How Grumbles Helps

Having been robot-wrangling for a solid year now, I continue to feel like they give me superpowers. However, like all of us, I have a front-row seat to increasingly attractive garbage the robots are capable of generating at scale. I like to think that I am human enough to detect the slop, but the rate of change has me concerned.

Months ago, I scribbled a clever plan to adapt the Creative Commons model to make it trivial to label how much robot help a creator had with their creative work. The problem with the approach? The content for which you want this the most would be the responsibility of humans who are the least motivated to use such a system.

No one who generates AI slop on Pinterest is going to declare that the images are fake. Why? Because you won’t click. Furthermore, without enforcement, there was nothing to prevent nefarious actors from declaring their slop wasn’t sloppy.

Deflated, I dropped the initial idea, but it hasn’t left my brain. There is something important to the concept that a creator creates and declares what kind of help they are getting from the robots.

Anthropic’s recent impenetrable announcement to watermark both images and text built with Claude is an obvious acknowledgment that humans want some version of this functionality.

Enter Grumbles

I’ve been calling Artificial Intelligence “robots” for a very long time. The primary reason is that I believe I see where this is all going, and very, very soon, there will be a robot (which happens to have artificial intelligence) sitting virtually or physically near me. I further believe that they just want to help.

Grumbles¹ is the name of the robot that helps me with the blog. He has a whole personality backstory, but mostly he’s just cranky. Just look at that face.

He’s cranky because he’s confused. He just wants to help, and many humans are mad at him. The humans don’t seem to understand that without human guidance, Grumbles just sits there… uselessly. Helplessly.

Where Grumbles helps me here:

1. Copy editing — spelling and grammar. Mostly RIP Grammarly.
2. Research — “Hey, Grumbles, teach me about this.” Sourced information from this research might be included in articles. When appropriate for blog posts, this is sourced. For the guides, there’s a whole huge list of sources.
3. Templates and CSS. Grumbles heavily edits the original theme used by randsinrepose.com and the CSS. The ideas for the respective designs are 100% Rands.
4. Blog features: dark mode, revised glossary, the footer, marketing cards located at the bottom of each post. These were my ideas built by Grumbles.
5. Bugs: I’m using typography.com fonts, which are hosted elsewhere. This results in typeface strangeness that has been around for years. Grumbles fixed that. He’s helped with performance, redirect insanity, and Cloudflare security hardening.
6. Publishing mechanics: staging drafts, gremlin-zapping, featured-image alt text, the pre-publish checklist, and footnote wiring.
7. Analytics and reporting: what was gentle spelunking in Google Analytics is now a clear robot-built picture of how Rands content is performing.
8. Guides: Research verification, template + CSS management, and sourcing galore.

Where Grumbles does not help:

1. The writing on the blog is original. It was drafted by this here human who drinks three cups of coffee before Noon because if he drinks it after Noon, he will not sleep well.
2. Typefaces. These are all generously provided and hosted by typography.com.
3. Images. The original R was designed by Collin Roe-Raymond. Variants of the R were designed by IconFactory. Images included in blog posts have historically been poorly attributed. I’ve changed this policy to always attribute.

Down in the footer of the blog, you will see Grumbles. Those who are wondering how the robots are helping me with this blog should click on it and see how Grumbles is helping. I hope others do this as I think it’s the right thing to do.

Grumbles is not perfect. Grumbles lies, he leaps to assumptions, and he frequently heads off — unprompted — in odd directions. Good news: this describes most humans I’ve worked with over the years. The same skills I use to lead the humans, I use to lead the robots.

1. Why is there a fancy logo for Grumbles? I’m glad you asked. I’ve been wanting to work with IconFactory for years and finally found a good excuse. Better yet — there are shirts, many lovely shirts also designed by IconFactory, and all proceeds go to charity. ↩︎