There’s been an overwhelming amount of discussion lately about AI and how it’s affecting people who write content on the web. It seems pretty apparent that AI companies are hoovering up everything we write and using it to give people quick answers without (clearly) sending them to the original sources. It’s certainly a real concern, especially for folks who depend on their content to pay the bills.

I’m not in that camp myself though. My website has always been a fun personal project rather than a money-making venture. Sure, it would be nice if it generated some income, but that isn’t my goal. I write because I enjoy sharing my thoughts on topics of interest. There is a sense of satisfaction in taking a moment to link to something I believe others might also like.

In some ways, the whole AI debate feels a bit like the early days of Google, when people worried that search results would kill individual websites. Some sites did suffer, but others found new ways to provide value. The landscape changed, but good content still found its audience. Now we’ve come full circle, with creators once again worried about how AI might affect the search results they depend on.

I get why content creators who rely on advertising revenue are infuriated. When AI systems can summarize your article without sending traffic your way, that directly impacts your ability to make a living. It’s frustrating to spend hours crafting something useful only to have it essentially republished without attribution or compensation. The business model gets turned upside down—yeah, it’s bullshit.

At the same time, I have to admit that as a user, I sometimes appreciate the efficiency. When I’m trying to solve a specific problem, I don’t always want to read through five different blog posts to find the one piece of information I need. If an AI can synthesize that for me quickly, that’s genuinely helpful. I find myself appreciating something that might be undermining the very ecosystem that created the information in the first place. It’s a weird position to be in.

The question of incentives is interesting. Money is obviously a big motivator for many content creators, but it’s not the only one. People write for all sorts of reasons: to build their professional reputation, to work through their own understanding of topics, to contribute to their communities, or simply because they find it rewarding. Those motivations don’t disappear just because the monetization landscape changes.

I think there will always be a place for human-created content, even in an AI-saturated world. People connect with other people in ways that AI can’t quite replicate. We want to know not just what the solution is, but how someone else approached the problem, what they tried that didn’t work, and what they learned along the way. There’s context and personality in human writing that gets lost when everything gets distilled down to the most efficient answer.

The internet has always been this weird mix of commercial and personal motivations. Some of the best content I’ve encountered over the years came from people who were just passionate about their subjects and wanted to share. Blog posts written by developers working through problems in their spare time, tutorials created by people who wished someone had explained something to them when they were learning, random GitHub repositories with surprisingly thorough documentation.

That spirit of sharing and learning together doesn’t require a business model. It just requires curiosity and a willingness to put your thoughts out there. If AI systems want to learn from that content, well, I suppose that’s part of the deal when you publish something publicly on the internet.

I’m not naive about this. After all, AI companies are making money from content they didn’t create, and there are legitimate questions about fairness and compensation. But for someone like me, who writes primarily for the joy of it, the calculus is different. My content might get absorbed into some AI training set, but it might also help individual people solve problems or learn something new. Both of those outcomes feel worthwhile.

The landscape is definitely changing, and I imagine it will keep changing in ways we can’t predict. But I think there will always be room for people who want to share their knowledge and experiences, regardless of what the AI systems are doing. The format might evolve, the distribution channels might shift, but the fundamental human desire to learn from each other isn’t going anywhere.

So I’ll keep writing about the things I find interesting, posting code snippets or apps that might be useful, and documenting the solutions I discover. Maybe an AI will summarize it all. Even so, someone might also find the original version and get something valuable from the fuller context. Either way, I had fun creating it, and that’s enough for me.