About

Assisted Intention is a running account of my AI fellowship and the way I’m trying to use creative generative AI in my classes.

The name comes from a pretty basic belief: a pencil is nothing without the person writing with it. I think the same thing is true with AI. It doesn’t really do anything useful unless there’s a person there intervening, steering, questioning, correcting, and deciding what the point is. Without that intention, it’s just slop.

That’s the part I’m interested in. Not whether AI can make something that looks good enough for people who don’t care. That’s not especially interesting to me. The harder question is whether it can help make something good enough for people who do care, and that still takes taste, judgment, context, and domain knowledge. You have to know enough about the thing you’re asking for to tell when it’s wrong.

So when I’m writing about AI here, I’m not really writing about replacement or automation as the main event. I’m more interested in what happens when the tool is treated like a studio mate: capable, fast, useful, but still needing direction. It can help me bounce ideas around, organize a mess, make a rough version of a tool, or talk through a process before I know exactly what I think.

The human part is still the connections. Communication is about knowing who your audience is and making something for them. That means lived experience, personal stories, taste, visual sensitivity, timing, and all the semiotic stuff that makes a thing land with a specific group of people. AI, on its own, tends to make the middle. Humans make things weird, specific, imperfect, and less boring.

This site is me trying to track that in practice. Sometimes that means graphic design, photography, video, editing, UI/UX, or app development. Sometimes it means the less glamorous parts of teaching, like rubrics, classroom tools, course prep, and organizing ideas well enough to use them. The through line is the same: what happens when AI is useful, but the intention still has to come from me?