At Orbital Alchemists, AI is part of how we work. This is the statement behind the short mentions on our pages: what we use it for, how the output is controlled, and why we think not using it would be the bigger mistake.

First, the what. We use AI to speed up the making of things: first drafts of articles and documentation, research on difficult topics, coding (certain elements) and this website, and the admin that nobody sees but everybody has to do. It also gets used as a thinking partner. Explaining our problem to an extraordinarily patient listener and having it pushed back on us has a way of sharpening (OUR) idea, even when the machine contributes nothing you keep.

Second, the control, and this really matters. Every piece we publish starts with a human seed: the idea, the argument, the experience behind it. AI never invents the position; it helps draft, organise and argue with the material a person supplies. Then a person reads the output line by line, keeps what holds up, rewrites what doesn’t and bins the rest.

Left to its own devices, AI produces stale, incorrect or boilerplate material. We have no desire to place that into the public domain. Human creativity is the essential base, and AI only serves to amplify it. That’s not a disclaimer, it’s the whole engineering problem: the machine makes a strong starting point faster, and the judgement about what’s true and what’s worth saying stays exactly where it was.

Now the why. We respect any individual or organisation that chooses to avoid AI; that’s a coherent position and it’s theirs to take. But Orbital Alchemists is a small studio handling development, operations, administration, marketing and media with limited resources. Without AI, some of that work simply wouldn’t get done, and the rest would take so long that half of it would be out of date before it shipped. Used this way it isn’t a shortcut around understanding. It’s how a studio our size gets to do proper work at all.

So here’s the deal, stated plainly. You can assume AI had a hand in nearly everything we publish. You can also assume a person read every word and stands behind it. Where we’re wrong, we’re wrong in public, and we correct it. And if something on this site reads to you as machine-made boilerplate, say so. That’s not an accusation, it’s a quality signal, and it does us a favour.