Broken Systems
And How to Fix Them
By Mark T Britton
Updated July 4, 2026

A.I. Policy

If I believed that my chainsaw was a safe tool, then it's very likely that I would be missing several fingers, or worse. A chainsaw is a dangerous but useful tool. This is also true for A.I.

All content on this website is generated by the author, with exceptions noted here:

  • The formatting of images, charts, and graphs: I used Claude to edit colors, line widths, and other formatting, but not the data.
  • The subtitles for images, charts, and graphs: Many times, the descriptions of these used Claude's text and formatting.
  • Spell checker: Claude sees words in context. It will differentiate the words "their" from "there," for example. It was used extensively.
  • Punctuation: Claude is good at formalizing punctuation. I did, however, change the rules to substitute a semicolon (;) for an em dash (—), as Claude seems to use the em dash by convention.
  • Grammar: Claude will suggest changes to improperly constructed sentences. This is a mixed bag. Claude is not good with colloquial expressions. Claude is not good at maintaining the author's consistent writing style. There were times when I used Claude's suggestions.
  • Page titles: Claude is pretty good at suggesting page titles based on the page text. I used these suggestions often.
  • Off-site links: Off-site data cannot be verified as containing A.I.-generated content. The laws need to be changed here.
  • I have used A.I. for the generation of placeholder images for my websites. I am not satisfied with the results. These images will be replaced with human-generated artworks.

My Assessment of A.I. in General

A.I. is an extraordinary research tool if properly used. Good prompting is required, however. Claude does not judge the credibility of an information source automatically. Without specific prompting, a scholar will be on equal footing with an unidentified "influencer" on X or Facebook.

Claude is used extensively on this website for research.

Research and Verification

  • Scientific papers: A published paper has little credibility until it has been peer reviewed, cited, and reproduced. Claude can verify these things in minutes compared to many hours of work by a human.
  • Conflicts of interest: For example, a scientific study may have been funded by an industry group with "a dog in the fight." To search manually for such conflicts is extremely time-consuming. Claude can do this in minutes and has been used extensively for this website.
  • Consensus and objections are important factors when judging the validity of information. Claude can quickly surface many reference sources for a particular subject, though completeness can't be guaranteed.
  • When there is a large body of reliable, publicly available information on a particular subject, Claude will do very well. For obscure subjects, A.I. is often subject to hallucinations.

General Capabilities

  • Claude is very good at generating charts and graphs, though once again, good prompting is required. Graphs can be very misleading.
  • Claude is very good at summarizing large documents.
  • Claude is very good at scanning large documents for specific information.
  • Claude is very good at providing opinions on subjects that have substantial data to work from, when prompted well. For example:

"Generate opinions on the effectiveness of the COVID vaccines. Use data generated by accredited epidemiologists, established medical journals, and independent agencies."

  • Claude is good at generating text for links and references to specific data. These must be verified as valid links.
  • Claude is very good at coding. The HTML and JavaScript coding for this website is almost exclusively generated by Claude. It has saved months of difficult work.

← Home