Blog posts in the age of AI
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I won't dart around the fact it has been a while since my last blog post and I wanted to reflect why that is the case.
With the advancements of generative AI models it would be all too easy to flood my site with AI generated blog posts. Simply prompt an LLM to generate titles and text, I could even provide all my existing posts to ensure the style and theming is similar.
But is that valuable? I write these posts as part of my own musings. Not purely to generate content for content's sake. Simply reposting AI content without amendment would be no different than my readers prompting an LLM directly. In fact I'd argue prompting an LLM would yield better results as it can be tailored to the reader and can be asked questions. Think about a software tutorial vs asking a sufficiently powerful LLM to work through the same work, which in theory would be more up to date, help fix issues and be ready to answer questions you have.
So are blog posts obsolete? Why am I even writing this now?
As I thought about this one reason would be to create richer content. Content that includes interactivity, videos, sound and other media. Turning a simple text based blog and elevating the content to the next level. If you have a blog post on a neat Web UI trick, show that in the blog and make it part of the content itself. We are already starting to see this be done by LLM providers.
But aside from that I believe blog writing is still valuable today. Posts that speak of experiences, opinions and beliefs can't as easily be prompted from an LLM. Understanding another point of view can be really insightful and can lead to new ideas and ways of thinking.
I try and write posts of this type. I write not for purely generating content but for myself. It helps me make sense of my thoughts in a constructive way. This is why it can be a while between posts, I am doing it for my own enjoyment and not to hit quotas or views.
Sometimes I feel that can be lost and is something I want to find again.