This website is for humans

Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search. The person in the ad had pointed their phone’s camera at a bowl of ramen, and the AI result explained how to reproduce it at home.

How does it know? Because it’s trained on all the ramen recipes that multiple recipe authors spent hours, weeks, years perfecting. Generative AI is a blender chewing up other people’s hard work, outputting a sad mush that kind of resembles what you’re looking for, but without any of the credibility or soul. Magic.

I subscribe to a lot of recipe websites via RSS, and look forward to new posts from some of my favourites like Smitten Kitchen and Meera Sodha because I know they’re going to be excellent. I trust that the recipe is tried and tested, and the result will be delicious. ChatGPT will give you an approximation of a recipe made up from the average of lots of recipes, but they lack the personality of each individual recipe, which will be slightly different to reflect the experiences and tastes of the author.

There's a fair bit of talk about “Google Zero” at the moment: the day when website traffic referred from Google finally hits zero. If the AI search result tells you everything you need, why would you ever visit the actual website?

Well, I want you to visit my website. I want you to read an article from a search result, and then discover the other things I’ve written, the other people I link to, and explore the weird themes I’ve got. I want some of you to read my article then ask me to speak at your conferences. Many folks rely on ad impressions to support the high-quality content they’re putting out for free.

I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them. I’m writing about things I care about because I like sharing and I like teaching. I spend hours writing these posts and AI spends seconds summarising them.

I'd much rather people read the whole thing, take it in, digest it and have opinions right back at me. I love it when people connect with what I’m writing (and sometimes they email me to tell me that, which is really delightful).

I don’t write these posts for VC-funded LLMs to come along and gobble up and produce some shitty facsimile, or summarise what I’m saying with none of the nuance or context on someone else's website.

This website is for humans, and LLMs are not welcome here.