Hansel AI Disclosure

I've decided I'm going to start putting a note at the bottom of my blog posts.

Written with Reggie, Claude, Gemini, Otter, and 64+ trips around the sun.

And no, it isn't an apology.

I use AI. A lot. I use it to argue with me, question me, organize things I've been thinking about for years, find holes in my reasoning, work through transcripts, compare versions of ideas, and occasionally help me find the words for something I already know but haven't figured out how to say yet.

Otter listens. Gemini helps. Claude helps. Reggie helps. I've given them names, roles, context, and more of my thinking than I probably could have imagined a few years ago.

But none of them have been alive for 64 years.

None of them grew up in my house or knew my parents and grandparents. They didn't go to West Point with me or spend decades standing beside tennis courts. They didn't build programs, watch them work, watch them fail, raise children, bury people they loved, make bad decisions, change their minds, or accumulate the scars and pattern recognition that come from actually living a life.

When Coach Peterson was alive, he'd call me at six in the morning. He'd tell me something I didn't want to hear but needed to hear. Summing it up in one line would cheapen what that relationship actually was, so I won't try. I relished those calls, even the ones that put a mirror up in front of me and made me uncomfortable.

I believe in the intelligence of these tools. I've just never given any of them the mantle of mentor.

They can help me work with the material. They didn't create the material. That distinction matters to me.

I've never been particularly interested in proving that I can perform every part of a process manually. I'm interested in whether the finished work says something worth saying. I use a computer instead of a typewriter. I use spellcheck. I dictate. I transcribe. I search. I talk ideas through with people. And now I work with several extraordinarily capable artificial intelligences.

I'm not going to hide that because someone has decided there's virtue in pretending the tools available in 2026 don't exist. At the same time, I'm not going to hand the tools the authorship of a life they didn't live.

The ideas on my blog come from somewhere. Increasingly, they come from looking backward at things I wrote, said, taught, built, believed, screwed up, learned, and occasionally got right over the course of a fairly long trip.

AI has made me much better at excavating that material. It has also made me more productive. More curious. More willing to revisit old assumptions. Better able to connect something I noticed twenty years ago with something I saw yesterday. I consider all of that a feature.

So I'm going to disclose the collaboration, but I'm not going to apologize for it.

Written with Reggie, Claude, Gemini, Otter, and 64+ trips around the sun.

The first four help me write.

The last one gives me something to write about.

Hansel