The demise of blogging and rise of the prompt engineer
Analytics and AIAn unfortunate sequence of events
It’s a sad day for the world of blogging as we know it. The rise of chatbots like ChatGPT has spelled the end for many of the industry’s most prolific writers, including the legendary Phil Factor.
For those unfamiliar with ChatGPT, it is a language generation model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It has the ability to generate articles, blog posts, and even entire websites with just a few prompts.
So, what does this mean for the future of blogging? It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s clear that ChatGPT and other similar technologies are going to have a major impact on the industry.
For one, it’s going to be much harder for human writers to compete with the speed and efficiency of chatbots. It’s not uncommon for ChatGPT to be able to crank out an entire blog post in just a few minutes, whereas it might take a human writer hours or even days to produce the same level of content.
Additionally, chatbots like ChatGPT don’t need breaks, they don’t get tired, and they can work around the clock. This means they are able to produce an almost unlimited amount of content, making it difficult for human writers to keep up.
So, what’s a human writer to do? It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s clear that we need to adapt and find ways to differentiate ourselves from chatbots. This might involve specialising in a particular niche or finding ways to add value that chatbots can’t replicate, such as personal anecdotes or unique insights.
At the end of the day, the demise of blog writing because of ChatGPT is a sad but inevitable reality. However, with a little creativity and adaptability, human writers can still find ways to thrive in this new world.
Postmortem
The blog above (including the cartoon) has been generated by Chat GPT and illustrates the progress, effectiveness and potential implications of natural language transformers like ChatGPT.
Writing any literary construct, be that fiction or nonfiction, legal, scientific or even programmatic is a trivial and instantaneous task for ChatGPT and in the not-too-distant future writing for these contexts will be one of choice rather than necessity. One immediate impact of ChatGPT is the birth of a profession called prompt engineering. This role leverages the user’s domain knowledge and ability to interact with ChatGPT (or other chat AI applications) to derive an outcome suited for the specific audience and subject matter context.
It’s worth noting the skills that a prompt engineer brings to text generation also applies to the visual domain through such tools as Dalle-2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Indeed, as this profession develops the likely expectation will be that the prompt engineer creates fit for purpose mash ups with AI generated text and associated illustrations across a broad range of subject matter. The ability to creatively engage with the audience will be the foremost concern and success indicator for anyone who pursues this profession.
As we enter this new frontier and before we bury our blogging tools in an archive folder – it is only fitting that we take our hats off to honour those who have selflessly contributed to the foundations of the blogosphere as we know it and although the content of the blogosphere may not change much the process and means of publishing blogs has changed forever .
