If you have been thinking of setting up a blog but did not want to because you thought blogging was dead, now is the time to have a rethink. I agree blogging has not been as popular as it used to be before, but it might just be ready to make a comeback. And here’s why.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk announced that X will be getting its AI assistant - Grok. Grok works like the other tools like ChatGPT and Bard and so on. Musk also boasted that Grok could tweaked to provide very brash and humourous replies.

But the thing the X CEO said that stood out was that Grok was trained using information on X. What this means is the many posts available on X is what was used to train the model and serves as part of its core knowledge base. This might not seem like an issue but for those who value their IP, it is a very big problem.

A lot of people use X, formerly Twitter, as their blogging platform. They use it to share knowledge or to educate people about things they know. And since X started the monetisation thing, a lot of creators have been getting paid. But this might come at a cost for them, and that cost is the fact that everything they’ve ever shared will serve as fodder for Grok.

To understand how much of a problem that is, some blogging platforms have put in measures to stop web crawling to prevent the content on their website from being used to train AI models. For a while, Twitter had some of these measures in place, stopping bots from crawling the platform. But it seems it was for a selfish reason - they needed their own bots to crawl.

This news and its implications could drive people who are very protective of their work to a more private and secure platform to share their works, and nothing provides such benefits like a blog you own.

A blog you own, not Medium or Substack, allows you to deploy one or more measures to prevent web crawling, including using robots.txt files, password protection, CAPTCHA, CDN configuration, and so on. Keep in mind that these measures do not offer 100% protection against bots, but they should serve as a very good deterrent, especially when combined, in keeping your works safe.

So, if you are a content creator, a writer, vlogger, DIY enthusiast, or anyone who just loves to share their ideas and thoughts with the world, you should consider setting up a blog today. Own your work and prevent it from being used to train models that could make your expertise obsolete.

Dey play, my fans.

EmmaxKeys:
Dey play, my fans.

If you have nothing reasonable to contribute, you could just switch off your phone and go to bed.