Using AI as a Tool, not a Writer

When I first set out to build and publish Vintage Buses, my goal was straightforward: share my photographs of vintage buses and tell some of the stories about these classic vehicles. I already had the notes and the photographs. What I needed was a way to organize, format, and present it all cleanly without getting hopelessly bogged down in the finer technical weeds of modern web design.

That is where artificial intelligence came into the picture. Rather than treating AI as a shortcut to generate instant, soul-less articles, I used it as an interactive technical assistant, available at all hours. From helping me navigate static site structure and refining Hugo layouts, to sorting out CSS quirks, terminal commands, and automating site tweaks, having an AI partner saved me countless hours of frustration. It allowed me to skip past steep coding learning curves and focus entirely on the content itself.

But there are pitfalls: AI gets it wrong, very wrong. It’s the old saying, ‘garbish in, garbish out’, meaning when AI is searching for information, it may select a website that is wildly inaccurate. I’ve been stung in the early days when I posted details of vintage buses on Facebook. You get roasted if a retired bus mechanic or enthusiast spots errors on your bus specifications list.

AI is invaluable as a search engine, finding details about a vintage vehicle, collating it all from the internet. But experience has taught me to tell AI to provide me with the source links to its information and I publish those links under ‘Resources’ in the posts.