A recurring thought when preparing articles online: Is it worth continuing to write in a digital publishing world flooded with machine-generated co...
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I resonate with this thought, however something at the back of my head also feels that this is the change. Transformation from hand-written content to AI assisted ones, and change is different and difficult.
I still write many of the stuff (which I never publish) by hand. That too with an ink pen.
This year, I'm planning to polish some of my work and publish it online
Beautiful!
As a long-time writer, I completely agree with you that AI-generated content lacks the persuasive power or appeal to readers, or at least to me.
I believe AI will assist writers in certain cases, such as spell-checking, grammar-checking, or suggesting additional content, but I would never rely solely on it to create content for my blog.
It's surprising that some platforms, like Facebook, as mentioned in the article, are using AI to generate content - have we reached the point where humans should create AI to consume content and let them interact with each other.
As a grumpy old dinosaur who just wrote his 3rd stone tablet of the day, I agree with this article whole-heartedly! :-)
I totally agree with you. AI is the new spam. I'm writing, on my own without the assistance of AI, but am seriously wondering what's the point. I'm trying to write mainly for myself.
AI is useful tool. As a non-native English speaker, it does great correcting grammar and suggesting sentence structures. I use it when writing articles to evaluate the content and point at potential shortfalls or improvements.
Fair, I'm being dismissive. I should probably try to leverage it in the same way.
Can't say I don't agree! I also frequent sites like Dev.to and Daily.dev, and I also think that their biggest problem is the lack of human emotion. It feels like there’s so many people grinding out posts so they can label themselves a “technical writer” or simply for the sake of marketing themselves. (There are people who make completely human generated content though -- they're just much harder to find than they should be).
And as you've said, the main cause of this is AI. It’s easily accessible to almost everyone, so why not use it in… everything? Additionally, it’s rarely shunned by administrators (at least when it’s “lightly” used), and if all you care about is cranking out articles, AI is your best friend.
On a slight tangent, I've wrote (and made) a lot of things that are "anti-AI", and I normally get one of two responses. Either "yeah I agree with this, cool", or "I'm gonna keep using AI because it means I can write faster". As with most things, people seem to be more focused on quantity over quality. Just wanted to throw that out there though -- it's not scientific at all.
Anyways, nice to see someone with similar ideas and whatnot. Thanks for writing -- I like your style!
I think plagiarism is an old problem.
For me, it is still worth it to write. Even if no one reads my writing but me.
The web had already been flooded with mediocre and outdated content getting attention with catchy headlines before, that's what ML/AI has been trained on. But generative AI feels like a quantum leap that scaled the problem, plus many sites and services even trying to persuade its users to use AI to generate content, and ML/AI-based assistance like Grammarly streamlining individual expression towards a mainstream language style when we accept all of their default suggestions.
Authenticity is the key: achieve something specific, highlight its impact, and write about it in our own words – so far, so good. Sadly, I agree with your observation that good content often keeps drowned beneath the bad – but that's not an AI issue. See Sturgeon's Law and prior discussion on DEV.
DEV discussion from 2022 before the generative AI hype:
and from 2023, focusing on low-quality listicle posts:
Conclusion? Research, communicate, recommend, blocklist, build networks, don't trust algorithms!
Still hold same views anyway. I was contributing to an open-source project built with Jekyll and trying to implement a pagination feature. While using ChatGPT for assistance, I kept getting stuck, even though it seemed like I had all the boxes checked. A quick glance at the documentation revealed that pagination does not work from a file that isn't
.html, which was omitted from the prompt I received from ChatGPT after we'd been debugging together for hours. LOLHost: "Welcome back to 'Digital Frontiers,' where we explore the intersection of technology and creativity. Today we have a special guest - a writer and tech blogger who's going to share some really interesting insights about what it's like to write in this new AI-dominated landscape. Welcome to the show!"
Guest: "Thanks for having me. This is something I've been wanting to talk about for a while."
Host: "So what prompted you to speak out about this? I know you recently wrote a pretty powerful piece about human writing in the age of AI."
Guest: "You know, it really came from this recurring thought I keep having whenever I sit down to write. I just keep asking myself: Is it even worth continuing to write online anymore? The digital publishing world is absolutely flooded with AI-generated content."
Host: "How can you tell it's AI-generated?"
Guest: "laughs Oh, it's pretty obvious once you know what to look for. These articles all follow this really rigid format, with this incredibly predictable language. And the style... I call it 'silicony.' Whether it's about tech, cooking, or car repairs, it all has this same passionless feel to it."
Host: "Like a nervous middle school student reading a report they didn't write?"
Guest: "Exactly! And here's the thing - I'm not just frustrated as a writer, I'm frustrated as a reader too. Especially with technical content, which is what I usually look for. The information is often outdated or just plain wrong."
Host: "I've heard people say, 'Well, if your writing is good enough, it'll stand out from the AI content.' What's your take on that?"
Guest: "That's such wishful thinking. Let me tell you a story that perfectly illustrates this. I once wrote an article about 11 new programming features, but I accidentally forgot to describe one of them. Within days, there were all these AI-generated copies popping up like mushrooms, and guess what?"
Host: "What happened?"
Guest: "Every single one of them described exactly 10 features, missing the exact same one I forgot to write about! Same code examples and everything. And here's the kicker - these copies actually got more engagement than my original article."
Host: "That's wild. So you're basically competing against yourself?"
Guest: "Worse - I'm competing against an army of AIs that can churn out fifty articles in the time it takes me to write one. And they're not just copying me, they're copying each other. It's like a photocopy of a photocopy at this point."
Host: "But you're not completely against AI, right?"
Guest: "No, and that's really important to clarify. I use AI daily for things like editing and grammar checking. It's an amazing tool. But there's a big difference between using AI as a tool and having it completely take over content creation. I know some people will see me as this grumpy dinosaur resistant to change, but that's missing the point entirely."
Host: "What do you see as the future of this situation?"
Guest: "Look, it's only going to expand. We're already seeing it move beyond writing into images, and soon it'll be audio and video too. Meta's already announced they're going to have AI profiles on Facebook and Instagram. They call it 'organic growth,' but there's nothing organic about it. It's artificial, and often built by violating the copyright of original human creators."
Host: "That's a pretty sobering outlook. Any final thoughts for our listeners?"
Guest: "Yeah - I'm not against progress or technology. But when it comes to genuinely new content, especially articles, there's something special about the human touch that I don't think we should lose."
Host: "Thank you for sharing your perspective with us today. This has been 'Digital Frontiers.' Join us next week when we'll be discussing..."
dont feed the ai with more brilliant stuff. add the ai-blocker tag in the html to prevent being indexed.
ai-blocker tag?
But AI for beginners, can get a lot of help, if you are learning alone
I think one of the frushrations right now is that AI should be helping people create, not replaceing
them