Wednesday, May 13, 2026
What can I say? This site has been made impure by AI
You can get a badge for your blog declaring that you never, ever use AI. While it’s true that I never, ever use AI for my writing, I did use it once to make a graphic for an April Fools Day joke about how Apple is making the corners on its windows rounder than ever.
Also, I use AI quite a bit to help me with coding problems, although I can’t remember if I’ve done this for Newsonaut. Let’s just say it’s possible.
I definitely used it to help me create a WordPress theme from scratch for my wife’s blog, The Animal Reporter. It used to be the common wisdom was to take someone else’s theme and tweak it. I always hated this because it took away my creative freedom.
I initially thought of using WordPress for Newsonaut back in 2010 when it started up, but could not get my head around it. I settled on Textpattern for this reason, and have been happy with it ever since. It makes me glad there was no AI back then because I believe to this day that Textpattern is the better choice.
Still, AI has opened up new worlds for me beyond WordPress templates. For example, it has helped me deploy a website based on a static site generator and create a PHP-based guestbook, among other things.
The many hours I used to spend in Stack Overflow have been replaced by as little as a few minutes in Lumo or Le Chat.
So there you have it — full disclosure.
Thinking back on it, what would I have done for my April Fools Day graphic in the days before AI? I guess I could have made a crude approximation and tried to pass it off as a mockup. Maybe that would have been funnier. It’s something to keep in mind for next time.
