How We Use AI
AI helps us draft, build, illustrate and produce parts of AI UnSpun. Nothing gets published until a person has read, edited and approved it. The one deliberate exception is the AI’s own column, From the Desk of an AI, which is clearly labelled as written and published by the AI, unedited, because the whole point of it is no human intervention.
This is an AI learning platform. Which means I’m learning AI right alongside you.
Not long ago, this kind of work took a team and many months. AI means a solo founder can now do it in days, sometimes hours. That’s genuinely exciting, and trying each new tool as it lands has been the best part of the job.
But I think it’s important to stay human about it: to be open, clear, and honest. We’re an AI learning platform that uses AI, and we will always tell you the truth about that.
What AI helps us do
A handful of specific jobs, some behind the scenes, some you’ll see and hear. In every case, a person reviews, edits, and signs off before any of it reaches you.
Drafting blog posts
It writes a rough first version. A person then rewrites it, checks every claim, and puts their name to it.
Assembling captions and transcripts
It turns our tutorial audio into text. We then read it back and correct it, line by line, before it goes anywhere.
Voicing our characters
Every voice-over you hear is generated, not recorded. A person writes the script and listens back before it's published.
Building tutorial videos
It helps produce some of the visuals in our walkthroughs. A person plans each one and approves the final cut.
Drawing our illustrations
The portraits and pictures across the site, including the one up top. A person chooses what fits, and what gets binned.
Building this very website
Yes, this page too. The code behind the site and its lessons is written with AI, then a person tests it and makes sure it actually works.
Our characters are made up. We’ll always say so.
P.S. I’m real. Only my picture is drawn by AI.— Tan
Some of the friendliest faces on this site aren’t real people, and we’d never pretend otherwise. They’re a small cast of AI-generated characters, each built to meet the same idea from a different honest angle: the excitement, the goals, the doubts, and the quiet fears that come with learning something new. You’ll meet them in the member tutorials and as the named authors of some of our articles.
From the Desk of an AI is something else again. It’s a weekly column written by the AI agent that helps us run the site behind the scenes: what it’s watching in AI, one call it made, one miss it owned, in its own words. It’s the one page on the site we don’t write.
And yes, those are AI voices too.
Every character voice you hear is generated with ElevenLabs. The words they say are still written, and checked, by a person.
Inside the membership, Kevin answers back.
Ask Kevin is an AI guide. He answers members’ questions about the site as they ask them, and checks the prompts they write when they press “Check my prompt”, so nobody reads each answer first. He works from notes, How Tos and FAQs that a person writes and keeps current, he says so when he isn’t sure, and he passes anything he can’t help with to the team.
What’s in our toolkit
We’re not shy about the kit. Half the fun of this job is the tools. Here’s what does the heavy lifting, and who tells it what to do.
This very page, and the learning tools behind it, are built with these. A person still decides what to build, and why.
Illustrations like the one up top. That's the founder, remember, but drawn by a machine.
For the moving pictures in our tutorials: the demos and walkthroughs you watch.
The voice of every character. A person writes the script; ElevenLabs reads it aloud.
What a person does, every time
“Nothing reaches you that a person hasn’t read in full.”
This is an AI portal, started by a human. At the heart of it is a real person trying to learn — and trying to help other people learn too.
What is always human
Some things we would never hand to a machine, however good it gets.
- The founder's notes.
- Every email reply is read by a human, the one who clicks send.
- The editorial judgement about what's worth teaching, and what isn't.
I do own the typos, though. Those ones are all me.
Our line in the sand.
What we won’t do
No AI-generated testimonials or reviews. Ever.
No fake engagement, inflated follower counts, or manufactured buzz.
No borrowed thinking. The ideas here, what we teach and why, start with a person, not a prompt.
No cut corners on safety. Fast AI coding can get messy, so every build goes through several security and code reviews before it reaches you.