On using AI in blogging

Right now, I don’t use AI to compose my blog posts. I sometimes use AI in the pre-writing ideation stage and later in the editing/review stage, but not the composing/“putting pen to paper” stage. Six months ago I might have made “not using AI in personal blogging” a principled stance, but my thinking has evolved since then and it is now more of a personal preference.

I think the most important part about blogging under your own name is that you are able to completely defend your work. I think provenance matters less than the ability to defend it. So few people are truly original writers. Most of us borrow phrases, sentences, and structure from other things we’ve read, often without realizing it. We get input and edits from peers, too.

AI might be an extension of that. I don’t see AI composition as fundamentally different from ghostwriting. There is an awful lot of handwringing about AI-generated writing, but ghostwriting is not controversial in the same way, and the end result is the same: someone else wrote it.

There is something to be said for personally grappling with the ideas and the words you put on the page. But what is the goal there? We don’t struggle for struggle’s sake. We struggle with words, whether ours or someone else’s, in order to understand their meaning and implications. When we read or hear things that ring true for us, we often adapt, remix, and make them our own. The crucial step in-between reading/hearing and adopting is wrestling with it.

What about developing and writing in your own voice? Given a decent sample set, AI can already convincingly mimic “your voice”, so that is not a good heuristic.

When you publish a post, you must be willing to defend it line-by-line, just as a publisher of a newspaper must be willing to defend what is published in their paper. Though on your personal blog, you are the de facto editor, fact checker, and legal review. If you can’t point to a line and say why it is in your post, it must be cut. That is true whether you wrote it or AI wrote it.

What do you think?