BoomerBroadcast is not my job; it’s a joyful retirement hobby, a labour of love where I share my opinions and observations on current issues of interest with my fellow baby boomers. Should I be concerned that my words will soon be meaningless as artificial intelligence overtakes great swaths of the written word and threatens to replace me as a blogger?

AI is already used extensively in newspapers, magazines, school projects, business reports, research, fiction and non-fiction writing, and personal correspondence. While I may not be at risk of being fired from my non-profit, self-created job, will I lose the attention of my readers if I continue writing and posting non-AI material? Am I good enough? Will you still support me?

I’ve been reading numerous articles lately about how AI is supplanting human brains in the creation of essays and other forms of writing. There was an extensive piece in The New York Times Magazine on December 21st about the proliferation of AI writing, its merits and shortcomings. One of the guys in my monthly writing group at the local library recently challenged ChatGPT with a few ridiculous writing prompts, and it generated some hilarious responses. They were incisive and entertaining, which is what I hope BoomerBroadcast is. Should I hang up my keyboard and feed prompts into my iPad to come up with material good enough to satisfy my boomer readers each week?

It has been twenty years since I retired, and I wonder how AI is being utilized today in my former job as Corporate Marketing Manager. A large part of my various responsibilities included writing proposals for multi-million dollar construction projects. Those proposals required a fair amount of boilerplate material that I massaged and reworded in each proposal—company history, services, scheduling, cost control, project management, and staffing. While much of the content obviously had to be written “from scratch”, there was always a commonality. AI would have been helpful, and I have no doubt it is being used by those who are now doing my old job. It has its advantages.

According to The New York Times article, however, there is a predictability and sameness in the structure of AI-generated prose and perhaps a heightened risk of inaccuracy based on the source material. It’s probably not detectable to the average eye, but it’s good enough, and that is putting a lot of writers out of a job. AI tends to package ideas in threes; it uses a lot of m-dashes—which I also love to use—and it’s often overly wordy. More significantly, it lacks emotion, which only we humans can accurately generate—so far.

The only time I employ anything resembling AI in my blog posts is in the use of “Grammarly,” which is annoyingly nitpicky about my mistakes. I have also used CoPilot to create some graphic images in my sign-off at the end of each essay, which I hope you enjoy. Sometimes, I find myself thinking I should investigate this new tool more extensively. Would it make my writing better, or would it no longer sound like me, with all my failings, shortcomings and imperfections?

While we may be tempted to use ChatGPT to write an email thank-you note to a relative for a Christmas gift, I think they would appreciate and probably prefer a 100% human-generated, sincerely written note, with all its spelling mistakes and au naturel word choices, instead of a slick computer-generated one. Similarly, I’m hoping you, my dear readers of BoomerBroadcast, will continue to endure my amateurish scribblings each week, for better or worse. Please forgive my incomplete sentences, my dangling participles, and my grammatical mistakes. I am human, after all, not AI. And, I can also write in cursive.

I have not yet and probably never will participate in TikTok, and I am sorry I ever signed on to Instagram—it’s a monumental time-waster. I am committed to sticking with my old-fashioned blog, which I share on Facebook. I’m happy in my own little blogosphere. I’ve concluded that AI is probably much smarter than I am, but it does not have my personality, my heart, my opinions, or my particular way of presenting my thoughts. There’s value in my shortcomings, my amateur writing style, and my specific opinions that AI cannot (yet) deliver. And, for that, I am truly thankful. I hope you are OK with it too. Your comments and feedback are always welcome and appreciated. That’s how I make BoomerBroadcast even better—with human intelligence. Are you in?