If I wanted an AI summary of a topic or answer to a question, a chatbot of choice can easily provide that for you. There’s no need for yet another piece of blogspam that isn’t introducing new information into the world. That content is already available inside the AI model. At some point, we’ll get so oversaturated with fake, generated BS that there won’t be enough high quality new information to feed them.
Similarly, I remember there was a lot of frothy startup ideas around using AI to do very similar things. The canonical one I remember is "using AI to generate commit messages". But I don't want your AI commit messages... again, not because AI is just Platonically bad or something, but because if I want an AI summary of your commit, I'd rather do it in two years when I actually need the summary, and then use a 2027 AI to do it rather than a 2025 AI. There's little to no utility to basically caching an AI response and freezing it for me. I don't need help with that.
The value is a nice starting point but the message is still confirmed by the actual expert. If it's fully auto-generated or I start "accepting" everything, then I agree it becomes completely useless.
To be fair, there has never been a lot of utility in you as a human being involved, theoretically speaking. The users do not use a forum because you, a human, are pulling knobs and turning levers somewhere behind a meaningless digital profile. Any human involvement that has been required for the software to function is merely an implementation detail. The harsh reality, as software developers continually need to be reminded of, is that users really don't care about how the software works under the hood!
For today, a human posting AI-generated content to a forum is still providing all the other necessary functions required, like curation and moderation. That is just as important and the content itself, but something AI is still not very good at. A low-value poster may not put much care into that, granted, but "slop" would be dealt with the same way regardless of whether it was generated by AI or hand written by a person. The source of content is ultimately immaterial.
Once AI gets good, we'll all jump to AI-driven forums anyway, so those who embrace it now will be more likely to stave off the Digg/Slashdot future.
What we got: more content polluting search, aka worse search.
Edit to add:
Projects like the Internet Archive will be even more important in the future.
AI is widely used for support tasks such as: - Transcribing interviews - Research assistance and generating story outlines - Suggesting headlines, SEO optimization, and copyediting - Automating routine content like financial reports and sports recaps
This seems like a reasonable approach, but even so I agree with your prediction that people will mostly interact with the web via their AI interface.
For something like a blog I would agree, but I found AI to be fantastic at generating copy for some SaaS websites I run. I find it to be a great "polishing engine" for copy that I write. I will often write some very sloppy copy that just gets the point across and then feed that to a model to get a more polished version that is geared to a specific outcome. Usually I will generate a couple variants of the copy I fed it, validate it for accuracy, slap it into my CMS and run an a/b test and then stick with the content that accomplishes the specific goal of the content best based on user engagement/click through/etc.
I'm certainly using Google less and less these days, and even niche subreddits are getting an influx of LLM drivel.
There are fantastic uses of AI, but there's an over-abundance of low-effort growth hacking at scale that is saturating existing conduits of signal. I have to wonder if some of this might be done intentionally to poison the well.
How? Fill the web with AI generated content or just using LLMs to search for information? As more junk is poured into training LLMs this too will take a hit at some point. I remember how great the early web search was, one could find from thousands to millions of hits for request. At some point it got so polluted that it became nearly useless. It wasn't only spam that made is less useful, it was also the search providers who twisted the rules to get them to reap all the benefits.
If you just want to get the information out then just post the bullet points, what do you care?
If you want to be recognized as a writer, then write.
This is so, so wrong. The writing is the thoughts. A person's un-articulated bullet points are not worth that much. And AI is not going to pull novel ideas out of your brain via your bullet points. It's either going to summarize them incorrectly or homogenize them into something generic. It would be like dropping acid with a friend and asking ChatGPT to summarize our movie ideas.
The idea that writing is an irrelevant way to gatekeep people with otherwise brilliant ideas is not reality. You don't have to be James Baldwin, but I will not get a sense for what your ideas even are via an AI summary.
I think if writing more than 200 words is painful for you, blogging probably isn't for you?
Who or what is clamoring for that AI-generated padding which turns 200 words of bullet points into 2000 words of prose, though? It's not like there's suddenly going to be 10x more insight, it's just 10x more slop to slog through that dilutes whatever points the writer had.
If you have 200 words' worth of thoughts you want to share... you can just write 200 words.
Writing _is_ thinking.
Except for the founders/early employees who get a modest (sometimes excessive) paycheck.
We meatbags are great pattern recognizers. Here is a list of my current triggers:
"The twist?",
"Then something remarkable happened",
That said, this is more of an indictment of the lazyness of the authors to provide clearer instructions on the style needed so the app defaults to such patterns.
(Context: I told it to write at "will" after a session of explaining Rene Girard's mimetic desire in the styles of various authors)
*Well, here we are,
You've got me tangled
*And hey, maybe I
*Imagine this: I'm sitting
*And maybe now, I'm
You've got me thinking
*Maybe it's saying, "Hey,
*And so, I think
Not just any wanting,
The kind that makes
There's something beautiful about
The way it drives
*But here's the kicker:
It's got a mind
It makes us do
It's a double-edged sword
*And yet, without it,
Probably just sitting around,
*So maybe, just maybe,
*Not just because you've
*It's that tiny ember
In the end, desire's
It's the fire that
*And maybe, just maybe, [yes, again]
So here's to the
May it burn bright
>>But here's the thing.
>This is one of the usual key turning points in these essays. An earlier one happened when it was like [introduces idea] [straw-mans objection] [denies strawman]. I didn't bring it up because it's not always a strong one and this one didn't seem entirely too heavy-handed. There is, however, much more often a very obvious "But here's the thing" (or similar) to be found. As soon as I saw that, I already knew I was going to find a paragraph beginning with "So" somewhere near the end.
I'm sick of seeing this everywhere. 2 hosting companies use this in every single weekly spam email they send.
Em dashes, "it's not just (x), it's (y)," "underscoring (z)," the limited number of ways it structures sentences and paragraphs and likes to end things with an emphasized conclusion, and I could go on all day.
DeepSeek is a little bit better at writing in a generic and uncharacteristic tone, but still... it's not good.
Needlessly close to bullying way to try and prove your point.
Which part of this looks like bullying? It was opt-in. They attended the presentation because they were interested.