AI and the end of traditional Blogging
If you and I are here, I am writing this piece of article and you are reading it, that makes us parties of interest for blogging. And we both are going to be impacted by evolution of the artificial intelligence. This is another article covering the same.
I do not intend to scare you of the developments and for sure I don’t want to sell you the idea that you need a subscription to some AI platform to survive the next-generation blogging industry. This blog is an attempt to prepare you with actionable insights on what is arriving in the next generation of blogging. Before we move further, let us first understand what a blog is.
What’s a Blog?
In simple terms, a blog refers to an online website or platform where someone (individual or group) publishes information. This information can be personal details, education, entertainment, pics & art, or pretty much anything.
Depending on the type of information one is publishing, there are different kinds of blogs such as personal, educational or informational, marketing or promotional, etc., All blogs usually end up in either of these categories.
Impact of AI on different kinds of blogs
To understand how the blogging industry would be impacted, let us first look into what is happening.
If you don’t know, then let me put some numbers regarding content growth in recent years. As of today, about 328.77 million terabytes of data are created each day. If you are looking for a quick view then it is shared below.
The amount of data being generated is rising exponentially and a lot of this data is junk. With the rise of reels, TikTok, and small videos, the attention span of individuals has gone down drastically. While you and I could have spent a good 40 minutes in focused reading a decade back, we will struggle to have a similar focus for 10 minutes in current times. Surprisingly it is for us who are into reading, for people who are born in the past 10–12 years, they will struggle to have dedicated attention even for 5 minutes.
Damn, this is not good!
Everyone knows it and industries have adopted new attention spans with everything being designed with small-duration engagement. Whether we talk about movies, sports, blogs, or videos, the engagement time has gone down drastically.
Now there are two things, one is artificial intelligence and the second is declining attention spans. These things are impacting the traditional blogging industry.
To see the impact, let us explore the impact on individual types of blog
Personal blogs
Personal blogs serve one purpose: to put your own personal views for the public. I don’t wish to get into why people do that but the purpose is simple, You publish your your personal life experiences and data for a larger public. The people who engage in personal blogs connect with you and want to know more. They want to see how things went and how the story closed. This keenness in one’s life creates a subscription and people eagerly wait for the next details.
With the rising video culture, people now create short videos about themselves. Facebook Live, Insta Reels, and TikTok are just some of the mediums to do that. With a more live face and highly interactive music dominating the engagement, more and more content creators have moved to vlog and the personal article-themed blogging space is struggling to survive. There are new celebrities every week, and new people get famous and also lose their throne to the next individual within a month. There is so much data on personal lives that individuals have stopped reading long-form information/ articles about anyone. Another reason why Wikipedia’s individual information articles don’t see traction anymore.
The traditional blogging is dying (if not already dead) and I don’t see individuals subscribing to long-form articles just to get a feel of how the next person is doing.
In terms of evolution, you can expect the next set of personal blogs would move to VR space which will connect individuals in a simulated world and create highly personal experiences. Apple Vision Pro is the start of that era.
To sum up, AI isn’t a big impactor in the personal space, it is the attention span that is wreaking havoc. The impact of AI is limited in creating new forms of engagement or may be modulating the content. However, AI is being used by creators to understand engagement trends and revolutionize their creation methods.
You can read more technical developments in the VR space and AI in my previous articles:
Four Breakthrough innovations of Artificial Intelligence in Virtual events!!!
Relying on AI to generate your content: Pause & see the damages
Education/ Information Blogs
The next set of blogs and the most interesting thing that ever happened to blogging was information-sharing blogs. These blogs had the purpose of imparting learnings and wisdom to the larger public. There are thousands of blogs for topics such as finance, tech, bitcoin, coding, language, sports, and plenty of other topics.
With the rise of AI prowess, context recognition, generative AI, and other capabilities, the content of any article can be summarised by the AI in bullet points. Again the attention span is dominating here and companies know it. Google, Samsung, and other players have already embedded this tech in their devices and as a result, if you want to understand what a long article, message, newsletter, email, etc., wants to convey, you simply need to use the embedded AI platform in your device and boom! the 20-minute long-form content can be summarised in a 2-minute content. That content can also be read aloud by phone/ tab if you wish.
Another impact is on the quality of content. With a push from video content and most of the content creators becoming greedy for monetization, everyone wants to create as much content as they can. It is mandating them to use AI and automated writing platforms. These platforms usually only scratch the surface and put on some details without digging deep into the topic.
Now, when the content is being written by AI and summarised/ read by AI, human engagement in the data has gone down. So is the quality of the content. Most of the new content isn’t detailed enough and lacks validation. Fake news is on the rise and will keep rising till we address the issue of low human engagement.
The low-quality content impacts the reader’s engagement. Most of the audience doesn’t spend much time in that and the ones that wish to understand the topic end up wasting their time. They are less likely to donate their future time to the same newsletter/ blog.
If the content isn’t detailed enough then the chances of getting a dedicated subscriber to be interested in the blog are highly less. Because the AI can scratch the surface and answer most of the questions. There is no need to read the long blog. Also, the chances that the blog is also created with the help of some AI platform are quite high. Thus, there are issues of data bias, credibility, authenticity, and Intellectual property.
With all these thoughts in mind, If you wish to predict the future of educational or informational blogging, then you can easily visualize the long-form content struggling in coming times. Only the content that is detailed enough, created by expert humans would garner the interest of future audiences. Also, the number of such individuals would be limited. Thus, please expect costs for accessing that quality content.
Only the content that is detailed enough, created by expert humans would garner the interest of future audiences. Also, the number of such individuals would be limited. Thus, please expect costs for accessing that quality content.
It will have a direct impact on the platforms that host the content. Either they would have to charge more and be content with smaller audiences that are specific to certain topics or they would go into oblivion and cease to exist after making a loss.
The last type of blogs that we are covering are promotional blogs
Promotional and marketing blogs
These blogs are created to market something. These are similar to personal blogs with the focus shifting from person to thing/ place or any object.
Whatever thing is being promoted is usually promoted or marketed to a larger audience. The thing/object is usually more public than a person’s life story. It can be generated by AI due to the large amount of data already available on the web. Moreover, to increase engagement, it should also be complemented by pictures, audio, video, and other sensory means. That’s why most of the marketing and promotional content has moved to small-form videos.
With rising awareness of human bias toward certain themes, more and more content creators are using AI to create avatars, cartoons, and other infographic elements that are used to play characters and still promote the content. One hardly visits a website to read a detailed review of any item. They prefer YouTube videos for the same. The success of YouTube channels that review objects can be attributed to this factor.
If you were to think of what kind of blogging would survive, think of these facts and you might come up with your analysis. Some questions that can help you understand would be:
Can AI create a personal connection required for personal blogs?
With losing attention span, would individuals still read boring blogs?
Would you not ask the question to the chatbot rather than searching a particular blog to understand the topic?
If someone needs detailed research about a topic, would they refer to AI or trust someone who is a master in the domain and has produced content specific to the topic only? Would that not require money for survival?
If most individuals would start moving to individual newsletters to satisfy their curiosity, what would happen to generic data hosting platforms and traditional blogs?
