The short version
- All artistic and creative components of this website has been and will always be created, written, produced, photographed, edited, and reviewed by an actual human being.
- The codebase of this website is also written by a human being and will remain that way as an exercise in non-AI-assisted coding. Vibe coding will never be employed in the production and development of this website.
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Some processes in the production of this website will employ AI
only because it no longer makes sense not to. In particular, the
following are done with the help of LLMs:
- Commit messages in git
- Code editor extensions that use AI for mundane and repetitive tasks
- Alt texts in some images from posts before June 2025 use AI-generated descriptions as their starting point and have been edited by me. All image alt texts in posts from June 2025 onwards have been written by myself only.
- francisrub.io will not feature AI-generated art in any form. It has not, and never will.
This website will always pride itself in the craft of creating websites by hand, and that includes the entire process from conception, design, coding, down to deployment and SEO management.
The long version
Large language models have become good at crafting texts, audio, still, and moving images. We are getting to a point where to retain the trust others have in you and your work, tell us how you made use of AI in your craft.
Generative AI has given us an opportunity to have a glimpse into the human soul—by showing us what art looks like without one. With the convenience that AI brings comes massive environmental harm in favor of the capitalistic interests of billionaires with money to burn. But I am not in the business of being overly woke; I do recognize the utility to be had in these AI systems.
That said, the very essence of this website is to be a channel for my creative experiments. It does not make any sense for me to use AI to write my blogs, put my thoughts into words, generate images of me in different outfits, or create layouts and designs for me and transform them into code. Number 1: the slop it would generate would give me migraines enough for me to take this site down altogether out of spite. Number 2: I can no longer do these creative endeavours anywhere else; letting AI do it for me is signing myself off to become a hollow shell of a creative I used to be. Number 3: I can do it several hundred times better than generative AI.
So depite what you might read elsewhere, the presence of many things here that people would call "indicators" of AI-generated content are actually indicators of Francis-generated content. Everything you have seen here, currently see, and will ever see had, is, and will always be made by me. Those em dashes and semi-colons you see—I've been using them since before the time OpenAI and ChatGPT even existed. I do use AI at work, and extensively as would make sense and as mandated by the corporate entities I work for. But I take pride in my work, and I would feel insulted to hear anyone calling my work AI-generated when they're absolutely not.
That said, there are things in software development that would ultimately be helped by artificial intelligence, to an extent where it wouldn't make sense not to employ it. In this website, I specifically use a locally-hosted LLM to accomplish the following:
- Alt text for images. In a few cases, I have a number of images that would take time to craft alt texts for. In such cases, I consider the intent for including the image. Images included to enhance information presented visually are sent to an LLM to generate a starter alt text that I then modify to my liking, to one that makes sense for the content around it. For images whose purpose is to embellish textual content poetically, I handwrite the alt text to an almost-poetic tone. Readers who can will see the image's romantic dance with the prose around it, while those who can't will get an elegy that will paint the visual in their mind's eye instead.
For the following, I use Github Copilot as it is built into Visual Studio Code, my code editor of choice:
- Git commit messages. I use git as my version control for this website's code. And as much as I want to handwrite every commit message, such messages are just summaries of the changes I made. It wouldn't benefit anyone to not let the AI do it; after all, it's what it is good in doing.
- Extensions. I may or may not use code editor extensions or plugins that employ AI in their backends. I may or may not be aware of it. But these exteensions, addons, and plugins will never be used to generate *any* content for me—even a simple lorem ipsum placeholder text.
My commitment is to preserve the human in art. I will keep updating this page with my AI usage as it changes.