AI vs. Authenticity: My Struggle with Auto-Blogging

You may notice a tag on some of my blog posts - "daemon-generated." These posts are from a tool I am building to learn some of the OpenAI APIs, LangChain, and some more NextJS. In short the tool downloads, transcodes, and ingests a YouTube video, transcribes it using Whisper AI, then uses LangChain to run chunks of the transcription through GPT4 to create a summary and refine a blog post using custom built prompts. Parts of this project I chunked off into other site features like the AI TL;DR you see at the top of all blog posts.

It is... well was... a passion project. I think I done with it for now but for a reason I didn't expect. I built this entire site including backend, frontend, functions, and an entire CMS first to learn new technology, i.e., NextJS, Firebase, etc, but more over because I wanted to write more AND continue to build something which made me better. I am not sure if the daemon/auto-blogger does that.

Here is the rub... knowing at any moment I can copy/paste any YouTube video and generate an okay blog post to start from has forced me into my own head and halted me creating own writing. Everything that comes out of the tool is polished and doesn't match the style I am hoping for in a personal site. It is not rough, it isn't raw, and while it may sound grandiose it lacks the soul I aspire to in my own writing. It allows me to be lazy.

I think that is the danger with ChatGPT for me. It is SO easy to be overwhelmed with the possibilities and see all the incredible things being done with it that it makes what you are doing personally seem small. Heck, I wonder if that is what has somewhat stalled my own YouTube journey (health issues aside). Looking at so many talented people often imposter syndrome rears its ugly head.

The core of the original idea was an auto-blogger for the Hacker Hangouts podcast and provide quick bullet point notes, though I question the usefulness of that and who in the world would read such nonsense. With a smile on my face as I write, I question the sanity of who even watches it - haha, probably the same person reading these words. If you are that person, thank you! You are the individual that I think of when I write, when I jump on the podcast, and the inspiration for wanting to jump online to begin with.

While I am sure I will spin back to the project and currently I plan to open source both this site and the tools running it, currently it is a distraction to honing the skill I originally set out to - writing more and creating more YouTube content.

Thank you for checking out my ramblings. I appreciate you and will see you soon on YouTube.

PS. This will totally not stop me from making AI images for posts... because come on... that is amazing!