I’m not going to begin this article with an in-depth discussion on the love-hate relationship I have with AI (AKA ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) though these days, it’s bordering more on hate but because of the crap they’ve enabled to be put out into the world.
This crap is making it harder to find the original thought and original writing. It’s clogging up the feeds and drowning out better human voices.
For example, if I’m looking for a guide on diving Cozumel, I have to wade through twenty articles of probably AI-generated slop before I find the one article that has value. I feel like someone’s thrown extra hay onto the original haystack (SEO content that also clogged up Google search results) that you lost the needle in—try find it now!
How can I tell it’s AI slop? I don’t even need an AI grader. The phrasing is unoriginal. The format is unoriginal. The word choice is typical. The originality is zero. If you’ve dabbled like me (as all curious people do), you KNOW.
And no, editing AI copy is still not writing. Also, how on earth can you call it a future proofing skill? Dude. Editing has always been something a writer should have in their toolkit.
Even if you fluff up AI content with your own descriptions it still reads without the true feeling, trust me. In our gut, we readers know something is off even if we don’t know why. It’s just not human.
What’s becoming evident the longer these tools exist is that as as these LLMs answer questions using our own sites and blogs to source the answers (without bothering to give us the click throughs, even when and if they do cite us as a source) our personal brand, thoughts, and experiences are going to become more important and valuable.
The AI companies use us as widgets. We’re a data point from whom they can extract money. Luckily for us, the version they typically extract is without the nuance of an individual and therein lies our unique value.
Yes, AI can spit out an article on a Dive Guide to Cozumel, but it can never spit out my opinion on a dive guide to Cozumel (unless you specifically asked for that but then you’d have to know to do that and odds are you’d only know that if you already frequented my site and valued my unique perspective). And thus, injecting your personal perspective (AKA brand) and voice will become more important than ever.
Of course, all of this was true too in an era of SEO-driven content, but it’s going to become more so now that the only true value people will get out of coming to your site is YOUR opinion. If you saturate your site with generic slop from LLMs you’ll ultimately lose traffic (and respect), diminish your personal brand, and fade into the mists of the internet backwaters.
I think this means we need to rethink how we write. We need to provide value because that’s what we love to do. Extract the educator in you that’s taken a back seat.
For example, I loved figuring out how to dive various sites in the Pacific Northwest while I lived there. Written dive guides were sometimes available on other peoples’ blogs but more often than not, they were not comprehensive, or were out of date. They also didn’t typically include things I valued such as the nearest good craft brewery, or a vegan-friendly food stop. When I added these things, my articles became more unique to me, and if you liked what I wrote you might have decided to follow me, just as I followed Scott Boyd’s blog, for example, when initiating myself into the realm of writing dive site reviews (I wanted his opinion, not a generic how-to guide because he was a photographer and he looked for specific things on a dive). I never wrote about sites I didn’t dive and I never copied other peoples’ articles. If I did use information from them, I cited them and linked back to them. This is how online communities are built. Come on people. Let’s not forget that. This is how you make connections with the people you respect and value. Old school!
If you’re using AI or LLMs to write for you because you feel you’re a bad writer, because you don’t have time to write, or because you’re trying to get ahead, you’re losing out in more subtle ways. You’re playing the short game.
Now is the time to write imperfectly because screw the billionaires turning us into widgets to harness for their own ends (no, they don’t think like us).
Bring value back to your own creations. Don’t become part of the slop. Don’t feed the slop machine. Write your own stuff even if is reads poorly. You’ll eventually become a better writer because you spent all that time writing poorly.
Develop your own voice and your own way of viewing the world. When you find your voice, it’s magical. It’s powerful.
There’s immense pleasure to be gained in writing once you let the critic fall to the wayside, once you find the joy in discovering what you think, once you find the perfect way to say the thing you didn’t know you wanted to say. That, my friend, is poetry.
Would an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT consider this a good article? Nope. It would attempt to tidy my intro and conclusion. Smoothe it out, adjust my sentence structure, blah blah blah—and yes, I always knew how to use an em dash and yes, I did sometimes randomly bold or italicize words. I’ll still be doing that thanks.
