Is it possible to blog in the AI era?
I write short stories every now and then and I throw them online. I also have a tech blog, where I moan about the decisions software I use make and with my “infinite wisdom”, I tell them what they should be doing instead.
I used to host both on Medium, but Medium got greedy. Then it was WordPress, but now even they’re trying to be greedy bastards and use my shit for training AI.
Some would argue that WordPress paid hosting will exempt me from the AI training, but for less than 100 visitors a year, it’s not really worth the expense.
So what is the solution? I ask the greater minds of this community for suggestions.
There are two good options: Host your own blog yourself, or join a blogging platform that isn’t corporate. I personally use BearBlog but I’ve heard good things about Write.as as well. These two have free blogging options and don’t sell your data. If you want to host it yourself (which is safer), check out Hugo.
Ultimately, bots scrape the entire internet and there’s no guarantee they will honor robots.txt of a particular website (which tells bots what they are and aren’t allowed to do). If it’s on the internet, people can scrape your content and there isn’t much you can do about it. That shouldn’t stop you from writing or blogging, just don’t post very personal data.
Also, feel free to join us on [email protected]!
When I was looking into Ghost over the weekend, Hugo kept popping up.
Also subscribed.