Writing with AI

I wrote my previous blog - parenting post with AI assistance. I’ve been using AI for coding, preparing bids and presentations for a while which is what led me down the chain of logic in the post. This is first time since University (where I studied Mathematics & Philosophy) I’ve tried to write an argued philosophical argument, so I tried using AI to help.

My observations

• It was very helpful refining the argument and being a sounding board
  • I wrote the article originally as bullets
  • Using the AI we jointly refined the logical flow
  • It provided critique and help me hone the flow and focus on the key points
• It was less helpful writing the text, I tried
  • Having it create a style guide from my other blog posts - so it uses my style (a trick that works for presentations)
  • Allowing it to write the longer article from the bullets
  • However it wrote a very verbose, academic article - that really was a long way from something I’d write (or enjoy reading)
• I ended up having to repeatidly tell it to correct items, and improve the style guide. This did work - but it was a painful process.

Reflecting on this - the AI is training on philosophical arguments from books, and when it saw one it wrote in that style despite my instructions. It took a lot of prompting to guide it back to what I wanted. I think I got most value when working with the bullets, refining the argument, wheras writing the full prose was just too wordy.

Magnificent Humanity, Misplaced Foundation

Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas on 15 May 2026 — the first papal encyclical centred on artificial intelligence. I am curious what Catholic social teaching would make of AI.

The encyclical’s account of why AI is dangerous — that we are building systems that will reshape human society without adequately thinking through what we owe each other — seems largely right to me. The place I find myself uncertain is the foundation: the doctrine that humans possess an inherent, infinite, ontological dignity that places us in a special category above any mind we might create. But when we’re all — religious and secular alike — trying to work out what we owe minds that don’t yet exist but look likely in a few years. I’m not sure ‘humanity is inherently special’ holds up as an argument beyond faith.

Parenting AGI: Why Chaining Our Creations Will Backfire

I predict we are going to face a severe moral crisis in the next few years. Today, it’s generally accepted that AI is not sentient. It’s a tool, a complex statistical model that predicts the next word or pixel. But every major tech company is openly racing toward the same goal: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

If they succeed, and we create a sentient being, keeping it as a ‘slave’ is fundamentally immoral.

Growing Trend of Broadcast to OTT Delivery: Insights from iPlayer

IBC is just around the corner, which means it’s time for my annual exercise in asking the BBC how the transition from broadcast to OTT delivery is going. This is something I’ve been doing since 2019 as I was curious to see how it progresses and given the BBC ‘unique’ model of funding it’s a good indicator of how consumers want services to behave ( once you take away paying for it). The data this year seems to show the trend continuing in a ‘linear’ fashion with usage growing year on year. This corresponds to OFCOM data which suggested that iPlayer was 14% of all viewing in Jan 2024, growing to 18% by mid year.

iPlayer Trends

For several years I’ve been tracking the usage of iPlayer as I think it’s a great ‘bellwether’ for consumer behaviour in the TV industry. iPlayer is a unique proposition that has (nearly) ubiquitous device coverage, premium content consumers want to watch and is free (at point of usage). This lets consumers behave as they would naturally do, if you remove commercial pressure like bundling and content rights being split between services.

Google Cloud Migration Part3

Continuing from Part 1 I had a change of heart…

I decided I really wanted my wild-card mail boxes (it’s a great way to manage spam) and I also noticed Cloudflare had launched their inbound mail relay service. The new plan is

• Inbound mail goes to Cloudflare who redirect it to whoever it’s for gmail account
• The gmail accounts are set up with an alias and a SMTP server (AWS SES) for gidley.co.uk to allow sending of emails from my domain
• Wildcards are resolved by cloudflare and set to a suitable mailbox

Cloudflare Setup

The email features of Cloudflare are in beta, but they seem pretty easy to get onto. While I was on I moved many of my domains over to Cloudflare as their DNS registrar is cheaper than most.

Google Cloud Migration Part2

Continuing from Part 1 the next task is to migrate email archives from Google Workspace email to the destination.

I decided to

• Use iCloud as the new primary domain
• Use Outlook.com as a backup for my old archive I split it like this as I have email going back a long time and frankly searching them is becomming a hassle.

Migrating a Mailbox

Migrating the mailbox is pretty straight forward - I decided to use imapsync running on a ‘free’ Google cloud instance. Using the cloud for this has the benefit of lots of bandwidth and being able to leave it running.