I have been overwhelmed with a sense of sadness lately - in the last couple of months but especially in the
last ten to fifteen minutes. I keep thinking about whether I should stop writing on this blog. Not because
I don’t like it, I really do. In fact, the question is not really about whether I should stop writing for the blog,
but more so about whether I should stop caring. I mean, stop caring about the visitors, stop caring about
cohesiveness between the topics, stop caring about the design of the site, since I could just write for my
own personal enjoyment; just for the sake of writing. Well, I keep wondering about that. And every once in a while
I try to do some research about this topic. About whether blogging is still a viable career path. About whether
generating traffic by just trying to be helpful is still doable. Even not considering AI, I have always despised
the practice of SEO-writing. Writing for the sake of optimizing for a machine. What are we even talking about?
Who am I writing for; the machine, or the human reading it? It’s the humans reading my texts that I care about,
so why would I optimize for search engine (you know, S*earch *Engine *O*ptimization)?
Well, tonight I felt like I needed to do more research. Generally I have not had much success with this kind of research in the past, since I guess nobody has answer to my question. I fell into the trap as old as time: searching for easy answers to complex questions. I guess I just wanted some reassurance. I wanted someone to tell me that yes, hard work will pay off, you can get people to care about your writing and you can work on your blog full-time. Of course, even this time, I have not been able to find the answer I was looking for. Oh no, what I found was much worse.
What could I have possibly found, I hear you ask?
It was all of these great looking articles. They were very long and elaborate. “Look, some fellow bloggers
writing an elaborate answer to my question”, I thought. I read. I started reading. The articles were long,
I read for 5 minutes and did not even go through a third of the whole thing. It sounded a bit weird
in some cases, but the writing seemed fine. Usually I am able to spot AI writing quite quickly, this one
seemed fine. Well, I keep reading and what do I find? You know, it was one of those tables. Those kind of
summarizing overviews that LLMs generate. They are these weird matrices that basically allow you to skim
over what the LLM just said but in a tabular fashion (you know, for lazy people that don’t feel like reading).
Well, who in their right mind would create a table like this for a topic as simple as this one? I mean, the answer is of course a complex one, but the topic is easy to understand. Why do you need a table? There is nothing to visualize?
Out of curiosity I copy-pasted a section of the article in one of those AI-detectors. I know, I know; those things aren’t very accurate. But it was the best I had, so please let me be.
100% AI-generated.
Damn.
Ok, so I move on to the next article. This one seemed even more convincing than the one before.
I keep reading. I was actually convinced this one was not AI. I was suspicious because of the experience
with the previous article, so mid-way through I decide to copy-paste a section of this article
into that same AI-checking tool that I used before.
100% AI-generated.
I quickly skimmed the next articles. For these ones, I didn’t even need the checking tool. They were clearly AI.
Now, of course this is not new. I know that a lot of content is AI generated and it has been for quite
a few years at this point. But this time it was different. It hit different, as they say.
It was the first time I actually realized the state the internet is in.
I did write an article about how I hate the modern internet
(you can find it here if you’re interested), and there I touch
upon AI content being an issue and that it is ruining the experience for internet users. But this time,
I’m telling you, it was different, it was a whole different story. Sorry if I sound repetitive, but I
cannot stress this enough.
Do you know what I mean, it’s like… I thought I understood it. I thought I knew what it was like.
But only later, once I actually realized and became fully conscious of what it was like, did I understand
that what I thought to be true before was only the tip of the iceberg.
I don’t know how to convey the idea any better than this, I hope you understand.
So I realized that I was searching about whether blogging still makes sense - and the question was clearly very closely related to the influence that AI has had on online writing - and everything I find is AI slop.
I wanted human opinions. This is the kind of article where, even if AI presents “correct” information, I could not care less. What I wanted was opinions, experiences and raw thoughts of people that were in my situation and maybe have more experience than me.
This has been a really sad relization for me. My job (for those that don’t know me, I’m a software developer) feels like it’s losing meaning. I feel like nobody cares about quality anymore. I feel like my blog is losing meaning. And now this?
On the other hand, I also thought that this could serve as motivation. This is the competition. Lazy people pumping out generic walls of text that nobody cares about. So maybe, just maybe, if I actually put in the effort of writing things myself and being useful to people and exchanging genuine ideas, maybe that will be appreciated and hence rewarded. Maybe I will succeed after all.
On the other, imaginary hand (I ran out of hands), these guys are ranking at the top of Google (I don’t even know why I used Google, usually I use DuckDuckGo or Mojeek). Google dominates the market. These guys are at the top. Why?
Why isn’t the work of honest, hardworking people at the top? Why aren’t genuine opinions at the top?
I don’t even know what the conclusion is on this one. Usually my articles have a short conclusion with a closing sentence that sums everything up. There is nothing to sum up here.
I guess we are screwed. I hope that I can reach people through means other than search engines, since by far the biggest search engine in the world seems to be dead in favor of AI-overviews and AI-written articles. I don’t want anyone’s pity. This is not what this is. I just felt like writing this out.
As always, if you would like to reach out to me (maybe we could discuss, maybe you are in a similar situation or you feel in a similar way about this), you can reach me at my email: info@eliasebner.com
In fact, I would love to hear some success stories, as they would serve as great motivation. Do niche bloggers still exist? People making a living writing about their passions and things they enjoy? Technology, travel, art, music, I don’t care. I highly encourage you to reach out, I would love to hear from you. Even if you just want to talk. Blogging is a great hobby, but it’s hard to come home after work and when it’s dark outside, on top of all the other responsibilities I have, sit down and write articles.
If you’re in the same boat, I feel for you. Thanks for reading and I hope to see you on my site again.