AI Use Acknowledgement
The Open Practice Academy uses AI-supported tools throughout its creative, organizational, accessibility, research-support, writing, design, and program development workflows. I believe in being transparent about that use.
AI is part of my process, but it is not the author of my work.
I use AI as a tool, not as a replacement for human judgment, lived experience, professional expertise, ethical responsibility, or care. AI does not decide what I believe, what I publish, what I teach, or what I recommend. It helps me organize, structure, clarify, draft, revise, test ideas, design materials, and move through work that can otherwise become difficult to complete as a one-woman business.
My main AI-supported tools are ChatGPT and Notion AI, both used through paid business-level accounts. I use these tools intentionally because they provide stronger workspace and data-use controls than casual or public use. I do not knowingly use account settings where my workspace content is used to train large language models, and I do not place sensitive personal information or personally identifiable information into custom GPTs or general AI workflows.
I use Notion as a second brain to capture research, notes, ideas, analysis, personal writing, drafts, and project history. I use ChatGPT and Notion AI together as thinking partners that help me retrieve, organize, compare, and refine information I have already gathered or created. For sensitive materials, I use secured, domain-specific Google Drives and my web hosting platform, Wix, rather than placing that information into AI tools.
My use of AI is also connected to access.
I am autistic and live with ADHD, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and related challenges that affect executive functioning, language processing, task initiation, organization, emotional regulation, and sustained workflow. AI helps me externalize and organize the thinking that is already happening. It helps me turn brain dumps, notes, questions, research, half-formed ideas, worries, and connections into clearer language and usable structures. In that sense, AI functions partly as an accessibility tool and accommodation.
My process is rarely a simple “prompt in, answer out” exchange. I usually begin with my own thinking: notes, reflections, personal writing, professional experience, source material, questions, and context from my work. From there, I work through ideas conversationally. I ask questions. I revise. I push back. I add context. I check whether the language says what I mean. I review sources. I reshape drafts. I make final decisions.
Nothing I publish is AI verbatim, unchecked, or uniterated.
As a creative person and someone deeply committed to human connection, I spend a significant amount of time shaping and reshaping what I put into the world. AI may help me get words onto the page, organize a messy idea, compare themes, create a first structure, or generate design options, but the final work is reviewed, revised, contextualized, and approved by me.
I also use other AI-supported tools for research support, design, website and app development, visual content, and workflow creation. These may include platforms such as Perplexity, Lovart.ai, Lovable, Canva AI, Notion AI, and ChatGPT.
Because AI is integrated throughout my creative, organizational, accessibility, writing, and design workflows, most TOPA materials may include some level of AI-supported influence. I use a layered disclosure approach: this site-wide AI Use Acknowledgment explains my overall process, and specific disclosures are added to public-facing materials when AI substantially supports drafting, research synthesis, document development, or visual creation.
I believe AI, like any major innovation, can be used well or poorly. It can flatten human thinking, automate harm, reproduce bias, and make it easier to avoid doing the work. It can also support access, reduce barriers, help people communicate, extend capacity, and make complex work more possible for people who have been expected to function without enough support.
I will not always be perfect. But my intention is to respect the technology, its strengths, and its limits. I use AI to support clarity, access, creativity, and sustainability, not to replace human thought, relationship, accountability, or care.
I do not use AI to replace my humanness.
I use it to help me express, organize, and sustain it.
-Megan