- Every word in this series was conceived, researched, and written by yours truly, without the aid of any Artificial Intelligence. It’s all organic, artisanal, brain-pan juice—mistakes, em-dashes, and all.
- I'm not anti-AI. Far from it. I believe it has a proper use and place.
- This site started with a Jekyll theme. To move it to Ghost, an AI assistant was used to implement the same functionality.
- In a few places, AI-generated images will be used, usually because I could not find an actual representative image. These will be properly marked and credited.
- I also use a commercial grammar-checking service that claims to use AI. I often take its punctuation and spelling hints, but tell it to f-off when it makes a stupidly bad phrasing recommendation, which is surprisingly often.
- I carefully select and use photographs from stock image sites taken by human photographers (properly credited). However, I have no way to tell whether THOSE images were touched by AI. I hope not, but nowadays, it’s hard to tell.
- For memes or GIFs, it’s challenging to locate original sources and provide credit. I apologize to the creators. Please drop me a note, and I’m happy to correct this omission or take them out and replace them with bland LLM-generated content.
- All technical diagrams, unless otherwise credited, were hand-made by me using illustration and presentation tools.
- Highlighter colors are added by me to emphasize something. There is no significance to the actual color.
- I’m personally drawn to stories of people. Occasionally, I will inject a bit of my own background and history into side notes.
- My thanks to the readers and reviewers (in alphabetic order): Adam R, Bea K, Bill P, Bruce I, Chris K, Christopher S, Elizabeth K, Hamid F, Heidi R, Ian L, Ian V, Larry L, Luke F, Mark C, Mike L, Mitch R, Nick F, Omid A, Paul V, Rob M, Seyed M, Shadi S, Sohrab G, and Vasavi P.
- Of course, all errors and omissions are mine and not related to any past, present, or future employers or consulting clients.
- Speaking of clients, if you are a startup or enterprise interested in the design and architecture of human-centric AI Assistants, feel free to get in touch.
- AI is a fast-moving field, and more products, features, and revisions will have appeared or evolved by the time this is published. I will try to keep these posts up to date as best I can. If there are errors and omissions, please contact me through Bluesky, or drop a note to contact@touchgrass.ing.
- Thank you.
A Note on the Name
In the English language, a noun must be converted to a verb before it can be conjugated. The noun grass, therefore, has to first be turned into the verb to grass before it can be used as grassing.
In Brit-speak (which I was immersed in through high school on the way to O-levels), to grass on someone is to report them to the authorities. In American-speak it's the equivalent of narking.
In American English, grassing is the gerund or present participle of the verb to grass, which means to cover an area of ground with grass, or to feed livestock.
To Touch Grass is an idiomatic term that is defined as:
to participate in normal activities in the real world especially as opposed to online experiences and interactions.
Interestingly, Webster's choice of words of the year for 2025 included both this and a pejorative term for AI-generated content.
Finally, did you know '.ing' is a valid top-level domain? Neither did I, until I set about to come up with a name that matched the human-centric nature of this project.
And here we are.