I’m not sure why it’s kicking up again, but I’ve seen a significant amount of writing surrounding Artificial Intelligence floating around. To that end, I thought it worth reposting this old (mercifully short) article on how I write my blog and the hardest thing surrounding blogging.

Before you get to it, I thought it might be worth adding some thoughts on AI. As you will see in the post, I write (or, rather, type) all my posts with my own fair hands. I don’t use any voice dictation software and it bears saying I do not use AI to write any of my content either. To be frank, it would be obvious if I had and – though I don’t claim my writing is any great shakes – what a chatbot would offer is typically not interesting writing. Those of you who have been reading this for a long while now will hear my voice; a voice that Artificial Intelligence would neuter horribly.

The other point relevant to AI is not only that I write everything here myself, typing out every word, but the content itself is also thought up by me. I take full responsibility for it, both the good and the bad. I cannot blame a bad idea or poor writing on AI. Everything here is thought by me at some point and written up by me at every point.

Now, I don’t claim everything here is excellent. Some of my writing is almost certainly poorly executed. Some of the ideas I offer may well be ill-conceived. I don’t doubt both appear from time to time. But what I do claim is that all of it has come from me. Ideas, execution, the lot. The only exception is the occasional (incredibly occasional) guest post flagged openly as written by someone else. But that someone else is never a chatbot, they are a real person writing something themselves – usually disagreeing with me and I have given them some space here to say why!

The reason I mention these things is that the hardest thing about blogging is content creation; coming up with the ideas to write. The next hardest part is actually writing those ideas up. Outsource that to an AI chatbot and you have neutered yourself as a writer. Worse, you are probably going to offer up some pretty ropey writing in the process.