TacoTalks

Will ChatGPT Replace Bloggers?

It’s no secret that ChatGTP has been the rage, perhaps especially among students who really hate writing essays. But my interest was really only piqued after seeing this blog post about how ChatGPT can be used to help your finances, because one of the suggested methods was to use ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool. Now, I’ve seen a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence replacing humans (it can probably play chess better than I ever could) so I thought to put it to the test and ask: Can AI (specifically Chat GPT) replace us bloggers?

Since I blog mostly about books and tea, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to suggest some discussion post ideas. Here’s what it came up when for book blogs:

Comparing this to the Discussion Post Prompts that Briana posted recently, I would say that the humans definitely win this one. ChatGPT’s prompts seem a little… too general. But okay, let’s see how ChatGPT would even write a discussion post. In this case, I asked it to write a short, 100-word book club discussion post on Frankenstein:

Well, I can see why students like ChatGPT, although I don’t think this will be getting you distinctions in your literature essays.

Moving on, I asked ChatGPT to give me some tea blog discussion post ideas:

Tea bloggers, WE ARE SAFE!!!

Ok, but I think the AI glitched a little and stopped before anything was generated because when I asked the question again (but lowered the number from 10 to 5), I did actually get an answer:

I have to admit, these ideas seem a lot more appealing than the book blog ones, perhaps because 90% of my tea blog content consists of tea reviews.

Incidentally, a friend of mine was playing around with ChatGPT and she discovered that the chatbot doesn’t do well with Chinese history – it mistook ‘Princess’ Der Ling for Diana, for instance. I suppose the data that the chatbot was trained on was Western-focused, so it might be some time before it catches up to anyone writing in niche and/or diverse topics.

Last week, I talked about why blogging should be personal, and I’m pretty sure that the topic was in my subconscious when I thought of writing this post. After playing around with ChatGPT, I’m pretty sure that it’s not going to replace bloggers as long as we bloggers bring something uniquely us to our blog. And that, alongside other factors, means that book blogs should be increasingly personal, and increasingly about the bloggers’ goals – be it writing to remember the books/teas we’ve read/drunk, or writing to connect with an online community. And that, I think, is a fantastic thing.

12 thoughts on “Will ChatGPT Replace Bloggers?

  1. Hm, yes, those suggestions are extremely generic! “Have you ever thought of . . . reviewing a book for your book blog?”

    My problem with this AI as it is right now (even when people say to use it to brainstorm) is that it gives responses that basically sound like it Googled the topic.

    “What do people write about on book blogs? Well, on book blogs you review books and write book recommendations!” Groundbreaking. The same for your Frankenstein prompt. It’s a nice little prompt to get a discussion about Frankenstein going, but I could probably get the same thing from Googling “discussion questions for Frankenstein” and hitting up SparkNotes. So I guess the real thing is that it . . . saves you the time of Googling this stuff yourself?

    But I agree that the appeal of blogging is that it’s personal. People don’t want “random list of top books from some anonymous source.” They read blogs to know what specific people thought of books!

    1. Exactly! Currently, AI is very generic and I think that’s because it’s pulling data from so many people (and probably, we aren’t at the stage of having AI with ‘personality’ yet). So what makes us human, i.e. the personal touch, is going to be really important

  2. Such a fascinating topic. I saw a YouTube video of a writer asking it to write him an urban fantasy book about angels and demons in the style of writer X. And it really wasn’t all that bad. True, it wasn’t all that great either. But give it some time, and the market might become flooded with AI written books. Some already exist by the way, and are available on Amazon. And, who knows, with a bit of editing they might not even be that bad. But I truly hope they never replace real authors who write with real passion and creativity.

    Right now it works best as a sort of private tutor. Like: explain concept X in an easy to understand way. For dummies basically. Works like a charm. Or like you said, for essays. Like write me something about topic X.

    And I very much agree that blogging needs to become more personal. That’s what makes it so unique. That’s its biggest selling point. And that’s how blogger can simply enjoy it a lot more.

    1. I’m sure there are already AI books out there – it may be good for nonfiction, if we’re just asking the AI to synthesise information. But I was listening to a talk that said that when people pick up nonfiction books, they are (sometimes) still looking to connect and get to know the author before they decide if the information is what they want, so it may be that AI can only work for very specific types of book where personality isn’t important

  3. For all the goom and doom about AI, like ChatGPT, I think it could enhance blogging in a big way. Like you tried, it could help come up with new ideas to blog about. But it can also help with outline, using keywords effectively, suggestions on improved writing/grammar/sentence structure, etc. I think it could help some people struggling to improve their content.

    Already there are super smart folks out there learning how to best use AI to get the best information out of it – it all comes down to the prompts. Like they say, garbage in garbage out. With better questions, bloggers can get the best information out of AI.

    I’m super excited about all this. And as a new blogger, I’m going to take full advantage of it. 🙂

    1. Interesting! I’ve not really thought about using AI for outlining (probably because I rarely outline reviews :p). I think we’ll soon start seeing guides on how to use AI more effectively – that would be interesting to read as well.

  4. I have been waiting for someone to bring up AI and blogging! But I do find it comforting that the examples brought up so far seem really generic. They aren’t wrong. But they are also basic and the writing seems like something I’d expect from a decent student paper and not anything groundbreaking or nuanced.

    I also agree that blogging resonates with people because it’s personal. If I wanted an algorithm to generate lists and suggestions, I could just go on a site like Amazon or Goodreads. There is something different around recommendations curated by real people with opinions and their own likes and dislikes. And certainly I want to know someone’s genuine, personal opinion on a book–not a computer-generated review!

    I have seen some people suggest you could start with AI and then tweak it to make it good/better. But that seems to me like more work than actually writing it yourself in the first place!

    And I do think we need to iron out the potential copyright issues. A lot of people are excited about this, but are they aware that these AI services are apparently scraping the internet and maybe using people’s work without citation or permission? That’s a huge issue, I would think. I am surprised many people don’t seem to care.

    1. Thanks for bringing up copyright! I know that one of the recent AI image generators has gotten pushback/trouble because they use copyrighted work as their source. There was an interview, I think on one of the NPR podcasts, about an artist who found that people were using her name as a keyword in the AI generation – so they didn’t want to pay her, but wanted something like her work!

      I think that would affect writing AI’s eventually. Like… to product a piece of work based on the style of [x writer] but on [y topic] might be possible if the AI has been trained sufficiently. When that they comes, I really wonder how that’s going to impact IP law in general.

  5. Sorry but, AI will never replace bloggers because bloggers give their opinions about things. In order to have opinions, you have to have preferences, you have to have feelings about things, and AI can’t express a preference of one thing over another, because for AI, everything is equal. For example, chocolate and vanilla are both flavors to AI – nothing more and nothing less. AI can’t say they like one and hate the other, because AI doesn’t have feelings. Can it debate if chocolate is better than vanilla? Sure, but it can’t be because they do or don’t like the taste, because AI has never tasted anything. Equally, AI can’t say that a character in a book is likeable to it or not, because it hasn’t got feelings to make it like or dislike a character – or a plot, or a trope, or a setting, or anything. AI has no soul, no feelings, no tastes, and therefore no opinions.

    1. That is true, AI is the opposite of personal – they can probably do customised recommendations if we feed them enough information, but they won’t have the same idiosyncrasies as a human

What do you think?