Not long ago I was wondering how much of the Internet is now taken over by AI. Apparently people now use LLM chat bots in place of search engines; we’ve come a long way from non-sensical word like “googling” entering the mainstream vocab to, oh I don’t know, having “gpt” as a verb soon, perhaps. To be fair, if I want a tutorial for troubleshooting my laptop, for instance, chatGPT and the likes would most likely give much more helpful advice than 7 different support threads filled with “Has anyone solved this yet?” comments from one year to another. Even search engines themselves now run their own AI agents to give a “summary” of answers at the top of the page. Why would anyone bother clicking on any links or pages to view and, God forbid, read things?
Then I thought about blogs and how any texts longer than a couple of hundreds of words probably would fall out of popularity even more in this day and age. The other shift is the possible reality that many blogs are already being written by AI. I think often about that Google ad where Person A hands a message to the AI to stretch it to a longer email, so that Person B, upon receiving the email, asks the AI to summarize it to just a short, core message. And while advertising all this, Google must have shrugged and said, “sure, that’s how we do things now, so let the silliness go on!” Couldn’t the same behavior apply where bloggers just feed little chunks of text to AI for it to vomit out a full-fledged article? I don’t want to assume what the average reader would do with the article after publication, but my sense for a long time has been that most just skim and scan. Now, bloggers would be lucky to get their writing indexed into the AI search summaries or chat bot answers.
On the topic of AI and blogging, I of course have thought about if and how this blog would be different, now that AI seems to be well-adapted enough for the blogging world. Sure, I could feed it a few of my past writing, drop a sentence or two to dictate what I want the post to say, then wait for the result that magically copies my tone and style. All that’s left is a bit, or a lot, of revising, but the harrowing task of writing is more or less done without pain. So would I use AI for the blog? The short answer is no, I simply don’t see much value in that, for a few simple reasons.
The first is that I see the writing process as a thinking process more than anything. I often start the whole thing with a simple idea or thought, often while blanking out randomly during the day or arriving at an epiphany in the middle of reading a book. I would then dump all my reasoning, intuition, and tangential questions onto paper, in my instinctive private-writing ritual. When I finally sit down to type up the blog, I often don’t have an outline, structure, or (in most cases) intention to arrive at some specific conclusions. I’ve written before about how the little pauses and breaks while writing can serve as valuable triggers for completely new insights and realizations, and I can almost always count on myself to reroute and develop the blog in some unexpected directions as words and ideas finally get committed to the page.
This to me is the real value of writing: the freedom to be introspective, to draw out all possible nuggets of thoughts, then shape, mix, and structure them into a coherent through-line that is reader-ready. The act of finding words to express my chaotic inner thoughts is one way to get to deeper, more layered and nuanced understanding of a topic. If I let AI write for me, I surrender my reasoning and thinking agency in exchange for a breezy illusion of having gotten “somewhere”, while in fact my cognitive faculties have gotten nowhere at all.
Second, the raw material that I draft myself, though not polished and eloquent as what AI can write, contains tinges of my confusion, discontent, intuition, and resolution, all combined. Other than my reasoning capacity, how sad would it be to lose also the real human emotions that would typically be embedded in the messy free-writing first draft? Of course I tend to filter much of my emotion in translating it to words (I don’t think I’m a particularly sentimental writer), but I find it especially tragic if this form of personal writing is done by a machine that is just trained to mimic formulaic patterns of displaying emotions.
I’m also fairly sure that most readers of my blog are friends who are keen on knowing what I think (thank you all!) and generous enough with their time to tune in once in a while. It would be strange to have technology corrupt this line of connection I have with real-life friends for the sake of efficiency. For as long as I’m holding space here, I want to treat this blog like a conversational zone where my thoughts and feelings are genuine, not syntax manufactured by predictive models, void of my own experiences and messy, flawed utterances.
Lastly, I do really enjoy the creative act of finding new, unconventional ways to express ideas that keep the message both clear and intuitive across languages. I’m not a native in English, and this might very well be my coping mechanism to the residual trauma of doggedly learning English grammar (all those phrasal verbs and idiotic idiomatic expressions!!!!). I sometimes toil and toil to really get to that one incredibly obscure expression that no one uses in everyday conversations, but that somehow captures the nuances of my idea much more concisely and definitively. I wouldn’t be surprised if sometimes the way I write reads like AI writing (it’s the trademark ESL awkwardness). But in any case, the little ESL nerd in me can’t help but indulge in a bit of figurative and embellished language for my own amusement, and AI won’t take that from me any time soon.
Writing has always been my lifeline. I have stacks of filled journals and notebooks, loose notes on my computer, at least 2 private blogs where I dump my not-public-ready entries, and dozens of almost-completed drafts for this blog. I have virtually no problem getting words out on the page, and for me, any struggle has mostly rested in that gap between public and private writing. Having to mold and morph my ideas to certain language that can be read by others is a tough challenge that impedes my motivation to write quite a lot. It’s not that I hold myself to impractical standards of writing only the most refined, manicured products – I’m just an ordinary writing hobbyist after all. Just like speaking to people and finding the right language in conversations though, I simply don’t want to wield that tool of writing carelessly.
That is perhaps the one thing that AI will be able to do well for me, to help bridge that apparent chasm between my unrestrained stream of private writing and the occasional drought of content on this blog. I can have all my fun sorting out ideas, stringing them together in a coherent flow, infusing my emotions and sentiments, and sowing some experimental expressions. Then, instead of sitting for hours with neurotic thoughts of whether the readers will find the writing too confusing, too aggressive, too informal, too silly, too absurd, etc., I let the dispassionate, non-self-critical AI take over as the proofreader and final editor. This doesn’t mean I will give up the practice and skill of customizing writing for an audience. I can still humbly follow the conversations on this blog if anyone ever wants to engage with what I share here, and in that process understand and learn what things mean from the perspective of readers. I figure that if AI can help ease the very last push for a piece of my writing to be out the door, we will have more ‘material’ to exchange and converse on, and that’s what I’m really after in any case.