About the authors of this site

Only one author here, Aki Vainio. Amy and Violet are fictional. Any text written in their voice is just Aki (that would be me) roleplaying as an ageless demon or a teenage trans girl.

Financial transparency

Costs:

Developmental editor: 1400 euros
Sensitivity reader: 300 euros
Web hotel: preexisting
Domain: Not much

Revenue

Nothing yet

The sadly necessary AI-statement:

I don’t like generative AI. However, I need to use them as part of my day job as teacher in higher education. Not in the sense that I actually need them to produce text, but instead since I’m inundated with texts of all kinds, I need to know what the outputs look like and feel like. Which leaves me in a weird place where I need to use them. At the same time, these tools are so bad that I don’t find them useful. Instead, what I tend to do is try what they are capable of, try to find their limits and try to figure out what happens under the hood. This means that I also need to use multiple of these tools, because they all work differently.

In general, I would advice strongly against using them, but this is specifically generative AI. And you know what? We shouldn’t burn down the planet to give more money to the ultrarich. Other kinds of AI can be great. After all, routing is very useful, character recognition makes life much easier for blind people, and there are so, so many advances in medicine made with the help of AI. These are just not as sexy as generative AI, so they don’t get talked about. But the sad reality is that these AI systems with actual upsides were already being developed before this LLM boom. What actually happened is that when LLMs became the focus, those other projects lost resources. It is likely that we could have cured diseases with those resources. Instead, we are creating slop.

That being said, just to make this statement bluntly enough for the people in the back to understand it: none of the words in the book have been written by an AI. I write because it is challenging, not despite it being challenging. I’m not going to sacrifice my humanity on the altar of big tech.

But to be completely transparent:

I have used ProWritingAid to check grammar, but this is not an endorsement.

I have used LLMs for research when I’m out of my depth and don’t know what to ask search engines (which use AI as well). I generally use Ellydee (again, not an endorsement), because they try to be transparent about their practices and their model is their own version of DeepSeek, which is uses much less energy than most LLMs (actually, we are talking about a pretty tiny fraction). I always check the results to the best of my ability.

I tested LLMs for editing, but it was so bad I decided to pay people instead (which was always the plan, but getting near-instant feedback is tempting). I also tried to create an ‘Amy’ personality to edit this book, but since she is a demon, the LLM couldn’t let go of that idea, even though the ethos of the book is largely about not being tied down by what society tells us we should be. She is still kind of fun, because she is willing to berate me, which most LLMs won’t do. (No, it is not a sex thing.)