I'm trying to write posts with newly updated hands-on samples/labs (using my commands from hands-on samples/labs/codes on my GitHub that were implemented/tested 2-3 years ago). However, I realized that among the sloppy posts produced by AI (COMPLETELY AI generated), the laboured posts are unfortunately lost. This leads to a serious loss of motivation to write new posts.
By the way, I'm not against AI, I even generate some images using AI, I make some grammar corrections, paraphrasing using AI in my writings/posts (because, I'm not native English speaker), I get ideas, new information/perspectives from AI. However, I realized that many posts are COMPLETELY AI generated. You can understand from unnecessary too frequent emojis (🚀✔️👉⚡💡🧠🌐🏆🎯), short info, unnecessary too frequent capitalisation, code that is simply copied and not even included in the code blog, 10-20 long posts are written in ONE-DAY, ~300-400 long posts in 2 weeks, etc. The problem is that there are many posts that are COMPLETELY AI generated. Human generated posts are getting disappear. At least, I'm feeling that giving effort while writing post in DEV, testing code/command in the post, creating drawings in the post are losing its value.
Some may disagree, some may agree.
But in the end, as these fully AI-generated articles increase, there will be fully AI-generated articles in the future.
As bad money drives out good money, there will be poor quality, untested commands/codes, COMPLETELY AI generated posts.
There will be no point in writing and reading.
It's important for EVERYONE, even for those who produce writing entirely with AI. Otherwise, there will be only untested commands/codes, not written/tested by real humans.
How will this inflation of sloppy writings/posts be resolved in DEV community? At least if there is a blind review randomly (getting score to motivate people), everyone who sees a post can tell if it is completely AI generated or not. I don't know any other rational way?
How will people stay motivated to keep writing posts?
Let's Discuss! 🤝
I am throwing a letter in a bottle into the ocean, maybe someone reads it, maybe nobody.. If anybody read/agree, pls write something in comments, or am I alone?
Top comments (38)
Ah, it seems to me that people are actually good at spotting what's written by AI. You can find a lot of examples here on DEV - the ones written entirely by AI are too superficial and vague. And they rarely get much attention.
On the other hand - posts written by people typically have something personal or genuine about them. Like a background story or something the author experienced, realised, etc.
(A funny side note - there seems to be a popular AI prompt that ends with a 'Conclusion' section - and it's never really a conclusion haha :)
Anyway, personally I think 'human-generated' content will continue to be valued highly, exactly because of the 'personal' part. People do like to know how the author reached a conclusion or something...
Firstly, thank you for writing your opinion, I just didn't think so. As you say, people notice it when they look, but when you search for tags and look through the list of posts, you are exposed to a lot of this type of posts, and your writings/posts get lost in the sea/ocean. The ones written by real people are less visible. Maybe tagging after review, a voting mechanism, or understanding why people do what they do and encouraging them not to do it. I don't know what the solution would be, that's why I thought I'd write about it. But as it increases more and more, as the motivation decreases, as the writings are lost in the face of the labour given, the number of writings/posts written by real people will decrease and disappear completely. The question will come to mind: why should we keep writing?
Uhm I think there is a kind of a 'voting mechanism' - having likes, comments, etc on your post will (IMHO) make it more visible? Also, I go and follow people who write well, which kinda works as a 'personal filter' for me and as a way for them to get their posts in front of those who read them.
As to why should we keep writing - I don't know, personally I don't post. I think I've only posted one
Hello! :)and that's it. So, technically, can't say much about why, I guess people do it because they have something to say. :)Voting mechanisms or tagging may help. I don't know what kind of method would be efficient/logical, but the point here is to point out the problem and discuss solutions. As you said, you are filtering for the quality of the articles according to the person. When you want to see new articles, you have to go through the lists by looking at the titles, you have to see the whole article by clicking on the links of the individual articles, each time you see the patterns of the articles, which are mostly completely AI produced, and you lose the desire to read / write. Why should I read completely AI generated posts. I can go from GPT and read better with more iterations myself.
Anyone can write, why do people write? If you use open source resources (code, blog, video) while learning, you want to transfer what you know in the same way as open source. The desire to make a contribution, as you write what you know, others write what they know, what they are curious about. In this way, knowledge increases. But, you cannot do this with posts produced entirely with AI, on the contrary, you will
pollute the system. When there aretoo many spam posts that are completely AI-generated, people are more exposed to these, and the posts written with human labour are lost.Yeah, I get that. I just don't see much that can be done (other than people filtering it out). You know - the internet has never been good at this - we've had the SEO crap for so long, and it won't go away, unfortunately...
There are, yes, little things that can be done (like up/down voting, likes, comments, etc) - but at the end of the day - if it's not us (collectively) ... or proper pricing for AI usage... I just don't see it going away...
What's your idea about solutions?
Perhaps, it can be prevented by tagging posts generated COMPLETELY with AI in moderation or in a way that everyone can do. People can recognise patterns by looking at them. On the page of the post or in the lists, this tag appears next to the title of the posts, people at least know this without going into the post. In this way, posts produced COMPLETELY with AI can be recognised.
" 'human-generated' content will continue to be valued highly" this times 100.
Thank you for writing here, I completely agree with you.
We have to pick our battles. AI generated content is only going to get worse. By worse, I mean it will flood the internet ever more. And that's not new, we've had spam pretty much since always. (And there's people playing SEO schemes here on dev.to promoting services unrelated to coding and publishing the exact same article from different accounts.)
If you want to keep writing, write something AI can't generate: add your personal touch, stories, anecdotes. AI is going to kill mediocre writers, and make good writers stand out.
Yes, you're right when you say that good writers will stand out. However, it will be harder for good writers' posts to stand out among so many posts generated COMPLETELY with AI. When you try to look at the posts in the tag lists, you see many posts written COMPLETELY with AI. I think most people are aware of this situation, even many of them have stopped writing their own ideas/posts, it seems like they have gone away. If there is no motivation to write original, high-quality posts, they will disappear in time.
I've just found one post, I think that he gave up to write => dev.to/syeo66/im-tired-of-it-5fe2
In the context we're interested in, writing enables us to organize ideas, retain concepts, methods and theories more easily, share, etc., and sometimes even put them into practice.
Writing allows us, even in a simple notepad, without publishing, to evaluate ourselves: “What is well conceived is clearly stated, And the words to say it come easily” - Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux.
So yes, when we publish, the feedback we get allows us to improve, to dig deeper into certain points etc., and we're happy and proud to have shared something.
But from my point of view, writing is about self-improvement. Write for yourself first, throw your article like a letter to the sea, the rest is just a bonus.
Sorry for my average English, I haven't practised seriously for a long time.
Thank you for writing your ideas. Yes, while writing, one develops, builds one's thoughts, adds one's creative thoughts. After writing and sharing, reading the post by people, commenting on the post by people, receiving feedback makes the author happy and motivates the author. Because it feels good to encourage people to think, to learn, to motivate. Unfortunately, that taste, that labour, is not present in the articles produced COMPLETELY with AI, and unfortunately, it also causes the posts on which time is spent to be ignored. No, your English is very good, please keep writing.
I completely understand where you're coming from, and I think that general "how-to" posts are the first to become fully AI-generated. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Do we really need another tutorial on "how to draw a button in JavaScript" or "how to install Python on a Mac"? Or the repeated "12 libraries every engineer must know"? Personally I just scroll past that type of content. It doesn’t catch my interest, even if it’s written by a person and not AI.
On the other hand I’ve noticed that content based on personal experiences or unique challenges is gaining more value. If you check the top-discussed posts on DEV.TO right now, articles about real-world stories like building a portfolio, optimizing AWS Glue costs by moving to Airflow, or lessons learned from crashing a production database get the most engagement and feedback.
So yes, blogging is going through a shift, and AI content is part of the reason. But I believe content that resonates with personal experiences or emotions will not just survive but become even more valuable in this sea of generated posts. It’s those stories that connect us as a community and remind us why we write in the first place.
Thanks for your comment :) As you say, writing simple ‘How-to’ documents may be unnecessary with AI at some points. But, there is still a need for guiding writings that need human approval and labour to understand the theory, to see the details, to learn, to apply. Because AI continues to hallucinate and seems to continue to hallucinate.
As you said, blogging and content production also evolves over time. Personal experience comes to the fore. What I want to emphasise is that there are a lot of articles/posts produced entirely with AI in 2 minutes, and when people look at the posts, they can understand some patterns, but the fact that there are so many articles that are not so labour-intensive makes it difficult to find labour-intensive articles.
We can't do statistics/surveys right here, but if we ask the writers here, I think the majority would prefer human-written posts.
A very good topic! When I first started writing, it was hard to look at the stats and not get demotivated when I saw very few likes or comments, or even views. Sometimes it still is difficult to keep writing, because you could spend hours crafting a good article but get drowned out by listicles or AI content.
For most of the deep-dive articles I write, hours of work go into it, not just to write the content but also to fact-check, write code, test the code, etc... I may use AI at various points in this process, but the final content is my unique perspective, my thoughts, and my ideas.
It's hard to be a writer but I keep going because:
A) It's great to share knowledge, even if one person reads it and learns something from the content, then great! I've achieved my goal.
B) I enjoy writing. I enjoy writing code too, but writing is a different way to express oneself which is a great feeling.
C) Documentation. Helps me to document technical challenges, so when I come back weeks or months later, it's far easier to understand my own writing than reading documentation written by someone else or following tuts.
Thank you very much :) You've made my point exactly. You can spend hours, even days to write high-quality articles/posts, documents, code. In a very nice way, you have stated that human labour is given while writing a post and the psychology of writing, the expectation of the writer/blogger. I totally agree with each of them one by one (A,B,C). That's why I am against COMPLETELY AI-generated posts produced in 2 minutes. There are so many such posts that the laboured posts get lost among them.
Thanks for pointing this out again. The internet always had a spam issue, but algorithms and AI seem to make it much worse, and that's not unique to DEV.to. I still hope for DEV to be both open and inclusive, while finding a way to boost unique high-quality content based on first-hand experience.
I see that generative AI is good for "common-sense" content in topics that have been written about a lot, especially when accuracy doesn't matter that much, like an HTML tutorial for absolute beginners. But there are still so many unanswered questions that nobody has written about or where there is too much outdated content. We can go for those unexplored topics. We can refine our very own writing style, ditch automated style advice like Grammarly, that used to help me a lot, but insists that I don't write "my own" etc. – let's be proud of our personal human imperfection and use it as a proof of humanity and uniqueness!
Thank you for expressing your thoughts. Hopefully Dev.to will find a solution to this and help differentiate between high quality human-generated writing and spammy, COMPLETELY AI-generated content. Many companies and platforms block and ban COMPLETELY AI generated content. Here, Dev.to may not want to do that because of freedom, I understand that, but somehow human labour needs to be highlighted.
For my project I used 8 different AI. Which is also lead me a moral question, time-to-time I using AI for fix my write ( english not is my first language ). But AI cannot a good source of some subject, because that is mostly reflect our humanity common knowledge, but don't put a new idea to table.
You are right, at the moment AI can't really reasoning, it simply guesses the next letter/word. After AI is trained with very large data, by writing answers like a human, it gives the illusion that it is reasoning. The situation may change in the future. As an assistant, AI will help humanity a lot in terms of giving ideas/information and saving time. Of course, depending on how people use it.
As I mentioned in the post, people do not gain anything with posts produced completely with AI, because AI can reflect hallucinations (which look real, but are not real). This superficially reflects untested codes/commands/methods that are likely to be wrong. When such COMPLETELY AI generated posts are few, maybe it will not have much effect, people will look and pass by. But, if there are too many, it will pollute the system, just like polluting a place. When people cannot distinguish between right and wrong, the value of writing/information will decrease. Also, as you said, every posts become to be similar, low quality/average posts. People will question why we write and read.
Good point. I think a lot of content on Dev in totally generated by LLMs. I have analaogy, when you post generated by AI post that seemes as cheating in chess with stockfishGood point. I think a lot of content on Dev is totally generated by LLMs. I have an analogy: when you post an AI-generated article, it feels like cheating in chess with a stockfish engine. Especially in the dev community, writing high-quality technical posts plays a crucial role in demonstrating expertise in your main area. Before reading, I often check if the text was AI-generated, and with greater ability, I wouldn't read it. I believe marking content as AI-generated will become a standard practice in the future.
Thank you for sharing your opinion. I no longer feel alone :) Technology improves, but we have to adapt and make improvements for better system/community. I don't know if Dev.to management will see these ideas, but it makes sense to discuss, make a note here and get everyone's opinion as much as possible, show the problem, evaluate and give feedback. We have to find way.
It is my answer to the question of Why. I'm focused on usefulness for myself: practicing my English and writing skills, and creating content that represents me as an expert.
I've written about this before and made a large-ish discussion post about it as well. Just wanted to plug that if you're curious. TLDR, there's no perfect way to moderate partially AI generated posts. As you said, it's a very nice tool for avoiding language barriers. However, most people agree that completely AI generated posts should just be removed though.
You're right, thank you for your opinion. AI-supported, high quality written, tested, human-checked, human-experienced writings/posts are valuable. Because, it saves people time, shows good content, teaches them, gives insight/vision.
Unfortunately, the increase and further increase of posts generated COMPLETELY by AI, which are not even read by the person who wrote the content (directly copied content), will unfortunately reduce the quality, motivation, labour, and the value of everything.
Somehow reducing the content which is generated COMPLETELY by AI will be better, or at least people should know that the article is produced entirely with AI without clicking from the list. I think that there needs to be a separation of posts written by human labour from posts generated COMPLETELY by AI.
Tbh, ultimately it depends on the value to the readers. If someone generates via ai but his posts are being liked by the audience, I think that should be fine. But if someone generates a lot of irrelevant posts and is ignored by the audience, I guess the platform can catch and give them a warning or an advice..
Thank you for writing. I hope that a better quality and more human labour-oriented method will be found.