I’m tired of it

The epidemic

It’s everywhere on dev.to, and it’s everywhere else, too. I’m tired of it.
AI generated content.

You know, we can spot it. The generic, bland and boring articles, which are usually filled with inaccuracies. The image without personality. The creepy videos with no real meaning. But let me tell you: If you do not want to put in the work to research, to learn and be an expert, to struggle and get good at a craft you enjoy, then you don’t provide value in any way. And if you do not provide value, what is the point? It’s worthless to anyone out there who would be better off just reading the docs, or an actual book written by a human; and it is worthless to you, because you don’t even seem to enjoy the process itself enough to actually do it. So, why even bother?

Yeah, I get it, it’s all about those ‘likes’ and ‘followers’… but let me tell you: even those are probably mostly bots.

I’m tired of it.

Pointless articles

And there it is again. Another article on dev.to. Not really interesting to read, and full of wrong things and stuff that does not even exist. As soon as you point it out the authors usually get pretty defensive. Just lying and trying to gaslight you into thinking they actually wrote the article by themselves, even though you can prove the opposite by simply using the the title of the article as a prompt to generate an article which sounds 99% identical. Sure, mate, you are allowed to just create a bland article using LLMs… but please, don’t try to tell me you’re actually providing value by doing that. And, please, pretty please, at least check if the info is correct. Do the code snippets work? Do the CSS properties even exist? And while you are on it: please check if you actually provide any value over me just reading the docs, or putting the prompt into ChatGPT by myself.

I don’t really enjoy writing. I don’t enjoy the process of getting good at it. I don’t even feel like I have much to say. But still, if I think I want to tell something I’ll write it myself, because I want at least try to add value. I want to do things I enjoy. I’m pretty sure just creating prompts is not fulfilling to anyone in the long run.

I’m tired of it.

Email decompression

I noticed an interesting thing lately. There are people on one side just using a simple prompt to generate an email. And then there are other people on the receiving end who take the email and paste it into ChatGPT to have it summarized. It’s some sort of inverse compression: Make it longer before you send it and condense it again after receiving. Maybe we might try to do the opposite: Write a full email, let the AI condense it into the summary and send that. Or how about you learn to write concise emails to begin with? Or maybe digital communications is getting pointless anyways since there are only bots left on both sides. In any case…

I’m tired of it.

Be human

What should you do? Be human! Take the time to suck at something. I’ll be way more interested in your crappy beginnings full of personality. I’ll be way more interested in the craft you spent hours with. I’ll be way more interested in you article with typos, grammatical inaccuracies and stylistc flaws, but full of your wit and passion. Your story matters, not the one AI compiles from the statistical probabilities of millions of other stories…

I’m tired of it.