Scientific Blogging in the Age of ChatGPT

I began my Psychology Today blog, Illusions, Delusions, and Reality in February 2019, with my first blog post entitled, "Mind-Controlled Motion Perception". This first post took quite some time and effort to put together. My inaugural post had to be engaging; describe an intriguing scientific finding in a way that could relate to real life. More importantly, it was my first opportunity to develop my voice as a blogger. Over the next couple of years, through dozens of monthly posts, I saw my blog writing skills improve. I got more confident and efficient at making writing decisions: how to structure a post; how to interweave an interesting observation; how to include relevant scientific examples; how to wrap it up as a coherent, digestible package. I began to really enjoy the process, too.

Then, in November 2022, this thing called ChatGPT came out: a futuristic, artificial intelligence chatbot that could almost magically produce any type of writing, on any topic, in any style, all based on simple, easy-to-write prompts. As we know now, large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT represent the beginning of an exciting and disruptive era in artificial intelligence technology, with implications for society that are impossible to fathom.

As ChatGPT proved quite competent at writing prose, poetry, and even computer code, it seemed like a no-brainer to use it to help me write my blog posts. Why not just come up with a topic or an idea, and let the AI do the rest of the work? After all, more and more online content is being written with the assistance of (or entirely by) AI, with some predicting that as much as 90% of online content will be AI-generated by 2026.

However, I can honestly say that I have not used AI in any of my blog posts so far. It's not because I consider it unethical to do so; there are ethical (and, of course, unethical) ways to use these tools in writing. It is also not because I think I can write better than ChatGPT, because I certainly cannot. I am sure ChatGPT could help boost the popularity of my posts, or help me come up with more intriguing titles or catchy taglines.

For me, using these tools to write blog posts just feels counter to my creative process. I like to develop my ideas sequentially; AI puts them all out there at once. I like to think about relevant personal experiences when writing; AI has no personal experiences at all. Ultimately, a blog post produced or aided by ChatGPT would not feel like my own work. Even if I highly edited the product and added my own voice to it, I would feel like, at most, a distant co-author of the work.

This is not to say that I will never use these tools in my own writing; it would be short-sighted to make such a proclamation. It is clear that AI is here to stay, and to maintain a competitive edge in many job sectors, it will be crucial for people to learn how to use these tools. In fact, I have already used AI tools in other aspects of my work: to help me develop a lesson plan, to help me write computer code for an experimental study, to help me compose a difficult email.

For the time being, I prefer to use this blog as a space to share my thoughts, to develop as a writer, and to feel rewarded by the process.

So, rest assured; what you've just read was written entirely by a human.