AI usage on this site

We use AI in some places and not in others, and we would rather tell you which is which than leave you guessing. Here is the whole of it.

The conversations are real

Every session and every story is a recording of people talking. None of it is generated, and none of the voices are synthetic. We edit the recordings in Descript, which uses AI for the tedious parts: removing the ums, tightening a long pause, cleaning up audio.

We invite guests, and what they bring is theirs. We cannot tell you whether a slide they showed or an abstract they sent us was written with AI, and we do not ask.

The site is built with AI, and the code is public

This version of the site was designed and written with an AI coding agent, working from a written brief that says what the site is for and how it should behave. A person reviews every change and every change is signed and committed by a person. Nothing reaches the site because an agent decided it should.

You do not have to take our word for it. The whole thing is open:the source, the brief and every commit are on GitHub, including the ones where we got it wrong and said so in the message.

The brand underneath it is not ours and is not generated. The logo, the colours and the typography came from Art of Design, and the build works inside what they made.

How a page gets here

Everything you read is written and edited by us in Notion. A script reads Notion, turns each page into a file in the repository, and commits it. The site is then rebuilt and published automatically. That means the text on a page is the text somebody typed, and you can see the moment it changed in the commit history.

Nothing publishes itself. A page appears here only once a human sets its status to published in Notion, and comes down the same way.

Where AI writes a first draft

After a story is recorded, we use AI to turn the transcript into a first draft of the written version and to pull out the design heuristics that came up in the conversation. Both are then edited by us before anything is published, and the heuristics are curated by hand: we throw plenty of them away.

The same goes for the posts that announce a session or a story on social media. They are drafted automatically and saved as drafts, and one of us reads and sends them.

Images

Some images are generated: the illustrations on the heuristics and the background templates the story artwork is built on, both made to match our branding. Photographs of people are photographs of people. We are moving the generated ones over to Canva as we go.

Our own writing

What we write ourselves gets spell-checked and tidied with Grammarly and, now and then, a language model. The thinking, the opinions and the mistakes are ours.

If something here looks wrong, or you think we have drawn the line in the wrong place, tell us in Discord. We would rather argue about it than get it quietly wrong.