There are many aspects I appreciate about things. For one, I appreciate how things appear. I might enjoy the composition, color, sentence structure, or texture of a thing.
But the appearance of a thing alone is rarely enough for me to really enjoy it. Many of the things I decided to furnish my apartment with are not chosen for their appearance alone. My two carpets are also the carpets that I grew up walking on whenever I visited my grandparents house. The Picasso-esque oil painting on my wall is also a reminder of my time in Vietnam. The coffee table in my living room has also been a long time companion of my partner.
The same goes for what I engage with online. Of course I get excited about an interesting story, but usually not without its context. Paul Coldren's blog about his experience is interesting because he gets to go to freakin Antarctica, sure, but it is even more interesting by being able to follow a living, breathing human, experiencing it all. Why would I read the same blog written by an AI? An LLM is obviously not drawing from it's own lived experience. It doesn't get excited, and so I can't get excited with it. There are no shoes I can put myself in, no effort, just electricity that has gone into the production of any particular thing.This is why I rarely use AI for anything I do that I want others to engage with. I do use it to auto-complete some of the code I write for this site to speed up the mundane parts of it. If I ever use AI for anything public facing, I will list it below:
Thinking About Photographing Strangers - For this paragraph, I used GPT 4o's deep research function to help find primary sources talking about Dani traditions.