With AI solutions being widely available and becoming an everyday tool to find useful information, my impression is that longer articles or blog posts are becoming scarce.
I think the whole process of retrieving information became much different now. If one plans a travel or searches information about places to visit or activities to book. It’s easy to just type few words to the AI assistant and get tailored answer. One can also get a better match but adding few precisions on the way, mentioning their interests in modern art, foodie cravings or preferred pace of travel. With such a convenient guidance why to even look into travel guides, travel blogs or forums if one can get answers on their own faster and more efficiently?
Those are the questions I was asking myself when the AI solutions became wide spread and so many people around planned travelling using the AI tools to organize their trips and learn about the destinations they wanted to discover.
Then I started planning my own trips trying to verify some information or read other’s people experiences and all I was getting in my Google Search/AI chats was websites with generic sentences, dry information without a personal touch, accompanying story or personal opinion. It was disappointing and made me feel that places I’m reading about are somehow less real as I couldn’t find human perspective in the articles. Also some of the suggestions proposed by AI were absurd or simply invalid and it made me even more convinced how careful one should be to approach the information provided by AI. It is important to remember that it is us who is responsible to verify the data and especially if we’re not knowledgeable about something it’s worth consulting with someone who has the expertise rather than trust blindly AI responses. This applies not to travel only 😉
Those reflections made me decide that despite the knowledge that so many people still do use AI on daily basis I want to support human writing, sharing experience, knowledge and presenting from personal perspective.
Of course, all that being said I don’t think we should go back to stone age and turn our back to AI in daily life or in our writing. I find that AI can be interesting tool to summarise and gather key points for broader inquiries like which museums are in the city or what kind of public transport is available in the area, etc simultaneously bearing in mind the fact that AI can give you wrong information and it’s worth to double check on official websites the exact information you’re interested in. Overall, to me AI is making sense as a support type of tool but not supersede our brains, our thoughts and our experiences.
So here I give you my 4 main reasons why I will not switch for AI to write my blog posts but also why I am not using AI created social media content for planning my own personal trips (I use AI though for my own inquiries which I then double check with official information or someone who has more expertise):
- Sharing experience.
I genuinely find that the one of the most important advantages of traditional blogs since its origins is sharing experience. Whether the blog is about travel, lifestyle, parenting or any different topic the author shares their own perspective, their own story, their own opinions which gives unique new insights, encourages to look from different angle and helps to see various advantages and disadvantages of places, objects, activities the blog’s audience is reading about coming from experience of other people who tried it all out.
- Original content and accountability
The AI content is generic. Of course one can also customize the AI written text specifying to be more relaxed, relatable or resembling more human writing but the text will always boil down to what AI does: converting prompts into tokens, processing relationships through transformer layers, calculating probabilities, and repeatedly predicting the most likely next token. I don’t want to interact solely with a generic content without original thought neither accountability, if the content is misleading or harmful there is no author to turn to in order to make a correction, adjust or remove inappropriate content.
- Personal connection
Human written blogs have authors. When I find the content particularly interesting I check the About me section to learn who the author(s) is and to read about their story. I like returning to the same places for new updates and quality content especially as high-quality blogs are becoming rare nowadays which makes the well written blogs even more precious. As I’m coming back I start to learn a bit about the person through what they post. It’s like learning about the experience, opinion and perspective of a good colleague, of an acquaintance. If I have opportunity to have similar experience as well and compare with what I read, some authors can even earn my trust which brings the reader-blogger relationship on the entire new level.
- Possibility of discussion
Quality blogs usually contain a comment section under each (or most of) posts. This allows to reach out to the author and share your thoughts about the article. I find this human interaction very valuable as other readers can also engage adding comments and thus expand the discussion with extra information, unique insights, experiences and perspectives. Personally, when reading the blogs with active comment section I appreciate when other readers actively scrutinize the content adding constructive criticism, confirm or challenge the facts, or add affirmation comments which validates the information provided by the author.
I’m curious in which direction the human writing versus AI generated text will evolve but I have a lot of trust that critical writing, expertise and sharing experience will be gaining more and more value as we know that it is becoming less and less a given!
