While RSS has almost completely disappeared from the tech landscape, I’m still a big fan of it. I get the majority of my information via RSS, and it’s fantastic. If you’re not familiar with RSS, it’s essentially a way to subscribe to news sites and blogs. It’s not unlike getting email updates on every new story they publish, but instead of my email inbox they all go into my RSS reader and I catch up when I have time.
I’ve been using RSS for a few decades, though I’ve eased off a bit from my crazy days in the past. What’s interesting now is that it’s really easy to notice when a site stops posting human-generated content and just lets AI spit it out. I’ve seen this happen in a few ways.
First, there is a friend of mine whose blog I’ve followed for years. His posts used to be fairly short and personal, and frankly, often riddled with grammar and spelling errors. I didn’t mind, as I was just glad to hear his thoughts.
His posts had the same tone for many years, and then one day they just flipped. They instantly become 5x longer, with lots of bulleted lists on the page, a super deep vocabulary, and no typos. He absolutely switch to AI, and I was quite disappointed. I stopped following his site because I wanted to hear his thoughts, not just perfect AI stuff.
Second, I’ve seen two other marketing agencies do similar things. In their case, the tell was their pace. They went from a post or two per week up to multiple posts a day. As with the previous example, the posts become much longer, with many more bulleted lists, and vocabulary that seemed way out of context for how they normally spoke.
Sure, they can if they want
To be clear, they’re absolutely able to do this if they want. There’s no laws or restrictions against it, and I support their right to generate content however they want. Perhaps this will benefit them in terms of SEO down the road.
For me, though, I’m just sad. All three of those blogs were ones that I followed for insights and information, and now they’re just full of regurgitated fluff. I’m hopeful that this isn’t a sign of where things are going, but I fear that this is exactly the path that many more companies are going to follow.
I encourage you to fight the urge and keep some humanity in your work.
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