A recurring thought when preparing articles online: Is it worth continuing to write in a digital publishing world flooded with machine-generated content?
As a reader, it is frustrating. Many of the articles I find on publishing sites are obviously AI-generated: they follow a rigid format, with a predictable language and a synthetic style. The information they provide is often outdated or utterly incorrect (at least in technical pieces which I typically seek), failing to offer any new insights into the topics.
While many publishers proudly embrace AI articles, a significant number of publications claim to be fighting against "AI-authors." From my experience, which may be anecdotal, they are struggling to keep up —and that's being kind. The number of AI-generated articles on most sites is so high that it's ridiculous. And yes, I'm looking at DEV, too.
Reader-me gets tired of encountering the same mannerisms and stony —or should I say "silicony"?— style that makes it indistinguishable whether the article is about technology, cooking, or car repairs. The same passionless feeling that doesn't convey anything beyond the hieratic nervousness of a middle-school student reading a report they probably didn't write themselves in front of a large audience.
As a writer, it is frustrating. AI is an amazing tool for editing grammar, checking spelling, or even suggesting improvements to articles. However, it is being abused by "writers" and publications that generate catchy titles and beautifully written, yet subpar, content.
People tell me, "If your writing is good enough, it will shine compared to AI-generated content." But that is wishful thinking. On sites flooded with AI content, it's almost impossible to stand out, no matter the quality. You could publish a Pulitzer-worthy article (not me), but good luck being discovered among hundreds of posts that drown your content in a sea of meaningless words.
There's some truth to it, though: in the end you end up being found. The question is, "By whom?" When I've had some modestly successful articles, it was only a matter of days before I found AI-generated imitations. And I'm not talking about coincidental articles on the same topic. They were summaries of my writings —Different enough to avoid plagiarism checkers, but close enough to be obvious copies.
The best case was when I wrote an article about 11 new features introduced in a programming language, but forgot to describe one of them (I still haven't). Days later, different articles popped up like mushrooms, all about these new features. Every single one describing 10 features and completely ignoring 1... The one I forgot to describe in mine. The same code examples, too.
Needless to say, those articles (even though they were later removed after me filing a copyright claim) got more interactions than mine. Were these reactions real or fake? I will never know. Was my article overshadowed by them? Yes. Because websites promote content with more views and interactions, as that's the content that sells.
A human writer is at a clear disadvantage. The time spent researching, writing, editing, and bringing everything together cannot compare to the five-minute turnaround that an AI needs. By the time ten human authors each write an article, a single "AI-author" copies those same ten articles and drops fifty more listicles and summaries of other blog posts, even from other AI-generated sources. This leads to content inbreeding that ends up resembling a photocopy of a photocopy.
I titled this article “Human Writing in the Age of AI,” but it probably should be updated to “Human Creation in the Age of AI.” While writing and static images are “easy targets,” AI is getting better at generating audio and video as well.
It’s only a matter of time before AI-generated multimedia content will floods every site. In part, because platforms will welcome such content. One recent example: Meta announced that it will unleash AI profiles on Facebook and Instagram.
They may see it as "organic growth," but there's nothing organic about it. It's artificial and fake, not genuine. There's nothing organic about it beyond the human's work that will be used to train those bots and systems, often violating the copyright and ownership of the original content.
It's difficult not to be cynical about it. People will see me as a dinosaur, a grumpy old man going against papyrus because we have stone tablets, or against the books because we have papyrus, or against the computers because we have books... And they will be missing the point. I'm not against AI —I use it daily to help me with certain tasks—, but when it comes to genuinely new content, especially articles, I'd rather have a human touch.
Top comments (14)
I resonate with this thought, however something at the back of my head also feels that this is the change. Transformation from hand-written content to AI assisted ones, and change is different and difficult.
I still write many of the stuff (which I never publish) by hand. That too with an ink pen.
This year, I'm planning to polish some of my work and publish it online
Beautiful!
As a long-time writer, I completely agree with you that AI-generated content lacks the persuasive power or appeal to readers, or at least to me.
I believe AI will assist writers in certain cases, such as spell-checking, grammar-checking, or suggesting additional content, but I would never rely solely on it to create content for my blog.
It's surprising that some platforms, like Facebook, as mentioned in the article, are using AI to generate content - have we reached the point where humans should create AI to consume content and let them interact with each other.
As a grumpy old dinosaur who just wrote his 3rd stone tablet of the day, I agree with this article whole-heartedly! :-)
I totally agree with you. AI is the new spam. I'm writing, on my own without the assistance of AI, but am seriously wondering what's the point. I'm trying to write mainly for myself.
AI is useful tool. As a non-native English speaker, it does great correcting grammar and suggesting sentence structures. I use it when writing articles to evaluate the content and point at potential shortfalls or improvements.
Fair, I'm being dismissive. I should probably try to leverage it in the same way.
Can't say I don't agree! I also frequent sites like Dev.to and Daily.dev, and I also think that their biggest problem is the lack of human emotion. It feels like there’s so many people grinding out posts so they can label themselves a “technical writer” or simply for the sake of marketing themselves. (There are people who make completely human generated content though -- they're just much harder to find than they should be).
And as you've said, the main cause of this is AI. It’s easily accessible to almost everyone, so why not use it in… everything? Additionally, it’s rarely shunned by administrators (at least when it’s “lightly” used), and if all you care about is cranking out articles, AI is your best friend.
On a slight tangent, I've wrote (and made) a lot of things that are "anti-AI", and I normally get one of two responses. Either "yeah I agree with this, cool", or "I'm gonna keep using AI because it means I can write faster". As with most things, people seem to be more focused on quantity over quality. Just wanted to throw that out there though -- it's not scientific at all.
Anyways, nice to see someone with similar ideas and whatnot. Thanks for writing -- I like your style!
I think plagiarism is an old problem.
For me, it is still worth it to write. Even if no one reads my writing but me.
The web had already been flooded with mediocre and outdated content getting attention with catchy headlines before, that's what ML/AI has been trained on. But generative AI feels like a quantum leap that scaled the problem, plus many sites and services even trying to persuade its users to use AI to generate content, and ML/AI-based assistance like Grammarly streamlining individual expression towards a mainstream language style when we accept all of their default suggestions.
Authenticity is the key: achieve something specific, highlight its impact, and write about it in our own words – so far, so good. Sadly, I agree with your observation that good content often keeps drowned beneath the bad – but that's not an AI issue. See Sturgeon's Law and prior discussion on DEV.
DEV discussion from 2022 before the generative AI hype:
and from 2023, focusing on low-quality listicle posts:
Conclusion? Research, communicate, recommend, blocklist, build networks, don't trust algorithms!
Still hold same views anyway. I was contributing to an open-source project built with Jekyll and trying to implement a pagination feature. While using ChatGPT for assistance, I kept getting stuck, even though it seemed like I had all the boxes checked. A quick glance at the documentation revealed that pagination does not work from a file that isn't
.html, which was omitted from the prompt I received from ChatGPT after we'd been debugging together for hours. LOLSome comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.