Using RSS to sniff out AI

While RSS has almost completely disappeared from the tech landscape, I’m still a big fan of it. I get the majority of my information via RSS, and it’s fantastic. If you’re not familiar with RSS, it’s essentially a way to subscribe to news sites and blogs. It’s not unlike getting email updates on every new story they publish, but instead of my email inbox they all go into my RSS reader and I catch up when I have time.

I’ve been using RSS for a few decades, though I’ve eased off a bit from my crazy days in the past. What’s interesting now is that it’s really easy to notice when a site stops posting human-generated content and just lets AI spit it out. I’ve seen this happen in a few ways.

First, there is a friend of mine whose blog I’ve followed for years. His posts used to be fairly short and personal, and frankly, often riddled with grammar and spelling errors. I didn’t mind, as I was just glad to hear his thoughts.

His posts had the same tone for many years, and then one day they just flipped. They instantly become 5x longer, with lots of bulleted lists on the page, a super deep vocabulary, and no typos. He absolutely switch to AI, and I was quite disappointed. I stopped following his site because I wanted to hear his thoughts, not just perfect AI stuff.