I was chatting yesterday with an acquaintance and mentioned that I work on a popular hosting blog.  He asked: “do you really write anymore?  Or is all just feeding prompts to AI?”

It’s a fair question.  You can turn to any of the popular AI services and say “create an article for LowEndBox about ____” and it will gladly do so, cheerfully festooning it with all manner of emojis and contrasting negatives.  Heck, you can even say “suggest an article for LowEndBox” so you don’t have to use your brain at all.

I’m proud to say that all the content on LowEndBox is not AI-written.

That doesn’t mean we don’t use AI, however.

Artwork

Much of the artwork is AI-generated.  There was a time when I hand-crafted each piece, particularly when posting offers.  In the past, the GPTs really struggled with consistently using branding materials.  But these days, they’re pretty spot on.

Here’s artwork I did for HostNamaste, and here’s what ChatGPT 5.5 produced:

Or here’s Luxvps:

Now some might say “oh, but that looks like AI art” and fair enough…it looks like AI art because it is AI art.  We’re not saying it’s not.  We’re just saying it looks more visually interesting than the non-AI art.

Certainly, this reflects my own lack of artistic ability.  But it would be uneconomical to hire a human artist at $$$/hour to create beautiful images every single day.

Double-Checking and Research

When I write tutorials or am looking at technical problems, of course I use AI.  There’s no point in struggling through a couple hours to trial and error when a single query will answer the question.

Looking back at old tutorials, I sometimes find a mistake or something that isn’t clear.   Or more frequently, not a mistake but something that is suboptimal or doesn’t cover a corner case I hadn’t thought of at the time.  AI today cleans that up.

I think tutorials (everywhere, not just on LEB) are a dying breed.  Which would you rather do: read a static tutorial on a web site, or interactive ask AI how to do something and let it guide you, fix errors, etc.?

Of course, when I’m writing non-technical articles, having a fact-checker or “Wikipedia on steroids” is also very helpful.

But I never copy/paste AI text.

Word Checking

One thing I should be using AI more for is grammar-checking.  Spell-checking is easy – the browser does that.  But cleaning up grammar would be helpful.  When I finish this article, I’ll re-read it, and I’m sure I’ll find a missing word or wrong word.  And over time, I miss some.

Unabomber Manifesto

I mean, “cheerfully festooning” – who else talks like that except me?  Who else writes sentences with a habit of ellipses…and then continues on dramatically?  What kind of nerd castigates and excoriates everything that is bad and evil and unholy in the world without using profanity?

There’s a half-dozen writing tics I have and they’re probably pretty obvious.  If I ever published a Unabomber Manifesto kind of thing, the police would identify me instantly based on the corpus of writing.  I owe this to my initial career as a literature student and my enduring habit of reading early novels (currently: Melmoth the Wanderer from 1820).

Now whether I’m a human or a dog…that’s a topic for another time.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.