If you weren’t aware, I have a blog and post on it every once in a while. Every one in a while over a very long while. And I don’t have any metrics or analysis trackers or cookies or other bullshit (outside of what’s the standard WordPress default) – you don’t deserve that. I have comments disabled and I don’t solicit feedback from anything I’ve written – I don’t deserve that. So that leaves me with really no idea how my writing "lands" with people.
But, a recent technological development has created fake people that can actually provide you with somewhat constructive feedback. They call it Artificial Intelligence. It’s creepy shit. And also, sometimes hilarious. Also, occasionally insightful. One day I had the idea that I should ask the fake people what they think of my blog. Of course, I don’t want them to think I’m fishing for compliments or anything, so I just ask them anonymously. Starting with an innocent question like "If you look at the blog, anachostic.700cb.net, what assumptions could you make about the author?" And, like all AI chatbots, they don’t want to stop talking, so they provide you lots of canned prompts to continue digging deeper. And "deep" is about six inches for these silicon analysts. (insert Oh My! Takai meme here)
I tried both Copilot and uh… what’s Google’s? Oh yeah, Gemini. Both had the same limitations and both generally said the same things in different ways. The limitations for both were how much they could actually access on my blog. Both seemed to be limited to pages they had already indexed, which in both cases, was probably no more than five posts, out of the (maybe) hundreds I have. What this resulted in was trying to glean as much information out of a very small source of data, and that means that they repeated themselves over and over again.
AI is well known for being overwhelmingly positive, so it’s no surprise they had no criticisms about anything I said or about my perceived personality. Despite that, they both seemed to pick up on the tone of the blog correctly, as well as the recurring themes and some of my motivations. Flattering, but I don’t take anything a machine says as an absolute truth, only as a guide or a pointer to find the truth myself.
Copilot was definitely more umm, emotional about how it presented its findings, where Gemini was more basic explanations. They both liked to use the word "authenticity" in their reports. Gemini made some very strange comparisons that didn’t make a lot of sense when trying to figure out the meaning of what I was writing about and that seemed based on the limited amount of data it had to work from. When all you know is I have a hammer, everything is related to hammers, somehow. Copilot got heavy into my style of writing, pointing out cynicism and sarcasm, talking big about my attempts to make an "authentic" impression. Copilot actually went so far as to break my blog down into "eras", which conveniently coincided with the few posts it knew from different time periods.
I specifically asked Gemini for criticisms about the blog and one comment was "As a personal blog, there is no marketing or business agenda behind the posts." Oh, well fuck me, then. It went on to soften that by saying that it might not be expected from a personal blog, but still, that hustle culture. Gemini, if you had more post data available, you’d know that I despise monetizing your life.
Overall, I’m fairly satisfied that if the reports they are giving are consistent with how a general viewership would read my trash, I’m doing things just how I want to. Now, once they index this page, I wonder if they will change their minds.
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