As I debated whether I wanted to start a new blog writing project, the creeping thoughts of “But what about AI??” became pretty loud. I’ve seen some really WTF stuff from former students and currently, a handful of editing clients, that turned out to be “AI slop,” so I had to pause before signing up to put more content into the world only to potentially have it scraped, distorted, and regurgitated.

Full disclosure: I have used generative AI for an occasional recipe or what have you. Never for writing, and never for reading or editing, either. Although I came up with the title and tagline, the logo and header image for After, Apparently was generated by ChatGPT, after being given a brief description of the site’s tone and style – and that’s mainly because I have absolutely no skill as a graphic designer, and anyone I know who does is out of my price range.

The essays published here on After, Apparently are all written and edited by me (or occasionally edited by a fellow human). I do not use generative AI for idea generation, essay organization or writing, feedback, suggestions, website management, website design (with the exception noted above) or anything else. Whenever I use an image, a quotation, a song reference, etc., the most accurate attribution is always included. The ideas, language, judgments, and editorial decisions represented here are entirely my own.

I also do not grant permission for the text or images published on this site to be scraped, copied, reproduced, ingested, or used to train, fine-tune, evaluate, or otherwise develop generative AI systems without my prior written permission.

In short: Please enjoy the essays, but please do not feed them to a machine.