How this was made.
A quiet accounting of what is human, what is machine-assisted, what is borrowed, and what is original at the Divine Karma Institute. If you notice something we missed here, please write to us.
Writing
All prose, poetry, and reflection at the Institute is written by David Ramirez. The books, the Central Thesis, the Illustrated Guide captions, the Sunday Letter, the app copy, and the site copy come from his own drafts, revised by him over months and years. AI language tools are used as sparring partners and copy-editors during drafting, but no published sentence originates with a machine, and every published paragraph passes under his hand before it ships.
Illustrations
The plates in the Illustrated Guide and the Visual Atlas were generated with the aid of AI image tools, then curated, edited, captioned, and sequenced by David Ramirez. The compositional intent, the reading order, and every accompanying line of text is human. The imagery is a rendering tool, in the same way a book cover designer might use Photoshop. It is not asked to invent the philosophy, only to give it visual form.
Where an image references a person, event, or place, that reference is symbolic and illustrative, not documentary. No plate is claimed as a photograph.
Tools
- ProseHuman authorship. AI assistants used as editors during drafting. Every published sentence is signed off by David Ramirez.
- IllustrationsAI image generation, human curation and captioning. Plates edited and sequenced by hand.
- TypographyFraunces (display serif) and Source Serif Pro (body serif), both open-source, served via Google Fonts.
- Interactive experiencesBistable illusions, breath pacer, Kairos draw, Sankalpa ladder, Visual Atlas: hand-written HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. No frameworks, no tracking, no third-party analytics beyond Google Analytics.
- HostingNetlify. Static site, no databases, no user accounts, no tracking cookies beyond GA4.
- NewsletterButtondown. One email a week at most. Unsubscribe with one click.
- Source imagesDivine Karma Illustrated Guide plates, atlas plates, and hero illustrations were produced for the Institute. Attribution belongs to David Ramirez.
Philosophy of use
We use machines where they help and stop where they don't. AI is useful for typography variation, layout iteration, image drafting, and finding the third word when we can only think of two. It is not useful for the actual work of pointing at what has to be pointed at. That still requires a person who has sat with a question long enough to say something honest about it.
The Institute's whole ethos rests on seeing clearly. Undisclosed AI would undercut that. So the accounting is here, in plain view, and revisable as the tools change.