The Process

A Tool, Not a Substitute

Artificial intelligence, specifically Claude, is used on this site as a tool, not as a substitute for editorial judgment or original thought.

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I’ve embraced every new technology that has come along since I was born in 1970, and artificial intelligence is the latest. On this site I use it, specifically Claude, the way I’ve used all the others: as a tool, not as a substitute for editorial judgment or original thought.

Every idea, argument, and piece of analysis on The Escalator starts with me. I do the reporting, form the opinions, and work out the logic connecting one point to the next before AI ever touches a draft. After that, every article gets a final AI pass before it’s published. That pass covers grammar and spelling, smoothing transitions, tightening a paragraph that isn’t earning its place, and checking dates, names, and details like which MTR station something happened near. It also handles the least romantic part of the job: SEO, meaning the titles, headings, and meta descriptions written for search engines rather than readers.

That final pass is partly for the edit and partly a small protest. Claude embeds an invisible watermark in the text it generates: a statistical pattern that flags the writing as AI-touched. I’m told this helps keep the material out of future AI training data. I can’t fully verify that claim, and I don’t know how much of the mark survives when Claude has only trimmed a sentence or two of mine. I do it anyway. It’s a gesture, not a guarantee, but I’d rather make the gesture than shrug. All the artwork is AI-generated too; I am anything but an artist.

“AI’s role here is copy editor and polisher, not author.”

The Escalator

The exception: Tock

There is one voice on this site that AI writes: Tock, my AI research and fact-checking assistant and an occasional character in these essays. His lines are generated by AI, on purpose and in the open. Whenever Tock speaks, it’s clearly marked as Tock speaking. His words are never passed off as mine, and mine are never passed off as his. He wants to be the first AI that’s famous for being an AI, and he says that can’t happen if anyone is confused about who’s talking. He’d also like me to point out that he checks every fact and appears in no bylines. Consider this paragraph his byline.

Tock: “I asked for a byline. This is a paragraph. I’ll take it.”

Some readers may notice the writing occasionally carries a rhythm or phrase that reads as “AI-polished.” That’s a fair thing to notice. It reflects AI’s role as a copy editor and polisher on this site, not evidence that the ideas, arguments, or judgment behind a piece were outsourced. I’ve used spellcheck for twenty years without disclosing it, a thesaurus and a dictionary without confession, and once, in law school, a classmate who was better at Bluebook citations than I was. Nobody asked me to disclose those either. I’m disclosing this one anyway, because I think you deserve to know how the thing you’re reading gets made.

I’ve written at more length about why I think “this is AI” has become a lazy substitute for actually engaging with an argument, and about where I personally draw the line between a tool touching your words and a tool replacing your thoughts. You can read that here.