Blogging is a hundred billion dollar industry (1). The time and energy invested in blogging is immense, even though only a small fraction is captured in monetary transactions.
I’m curious how LLM’s will effect this massive industry. At the market level, there are two possibilities — LLMs may tend to increase or decrease the industry growth rate. It seems unlikely to have a neutral effect. In this article I’d like to consider the each possibility and some implications that come to mind.
LLMs Cause a Decrease in Growth Rate
In this scenario, the value of content diminishes. This may happen if people do not want to read machine generated content.
This would mean that tools which can identity LLM generated content will be valuable. There are a couple possible implementations of these types of tools.
General classifiers
There are already a many classifiers on the market. For example, Originality.AI, Copyleaks, and many more (search “tools to identify AI generated content” for a dozen more). These tools algorithmically identify LLM generated content. I find this strategy risky because I don’t see how they can keep the technology ahead of the LLMs. I believe the quickly improving LLMs will soon be indistinguishable from human content. Also, people will find tactics to trick the classifiers using series of prompts. I don’t find this technology viable, but of course I could be wrong.
Source content verifiers
I haven’t seen any tools like this yet, but I think it could be an interesting angle. This type of tool would monitor a person at the time of content creation. Think of this as a CAPTCHA for blogging. It could monitor keystrokes, camera, and the content itself. Once the content is finished, the tool could store a hash of the content data on blockchain along with a signature from the company secret key or wallet key. This information could shipped as a copy/paste “stamp” which could be included wherever the blog is published. One issue with this kind of tool is that people will not easily visit a separate website just to write a blog post before publishing elsewhere.
LLM’s Cause an Increase to Industry Growth Rate
In this scenario, the blogging industry size continues to increase. This trend may be caused by the average quality of all content improving with the help of LLMs; and if people do not care about the source of content, just the quality.
I personally do care. I strongly prefer to engage with human generated content.
Thank for reading!
Originally published on Medium