Start Prepping UK will never use any sort of generative AI to create content. I will never use AI to plan, research, or write any material on this site.
Generative AI models like ChatGPT and MidJourney scrape millions of pages of internet content and use machine learning algorithms to use that scraped content to “understand” language or images. This allows these models to generate content when asked – but they don’t really understand it, they’ve simply learned to create believable replicas the way a parrot mimics speech.
As a result, they often provide false or completely invented facts – the AI understands that, for example, a phone number should go in a certain place in the article it’s writing, and it understands what a phone number looks like, but it doesn’t understand what it means, and so it invents one that fits the space.
It seems solid until you try to call that number, and find that it isn’t real. Anywhere where solid facts are required, or numbers and processes are needed, AI models can and will create their own data and present it as real. I can’t take that risk on a site about teaching people preparedness skills.
Every article and page that you see on this site has been researched and written entirely by me (Dan), and no AI models were used at any point.
Also they make poor-quality pap content and if someone can’t even be bothered to write something, why should you bother to read it? You shouldn’t. Read works written by humans. The machines can stick to machine stuff, like making staples or making me spend half my paycheque on petrol each month.
Nice commitment and well worth doing
Similar to my local Tesco introducing self scan tills a few years back, people thought “great, no more queuing at the tills”, recently they have got rid of all the manned tills and replaced with self scan ones.
Having to self scan a trolley full of stuff and then place it on the weighing table – try doing this with multiply bags – is at best a pain.
80% of the machines are also card only, so whittling away the need for that cash that preppers are storing up.
It has also had the effect of reducing the staffing level to just a few shelf fillers.
Oh and there is still a queue to use these self scan tills :-(
Just a note that MidJourney is AI image generating software, so does not “scrape scrape millions of pages of internet content” in the same way that large language models do (on which ChatGPT is based).
Also, AI does sometimes add in made-up facts or stats when generating text content (this is called ‘hallucinations’), but any human using AI to generate content should proofread and factcheck AI-generated content before publishing, as this would the responsible thing to do.
Hi Kathryn, thanks for taking the time to comment – I’d hope anyone who uses AI generated content would thoroughly proofread it, as you’re right, hallucinations are more common than we’d hope and can be easy to miss at first glance or if the poster is in a hurry. I expect they’ll get more common as the datasets the LLMs are trained on become increasingly populated by AI-generated content themselves – they’ll have to be careful to avoid a feedback loop where the LLMs are trained on their own output, I can’t imagine that would be good for them. For a lot of content generation this sort of thing may be completely fine, but this site is a passion project for me, and writing the pieces myself is something I find very worthwhile. It feels like a problem out of a sci-fi film, doesn’t it? Anyway, stay safe out there!
Hi,
Apologies my comment is not necessarily relevant to the post but as this is the most recent post on this site thought I would put it here.
Very interesting in news today that Swedish government have distributed pamphlets to all households advising that they begin “prepping”, food, water, other essentials etc. The whole pamphlet is available in English on swedish gov website, interesting read.