Who wrote this blog post? Well, in this case, I did: Holger Haberstock from the YouthGovAI project team. And in writing it, I did not use ChatGPT, Le Chat, or any other kind of LLM to produce the text.
This means that I sat down and first outlined the blog post in order to give the issues I wanted to touch upon a rough order and structure. Then I wrote freely under the sections of my outline, without worrying too much about well-formed sentences or the like. Although I did use DeepL from time to time when I was not confident enough in my English.
After that, I rewrote the sentences and sections that were not good enough or that I was not satisfied with, in order to polish them so that you, the reader, might enjoy them more or follow them more easily. Again, DeepL helped me here. In the end, I reordered some of my thoughts to give my argument a better structure and to drive the point home I wanted to make.
Would this process have been much faster, and might my text even have had a better structure, had I used ChatGPT or Le Chat? Maybe. Would this make a difference to you, dear reader? I guess it is hard to say, since you only know this version of the text. Let me ask a different question: would it make a difference to you if I revealed now that this text had been written completely by ChatGPT?
Blogs in the past
It wasn’t, trust me. But would it have made a difference?
I do not know. But what I do know is that blogs in the past, let’s say in the mid-1990s, were often very personal online diaries through which people could follow the work or daily lives of others they were interested in. This could mean simply following the travel log of your friend or reading about the work of your favourite game developer.
In the early 2000s, blogs became a common tool for people who wrote professionally, such as journalists, to comment on political and social issues. And at the latest since the launch of the publishing platform Medium (which I loved in the beginning) writing personal articles has become truly mainstream. Since then, blogs have also been used as a marketing tool by companies, politicians, celebrities, and others.
However, there is still this notion of blogs as a very personal medium, a place where people express themselves. And I always felt I could tell the difference between a deeply felt text and a marketing narrative.
Blogs since ChatGPT
Since ChatGPT, however, it has become possible to mass-produce blog articles. While I perfectly understand why this is happening, and while I too have used LLMs to help me write blog posts in the past, I cannot help feeling as if we are losing a form of human connection.
Does it matter who wrote this Blog?
Why does it matter if I wrote this text? It matters because I am able to express my point of view on a specific matter. And maybe there is someone out there reading this who agrees or disagrees, but at least we have communicated across space and time. And it feels strange to me if we let AI do our communicating for us.
What is the difference in the end? Why shouldn’t I ask ChatGPT what it thinks about whether LLMs should write blog articles? (I didn’t do so but feel free.) Maybe it would come up with a deeper and more nuanced piece of writing, one that offers more insight to the reader. So why not?
AI has no point of view
To me, it all comes down to having a point of view. As far as we know, LLMs do not have a point of view. They simply produce text based on probabilistic (I had to look this word up) methods. There is a nice short clip of Rick Rubin that sums this up very well.
And yet, I feel there are still situations in which it is okay to let LLMs write for you, and it can be difficult to judge when that is the case. An article that simply gives a factual account of the last project event might even be improved by an LLM.
But my feeling at the moment is that the more a personal view matters (for example, my fear of losing human connection if we outsource too much of our communication to machines) the less we should allow LLMs to become an intermediary or co-producer of what we have to say. Anyway, I have not completely made up my mind yet. So, if any of you have an opinion on this, I would be more than happy to read it.
