As AI Devalues Human Content Creation, a New Motive for Humans to Create Content that Channel the Newfound Vulnerability

It feels like I have been sick for quite a while now. Every night before sleep, I cough up phlegm. And when I wake up, a dry mouth awaits me. A constant stream of lozenges during the day may suppress the itchiness in the back of my throat during meetings. However, their too frequent usage has led to occasional bouts of diarrhea that forced me on a soup-and-bread diet for days at a time...graphic as this may all seem, it is a rather apt description of the week I have had since returning to Malta from an intercontinental journey less than a week ago.

As I quietly fend off the coming-and-going feeling of mild headache over stuffy noses, I cannot help but wonder whether, at 36, I am no longer cut out for long journeys beyond my designated homepad, even if infrequent and for a relatively short duration. It is depressing to think that this blog, a good portion of which is based on my observations from living and traveling in foreign lands, would become more monotonous in content as my worsening health increasingly becomes a constraint for gathering materials that go beyond the routines of everyday life.

It is not the only obstacle that has made the upkeep of this blog so much more difficult beyond the physical act of writing. I originally chose the idea of starting a weekly (if not more frequent) blog as a way to accumulate easily searchable thoughts. In an era when pictures and videos were easy to record but difficult for search engines to index as distinct pieces of information, it made sense to spend hours typing up thoughts and observations into words that could later be easily searched through. At the time, the trade-off of more effort for more future impact was clear.

Not so in the age of artificial intelligence. Technological advances have made voice-to-text conversation not only more accurate but faster and more financially accessible. The likes of ChatGPT can easily look through a catalog of videos and find relevant content based on a simple prompt, without the need to go through the laborious process of having humans listen to conversations and add in subtitles. Unsurprisingly, one of my many freelance jobs in the past, providing subtitles in different languages to videos, is no longer so popular or available.

While this blog was never meant to be for widespread popular consumption, the very thought that technology can further reduce its value and efficacy no doubt helps to reduce the drive to continue, just as sore throats and upset stomachs kill off the desire to keep traveling. With AI becoming ever better in writing, the value of original reporting has been reduced as well, if not stylistically, at least mentally. In a world where I can hypothetically ask an AI chatbot, verbally, to write an original blog post based on a story I briefly describe, then why not take that route instead?

But if content is cheapened by technology, perhaps the experience of undergoing it is something worthy of reflecting on, in thinking and writing. Meta, as it may sound, AI cannot genuinely reflect on the pains that humans feel when their work is devalued by the perfectly edited versions on the same topics crafted by AI. Just like my talking about the pains of my persistent sickness, getting an AI bot to write about the topic would be a different type of hallucination, based not on facts but pure speculation of what AI understands that humans are supposed to feel in such circumstances.

The output can be termed and categorized as analysis. Yet, humans do not always read for analytical reasons. They seek the emotional resonance, the fear and excitement of the unknown, even if the situation at hand is not particularly logical. To get someone to sympathize with my illness, I cannot simply detail the symptoms. The shared concerns emerge from engaging the thoughts and feelings that stem from suffering the symptoms. Those personal mental interactions with something negative, such as an illness, are what make people want to read about a sick person, not the fact of the sickness.

I concede that this blog, and all human blogs, for that matter, will never again reach its past glory in the age of AI. New blogs are too easy to create, and even more new content will fight for a limited amount of eyes and attention as AI-generated content becomes even more ubiquitous and sophisticated. However, amidst the continued vulnerability of the human emotion, especially in their newfound sense of devaluation and irrelevance in the face of technology, is there not a new motive to keep going, if just to show our growing weakness?