Drags Many Wolf Tails

I’m not an anti-AI individual. I test out the main services every so often, buy my own API credits to use through third-party configurations, and enjoy AI use in Kagi, my preferred search engine. I don’t use AI to generate writing; I just like to see how it’s progressing and have never found a good use for it. However, I still yearn for a simpler human experience on the web.

I’ve had all sorts of blogging iterations online over the years but never kept to one in particular. I like moving around and trying new things a little too much, but I am also inspired by those who have stuck with one or two platforms online for the majority of their writing. I’ve had too many online homes for my writing to maintain any serious sense of consistency in output.

Most recently, I was over at Micro.blog which was a fine place. I was just experimenting with it for a while, ending up paying for a year and testing it out for a few months. Returned to Ghost this year as well, another place I tested for a couple months before I moved on to something else. Now, I'm back to Write.as, a place with an ethos that speaks to me enough to have always remained in the back of my mind as I traversed other blogging platforms. An expensive habit of mine appears to be paying for a year for writing tools I will only use a short while and then abandon them. I chalk it up to donating to developers I respect, but it's something I should temper a bit more.

One thing I liked about Micro.blog—a hybrid blogging and social media site—is its preference for blogging over social media engagement while still allowing for heavy integration with popular social environments both natively and through cross-posting. I intended to use it as a blog that is integrated with the fediverse as well as to crosspost to Bluesky—a place I don’t like to spend time at due to the people there but am still interested in how they advance the technology. Micro.blog did get rid of some of the typical functions of a social media site, things such as likes, reposts/boosts, seeing who’s following you, etc. It relied much more on the old Internet practice of replying to other people online instead of the at-times addictive and lazy engagement prevalent on every social media site. While I appreciated the ascetic practice of ridding yourself of those elements, I still missed them. I missed the discovery factor that reposts/boosts provided, and I missed the ability to ‘like’ something more than I thought I would. Sometimes a ‘like’ is all that’s needed to say “I see you.” And sometimes a ‘like’ is all I need in return, kind of like a read receipt, to let me know you heard me if we're having a discussion.

But now I'm less interested in social media and more interested in blogging.

I mostly yearn for a simpler blogging life, one that existed years ago where we were more happy with personal blogs sharing the unique and strange aspects of our personalities on the web and finding some others interested enough in our niche to hold sustained conversations. Over the years of the 2000s, blogging started to lose its personality. I wrote freelance for many businesses and people since the 2010s, but SEO principles reigned supreme and uniqueness was held strictly within branding guidelines and Google’s heavy-handed algorithms instead of personality. This formed a web of stale blogs that mimicked each other because you had to rank high on Google searches for your blog to “matter”. Today, people are worried about AI making the internet worse, but we’ve been we’ve been writing for robots for a couple decades now. Now it’s robots writing for…who exactly? We have AI write for us then use AI to summarize what the other robot wrote so that we can have the robot reply to the last robot and so on, so why are we around for any of this in the first place?

I only recently stopped writing freelance, largely because of AI issues where managers or editors either use it for their business writing or blame you for using AI as a freelancer who has written for years before AI trained on business writing that was most popular and now outputs that in staid ways that make people think everyone who writes succinctly—with three points, with em-dashes, and with bullet points—is always using AI to generate their content. I grew frustrated with the accusations from those who provided AI outlines for articles that I was to follow. I love writing, but I greatly dislike the business that writing grew to be.

I was never sure what I wanted to do with my blogs. I did want a place to share my creative works, of which I have a backlog of with nowhere to put them, but I wasn’t sure what else I wanted to do with it. I had originally wanted it to look professional. Now, I’m thinking I don’t care about trying to appear as any sort of professional or even as a ‘writer’, but simply as a human who accomplished small things. As I’ve aged, I’ve lost the care to be something, to appear as something other than who I truly am. Now, I just love living. I love simplicity. I love spending time with my family. I love writing about Jesus, and NDNs, and telling stories. I think I’ll keep that up here, choosing to remain hidden somewhat from social media, treating my blog as my output to the world that may be seen or not, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter.

I just want to contribute a little slice of humanity to an ever-changing AI landscape.

I’ll keep experimenting with AI because it’s inevitable that it will continue to progress, get better at reasoning, and even become useful to humankind. There’s no escaping it. But I also don’t want to lose humanity in the process. We’ve already been too easily tempted by having technology infiltrate our lives, turning to our phones—of which I do this a lot—to numb ourselves from boredom, impatience, and even relationship. The effects of AI are nothing new but amplified even further.

So, here's to blogging and simplicity and the wonderful act of writing. Maybe I'll discover more of myself in the process.

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