First of all I need to say I’m not “Anti AI”. There’s no doubt what you can do with the likes of Chat GPT is a real game changer. It’s super easy to crank out content using these tools. Heck, you can use it to do so many things including writing code, which is absolutely shamazeballs.
Here comes the caveat…
Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you always should.
You see, at the time of writing this I am of the belief that on a blog like this you are still not going to beat hand-written content, imperfectly created and shared; you know this is me and if you continue to stick around, you’re doing so because you have a level of interest in what I have to share with you.
When you start creating blog posts with AI images and the formatting framework associated with it, anyone who has spent any length of time being exposed to this kind of content, know it looks and feels a certain way.
Don’t get me wrong, to an extent it’s quite impressive, but it’s frequently devoid of soul and quite boring at times (in my experience)
AI can’t compete with my neurons when it comes to being human – not yet anyway.
At the end of the day, I’m writing this content for fellow humans, not for the bots or to win points because I have an impressively long post.
I don’t do post length envy 🙂
Why am I rambling on about this?
Well, do you remember a film called Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino?
There was a section in that film where they talk about dogs having personality:
“Jules:
I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent:
Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules:
Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charmin’ motherf***in’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?”
The key bit in that little excerpt there was that “Personality Goes A Long Way”.
It’s the same with blogs, especially personal ones and one of my favourite blogs I check in at every few weeks always had personality. It was another one of those basic ones but the owner of the blog shared some really cool stats and information.
I went there earlier and it now looks like any one of the gazillions of AI generated blogs out there. Long, impressive posts filled with content and key facts… and boring as hell.
Ah man, the person running this blog sold out what was so good about the blog and replaced it with a load of auto generated AI content that is about as stiff as a starched suit on a bad day.
I now have no reason to visit it again and that’s a pity. I’m not going to name or link out to that blog here, because I respect the marketer whose blog it is, I just think what they have done is a mistake but who knows what their underlying strategy or intention is with that site.
My personal view is that it’s nowhere near as good as it was because of this change.
There are no shortcuts with this kind of endeavour. If you want something of value, you have to keep chipping away at the coal face and inject your personality into it otherwise you don’t stand out.
You just end up being a bland bit of the landscape that nobody is interested in. The sad thing in the case of that blog I was talking about is I know the marketer behind it could write 200 word posts much more interesting, without the bells and the whistles and would be of far more value to the visitor.
When you watch a stop motion film like Jason & The Argonauts as a kid it just seems magical and you don’t question it, but you just know it’s something special. When you’re an adult, you appreciate the unbelievable effort that went into making things come to life with stop-motion. The human element cannot be denied, just as it cannot with hand drawn cartoons – you know, the old ones that were really good (if you doubt what I’m saying go back and look at the old Popeye cartoons – there is no comparison if you put any value on originality or an end result when someone does something they actually care about).
When everybody else is zigging, you should be zagging.
AI is hot but it aint human. Don’t sell out what makes YOU unique, dear reader.
You are your own USP.
Signing off on this one with one of my favourite Kraftwerk tunes – Man Machine (an absolute belter):
Thanks for reading, see you in the next post…
