I started listening to a podcast of someone who I know has great ideas and insight. But within the first couple seconds I could feel the ChatGPT oozing from the speaker. I began to imagine this woman opening ChatGPT, asking it to help her write an outline for her podcast episode on XYZ, and then her reading it from a screen while she records herself for her podcast. I found myself scrolling further back in apple podcasts looking for an episode from her podcast dated prior to ChatGPT being so widely used. That is the content I feel better about putting my trust in personally.

Then I thought about the hundreds of thousands of people who subscribe to her podcast and who are now being fed the ChatGPT voice and sentence structure, and I felt like I could see the intelligence and authenticity of the world slowly melting away and everyone becoming more and more like robots. Maybe this is extreme but maybe it’s also not such a crazy thought. We all love to joke about AI taking over, like many movies have portrayed over the years, and we all laugh at the absurdity of it really happening - even as I write this, I don’t really believe it will. But maybe the way AI takes over isn’t in the cliche way Will Smith showed us, but in a way where we all just slowly lose ourselves.

I’d like to believe that the news of Barnes and Noble opening up 60 new locations this year, means we’re heading in a good direction and maybe we’re counteracting the effects of AI by reading more… one can only hope.

As I read blog posts that I know were written entirely by ChatGPT, it makes me wonder what value that person who “wrote” the blog actually possesses. Has it just become “who can get the best content out of ChatGPT” now? It feels like nobody actually has any original thoughts anymore. 

As an entrepreneur trying to grow a business as a solo woman, I use ChatGPT for administrative tasks to save myself time where I can, but I'll never put out content using ChatGPT when I know my audience is assuming it's my voice... my original thoughts. Knowing that creators are doing this makes me extremely disappointed.

I clearly can not speak for other creators, but I refuse to let AI touch my personal writing.