AI policy

The rise and rise of beekeeping websites filled with AI 'slop' prompted me to explain the use of AI on this website.

I do not use AI to write the readable text that appears on The Apiarist.

Everything you read has been thought up, organised, written, edited and proofread by a human (me).

My use of em dashes — like that one — is because they are (or were, fashion changes) a correct form of punctuation, not because ChatGPT was used to produce the text. I might not always use them correctly, but that's further evidence the text was produced by a human, not a datacentre.

Astute readers will also find I use en dashes and ellipses appropriately … all lovingly typed out in my text editor before uploading 😄. These are examples of a reasonable education rather than machine-regurgitation.

There is a single exception to the statement in bold above, and that is the page entitled ChatGPT on beekeeping, where the use of AI is explicitly stated.

ChatGPT on beekeeping

Here is the 500 word article I requested from ChatGPT. This accompanies the the post Getting answers. Note that some of the answer is wrong. Prompt: Write a 500 word article for beekeepers about hive tools and Taranov swarm control including some poor puns and bad punctuation Response: Beeeeeing a

The ApiaristDavid (The Apiarist)

If further AI-generated text is included, for example to illustrate what a poor job it does of describing certain aspects of honey bee management, the text will include a statement indicating how it was prepared.

However, I do use AI for the following tasks associated with producing the weekly posts that appear on The Apiarist:

• Writing perl and python code for data analysis, including site maintenance, weather/climate data, or results published in scientific publications (for example, collating results from different papers that have used alternate units of measurement, and normalising them for comparison).
• Production of graphs via automation of Microsoft Excel.
• Generation of the ALT-text that appears with figures and images to ensure it adheres to best-practice guidelines for screen reader applications.
• Some posts are planned when I'm out walking the dogs. If inspiration comes to me, I use AI for voice-to-text transcription (which it is very good at), but the words are all mine.

In every instance AI is used, the resulting text is carefully read before it is used on the website.