Hi, it’s me and I’m back for a less-than-monthly irregular entry because today is a public holiday (here in Singapore) but instead of being out and about, I have been stuck at home for an extended period of time because I fell sick again. It had been a really busy September for me, where I went for 2 short holidays to Hong Kong and Bangkok, and then corporate life got busy and then there was also the f1 weekend in Singapore and the moment I thought I could take a breather and relax a little, my body caved in and yeah I caught the influenza A bug, which wrecked me up worse than covid. The past two times I got covid, I could still function and work from home 70% of the time but this time round, I was completely out of action for 2 days. The fever couldn’t subside without medication, and I find myself in an endless sleep cycle with almost no flavour to my taste buds. I could still smell and taste stuff, but for some reason everything just doesn’t taste good at all. It has been a miserable past few days. My fever finally ‘broke’ after 4 days, but the coughing and phlegm still persist. urgh. Even the vitamins and endless supplements I eat couldn’t save me from the symptoms of Influenza A. Well, it was ‘kind of’ a fault of mine for not taking my flu jab in a timely manner due to bad time planning and stuff but I guess I’m paying the price of it all. Hopefully after this spell, I would have the antibodies to fight against other flu bugs.
Had a wrecked sleep cycle last night as I was catching the Liverpool vs Man Utd game, where Man Utd won 2-1 at Anfield which was something that has not happen in a decade. I don’t usually watch Man Utd matches unless it is a big game in a reasonable time slot but wow I’m glad I didn’t miss all that action. Then 1.5 hours later was the F1 Grand Prix in Austin which meant graveyard hours in my country. It was a rather boring race if I didn’t support Lando, but because I did, it was just watching the overtaking battle for 80% of the race and thankfully it was the best result that could happen so I was pretty satisfied and went to bed happy and woke up.. in the afternoon. To be honest, I’ve been sleeping so much the past few days that I’m surprised that I can still sleep so much, but I guess my body is still ‘recovering’, so it is definitely not rejecting more sleep.
Anyway, so this morning I read an IG post about a content creator and a tour agency that was lamenting on how ChatGPT is killing small business owners. To be honest, I had the same exact thought a couple of months back when I was figuring out how much longer will I keep up with this website, given that ChatGPT/AI is pretty much killing off the revenue streams to make this website ‘self-sustainable’ at the minimum. Sometime ago, I actually ask ChatGPT to craft a blog post for me on random topics that came into my mind like reasons why I like traveling or a post about nostalgia or top travel moments and random stuff like that and guess what, the result scared me because something that I might take 1 to 2 hours on just came out in less than thirty seconds. The funny thing is that, while the content feels pretty legit and could be convincing at a start, real readers and my following would be able to tell a difference because I usually write in bad grammar and weird sentence structures with awkward punctuation. So if there’s one day you come to my blog and you’re reading a post with perfect english and grammar, I probably didn’t write it. I hope that day wouldn’t come because I don’t want to lose myself to ‘a bot’ and why would you want to be reading something so lifeless?
I’m really very angry and upset with AI, to the extent that I haven’t used it to the extent that most people do. My website views have been taking a hit because people just use Chat GPT or read the snippets from Gemini whenever they do a search, which means that they no longer click into your website to read the information. This means that I will not get any advertising revenue despite my content being extracted and summarized as part of the Chat GPT summary. Which means that I invest the time and effort in real research and have all this content ‘referenced’ and summarised by a bot with no or minimal ‘crediting’ to the original source. Given that it is a bot, there’s also no accuracy or quality control in their results. Given that people are lazy these days, why would we bother to cross-reference the results when we can just brush it off with a “Chat GPT said so” conclusion. Urgh. It really kills creativity. Remember the studio ghibli AI art that happened? If things go this way, I really don’t know how many people are gonna lose their livelihood cause of technology.. The pursuit of speed and efficiency comes at the expense of quality and precision. It’s frustrating how people are just giving up and slipping away from quality work just because the direction is on volume and speed, like those algorithms programmed with an ‘artificially intelligent’ mind of its own. To be honest, I do see (or perhaps hope for) a reversal sometime in the future, but not too sure what is the extent of it. Would books in the future be written by AI too? I mean authors these days probably use AI tools for reviewing purposes but there would definitely be a day where the entire book is written by AI? Imagine you can train the AI to give the prompt too. Is this the future of humanity or perhaps AI-ity? I mean if people these days are spending their time speaking to Chat GPT as if it was their friend on a counselor, would there really be a need for real human interaction? I don’t know man.. I feel like the world is going down a slippery slope and the landslide will happen in time to come =/
On a sad note, the exciting news which I hope would happen hasn’t happen yet but it’s kind of my fault too. I’m simply too indecisive and when it comes to making big and expensive decisions, I tend to just chicken out? I don’t know how long it will take but everyone tell me to be calm and not rush into things. Oh wells.
That’s all I have to write for today. Thanks for reading my 100% self written post not powered by any sort of AI. Cheers^^