BULB's Official Position on The Use of Artificial Intelligence (December 2023)
Introduction
Howdy BULBers,
As some of you may have noticed, there has been increasing conversation within the community about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the BULB platform. It's clearly a divisive topic which has generated some pretty heated responses with arguments from both side of the debate. Although we don't appreciate the exact method in which these concerns have been raised, we'd like to address them and put the communities mind at ease by clarifying our position on the use of AI on BULB.
Community Concerns
A number of community members have reached out to the BULB team via Discord to express their concerns over writers within the community, specifically our verified writers using AI to enhance their articles. The solution put forward was to penalise the use of AI and utilise a detection API like GPTzero to identify this.
The question we need to answer is: Should the use of AI be allowed on BULB?
Why This Conversation is Important
AI is currently revolutionising all industries in one degree or another, businesses are using AI tools to streamline business processes, optimise product development, minimise human error, be more creative, personalise products and services, the list goes on and on.
Pertaining to content creation we are seeing a trend of mass production and content optimisation occur. Some content produced by AI is poor, lacking creativity, human ingenuity and original thought. Some, is really good, especially when it is built upon the human elements that make a piece of content unique.
So, as arguably the most important technological advancement since the inception of the internet and one that poses a degree of risk to the content creation process. It's important for us to address our community on this topic.
Official Position
BULB's official position as at 22nd December 2023
We encourage the use of Artificial Intelligence to enhance but not replace the unique process of content creation.
What this means from our perspective, is you are entitled to use AI to research for your article, streamline sentence structure, build out ideas and optimise for SEO. We have deliberately built BULB AI as a blogging co pilot to assist in this process.
What this doesn't mean is that the team are okay with AI completely replacing the content creation process. Content 100% created by AI is boring, clogs up the platform and won't earn you as many BULB points as you might think. If you as a community member feel a piece of content is 100% written by AI and have a problem with it, we encourage you to 'vote with your feet' and choose not to reward that creator with your engagement.
With that said, @Darox put it best in a comment reply: "if readers appreciate an article written by AI then what's the problem? It's like blaming those who use a computer keyboard instead of a pen". We completely agree.
Why is this BULB's Position?
Whether we like it or not on a personal level, AI will become an integral part of our daily use of the internet over the next 5-10 years. It's our strong opinion that any blogging platform or technology company in general which chooses not to embrace this technology, are doing a disservice to their user base and it will inevitably cost them in the long run.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, AI is a tool that we should all look to use in one way or another. It's not a direct replacement for the human ingenuity that makes you and your content unique and it never will be. As a community, the best way to encourage writers to be more unique and creative is simple, engage with well written and interesting content and do the opposite with boring content that feels like it was completely written by a computer.
We know this stance won't please everyone and we do genuinely value everyone's opinions, so please feel free to launch a ticket in our Discord to discuss your concerns further but we hope you can reframe the use of AI from a 'form of cheating' to a form of amazing content production when used correctly.
Thank you BULBers, this platform wouldn't be what it is today and set up for huge growth in the future without your ongoing support and amazing passion, engagement and ideas.
Let's continue to Write-to-Earn and Read-to-Earn as a tight community who, together, will take this platform to the next level!
-BULB Team
