AI Content is Ruining the Blogosphere

AI-generated content continues to proliferate on the internet, and it’s leading to a lot of pushback. People on Reddit are getting annoyed at how common AI-generated comments are on the platform, and how they often become the most upvoted comments. I see these comments all the time on YouTube and social media as well. I’ve also noticed an increase in AI-generated articles and comments on blogs, and it’s a trend that irks me. It’s obvious to me – as it is for most people – when a blog post or comment is written by ChatGPT. The content is typically emotionless, impersonal, overly formal, coldly neutral, and free from grammatical errors. It is also free from any sign of personal touch, personality, creativity, and opinion. Using AI-generated images in blog posts has become commonplace as well.

I think this trend of maintaining and growing blogs using AI deserves pushback. It’s ruining the blogosphere, for several reasons. Firstly, there is the element of deception involved. People creating blog posts or comments with AI are trying to pass off this content as if it were genuinely human-created. Although most people recognise that the writing is created by AI, the attempt to pass it off as non-AI is still bothersome. When AI-generated blog posts and comments become the norm, the blogosphere becomes less of what it’s intended to be: a place for human thought, discussion, and community. Engagement drops, as people don’t want to share posts, or leave comments on them, if they bear the signs of AI.

The increasing intrusion of AI into the blogosphere is negative for the bloggers and companies doing it, and for readers too. When you rely on ChatGPT – or an alternative like Claude or Gemini – to write blog posts, the content ends up being worse in many ways, and it stifles the effort and work that goes into developing one’s writing skills and voice. And when readers see AI-generated articles and comments on blogs, it makes those blogs look inauthentic, lazy, uninteresting, and spammy.

I won’t name names, but I’ve come across blogs that publish a mix of human and AI articles, or solely publish AI articles, and the AI content just feels like soulless summaries. Despite these articles being ‘written well’ – they’re easy to read, grammatically perfect, and informational – they’re uninspiring. In addition, while AI avoids word repetition, the sentences still feel repetitive and empty – typical of the most generic, content mill-esque writing that’s intended to just meet a target word count.

These articles are also informationally shallow – they offer summaries and are low in human creative input like synthesis, argument, speculation, anecdotes, and storytelling. These are the qualities that make the blogosphere an interesting place. Interactions between bloggers and readers won’t be the same if a reader is responding to a blog post that is clearly AI-generated (although people are less likely to comment on such articles in the first place). And no one wants to engage with a reader in the comments section if they notice their comments are AI-generated. I’ve seen a user on X reply to comments with obviously AI-generated responses – these responses had a cold calmness and even-handedness, and the choice of words used – as with other AI content – gave it away too.

The inundation of AI images in the blogosphere is a problem as well. (Admittedly, a few of my blog posts feature AI art, but I plan to avoid it in the future. For these particular blog posts, I think the images fit the content well, and I wasn’t able to find a suitable, free alternative. My preference is always to use art created by people.) Relying on AI-generated images, like other AI content, is negative for two reasons. The first reason is purely an aesthetic one. The kind of AI artwork used for blogs usually looks AI-created: it’s often clean, polished, perfect, bright, detailed, and colourful. Mistakes and weird forms based on the prompt given are common too. AI art depicts a plastic-looking world that an algorithm has in mind, not the real one we inhabit, or one which we choose to imagine or represent. Also, the more that AI images feature in blog posts, the more homogeneous this content looks. As a writer covering psychedelics, I have noticed blogs increasingly rely on AI to generate images, which have this homogenous utopian and fractal-patterned aesthetic.

The second reason that relying on AI artwork for blogs is negative is that it puts talented human artists out of work. This same problem applies to professional bloggers and writers. It applies (to a lesser extent) to content creators on YouTube and social media platforms as well, as these are also becoming full of AI accounts pumping out AI-created videos. (The demand for YouTube and social media content creators is high, whereas the demand for human bloggers and writers has fallen.) When companies and bloggers rely on AI artwork for their blog post images, it is more difficult for human graphic designers and photographers to find work. This is not a case of meaningless and boring work becoming automated; it is a trend that means the erosion of creative careers. This also means that the blogosphere is increasingly becoming a place in which we don’t see human art. And this is regrettable.

Human art – be it in the form of drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, or illustration – adds a unique touch to written content. This uniqueness is lost when we favour AI over human creators. A photograph of a real scene, or an illustration in the particular style of a graphic designer, is not replicable by AI. When we rely on AI for blog post images, we also ignore all the famous artworks that could complement the topic in question.

While using AI to create blog posts, comments, and artwork is easy and may help boost metrics, we have good reasons to oppose its increasing influence in the blogosphere. If we don’t, we risk losing a valuable space for creativity, ideas, and connections to flourish. We don’t want to ruin the diversity and richness of the blogosphere and turn this creative ecosystem into a bland monoculture. So it’s worth pushing back against this trend. This might involve leaving (respectful and constructive) comments on blogs that use AI content, communicating privately with bloggers, expressing one’s views on social media so that they reach many more readers and bloggers, or blogging about the topic oneself.