Peace by Piece

There’s a lot of controversy around AI these days. I know a lot of people are using it to just generate content, whole pages, whole voices – whole stories. 

When I started using Pinterest, I had to tick a box declaring whether I’d used AI in the content. The honest part of me ticked it, but by ticking it, it does not go further into breaking down HOW and WHERE AI has been used. Therefore, it can easily be misconstrued, and deceive people into thinking that something I’ve sat and worked years at building was AI generated from the start. That loses my credibility. It loses the message I’m trying to give. It loses the essence of what I set out to create and the story I have to share. 

So let me give you the actual context.

I started this journey in 2019. I’ve honestly only known about AI for maybe the past year of my life. When I started, it was purely me journaling my story, from the beginning. As it evolved, I ended up with so many pages I could not possibly edit them all myself. I’d sit down to write one piece and an earlier memory would surface, I’d jot it down to expand on later. So there’s been repetition, there’s been an opening I’ve rewritten more times than I can count – because that’s not the kind of journey this was. I could not simply sit down and upload it all in one go.

Originally this was to be a book. But then I thought about the issues that come with an editor wanting to change how I’ve written things, what I’ve said – I didn’t want myself, who I am, and most importantly – the story – to be lost to an authority I had no voice over. That’s the reason I chose to build these pages instead of going the traditional publishing route – so it could stay authentically me.

I also started this with no money. The little bit I had went into the domain and the WordPress site. Expenses I did not realise would be as much as they were, however, I had a dream, and in order to achieve it, these expenses were necessary. What I could not afford was graphic designers or web designers who would charge me thousands to create something that did not justify the price. The solution – learn how to do it myself. And use AI to assist where needed. 

So here’s where AI actually came into it. 

THE LOGO

I had the name of the blog, and a vision for the logo in my head for years. I sat with ChatGPT and gave very strict instructions until that idea in my head was perfected onto my screen. I was stubborn – and every rope thread, every orchid, had to be exactly as per the vision in my brain. After much back and forth (and sometimes frustration), we got it right.  Seeing my vision that I had held in a secret chamber in my brain for years come to life was exciting and emotional at the same time.

I then took that logo and threw it into Canva to upscale the quality. That logo has now gone onto my workbooks, and that is where the AI contribution I had to tick on Pinterest comes from – AI generated my logo. AI did not create or make my workbooks. Those workbooks are something I taught myself to build in Canva. I designed them myself, every colour scheme, every line, every orchid, every heart, every question, the overall aesthetic – I taught myself and I made it – and I now have one blueprint that I adapt to the context of each and every workbook.  Even with a blueprint, the workbooks still take hours of my time to create, to perfect. 

THE WEBSITE 

My website is hosted through WordPress, I did not use their AI tool to create it. I watched tutorials, and where I got stuck on things like permissions, or how to set my font packs that I had chosen, or how to change my footer etc etc – I used my three AIs between them – ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.  Each one generally fills the gap that the other does not. Most times that was useful, and at times it wasn’t. AI isn’t actually able to assist with every hurdle you come across – a lot of it I had to figure out and teach myself in order to get right. I was also often misdirected on little things, like which mailer program to use. The first one I used, AI told me I could use it free for ten days and then not have to pay anything after – I ended up having to completely change that, which took 3 days to deregister and unlink everything I had done before and then relink and set up the new mailer program.

MY ASSISTANT 

I’ll have my phone on me, out and about, and another angle for one of these pages will come to me, or another thematic post. I’ll jump onto Claude and say I have an idea for another thematic post, this is what I want to say, this is what I want to outline. Claude will then go and look for places where I’ve referenced these sorts of things before – it pulls context out of everything I’ve already written and helps me draft a skeleton. And then, with that skeleton, I sit and make my own amendments. Making those amendments on one post can take days – my new one, The Looking Glass on Cheating, has taken me nearly 2  weeks to fine-tune, to get the context right and get the repetition out. 

Further to that I get Claude to make me constant check lists of what still needs to be done as I am very forgetful, so Claude has in a sense taken over all my scraps of paper that used to lie about in what I love to refer to as organised chaos. 

MY EDITOR

Affirmation and validation are big themes of mine – I want to affirm the reader – and I tend to say certain things over and over again, which could become very frustrating to somebody – Claude checks it for me, flags it all, and I go in and make my amendments.

Claude will flag me where I’ve made repetition, if I have jotted the same notes on the same subject in multiple places – so I don’t start boring the reader, or have the reader thinking I say the same thing every time – because that is not my intention. 

Every post I put up, over and above the years it’s taken me to write the content in the first place, keeps growing. Every time I sit with one, there are more details I can add to it. That’s what happens when you’re going on twenty years of memory with something – things and situations you’d forgotten about will suddenly surface, and you realise you haven’t actually written on it, and it can become its own piece, or it can fold into a current post. 

So AI has helped me keep some consistency to the message I’m giving, because my brain can go into seventy different thought patterns in five minutes, and nobody wants to read something that jumps from 2004 to 2017 to 2005 to 2026 to 2001. It’s like watching one of those movies that’s all flashbacks – and personally, I don’t like them.

Once a post is completely written and I’m happy I’ve edited it as much as I can, I ask Claude to check where I’ve typed a lowercase “i” and forgotten to capitalise it, or where I’ve made spelling mistakes – because I tend to do that. I’ll sit and just type out a string of words, and when you’ve got five pages to go back through, it’s a lot easier to get AI to have a look at it and flag me where things need to be changed, and I then go and do the changing.

I use Claude to make sure I haven’t made any references that would give away the actual country I live in, to keep the pseudonyms I’ve chosen for everybody consistent, and to catch it if I’ve accidentally typed a real name. When you’re writing about real life things, it’s very easy to type a real name and then forget you’ve typed it. When you’re proofreading your own work, your brain doesn’t always flag that this person’s name is now X – especially when you’re in a rush, or you’ve been editing one post for hours upon hours upon hours. Those little gaps, those little instances, can slip straight past your own brain. That’s been a big part of this too, because keeping my anonymity is one of the most important aspects of these pages.

RESEARCH

I have a post coming in a couple of months about addiction and mental illness, and where the two cross paths. I needed a lot of data research for that one, and I used AI to do the research for me – to cite everything, and to make sure it’s only truthful, accurate information. Instead of spending two weeks sitting and compiling it myself, I was able to get the research side of that post done in a couple of hours. That’s one example of AI being a deeply intrinsic part of these pages. But it’s one of very few.

THE VISUALS 

After a post has been checked, I throw it into ChatGPT to give it context, and ChatGPT creates my imagery for me. I have given a very strict brief into aesthetics, fonts, colour schemes, the difference between the seasons posts and the thematic posts. I do not have the time or knowledge to sit and create imagery myself. I do not have the finances to have someone create them for me. I therefore tell ChatGPT what I want. Sometimes I get very frustrated with it, because making one image can take almost an hour – stupid things get thrown in that I never asked for, or the memory gets lost and the direction goes completely inconsistent with what we’ve been working on. So there are pros and cons. Sometimes I think I should have just done it myself, it would have been quicker. But that is where my imagery comes from.

IN CLOSING

So that’s basically a glimpse into where I’ve used AI, and the ways it’s been able to assist me. But the context and the basis of what I’m trying to do stays at the core – my message. My message has not been changed. It has not been modified. My voice has not been changed. It is written as I would write it – without the repetition, without the spelling mistakes, without five sentences combined into one because I forgot to put in a comma while I was typing. Without my ramblings. Because I do ramble, a lot.

I started this under the misconception that this whole thing is relatively easy – and not easy in inverted commas. I didn’t think it would be this hard. There were so many more elements and aspects attached to it than I could ever have mapped out myself. Honestly, had I sat and researched the full trajectory of what this entails before I started, my honest answer is that I may not have started at all. There are so many elements that come into it – legalities, terms and conditions, disclaimers, all the things you don’t actually think about when you sit down one day and say to yourself, I need to start this.

I did not have the resources to pay somebody to build this for me. I did not have the resources to pay somebody to get the legal information and write me disclaimers, and do all the things I’ve had to learn how to do, and teach myself how to do. AI is more an assistant to me than something I’ve sat down and said, here’s my idea, please build it for me. That’s evident in the time between each of my posts too – one post can take two weeks to edit. It’s time consuming, and trying to do this when I’m not currently generating an income from it is difficult, because I am at the point where I actually have to work, because I have bills to pay.

So as beautiful as this journey started, it may not end the way I intended, because once I find an eight to five job, I’m going to have less time to work on this whole beautiful concept, this whole beautiful journey, than I have now – it really has been far more time consuming than I ever set out for it to be. If I wanted to build what I envisioned in my head properly, it would become a full-time job, and I am not in the financial position to let it be one.

So, as a closing statement: thank you for taking the time to let me clarify the points where I have, and have not, used AI. I do not see this as being any different to somebody who had the financial resources to hire a marketing agency to create their logos and their content. This is not where I started, and AI was the best alternative for me. 

In all reality, parts of using AI make me feel like I’m running a corporation with incredibly skilled workers – and then there’s the other part, that makes me feel like my workers aren’t so skilled, and they don’t listen. There are many sides to that spectrum. At the end of the day, I have always, and will continue to, bring you content that is my voice, my heart and my journey. And I do not want that message lost because I clicked a declaration on Pinterest stating that AI has been used – without context.

I want to be clear about why this matters to me. I really do not want the core focus of my message getting lost in any of this, and that is: I have been through a journey similar to what the people landing on these pages have experienced. I have cried, I have screamed, I have begged, I have prayed. Sometimes my prayers have been answered. Sometimes they haven’t. At the end of the day, above all of that, I am still standing. And that is my hope for anyone coming into, or already living through, a situation like mine. That is, and always will be, the message.

Love, Sloane