I accept guest posts and sponsored posts on my blog, and I used to get some good ones. Now, 9 out of 10 are written by Chat GPT and have a lot of words that add up to very little useable info. And why does every Chat GPT article start with, “In a world…?”
AI makes me very uneasy. Because in a world of bloggers carefully crafting their articles (see what I did there, haha) AI is cranking out one lame post after another with just a few word prompts. I’m so tired of these terrible posts, of which I am guilty of occasionally publishing because a girl’s gotta pay her bills after all.
So just know, when you read something that seems odd and not incredibly useful (besides these posts where I basically just complain about stuff) I didn’t write that.
I turn down A LOT of posts. I just turned down one this morning that was about dressing like Princess Tiana from Princess and the Frog. It was a long article, with several factual errors and it reeked of AI. It started with a sentence about how every single Disney princess was known for her feminine charm and how you too can emulate that. Guess they never saw Brave…
I wrote back to let them know I couldn’t publish that, even as a sponsored post. I like making money, but I still have standards!
Update: They resubmitted the post twice and I finally published it. Barely.
Fighting Back Against AI
I get so many badly written AI articles, that I’ve started running them through an AI checking tool called ZeroGPT, to detect how much is human written. It’s not 100% correct, but it’s still helpful. There are several programs out there, but so far, I’ve liked that one the best.
And on the other side of the people sending the awful AI posts, is the bloggers that have blogs just full of these posts. Just one unpersonal robot article after the next, filling up the Inernet with useless and often questionable information. AI isn’t foolproof- you have to still have an actual person fact-check check those articles.
For example, I recently popped on ChatGPT to get the background story on Elf on a Shelf, and it told me it was celebrating its one-year anniversary of being released. It was way off on that one. So, if I just cut and paste like I see so much of, I’d be spreading misinformation, and somebody out there would be telling someone else how it’s only been around for a year because they read it on the Internet.
AI can be useful, but it also makes me incredibly uneasy. For me, writing has always been personal. My whole blog is personal. AI tries to be personal but just comes off as weird, unnatural and repetitive.
I worry that real writers that write real blogs will be replaced by AI just by the sheer numbers of posts being cranked out. It’s hard enough to Google anything anymore without an AI generated answer, or a link to an AI post that is always very unhelpful and often misleading.
Do You Use AI? How?
I admitted above that I do sometimes use ChatGPT to flesh out certain parts of posts when I need more factual information. But I do always fact-check whatever it tells me, and then rewrite it in my own words.
So I’m curious- do you use AI? Can you recognize the posts created with it? What do you think about it?
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Another great tech article. I don’t use AI, I hate it. Half of why is the reasons you spelled out so clearly. The other half is I don’t like the way it’s being developed. There’s no safeguards in place for starters. It’s the epitome of the sci-fi mad scientist developing tech just to show others he’s smarter than them. It’s also using the public to train and grow it, with the false promise of getting rich from it’s use. Lastly, all that inputted data for creation requests is all data mined to build profiles on users. It’s scary what can be pieced together from enough vague clues.
Yes to all that! The whole thing just makes me uneasy. And it’s making a lot of marketing people think they can write and don’t need actual bloggers/writers.
I hate publishing some of the guest posts, but they pay well, so I apologize in advance next time you see me post something that doesn’t quite seem right. I consider them my blogs “commercial breaks” Lol.
Completely agreed. I didn’t touch on it since I was ranting on the other aspects, but the writing thing drives me beyond nuts. We work hard to improve our craft, and these lazy schmucks come along with sloppy A.I. generated writing that would flunk out of a 3rd grade English class.
Yes! But they always tell you they are “working with a team of writers” lol
Tell them they need a team of proofreaders, LOL.
I tried an AI website once to outline a blog topic I had massive writer’s block over. It broke the topic down to several headlines that gave me ideas for several new blog posts.
Would I use it for research? No.
Do I want to read an AI “news” or blog article? No.
Do I think it’s pretty OK for brainstorming and getting topic ideas? Sure. I will never pay for one and I will never create an account, give my information or anything and I will clear all cookies immediately after, but if the tool is 100% free, it can be good for an idea when you’re dealing with block.
I agree with you- I think it takes the soul out of writing. It eliminates the fun part and the ones who use it aren’t writers. They aren’t authors. They are opportunistic and looking for ways to get rich quick. I see people who “write” using AI as being the image of the man in a trench coat trying to sell you something in the alley. I don’t trust them.
I agree that it has some good uses! Those that just cut and paste are abusing the system. I hope AI stays being crappy so real writers just get better and AI stays weird, Lol.