The Blog the Computer Wrote

So this week, I stumbled across a website that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to write blog posts.

I am sure you can already see where this is going.

My interest was piqued and I HAD to see how bad this really was. So in the interest of investigative journalism, humour and scoffing at how bad AI still is, I submitted a request for a blog.

I mean, what if it was awesome? What if the computer wrote poetic and heartfelt content for me and saved me hours of writing?

What if indeed.

I decided to keep my request really open, I literally asked it to blog about my name and the words Newborn Photographer Brisbane.

What resulted was the AI doing a quick Google of those words, pulling some text from my website and then most of it's text from a blog by a business that charges photographers thousands of dollars to be rated in their "Top Ten Photographers in *CITY* " on their blog. I know this because they gave me spot #3 for free then approached me around ten months later to pay for that spot after using my backlink to their blog to get it ranking high on Google. But that's a whole other story that I am still clearly angry about the underhanded manipulation and extortion of myself and my peers.

Note: Some photographers don't pay for it but are still included further down the listings as they need to make up the numbers for their "Top Ten" blog to look legit.

Anyways. Back to the blog the computer wrote.

The AI prides itself on the blog it wrote for me being 90% unique - and I will give the AI that badge of honour. This content is certainly... unique.

It starts off medium Ok. I guess. I mean, it starts with content actually about me and from my website, so far so good-ish.

*Note: There is no such thing as winning "Associate Professional Photographer of the Year". Its not a real thing. I am an Associate Photographer in the AIPP and won QLD Newborn Photographer of the Year.

And then suddenly by paragraph three it veers awfully off track, pulling random sentences from this other blog, swapping some words with a quick flick through www.thesaurus.com and smooshing them together like a bunch of newspaper clippings that a dog has chewed up, spat out and we are trying to understand what it said in the first place.

A lot of it sounds like a bad translation from another language.

Oooh ooh! Heres one of my favourite weird bits! They quote one of the photographers as being part of the "Australasian Photography Association" and other similar sounding professional organisations. Which, I had never heard of, so of course I Googled it. I mean, if there are these professional groups to join I want to be part of that!

Of course, it doesn't exist. The AI just totally made that up by taking the words "Australian Institute of Professional Photography" and doing another quick flick through www.thesaurus.com for some variables. Not that it matters I guess, because they weren't referring to me anyway.

Actually, there is no further mention of me or anything relating to me or Family Photography by Natarsha March at all. In total, only the first sentence is actually about the content I requested and sited as collected from my website with all other content from this other blog.

So in summary... the blog the computer wrote is a shemozzle of a dogs breakfast! But a bit of fun to laugh at and hey, it's free so why not have a bit of fun with it?

I also think we can all rest assured, the computers are not taking over the world - and certainly not this blog again anytime soon!