i want to know *you*
This blog marks my first time using my real first name on the internet, like ever. I see other bloggers do that not just on their blog, but pretty much on all of their socials. More than that, many combine their first and last name in the way they present themselves at all times—a concept deeply foreign to me unless I’m communicating with the bureaucracy.
I reckon that this is a generational difference: whereas I grew up on an internet that favored new connections and distance from the offline world, older people grew up on an internet as an extension of their world; not a new world altogether. Since my name is kind of a rarity in the West, I’ve been most reluctant to use it outside of formal or familiar spaces.
Yet I still chose not to hide behind a pen name. I deeply believe the rise of AI deserves a backlash of unabashed authenticity to counteract all the deep-fakes and slop flooding the internet. The Small Web revival is the only sane answer to it. We need real people to keep posting their mundane activities, niche interests, and random takes to maintain a humane web—by humans for humans.
You may have noticed that I use em dashes in my writing and I won’t stop doing that because some misguided people online think it’s a sign of GenAI use. The reality is that you often can’t tell unless you pay close attention to patterns in posts (which still has many false-positives anyway). You simply can’t tell what is GenAI on the web because it was itself trained on the language present on the web. Some people disclose their use, but other than that we have to trust they aren’t using GenAI.
There is just no point in using GenAI to tell your story. When I add bloggers to my RSS reader, it is because I find them interesting the way they are and not what they could possibly promote to me or their "perfection". If you’re going to put on a performance with GenAI, you’ll lose interest in what you’re doing pretty quickly and start questioning the value of it when it can be generated in seconds—with or without you.
The value lies in the process, never the final product. I like reading your thoughts as they develop, the ones you write at 4 am after a sleepless night and a busy mind not a possibly correct and mature opinion generated in two seconds by what Sam Altman and his henchmen stole from us with investor money and government backing. Be unapologetically you, it’s worth it!
So I guess, this is my AI statement and actually befitting a new blog. I will never use AI to write or "improve" my posts because that goes against this blog’s raison d’être. I want it to be part of humanizing the web, not among the drivers of its demise.