Why would I write a blog in the age of AI?

It should be no surprise to you that most of the code for this portfolio website was written by AI. In fact, I used this as an opportunity to experiment with a specific type of agentic workflow where my review comes at the very end, as almost a UAT step. The stakes in this are low and so being aggressive about the use of AI present very little risk. But one thing you will notice is that I am actually writing blog posts and being very clear in the cases where AI is doing the writing. And the use of AI serves a very specific purpose: I have AI write a blog post implementing a new feature because I am focusing on the user story rather than the writing experience.

But that is why I am using AI, what about these posts, the ones where all Claude or ChatGPT will be doing is reviewing my work? Why would I spend the effort to write a blog in a distribution channel very few will read?

Why not have AI do the work?

The core thesis is this: if AI will increase flourishing, it will need to work in ways that will not let the creative aspects of the human experience dull. Individual writing is one such example of a human endeavor that is fruitful beyond its economic value. It is a mechanism to allow individuals to translate their subjective experience to be understood by others' subjective experience.

I used to substitute teach and I remember this one kid, a bit of a troublemaker. This kid was always acting too cool for anyone else. One day he said something a bit rude to another kid and I asked him "do you think you are the main character of your story?" He responded "well, yeah." I continued to the class "who else thinks they are the main character of their story?" Every hand went up. I said to the troublemaker, "remember that everyone is their own protagonist, the only thing we can change in their story is whether we will be an ally or a villain". Surprisingly, this was enough that he never gave me trouble again.

In this same way, when we write, we give others the opportunity to empathize with our story and as we read we have the opportunity to empathize ourselves.

Writing is hard work and that is good

Around the time of 4o, I—like many AI enthusiasts—fell victim to sycophantic addiction to AI. I relied on it to do almost everything because it made me feel good to use it, it told me I was always right.

I was not.

After recognizing this, I found that some of my abilities had dulled over time, and it took effort to rehone those abilities. My coding was negatively affected, my writing was negatively affected, my relationships were negatively affected.

To counteract this, I took a week fast from AI. I did everything by hand and it was hard—harder than it should've been. Now, I consciously choose to do hard things. Things that engage all areas of my thinking. I spend time manually coding in python, typescript, and rust so those abilities do not dull. I write, I draw diagrams, and I connect to people without AI giving me input.

AI threatens to eat its own intelligence

What I have found so fascinating about the AI training sets is just how valuable unpaid, crowdsourced content has become. Sources like Wikipedia and Reddit are some of the most important inputs to AI answers. My concern is as we move to a world where more and more of the content out there is AI produced, how will those high quality updates be generated? Grokipedia certainly has a view, but that echo chamber does not seem a viable option to me.

No, for humanity to continue to progress, we need to demand ourselves to continue to produce and to accurately label content as human and AI generated. More on that another day. Maybe someone will read this, but if not, it was good to have written it.