Brain From Atrophying

I am publishing this blog site for two reasons:

1. Create dog fooded blogging functionality for BlockNinja CMS, my custom CMS platform
2. Make sure that I don't forget how to write functionally (if not well)

The internet is currently full of news articles and studies that should strike fear into the hearts of people that make frequent use of AI. The general idea is that the use of AI is causing us to become dumb.

I can believe that. I can believe that outsourcing your thinking to AI is definitely an attractive addiction. Because I can feel the urge. There's also a grey area between "Just Googling for recommendations" and "asking ChatGPT or Claude for recommendations" because functionally it's the same data, right?

Often when responding to emails and forum comments I'll find myself writing a couple paragraphs and then getting tired of assembling my thoughts and I paste it into ChatGPT. I've even sat there prompting it for several iterations to try to make it sound like me.

Thinking about this AI crutch problem recently got me thinking: I actually haven't written any long form content for a long time. Not since having kids and even longer than that. I've always been proud of my ability to write, since being a teenager. For that reason alone I believe it's something worth continuing to hone and spend energy upkeeping.

So I dusted off my favourite unused domain name, knocked out a nice simple template for it, and wrote this post.

I also developed Human Proof -- a way to actually "prove" that you've written something. By being able to play back the writing process in real time.

A lot of people might not like this, as it does often reveal dumb thinking while writing that we eagerly edit away later, but I think it's a fun idea. Proving that content was "Human Made" is going to be something we will continue to have to strive for.

Hope for stability, but assume chaos, because it is the safe bet.