People put little badges on their sites now: “100% human, no AI.” I understand the impulse. But it would be a lie if I wore that badge, because I use AI every day and I write about it constantly. So let me be precise about what I actually mean when I say this site is human.
The judgement is mine. The tools are AI; the thinking is not. There is a real difference between using AI to help you work and letting it do your thinking for you, and I know exactly where I draw that line. I decide what is worth saying, whether it holds up, and whether it is any good. The machine never gets that job.
A note on my English
German is my first language. A lot of what you read here started as German thoughts, often on my German site, and I carried them across into English. That crossing sometimes leaves phrasing a native speaker would not choose. I used to treat that as a flaw to hide. I don’t anymore. It is just what it sounds like when someone thinks in one language and writes in another, and I would rather you heard the actual person than a smoothed-over imitation of one.
Why it matters to me
I have built AI systems from the inside, so I am not romantic about any of this. I have seen what these tools can do, and where they quietly fall short. What I keep coming back to is that experience cannot be synthesised. My writing comes from decades of doing the work, getting plenty of it wrong, and slowly noticing what mattered. A model can imitate the shape of that. It has not lived it.
So when you read something here, you are reading a real person’s considered view, in his own slightly accented English, helped along by tools but decided by him. People keep asking whether a human wrote the thing in front of them. With me the answer is yes, and now you know what I mean by it.