Really, WordPress?
I haven't been doing much of anything lately and I decided I would at least get a few things checked off my to-do list today. It's been awhile since I've looked at my RSS reader or sifted through the Discovery feed to see how my fellow bloggers are doing and it was nice to get caught up.
While reading through peoples' thoughts, I was struck by how much I wanted to write about my excitement for World of Warcraft Forever, which is launching later today. I wanted to muse about my old journeys and talk about how playing on a roleplay server back in the day really got those creative juices flowing.
As ideas came to me, I went poking around for a specific image I wanted to use in the post, but couldn't find it on my computer (digital organisation is still an ongoing battle). I was pretty sure it was on my WordPress backup site1, so I went to login and look there.
On the general WordPress homepage, I was greeted with something distasteful:
I don't mean to rag on this. I really don't. Everyone has their own stance on AI and its uses; I've already shared some of my thoughts on it too.
I also didn't really know what this announcement header meant. I only caught it out of the corner of my eye when I went to click Go to dashboard and my mouth twisted as though I'd licked a lemon. On my blog dashboard, I saw a bit more:
I actually groaned at this. I groaned aloud.
WordPress used to be a blogging software; I know it's very different now and viewed as more of a website builder. You can make a shop, a blog, a company website, a portfolio, blah blah blah. WordPress will always be THE blogging website to me, though. It's where people used to go to make blogs to talk about their lives and passions — where they went to review books and talk about their tabletop adventures.
There is something so soulless to me about "working together" with ChatGPT to write a blog post. I especially feel icky about the idea of doing this through a "conversation". The post will not be written by you; it will be written by a sycophantic amalgamation of trillions of scraped materials.2 It feels so disingenuous and such an embodiment of everything I've come to hate about the Internet. It's just content — empty, vacuous content.
The spirit of blogging lives in the anti-perfect — in the spelling errors we make and the tangents we go on along the way. Writing, like all art, is definitely a struggle for a lot of us. That struggle is what makes it real and worth doing. It's in the agony of "Augh this is awful and not how I wanted to word this at all" or "No one will want to read this anyway". The pure essence of blogging is in the posts I see about people who shyly say they are not very good with words, but continue to post anyway because they want to share their excitement or sorrow with others.
Blogging is about connection and honesty. ChatGPT kind of fails at both of those things.
I know I shouldn't be gatekeeping this and whatever nonsense WordPress gets up to shouldn't get me this annoyed. It just makes me so SAD. I think I want to just see people TRY. Please try to do the hard thing and work at it. Maybe it's hokey to say that the journey is the point, but it really is. You learn and grow and change by struggling with something and there is wonder in that. Generative AI robs us of the journey. Removing the struggle might make it easier to churn out posts, but — what's the point then?
Anywaaaaaay. Sorry! Didn't mean to harp on about this, but here we are. I don't have much time to really talk about WoW Forever now, but I will leave you with the picture I wanted to include in the post originally. I don't know if I'll get what I want out of WoW Forever, but we shall see.
I've had so many iterations of my website/blog combo over the years that I started backing up my blog entries on my old private Wordpress.com site for posterity. It's been pretty helpful for finding post images from decades ago!↩
Some of which happens to be raunchy Harry Potter fanfiction. I mean, it's out there and judging by the melodramatic cadence of some gen AI output, there's a preeeetty good chance it was used for training LLMs.↩