Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, whether we like it or not. We have a choice to make: embrace its strengths without sapping our creativity, or shun it completely and go old-school. Both choices have their merits. I have chosen the former, mostly because I am a lazy and inattentive proofreader; I hate scanning through lists of pages provided by Google searches, and, well, AI is pretty cool! But I have placed some rigid guardrails on myself, to wit:

• I use AI for brainstorming, researching subjects, getting questions answered, summarizing longer publications or sets of publications and fact-checking.  I often venture down deep rabbit holes with my AI assistant as I dig deeper into a subject.  I also often veer off into tangential subjects that waste my time. But I am ever vigilant and skeptical.  I frequently find errors made by my AI assistants and call them out.  Any information that I use in my writing has been verified against original sources to the extent I am able.  
  
• I am a terrible proofreader.  I can reread the same misspelling or garbled sentence repeatedly and not see it.  I sometimes have trouble spelling four-letter words. I use AI for proofreading, grammar checking and general copy editing.  I ask it not to critique my style, opinions or my voice—that, my dear reader, is your job. It is my choice whether to accept any suggested edits, and I take responsibility for every word, phrase, sentence and paragraph. I own every colon, comma, and dash (em or en), including the errors, omissions, misuses, and overuses.
  
• All the writing, opinions, truths, and mistakes in my posts are my own.  Unless I indicate otherwise, I draw any and all stories from my own memories, however faulty they may be.
  
• In creating this blog, I have not and never will ask an AI to write on my behalf.   The writing is all from my own warped, aged, pickled, and fermented brain.