Privacy & AI

No ads, no cookies*, no Google Analytics, no LinkedIn Insights, no Meta Pixel, no Pinterest Tag, no Substack spam. No tracking of any kind.

No need, turns out, for a privacy policy.

I'm solely responsible for all content on gwagner.com.

If you happen to navigate to a page with an audio or video clip, you may be asked to accept a third-party cookie (e.g. from NPR or YouTube), but that's it.

If you sign up for my mailing list, I will email you occasional updates sent directly from gw@gwagner.com.

These emails will always be free. Nobody else has access to the list. Nobody else is writing these updates. That also means no AI.

No AI for Writing

If I didn't bother writing it, you shouldn't have to bother reading it.

Nothing written on this site has been generated by AI. If I put my name on it, I wrote it. That includes my correspondence and all my social media posts, whether BlueSky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn.

I do work with plenty of co-authors. So yes, guilty: not every word is indeed written by me; lots are written by other humans. All know about my no-AI writing policy. Or perhaps better: I work with co-authors because of their subject matter expertise, or their writing abilities—not as a shortcut of sorts to add more words to my site.

And yes, there are good uses for machine learning in research. I do, for example, use random forest models. Even though everything seems to be called "AI" these days, such machine-learning algorithms are fundamentally different from large language models.

LLMs, too, have some uses, both for research, and for otherwise inconsequential tasks. (I was an early adopter of x.ai circa 2017(!), when the site was a useful scheduling tool.)

Writing is not one of those inconsequential tasks. But now I'm going in circles. (Yes, editing, too, is a task that takes special expertise. Some of my best writing has benefited from excellent editors with whom I've had the fortune of working over the years.)

AI in Teaching

Speaking of "No AI," here's my latest on AI in teaching—Warren Buffett and Andrew Tate videos on reading, and all: AI.pptx. (Feel free to use and adapt with credit.)

Of course, there are also good uses for AI in teaching: If you teach coding, a "no AI" policy will only go so far. Something similar goes for applied data analysis, or plenty of other courses teaching how to work with practical tools.

For example, I now use "CAiSEY" in my courses, a platform that allows students to explore business school cases while chatting with a bot. (I have similarly experimented with having shorter Financial Times mini case studies as another option for students to explore some of these same questions. The jury is still out, but it seems like most students prefer the FT mini case studies to exploring the same materials with a bot.)

But teaching and learning how to think means just that, Andrew Tate may disagree, but there are no shortcuts to readings and writing.

*No cookies and dark mode

The no-cookies policy, turns out, does come with some challenges. Take the dark-mode toggle on the top right of each page. It works just as advertised without cookies, with one exception: If you have set a default on your browser, and you toggle away from it, you may now see a small flash every time you navigate to a new page.

The smoothest fix: a cookie. The browser reads those on the server-side before loading the page. There apparently is no way to avoid that flash without a cookie. Tradeoffs.

If you know of a fix, please email web@gwagner.com.