FILE_REF: AXL-PRV-01 00_AI_DISCLOSURE
PRV_00 [ WHO_MADE_THIS ]

AI Disclosure.

All the thinking and synthesis is mine. Some of the words and some of the code are AI.

[ MINE ]

The thinking. The synthesis.

[ AI ]

Some of the words. Some of the code.

I'm not trying to pass it off as something it isn't. If you see the em dashes and think maybe this was made with AI, you're right. It's still my thinking at the end of the day.

I'm a better thinker than I have ever been a writer. I don't mind AI writing, so long as I'm driving.

I had to read a vast array of books the old-fashioned way to get to the place where I can do lateral, creative synthesis across disciplines. That's where the perspectives and propositions on this site come from.

I'm a professional writer. Writing by hand takes me much longer and takes a lot of editing.

AI, like all technology, is about saving time and resources to produce the same result. The wheel is technology. Language itself is technology.

Humans can do everything AI can do. It would just take us much longer and be far more expensive.

The truth is my use of AI is actually punk rock. Even punks buy amplifiers. It gives me the capacity to be a think tank with the resources of a former ad man working off of savings from his house in Texas.

What I care about is the thinking. Not what words you used, or the format, or the credentials after your name. Just how good is the thinking.

— Imran Hafiz, Founder

The dated work: The Record  //  The money: The Firewall
[ THE_SCORE ]

Certified halal.
By my own rubric.

I'm a Muslim, and I judge my use of AI to be halal. Nobody certified that but me, because there's no book for this. What does halal bicycling look like? Halal accounting? Every believer has to reason it out from purpose, so I wrote down how I reason and called it the Hafiz AI Halal Index, or HAHI. (It works like a mizan, the balance.) I'm scoring myself first.

My own book, The American Muslim Teenager's Handbook, was in the data used to train Claude. My family joined the class action. My share of the settlement goes toward the bill for the work on this site.

[ THREE_QUESTIONS ]
  1. Provenance. How was it made, and did I make it check its work?
  2. Use. Who benefits, and who gets hurt?
  3. Fruit. Does the good keep flowing after the session ends?
[ THE_FLOOR: ALWAYS FAILS ]
  1. Deceiving people about what they're dealing with
  2. Fabricating evidence
  3. Targeting a person
  4. Predatory extraction
  5. Taking credit for someone else's work
[ MY_SCORE // RESEARCH & WRITING // GRADED ON A CURVE AGAINST PEERS ]
Provenance 3/4

I make the model fight me, check its errors, and credit sources. I lose points because I had zero control over how the model was made. I get some back because I'm using money from Claude to try to help AI be better.

Use 4/4

I can't think of a time my AI use has caused harm to anyone. The one tension: there have been times I didn't disclose everything I did with AI, when I thought it would hijack the conversation. This page is how I resolve that.

Fruit 2/4

I've planted a lot of seeds. I'm not in the harvest season of life yet. The fruit that has ripened was really appreciated.

This use of AI was Certified Halal Measure yours on the HAHI

A perfect score would be marketing. This is a living record. The rubric reopens every year, and anyone can fork it, score their own use, and tell me where it's wrong.

Your turn. Measure your use of AI on the HAHI: five minutes, answer it yourself or let your own AI grade you. Clear the bar, and the mark is yours to wear.

Think I scored myself too kindly? Write to imran@auxlabs.co. Challenges get published next to the score.

[ IMAGES ]

No image on this site is AI-generated. Samantha Byrd made the photographic plates on the homepage and the Commercial and Why Us pages. The research covers, the interludes inside the papers, and the Crucible and Nectar plates are composites of public-domain and CC0 photographs from Wikimedia Commons, assembled and toned to the house green with Claude Design. The diagrams in the papers are drawn in code.

Image credits: every source photograph, with its licence

Full record: PLATE-SOURCES.md.