I suck at writing.
That's probably not the most flattering way to start off a blog post — much less an inaugural blog post — and I actually did have something else entirely different planned for my “Hello, World!”. I was, however, forced to start over, because a couple of days ago, I sent one query too many to ChatGPT.
Now, over the years, I've asked my fair share of stuff to LLMs, and although the answers will almost always come back in written form, I've never explicitly asked them to actually write something — except maybe for the occasional PR description, or some bit of documentation, but that’s technical stuff. I've never asked them to do any creative writing: blog posts, poems, fiction — I've always steered clear of those.
The reason, I had been telling myself, was because I wouldn't want LLMs to shape too much the way I write, because I'm pretty sure I would end up replicating all the traits that make a text “clearly AI-generated”, minus the hundreds of terabytes ingested during the LLMs’ training process, which would amount to me having spent days trying to come up with a “perfect” post, only for it to be called “AI slop” by someone on Twitter.
Besides, even if I did ask them to write creative stuff, it was probably not even gonna be good, right? How could a probabilistic model that predicts the next token, one at a time, even output a chunk of text that us humans would consider creative? “Why, by iteratively computing the softmax-normalized distribution of the logits vect—“ yeah yeah yeah, that's not what I mean and you know it.
A couple of days ago, I decided to put my money where my mouth was, and asked ChatGPT to write a blog post, but not any blog post: this very post.
"Write a blog post called "Do blogs even mean anything still", for a tech blog called Garbage Collection. It's a reflection on whether blogs are still meaningful in an era where you can generate any sort of post with LLMs"
I got humbled quick. As it turns out, there are some perks that come with having been trained on terabytes of data, so much so that I didn't even stop to think if the content was actually creative or not, because it was so well-written.
Turns out that, what I had been masquerading as being protective of my own writing identity was actually fear. And boy, was I right to be scared.
Now, you see, I think that right there, the way that previous paragraph ended, I think that’s the core issue that I’ve been struggling with: I just don’t know how to write impactful sentences without adding that “suspenseful” punchline. That’s probably a side-effect of having read all of Dan Brown’s books,