: Not everyone blogs for the sake of virtue
I just read this post by Artemis:
If you use AI to write your blog posts or “enhance” them, why the fuck are you even blogging? Who wants to read a perfect post with perfect spelling, grammar, sentence structures, and a fancy title if it’s not you who wrote it? What’s the point of your blog then if all you do is “prompt engineer” your writing into “perfection”?
I have often wondered the same thing. The most obvious case is people like Andy, for whom blogging was never about baring one’s soul to the internet, but rather a game—like correspondence chess, except instead of submitting moves, you submit blog posts, and instead of winning you get traffic and comments. If you think this game is fun (I don’t, but the world is a big place), then it might feel perfectly natural to use AI to generate your content, because the content was never really the point, but rather how you package and market it.
But Andy is an extreme case—I know there are bloggers out there who have adopted AI into their workflow and nonetheless do feel that they are engaged in meaningful creative production. Even if we take the “staunch” view that says that using AI is never ethical, it’s worth trying to understand the psychology of those who use AI without being overt champions of the technology.
To answer Artemis’s question as posed—“why the fuck are you even blogging?"—here are a few reasons I can think of (are people going to think I wrote this with AI for having a bulleted list?):
- AI is a “better spellcheck.” For lots of bloggers, English isn’t their first language, and AI offers a speed boost in getting from a first draft to a final draft. In many cases, AI will convert very simple grammatical structures or repetitive word choice into something more interesting. Whether this is actually an improvement is a matter of taste, but I have heard anecdotally that it’s a powerful language learning tool for getting quick feedback on speech patterns that sound non-native.
- Some people blog less because they are enamored with their own thoughts and more because they find the process of building a website, selecting colors, laying out the text etc. to be relaxing. Your response to this might be “Well, if the text is superfluous then just use lorem ipsum or something,” but that’s too reductive—we can arrange people on a spectrum from “cares exclusively about the design” to “cares exclusively about the text content” and there is a sweet spot, about 20% of the way from the left side, where it might make sense to generate posts vaguely related to your interests using AI to free up time to work on the design.
- Garden variety burnout—maybe they started out writing their blog by hand and it got fairly popular and now they feel they have a duty to their readers to keep producing content but are running out of ideas, so they dialogue with an AI to come up with ideas for a post, and one things leads to another, and … you know?
- Some bloggers are genuinely interested in AI as a technology and blogging is a way to like, experiment with how LLMs work and get a feel for how to shape its response using different prompting. Could you do this alone in the privacy of your own bedroom? Probably, but is it harming anyone to have it in public?
- There are some (probably mostly middle/high schoolers as of this writing, but they will be adults before you know it) who have never written anything substantial without the assistance of AI. This technology has been ubiquitous for several years now; it’s no longer an obscure trick.
I’m not asking you to regard these hypothetical bloggers as like, paragons of virtue and creative vision, but I think there is room for a bit more understanding. I do wish that those who are using AI to “augment” their process would be more forthcoming about it, but at the same time, I think this technology is becoming so commonplace that such disclaimers will soon be regarded as tedious, or included on everything by default as a formalism, just like “this product was produced using equipment that also processes tree nuts.”
Returning to the idea above of a spectrum of people who enjoy blogging for design’s sake vs. for writing’s sake, I’m all the way on the right end. I’m quite confident that using AI to generate blog post content would kill all the joy of blogging for me in like, seconds flat. I also feel like I have a certain duty to the reader to give them human-generated words (you can prompt the LLM yourself, so why would I do that for you?).
In fact, I’m sometimes afraid that readers will think I am an AI, e.g. programmed by [misc. political forces] to promote a certain worldview rather than what I actually am, i.e. a guy on the internet. One way I assuage this fear (with a degree of intentionality that varies depending on my mood) is by sometimes just letting typos go through or using comma splices/weird grammar as a countersignal. But as I write this, I realize that doesn’t really prove anything—you could ask ChatGPT to insert humanlike instances of “unnatural” speech, huh?