How I do – and don’t – use artificial intelligence in my work

The use of AI in my profession, and in associated creative fields, is rightly a cause of extensive and active discussion.

To clarify my own position:

• I do not use AI to create, edit or refine any aspect of my writing

• I do not use AI to generate ideas or suggested structures for my writing

• As of January 2026, I am trialing the use of Ecosia and Kagi. These search engines both allow the turning off of AI summaries. Ecosia has the additional benefit of supporting climate action, and Kagi of being entirely ad-free.

There are some ways in which I do make use of AI in my work:

• I use Sonix to support the transcription of interviews and conversations, and have in the past used Otter. These are assistive tools, in that I manually check every aspect of an automated transcript against the original recording. In my opinion they do not and should not remove the need for human expertise in creating transcriptions.

• I have used Google Translate and Linguee to support French to English translation work. I never use these tools to entirely create a translation or fully rely on their outputs and, as things stand, I do not believe such tools can or should replace human translators.

• I have used Descript to help me edit podcasts and videos. I would stress my skill in this area comes nowhere near to that of professionals in this field, with whom I will always choose to work wherever possible.

• I have very occasionally used ChatGPT to assist in finding papers, publications or people relevant to a topic I’m writing or researching. The use has been occasional because, frankly, I currently find its value to be severely limited.

My view is that, like any tool, AI is neither inherently good or bad but that the uses to which it is put need careful and continuing consideration. My position is an evolving one, just like the technology itself, and I will update this page as appropriate over time. (It’ll always be a hard no on Tilly Norwood, however.)