An Honest Reflection of Content Creation Today

Once upon a time, all stories began with “Once upon a time.” It was the way things were done. If you heard those first four words, you were about to hear something that was related by one person to another. The story had gripping words and something called a plot. In the plot, there was usually a challenge that had to be overcome. Sometimes there were two challenges that had to be overcome. This is also how heroes were created. Sometimes there was a moral to the story. “Don’t do this, or this will happen. And that outcome is bad.” Or “do this, and you will be rewarded.” This is also how human history was relayed from one person to a group for millennia before we became “technologized.”

I have always been a writer. I began with learning to read when I was three years old. I read my first book in the first grade, a book about a pickle and it was 127 pages. I read Moby Dick on my own in the third grade. I excelled at creative writing in the fourth through eighth grades. Soccer took over and my writing went on the backburner. I was in a couple of classes and schools (the last one Florida State University) where teachers lined up to rip my writing to shreds. This was the 1980s.

Along Came the Internet

The internet came along and I found myself ostracized from those “friends” of mine who dismissed my chances of success since I didn’t (and still don’t) have a college degree. I started subscribing to Fast Company magazine in 1992 and was the founder of the Entrepreneurship and Small Business Special Interest Group from 2001 to 2006. That’s where I first heard about LinkedIn and blogging. My first blog post was on Yahoo360. It was about Hurricane Frances hitting south Florida in 2004. I started this website in 2011 and it has definitely been through some changes (including my lack of attention). Here I find myself redefining life as more changes to the economy are coming since I launched my “micro marketing agency” in 2012.

The Next Chapter: Artificial Intelligence

I’ve heard about artificial intelligence for about a decade now. In January 2023, I jumped in with both feet. The main attraction was that AI would help me create content faster and better than I could alone. I started subscriptions with ChatGPT, WriteSonic, and Copy.ai. In the beginning, I was amazed with how AI could write copy that kind of sounded like me. I did about ten blog posts to MichaelNeely.net and I noticed something after a few blog posts. They all started to sound the same. They used the same words over again for different blog categories. One could argue that I needed to learn how to write AI prompts better. Then I started writing prompts that were longer than the content I needed generated. What’s the point of that?

What AI Can’t Do

I think a lot of people are still trying to make heads or tails of AI and what it is for. A lot of those people are also in the government (yikes!). AI is not going to replace humans anytime soon. And if it could, what’s the point of furthering a technology designed to eliminate humans? So there are only three socially inept developers left in the world? AI can’t make decisions for you (and shouldn’t). AI can’t decide what you should have for dinner. Bard and Bing Chat are a major improvement for search engines but they aren’t going to make a major difference in the course of human development anytime soon.

Another thing AI can’t do: tell a story from the memory of human experience. AI can’t relate feelings, can’t tell you what something smelled like, or tasted like. Maybe it can and I just don’t know how to write that AI prompt. But why would I take that shortcut? Why would I look up what the New England coast smelled like when I could just describe it from my own memory?

This is my promise that anything I post on this site is non-AI generated, enhanced, or even researched (ok, maybe I can’t rule out researched, AI is a phenomenal research tool). I will be writing everything from the heart, my heart. And it will be 100% human-generated. By this human.

So, sit back and relax. Let me tell you a story…