I keep wondering if the AI written posts will work out in the long run. Cheaper than paying people to write but lacking any real experience with the topics they write.

They used to say "Don't do this at home, kids" when something was possibly dangerous/ risky. I think that will be a problem with AI generated posts. A computer can put together an article but is it giving people information they can count on?

My Mother isn't sure about AI/ computer driven cars. I thought it was a good idea, safer for drivers who may be distracted, intoxicated, tired, nervous, or just don't drive. All the AI needs to do is follow the line of the roads, know traffic signals, etc. After all, people drive themselves places half in a trance and are surprised when they get there. If all vehicles were AI driven there would be very few unexpected incidents, they would all be driving the same way. No second guessing, no human errors.

But, this relies on everything being predictable for the AI. An AI only knows as much as it knows, no more. What if the road hasn't been maintained to the standard the AI needs, for instance? People who drive know it isn't easy to see the white lines in the road when the paint is worn away or during a storm. Can the AI deal with that, or will that be a time when the AI needs to shut down and the vehicle is driven manually, by a human.

What about AIs writing articles online, giving people information, advice? People stuff information into the computer and leave the AI to spit it out as an article. So the AI gives advice to people about assorted topics: fast food restaurants, fashion choices, and cancer medications. Is the AI a trusted source? No. The AI is not an expert, does not have any experience or training. The AI only has information given to it and information it scrapes from other sites/ sources online.

Who will be responsible if the AI gives people the wrong advice, bad information? I don't think its just a small chance that this will happen. Fact checking has gone out of style, like proofreading and I don't see much editing either. Yes, the AI can edit itself for punctuation and grammar. Pretty limited with fact checking. By the time the article is written the AI considers it to be fact checked based on whatever information it had or came across. But, its just software. An influencer, not an authority.

The authorities will be at home, washing their dishes, cleaning the garage, all those dirty, messy, tedious jobs we thought robots would do for us. What comes next? What else will AIs do "for" us?

"Don't try this at home, humans, I'm just an AI and don't know any better." Will that be the new warning when something could be dangerous or risky? Probably more legalese than that.

One way or another I've done what I wanted for the site layout. Not exactly as I envisioned it but its done. Sometimes I can get lost in the details and use that to procrastinate from the bigger work at hand. Not 100% wanting to start on the big picture.

I tried using the FSE (full style editor) with WordPress. I even liked the idea of it. But, at this stage its more work to deal with it than to go back to GeneratePress, which I've gotten to know and find pretty reliable. So, that's what I did. Chalk it up to a learning experience as far as the FSE editor.

I also added a contact form. Something new for me. Will see how much spam it gets and then decide if I want to keep it. I'm not even sure how it works yet. Does it need an email address? I didn't give it one. If it stays in WordPress that will work out well enough. I'm not expecting to hear from many real people versus spam, other than my Mother.

Next I will start going through all my posts from the last 20 years to update them, decide whether or not to keep some of them, and fix the broken image files on all of them. Thank you WordPress for not exporting them this time. (I'm sure it did before because I don't remember having to fix this many other times I've moved the site). Anyway, it will be like re-visiting myself, reading an old diary. Along the way I will tidy up categories and maybe even tags.

Then, what can I do about content scrapers? Nothing I've found or tried seems to work.

I've been reading that blogging is dead. Some of these predictions are just for self promotion, trying to write something that will go viral. However, some of them are based on real perception; watching the trends and having an understanding of the way things work.

The individual publishers of blogging are not dead. Social media gurus, content curators and general blog publishers (notice publishers, not writers) are  still linking to content. So content is still out there. It has been getting harder to find quality content versus content which is carelessly written, very repetitive, unoriginal and usually has nothing to say, like a political speech with a lot of words to fill space but actually say nothing.

The web has become commercial versus creative. Less content (which is both unique and freely given) is being created.

Quality of writing has suffered as people really don't care what they publish. It isn't meant to be fit for human consumption and doesn't really need spelling, grammar, punctuation or comprehension in order to be good for SEO (search engine optimization). Quality of the content itself has also suffered, for years. Writing which has a point of view, writing which actually has something to say rather than regurgitating every other article, post and opinion online has been getting harder to find.

As a writer looking at writing jobs being offered I am seeing a big emphasis on social media and keywords. The quality of the content isn't high on the list of importance. So the people writing this stuff, don't need to know how to write -  if they can sell the stuff they write. They sell themselves as content marketers and those are the people who then write for the site.

It isn't the individual blog but the individual writer which makes the content people want to link to.

The bigger/ popular blogs may have hired writers but even the hired writers are writing the content the publishers want to sell. They are often writing for keywords, better SEO practices and Google (even though Google is a bot, not the reading public).

This is pretty much why people have started claiming blogging is dead. Commercial blogging has caused most blog content to be meaningless, just repetitive drool you could find on a lot of other blogs. Very few blogs still post original, valuable content without turning it into an ebook (or some other format) which they sell rather than distribute freely.

Web publishing can not exist in a vacuum where the creative spark is sucked dry.

The people who do still publish original content are having it scraped/ stolen until they become too discouraged to continue publishing. Some quit, some give in and write the stuff that sells and some continue to write but they stop distributing it freely. Making the content for pay then gives them some control over having it stolen.

Not all content you pay for is worth paying for, of course. The commercial publishers think getting paid for an ebook full of nothing useful is a great idea.  Rewrite the same old stuff, hire writers to bang out something with enough words and you can offer up an ebook. Market it the right way and pull in the sales.

Ironic (and sad) how the Internet is eating itself, like an ouroboros (the snake eating it's own tail).