I've had a ton of training in my current role in digital and corporate services in international procurement for an electronic health record for the NHS. I'm also a member of the NHS England AI network and the NHS England Digital Health Inequalities Network, both of which are instrumental in creating policies around AI, digital and health inequalities policies in the UK. I've worked in digital on and off since 1997, so I know the ropes.
After a lot of testing, thought and research, including asking ChatGPT about its own role in shaping society, I've decided to actively restrict my use of AI in my research, writing and wherever else I can. This is tricky, since I'll need to convince my web browsers, devices (including work devices) and so on to stop automatically popping up with AI. But I think that for me, removing AI wherever I can will reduce distractions and allow me think and write in the way I always have. I'll give my brain plenty of data and water, and reboot it from time to time with lovely walks, so that it can continue to do the job.
Thus, any research and writing errors, typos, silliness and/or hallucinations contained in my writing are my own fault.
I will continue to allow Word to check my spelling with its squiggly red lines, but not to make or suggest changes to my text. Starting on January 1st, 2026, I DO NOT use any of the following AI services, unless specifically stated:
- Grammar checking services (I am my own grammar nerd)
Pic by @_ren.photos
No AI needed - Online research or search (I believe Firefox search is working on an opt-in for AI)
- Transcription of audio interviews
- Summaries of materials for research purposes
- Brainstorming partner
- Suggestions for titles and headings
- Generate outlines
- Generate first drafts
- Assess reading level (I generally hand my document to a child, if I want to check age appropriateness, and I always find this most useful and informative)
- Evaluate and find errors and inconsistencies in text drafts (I've also got lovely willing adults on hand to do this check for me!)
- Generate or clean up citations (although I would have loved this during my master's dissertation!)
- Generate or clean up formatting
- Upload project content to projects or repositories
- Generate drafts of graphics
- Generate final graphics for publication
- Generate audio narration
- Generate synthetic video
- Generate synthetic images
I realise I'm incredibly fortunate to have had an excellent educational foundation, to be naturally creative, and to have literate human children and adults of all ages around me who are happy to read things and point out any holes and errors they spot. Not everyone is so lucky.
I DO use a secure, commercial AI in my NHS role, to help me build and analyse excel workbooks, including quick analyses of qualitative data. AI does in 10 minutes what would probably take me a month, which saves the NHS money, but I still need to sense check and ensure it's not concocting nonsense (which it does, all the time). It will be interesting to see what wonderful things are created with the help of AI, and how the whole situation develops.
You can see a good example of an online AI disclosure form here, which I've used to help me create the above list.
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