Thanks for your comment Lauren, it’s cool you know my blog from way back when! Sorry to hear you are being hit by the changes. I just read your piece on NK btw which was super interesting. Exactly the sort of perspective people will never get from a bot.

Yeah that’s true. I’m also finding AI useful as a feedback and debugging tool, so I can’t really be anti-AI. On the other hand it’s enabling a massive takeover of the open web, so there’s that 🙂 Thanks for your kind words!

I was hoping one day I might become a full time blogger, but as it stands today AI has definitely made it much harder to make money from content on the web.

Like you this is an ongoing conversation I’m having with myself, and my feelings are always mixed about AI.

On that note, thank you for an excellent blog. It’s one of the very few travel blogs I read.

You’re not alone in this.

I couldn’t care less about AI. It’s creating a whole generation of dumb, illiterate zombies devoid of any kind of humanity or individual thought. And as for all big tech bro companies… screw them! We all can live without Google, Facebook or X (at least, I do). It’s time to switch off from our screens and to connect with real people, real experiences on a daily basis.

Cheers and live well.

This was such a great read! I am also a travel blogger and have lost so much traffic and revenue since AI has started appearing in search. It’s really devastating, and it hurts that all our hard work is just being read and regurgitated by bots. I’m in the process of rewriting a lot of my content to try and make it different to what people would read in an AI overview, but I feel very uncertain about it all. Hopefully there will be a shift of some kind. After all, without content creators, the internet is nothing!

Yours was actually one of the first travel blogs I ever stumbled across so it’s been great to read your perspective 🙂

Lauren