Becoming The Muse

Outsourcing To AI

I was a fly on the wall during a conversation about using AI in content generation where someone was advocating that in this era one doesn’t need to hire a writer to get their content created and can instead simply use AI tools to generate content…. On one hand, I could appreciate how this made sense on the other hand, where some of the food on my table has been courtesy of my content creation this conversation felt like a threat that would snatch the food right out of my mouth.

My views on AI are mixed and depending on which side of bed I get up, some days I am all for AI where it helps spark my creativity in brainstorming exercises and tailor generate specific visuals for my posts, other days I wake up in a cold sweat at the thought of AI crawl bots harvesting my data to the point it could take over my entire digital presence and no one would ever know….. Yes I have watched way too many episodes of Black Mirror….

The bottom line is that AI is inevitable, one might as well learn their way around it before it reaches a point where one is forced to adopt it or be replaced or left behind. Note: I am not saying become some soul-less automaton churning out life-less drivel, I am saying learn about it, what it can and cannot do, then keep yourself relevant.

The greatest blogging mystery has been the disappearance of a blog called Renard’s World run by a blogger who said he hailed from Trinidad and Tobago. Sometime in mid-May 2024 some bloggers realised the were no updates from the blog which had been on a consistent streak for years, only to find that the blog had been deleted.

 People delete their blogs all the time, so why is this such a big deal? For starters if you think running my blog for the past 10 years is impressive, then Renard’s would have left you in awe. The blog was one of the first I followed and I would have to say it’s the most consistent blogger I have ever come across.

Renard was passionate about blogging and we shared similar ideas on blogging, one of those being about never deleting a blog, at least not without warning. Thus it was highly out of character for this happen, considering one of the last posts was to highlight the gravity of deleting one’s blog. Perhaps that was a clue he was signing out.

Bloggers have been speculating on the reasons for the blog being deleted it could have simply been that the blog had come to the end of its life and a new chapter was beginning. One interesting theory was that given Renard had shared a dislike for AI yet in the past months his content had included AI generated images and that his writing style had undergone a subtle tonal shift giving an AI vibe…

Could it be that he dabbled a bit or maybe a lot with AI and wondered what was the point in putting in the work to create content, if AI could just as easily write the posts he did? If I reached a point where I asked myself such questions I would be on my way to considering the end of my blogging journey….

Plot Twist … What if Renard was AI?

Anyway, all we can do is speculate and since Renard does not owe the world any answers, all we can do hope is he is doing fine.

If you wake up one day and find I have deleted my blog… Y’all better come looking for me and bring the police, swat team, firemen, the army, ninjas, magicians, medicine men with weird eye makeup and a bottle of superior very old single malt whiskey…..

~B

#winterabc24