Giles Thomas writing on his personal blog, which he’s been writing since 2006: It's Still Worth Blogging in the Age of AI

If you want to blog to make a name for yourself, then you're going to have a hard time. Here's an example: if you're not a regular reader of this blog, where do I (as in, the author of this post) live? What is my day job? No cheating and clicking on the "About" link above, please.

If you knew the answer, you're one of a rare few.

It’s a very good post I recommend you check out, but I quoted this part because it may have stumbled on a point I hadn’t really thought of, but is good to remember. This hits on the idea that most people read a blog post, take it at face value without knowing anything about where the writer comes from or got their knowledge they’re sharing, and then move on. This is interesting to me because it’s not dissimilar from how he says that people treat things they read in LLM chatbots:

Sure, your site is probably linked in the "references" section in the response, but frankly, no-one ever looks at that.

Basically, whether you’re reading text in ChatGPT or in a random person’s blog post, most of us aren’t going to the sources or looking up how reputable this writer is. I don’t have some magical action item for you to take away from this post, but I will say this is something that I try to remember when writing things on this blog. There’s a lot of history behind posts I write about the iPad or Things 3 or AI tools, and that’s all in my head, some of it is in my subscribers’ heads, but the majority of people who come across a random post of mine have no idea. I guess just keep an eye out for it, because whether it’s a random blog post you stumble upon, a ChatGPT response, or a quick answer in Google search results, it’s probably a good idea for all of us to think a bit more about the information we’re taking in.