Spending an hour just writing for the sake of writing
Weblog notes from April 25, 2026 that were compiled and shared.
All that AI fatigue – I’m still invested in creating content on Substack and engaging with the ecosystem. For the most part, you can carefully avoid AI generated content. That is something I’m wholesale interested in achieving. To that end, I would like them (the Substack team) to create a toggle for readers that flags in or out AI generated content. I think writers could be responsible enough to mark the content themselves and allow some type of reporting feature for readers to flag improperly marked content.
Right now I’m interested in maintaining a cadence of weekly weblog posts where I share some observations and continue my practice of functional journaling. That is more or less something that has been ongoing for a couple decades at this point. I recently was considering what to do with that back catalog of content that for the most part is dormant online in archives and structurally inaccessible. At one point, I had pulled it all together into a corpus file that I could access by the ChatGPT 2.0 model they released. That was fun enough to chat with my previous writing and to train that model to write in my style to see how effective that would end up being. It was an interesting experience, but it eventually led to where we are at now which is a general and prolonged AI fatigue.
Let’s face it, the endless stream of banality creates fatigue. Reading great writing brings joy to people and has for a couple millennia. Being constantly exposed to middling and generic writing just makes taking in new knowledge and the journey of learning worse or more to the point perhaps it makes it tiresome. We are facing a new world of constant summary of a summary based content delivery where the original and novel fades away and sameness begins to be not an average of various inputs, but the constant drum beat of our generative model information age. An age that will probably remember more as a turning point in terms of how culture folded inward toward a repeating loop of normative fatigue.
Sure I’m watching season 13 episode 22 of the Curse of Oak Island right now while writing this missive, but I’m very confident that Lagina brothers are not spamming out AI generated content. They may have made 250+ episodes of searching an island in Nova Scotia for treasure, but it is most certainly not generated by an AI model. It’s really just an ongoing narrative of some people that came together with a shared purpose of searching for something with a relentless abandon. It’s probably that willingness to continue and strive forward that makes the show enjoyable.
Maybe the ongoing narrative that blogging provides is really about that same striving to edge forward by consideration of thoughts that appear within the forefront of the mind. Those top of mind topics can stack up and end up being just a lot to break down. Keeping things topical, but well considered takes a bit of diligence on the part of the writer. Making sure the content stays evergreen and meaningful for readers is an even harder bar to achieve. All that taken together is what separates some writers from others as they are able to build a backlog of excellence. A lot of my previous writing is just well previous and dated to the time when it was written. Some of it might veer off into the philosophical, but a lot of it is just a reflection of that moment that probably should just remain archived. It was a good and worthwhile activity to complete the consideration, but the output might be less valuable than the process used to create it.