MADRID, SPAIN—Alberto Romero sits down to write another thoughtful deep dive on the state of AI, a topic—he assures me—his readers still care about. I watch him as he confidently taps out the headline: How AI Will Replace You—But Not Yours Truly. For some reason, he believes they care about his employment status as well.
“AI won’t take over blogging,” Alberto says, siping his third coffee. It’s a bold claim and one he’s made before on his blog The Algorithmic Bridge. “AI is coming for them all . . .” He’s carefully dictating aloud to the speech transcription system as he checks ChatGPT for the latest news on AI’s threat to the workforce, “. . . From factory workers to surgeons to programmers. Personal essays? Done. Poetry? Maybe. Art? Already happening. Writing about AI, however, requires a recursive self-referential touch you can’t automate.”
Studies have long confirmed Alberto’s claim: AI can hardly replicate bloggers without seeming too competent. Unfortunately for him, AI is stealing his blog anyway—he forgot to opt out. “Sure, AI can write, kinda,” Alberto admits, looking at a copycat’s suspiciously average prose. “But it’s just a stochastic parrot, an autocomplete on steroids, a shallow tool for approximate statistical predictions that merely regurgitates patterns from sentences it’s read before. You know, a blurry PNG of the web. Wait, no, a blurry JPG. Or was it a WEBP… Anyway.”
According to industry analysts, Alberto’s blog may indeed be one of the last bastions of human labor in the AI-dominated economy, but not for the reasons he imagines. “AI could replace bloggers today if anyone really cared to try,” Dr. Ana Ibarra, a tech ethicist, wrote in WIRED Spain. “But who would build a machine to churn out verbose, shallow, and performatively opinionated commentary on AI’s impact? I assure you no one cares.”
Even so, Alberto insists that his work is irreplaceable. “I bring personality to my writing. And freshness and spontaneity and…” he says, furiously rewriting the conclusion of his latest post for the seventh time. “Readers come to me because I’m like them: part journalist, part philosopher, part entertainer, part intellectual, part humble. AI can’t replicate that.”
Critics disagree. “AI doesn’t need personality,” said a rival blogger who wanted to remain anonymous. He recently pivoted to using ChatGPT for 99% of his newsletter content, focused on an important topic: keeping the human in the loop. “Readers just want smart-sounding but actually dumb and vaguely pessimistic takes about the future. Alberto does that super well… AI just does it faster.”
As for the readers of The Algorithmic Bridge, they seem unaware of Alberto's existential crisis. “I love his takes,” one loyal subscriber told me. “He’s so relatable. Like, if I was unemployed and worried that AI could steal my thing, I’d probably blog about it too.”
At press time, Alberto wasn’t immediately available for comment. He was drafting his next post: Why UBI Isn’t Such a Bad Idea After All.
REMINDER: The Christmas Special offer—20% off for life—runs from Dec 1st to Jan 1st. Lock in your annual subscription now for just $40/year (or the price of a cup of coffee a month). Starting Jan 1st, The Algorithmic Bridge will move to $10/month or $100/year (existing paid subs retain their current rates). If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, now’s the time.
AI can't replace the repartee in the comments. Or....
Fabio Matricardi @thepoorgpuguy, sit silently contemplating the screen: to his surprise what he is reading it is Yet Not Another BS about writing. So, it re-assuring to still have a Braveheart standing against a dystopian hype. And Fabio reflect on the absurdity: "the only use cases for LLMs are about content creation... without any soul into it"