My Articles Will Always Be Written By Me

The eagle eyed among you may have noticed in past couple articles I've made use of the em dash. That's not because I'm using AI to write my articles, but because I just learned about the compose key on Ubuntu. The compose key — if you don't know — (that's me flexing there) is a hotkey I can bind to a key on my keyboard. I chose the right alt key. When I press right alt, a circle like this • appears, and with certain sequences of key presses, I can type characters that don't exist on my US keyboard. Like if I want to type the letter "a" with umlauts over it, I can press my compose key, type "a", then the double quote key, and I will get ä. No searching for "a umlaut" on the internet anymore! And this is a much more intuitive solution than alt codes on Windows.

I also read a lot of news articles, magazines, and some books. I don't watch as much YouTube as I used to, and I don't spend as much time on social media. With the media I'm now consuming more often, I very frequently see the em dash; It's like a cool comma, and an alternate way to break up the flow of a sentence. I want to use it in my writing too! It looks better than a million commas in a sentence, and it's better for adding more emphasis to a break in the sentence. I'm still a novice in wielding the em dash, but the only way to get better it to start using it.

My discovery of the compose key just happened to coincide with the release of chatbots onto the world. Which is unfortunate, because before the advent of chatbots, I could have looked really cool showing off the em dash in my articles without people raising an eyebrow.

One of my favorite parts of programming is just sharing what I've created. Part of that is writing down what I created and how I created it. It's really fun to write out my thought process, the reasons I chose to do things the way I did, and the lessons I've learned along the way. Why would I give all the best parts of sharing to the world what I did, to a machine? A machine that can't possible get inside my head, know my thoughts, and know how I want to present them to the world. It wouldn't make any sense for the reason I run this website.

I don't just write articles on programs I made, I also sometimes write about my opinion on certain things. Why would I let a bot speak opinions for me? It doesn't make any sense. I want to write about my opinions, I don't want a bot writing them for me. Like I said, I bot can't get into my head, and with the amount of effort it would take to explain to a bot the details of my position, I might as well just write the article myself.

Like imagine being at a party, and you have a really cool story to tell. But instead of telling the story, you pulled up ChatGPT on your phone to tell it for you. It wouldn't make any sense, just like having ChatGPT write my articles for me.

I don't see any good reason to have chatbots write out full articles, and the people that do use chatbots to crank out full articles probably have some ulterior motive to doing so. Maybe trying to gin up content rank higher for search engine optimization (SEO). Maybe they're cranking out slop as a medium for serving ads. Or trying to pad out a website with content in order to appear more credible to readers passing by. Whatever the reason is, I don't trust people or organizations that artificially create content like that. 

Now using chatbots to assist with proofreading articles is different. While I don't use chatbots to proofread my articles — I want to sound completely like me, a human — I think it's fine for others to use it for that purpose. Or maybe you need to do some research so you ask the chatbot to comb through the internet for you. That's fine I guess, as long as you're not just going from ChatGPT straight to your website. If I wanted to read an article from a chatbot, I would prompt the chatbot myself, and there I could even ask follow up questions.

I'm not against using chatbots entirely either, in fact I'd recommend for using them in a lot of cases, but just not for writing whole articles. Chatbots are really good for setting setting up boilerplate code, for things that have been done thousands of times over by tons of other people; They're also really good at being a super autocomplete; They're good at bouncing questions and ideas against, like a rubber duck that talks back; And tons of other things. So don't swear off chatbots completely. They're a useful tool, just not for good writing.

In summary, after delving into this bustling tapestry of thoughts and reasons behind the use of em dash in my articles, not only do I not utilize AI for writing my articles, but I also never will utilize AI for writing my articles! 🎯

I wonder if that last sentence will get interpreting by search engine bots as a sign that my website is generated by an LLM… Not that I give a shit what search engine bots think…