Bloggers, Writers and "Synthetic Content"
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but today I encountered the term "synthetic content" for the first time.
In a world increasingly taken over by AI generated content I suppose it's an appropriate description and I suppose it means that we're now going to have "organic content" and "synthetic content." In the case I ran into, the reference was music generated by AI.
The effectiveness of AI seems to be growing by leaps and bounds, and I listened to some of the music that was labeled as "synthetic", and I was a good 20 minutes into it before I realized that what annoyed me about it was the extent to which it never varied.
It wasn't so much a commentary on the construction of any particular track, it was the fact that all the tracks were virtually identical and I would not have been able to pick a favorite from them.
The music sounded "just OK" and would likely not have bothered me as background in a store or on-hold music, but even so... something was a little "off" about it.
Anyway, I'm not a composer or musician but the experience did leave me thinking about "synthetic content" as it might apply to the world of blogging and other forms of content creation.
I guess the thought I keep mulling over is this idea that I am becoming obsolete. That is to say we are becoming obsolete, as writers; as content creators. I've already been feeling that in my work as an editor... people are increasingly likely to use an AI agent to review their manuscripts, rather than pay someone like me. Besides, more and more manuscripts were "written" by AI, in the first place.
Now, I write because I enjoy the process of writing and turning thoughts into the written word, and the creative process that is associated therewith.
But with that sentiment I'm probably part of a relatively small minority. I remember quite clearly when I was at University that many people would deliberately avoid any courses that had the proverbial "substantial writing component."
With the advent of AI, I feel reasonably certain that those same people — all these years later — are going to choose to use AI to generate their content or work-related writing assignments, rather than doing it themselves.
Which, of course, begs the question of when AI is appropriate and when it is not. Or does "appropriateness" even matter anymore?
In some ways I can't help but feel like it is humans who are pushing AI off in the possibly wrong direction. I think AI would be amazing as a medical diagnostic tool because of its ability to aggregate millions of data points for medical publications with far greater thoroughness than a medical professional. Not suggesting that we're going to replace doctors merely that we're giving them an amazing diagnostic tool.
But having AI takeover our blogging and music seems kind of silly and self-defeating. After all aren't we doing these things in order to express our creativity? And can we truly claim that a machine doing it for us allows us to actually express that creativity?
Besides, I keep returning to ponder of the irony of the fact that we have AI that can write our blog posts, and compose our music, and paint our digital art but I'm missing AI that will do my dishes and fold my laundry! Because that's where I really want some help so I can have free time to do that writing.
But I guess it's going to be a while before we have that.
In the meantime, I'm going to continue with my organic content, thank you very much!
Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2026.02.19 00:45 PST
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Thank you @ewkaw, appreciate it.
"Synthetic content" is a good term for some of this new wave of filler media A.I. slop. However, I am seeing a lot of active effort to replace real human content, and search engines seem complicit in pushing it to the head of the queue sometimes.
I was recently looking for some videos on how to do some car repairs. The Friend-Shaped Car has an awkward engine bay, and I wanted to double-check before removing some parts to make room to work. The first hits on a search were for A.I.-narrated videos that only gave the illusion of information, not something useful to a real D.I.Y. situation from a mechanic. There's nothing wrong with my Google-fu, because I've been at this for years. The search engines can censor ideas they don't like, but not synthetic content? Riiiiiight. They want us to make wrong clicks to sites selling more ad revenue and waste our time now, I think.
And I wasn't even using Google's search engine.
What's ironic about it is that 15 years ago Google was on a major kick to erase all click farm content from search results. I remember Google quality assurance czar Matt Cutts constantly releasing new countermeasures as part of the algorithm to get rid of the exact type of content that is now being spammed by AI.
I suppose the rationale behind pushing AI content to the forefront is the fallacy that it is somehow less subjective than human content... blithely overlooking the fact that AI draws from the existing knowledge base of human content.
Idiocracy, here we come!
It's the age-old problem of garbage in, garbage out combined with the inherent bias or error of whoever selects the training data.
It's like complaining that A.I. turns racist/sexist after it was "trained" on data including edgelord forums and 4chan.