While typing up the previous post, I received an e-mail from my website host regarding the new services that they had to offer, but I didn’t let it distract me. Once posted, however, I took a quick look at it to see if there was anything of interest.
Disturbingly, three of the four new services featured Artificial-Intelligence-generated content: AI Website Builder, AI Domain Name Generator, and WordPress AI Assistant. Wow, how handy!
I’ve posted about AI twice before, though mostly on the broader, more hand-wringing (snerk!) aspects, and have two separate posts in the works regarding it as well, one of which may well be a podcast. I don’t consider it a good or bad thing, really – the topic is way too broad, anyway, so it’s more about what uses it can be put to, which is frankly not much. But it really says a lot if you find that you need it (or even want it) for any of those three uses above.
First off, if you find that you’re resorting to auto-generated content in any manner, the quality of your content has already degraded to the point that you should just close the site down entirely. Domain name? Uuhhheeerrrrmmmm, maybe? But only if you feel obligated to have a website but no great ideas for the domain – this generally means e-commerce or some such rot, and I’d be very hesitant over the copycat nature of any names generated. The website builder has some potential, only insofar as creating (or even updating) a decent site is extremely time-consuming and can make you go bleary-eyed pretty easily, but I think this is better served with templates and/or automated code generation, which I suspect WordPress has already covered anyway. [Believe it or not, only the blog is done on WordPress, and the rest of the site is my own creation, for whatever that’s worth – that may drive you straight into the arms of AI, I dunno.]
But overall, the thought that creativity is so lacking or hard or whatever that we want a generic algorithm to produce something that sounds about right, is really quite sad. If you can’t do the content, then get out of the practice – nobody needs sites that have nothing new or useful to say. I’m quite familiar with the feeling of obligation to have new posts, and inspiration isn’t always there – this is why there are few scheduled posts here, and sometimes gaps of several days. But AI-generated stuff serves only you, not anyone that comes to your site – it means your priorities and goals are all screwed up. The idea of easy public display of our talents, creativity, thoughts, skills, wit, education, and so on was what made the internet so cool and popular in the first place – and now we’re subverting it entirely for this? That’s pathetic.
I realize that the host is likely just pandering to the popularity of the topic – which is kind of pathetic in itself, though not as much as someone actually using those services. It still means the actual value of such offerings is next to nonexistent, and it would be much better if they had something of a broader use – these ‘features’ have no function nor appeal to me, and shouldn’t to anyone. Hopefully things like this will die down soon.
[Yes, there is a sly joke in the title, since that’s my name and not an abbreviation – it’s easy to miss if you’re using a sans-serif font…]