I think there’s no better way to start a blog than by telling you something uncomfortable: start one. It might sound like a stupid idea, you might feel embarrassed, or think it takes up too much time.
I’m telling you to get rid of all those ideas and asking you to think about the state of the world right now.
We consume more and more content in video format. Everything has more colors, more subtitles, more Subway Surfers gameplay in the background. And in all that noise, we forget what matters most: language. What I just said might sound like some nonsense straight out of a language teacher’s mouth, but think about it for a second. At the very least, use writing as a break from so much distraction.
To help you understand where I’m going with this, I’ll tell you why I decided to take this step and start a blog.
I’m 22 years old at the time of publishing this post. When I was in high school and during my first two years of university, I felt that one of my strongest skills was writing. Well, AI has pretty much destroyed all of that—I’ve practically forgotten how to write. I’m sure that if someone asks you to hand in an assignment or a report, you do it with an LLM, and if you don’t, you should know you’re probably being less efficient than you could be by doing so.
In my case, my last university assignments, including my final thesis, were written more than 90% by ChatGPT. Law made, loophole found. Obviously, I didn’t do them with an AI agent—OpenAI didn’t go out into the field for me. There was a captain steering the ship. But no matter how much I was the one who knew how to communicate well with GPT and write the best prompts, I’m still atrophying my writing skills every time I ask it to write for me.
As a programmer, not long ago I set myself the goal of trying to do things on my own without AI help, but writing is something that completely got out of hand. If I had to write a report or any other simple, boring task: ChatGPT. If I had to think about a topic where writing would actually help: ChatGPT in voice mode, telling it my life story.
And this last part is very important. Writing allows you to have a kind of catharsis that talking to ChatGPT doesn’t. Also, many times when I talked about something I didn’t want to forget, it became really annoying to find the chats I was interested in later. This isn’t a cry for help for someone to develop some kind of wrapper or extension to manage chats more efficiently. It’s a warning to tell you that if you don’t write often, start as soon as possible. And even more so if you’re someone with lots of ideas and you don’t want them to slip away.
Listen, if the idea of writing a blog really makes you uncomfortable, it doesn’t have to be this format. It’s the one I think will work best for me (time will tell), but I believe that having to publish can help force you to write properly and not in a lazy way.
Other alternatives could be writing scripts, a book, a diary…
You can do anything, but please write (without AI). You’ll thank me someday.
See you soon!