My AI Policy
The creative work on this site is entirely human. Not "human-guided," not "human-reviewed." Human.
I’m writing this down because "made by a person" is becoming a claim that has to be stated rather than assumed, and because a promise is worth more in writing.
1. Where I DON’T USE AI:
I do not use artificial intelligence to write, generate, develop, or produce the creative work I publish. Specifically:
- Writing. I write every word of every post, newsletter, page, and script. No AI drafting, no AI outlining, no AI rewriting, no AI editing pass.
- Ideas. I don’t brainstorm with AI, use it to generate angles, hooks, or titles, or use it to get past a blank page. The blank page is part of the job.
- Research. I read primary sources myself. I don’t ask a model to summarize a topic and build on top of the summary.
- The podcast. I create the episode topics, questions, structure, and conversation.
- Graphic design. No generated images, no generated illustrations, no generated layouts. The design work is done by hand.
- Video. No generated footage, no generated voiceover, no AI editing.
- Voice and likeness. Nothing on this site is synthesized. Not my voice, not my face, not a guest’s.
If something appears here under my name, a person made it. That person is me.
2. Where I DO USE AI:
My use of AI is narrow, and it’s downstream of the creative work rather than part of it.
I build my own websites and tools. I design them by mocking them up myself and writing all the copy myself, then I use AI coding assistants to implement what I’ve already designed: writing components, debugging, refactoring, and handling the boilerplate between a design and a working page.
The distinction that matters to me: AI doesn’t decide what to build, what it says, or what it looks like. Those decisions are made before any model is involved. It’s a faster way to type, in a language I’m still learning to type in.
Where AI-assisted code ships, I’ve read it, tested it, and I’m responsible for it.
3. Tools that use AI
When a tool of mine uses AI:
- It’s disclosed in the tool, at the point of use, not buried in a policy page.
- I configure these tools to exclude your inputs and outputs from provider model training wherever the provider offers that setting.
- I keep as little as possible. If a tool doesn’t need to store your input to function, it doesn’t.
Each tool may carry its own terms and privacy notice. Where it does, that document governs the tool and this policy sets the floor.
4. AI training on my content
I do not consent to my work being used to train AI models.
The writing, podcast audio, images, design, and code on this site are my copyrighted work. Using them by scraping, bulk download, or via a third-party dataset to develop, train, fine-tune, evaluate, or ground any machine learning or generative AI system requires a written license from me. Publishing this material publicly has never granted one.
This is an express reservation of rights for the purposes of Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, and of any equivalent text and data mining exception or limitation in any other jurisdiction. It applies regardless of how the content is obtained, and it binds intermediaries and dataset compilers as much as model developers.
What’s fine
- Search indexing that links back to the source
- Quotation, criticism, commentary, and other fair use: those rights exist by law, and this policy doesn’t try to override them
- Archiving by recognized nonprofit web archives
What isn’t
- Crawling for training corpora, whether or not the crawler respects robots.txt
- Republishing my content through an AI product in a way that substitutes for reading the original
- Voice cloning from podcast audio: this one is not negotiable
- Generating content in my name, style, or persona in a way that could be mistaken for me signals
Licensing
If you want to use my work in a model, a dataset, or a product, the answer isn’t automatically no.
Why this matters to me
There’s a version of the next few years where "modern storyteller" will come to mean "person who operates a generator." I’m not interested in that job.
The friction is the work: the blank page, the bad first draft, the idea that takes weeks, is not overhead standing between me and the output. That is the thing. Removing it doesn’t make me faster at what I do; it makes me stop doing it.
So this policy isn’t a marketing position, and it isn’t a prediction about where the technology goes. It’s a description of how I actually work, written down so you can hold me to it.
Changes
This policy will change, because the technology and the law are both moving. If my practices ever change, this page changes first, and the "Last updated" date at the top tells you which version you’re reading.
Questions, disagreements, and licensing requests: me@nikgoodner.com
NikGoodner.com is operated by Nik Goodner LLC, 3065 Daniels Road #1120, Winter Garden, FL 34787, United States.