5 Reaons Why I Don’t Use AI For My Blog
Generative AI is all the rage nowadays and is slowly becoming more embedded into our daily lives, at home, school and at work. I’m no different; AI has helped me with all kinds of random things – suggestions for what to do with an abundance of spinach in my fridge, self-diagnosing symptoms or IDing an insect bite.
Despite the fact that I’ve seen how AI can be a useful tool, not using it for my travel blog continues to be a strong value for my business. I’m proud that everything I write, post, or send is an original creation, and I enjoy the creative process. I believe that avoiding AI has kept my quality up, content engaging, and my income higher than it would have been.
This may not make sense to everyone; readers and content creators included. These days, we’re hard-pressed to find a content creator who isn’t using AI. So, why wouldn’t I use it to speed up or enhance my stuff if it seems to be helping so many others?
See, its not just that I haven’t used generative AI for my blog – it’s also that I never will. To be clear, when I talk about never using AI, I specifically mean generative AI (GenAI), which creates ‘new’ content (written text, images and videos.) I will never use GenAI that for my business, or for fun.
Helpful chatbot once in a while, sure. Creating stuff for my business that I plan to pass off as my own, nah. Never.
So, why am I so against it in a world where most people are for it? Why aren’t I at least willing to consider implementing AI into my processes? I’m glad you asked. Here are the reasons why I have never, and don’t plan to use generative AI for my blog…
A brief background on my blogging experience: While I only started my travel blog in 2023, it generated a lot of success early on, and held steady through many of the Google algorithm updates to come over the following years. Today, in 2026, I continue to earn a solid livable income from my blogging passively, while spending time with my kids, travel, and tackle other creative projects I’m passionate about
5 Reasons Why I Don’t (And Will Never) Use AI for My Blog
1. I love to be creative
I’m a lifelong amateur writer and artist. I have stacks of journals and stories that I hand-wrote as a child, and drawings that I would spend hours shading, colouring in the lines of and putting in those small finishing touches. As a kid and teenager, I was always working on a creative writing side project or hobby.
I believe that all humans need a creative outlet, whether it’s writing, art, music, cooking, gardening, or something else. That’s part of what separates us from other life forms. I do feel sad at how GenAI has undermined human creativity and the process; how it’s cheapened the way we now look at anything (“is this AI?”) It’ll have a detrimental effect on our mental health, and probably incomes moving forward…but thats a story for another time.
All I can say now is that I enjoy what I do. I have a process that I enjoy just as it is, and there’s no need for GenAI input.
2. It’s copying
As someone who worked as a teacher for almost a decade, I completely understand the concept of not ‘reinventing the wheel,’ by spending hours trying to create something that has already been done over and over again.
As a teacher, I leaned into the ‘don’t reinvent the wheel’ advice by networking and purchasing resources from other teachers, so that I wouldn’t have to do and make everything from scratch.
However, my travel content that I publish online is not the same as a worksheet or a quiz that I would have given to my students. As a teacher, I was never trying to pass off any of these things as being original and created by me – whereas, as a travel writer, I certainly am.
I mentioned above that GenAI creates ‘new’ content. It does so by pulling from the sources of creation of others. In many cases, the GenAI was trained with others work without their consent, and as a result, they are losing income. That’s also a story for another time.
The bottom line for me is that anything published under my name should be fully mine. Period.
3. Not using it has actually helped me
People said I would be left behind if I didn’t use AI. That “AI is the future” and it was either adapt or go the way of Blockbuster by sticking to old, outdated ways of doing things.
Well, guess what? A lot of people who were loud about saying stuff like a few years ago are no longer receiving organic traffic to their blogs.
But I am. Maybe not as much as I was before, sadly, (thank you, AI overviews, and ChatGPT travel advice.) But, my blog is still doing better than the average blog, which is impressive considering it’s a relatively new domain. I fully believe that my success is due to my original, thoughtful and helpful content.
Would I still be doing well, if I’d at least used some Gen AI to enhance my processes? Maybe. And is GenAI stealing my stuff? Yes, it is. (Thanks again, AI overviews and ChatGPT.)
But even if GenAI exists, and has impacted my income negatively, I’m still doing quite well. I know that I wouldn’t be if I’d used a bunch of AI. One of my tips for blogging success is to write stuff that only you can write. And a chatbot can’t do that, because it hasn’t experienced what you have from your unique perspective.
4. Honestly, it’s easier for me not to use it
People said that you could become a “content pumping machine,” creating mass amounts of content and generating thousands of views, affiliate link clicks, and amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. And its so easy, right?
Aside from the fact that that plan didn’t seem to work out for too many people long term, let me talk about the process of leveraging GenAI. There’s a lot of prompting involved, and now people are teaching people how to prompt. Prompting itself is becoming a skill, that people are now teaching other people.
Well, I don’t want to prompt. I want to write. And rather than learning all the prompting needed to create something remotely good, I’m just skipping that step all together and creating it from scratch. I promise you, its just as fast, because it feels like it comes naturally to me.
5. The environmental aspect
I’m a travel blogger, so it goes without saying that I love to travel. Why? I love seeing and experiencing the beauty around this Earth. We all do. Whether it’s from travelling ourselves, or admiring beautiful photos, or homeroom travels – reading about them in a book, watching nature documentaries or movies. Nature is beautiful and healing, and I want to do anything I can to preserve it.
I’m not an expert on global warming, water supply or environmental degradation. But I do know that GenAI images and text use more water and energy than necessary, and they come at huge environmental costs, mainly the usage and waste of non-renewable fresh water.
Since I don’t feel the need for it, and am doing just fine without it, I’m happy to be sparing several ounces of fresh clean water every time I don’t use GenAI, and instead just create from scratch.
6. Not using it makes me a better writer
I’ve heard the narrative that “ChatGBT can make writing stronger,” and can help with a writer’s block. I personally don’t agree.. I believe that writer’s block is simply a thinking block. A big part of writer’s block comes from fear of an empty page, how something might sound, and the pressure of wanting it to sound a certain way.
GenAI seems to produce well-written stuff (thanks to the humans it has scraped from), so it seems like a safe way to get some well written stuff on the page; a starting point to work from. Except, it stops you from developing your own voice.
Even after three years of blogging, I’m still improving my writing and developing my voice. I know that working from GenAI would have changed the development of my writing (if it would even be developing at all.)
Interesting fact: This blog post took me less than an hour to write and edit, at 1,500 words. It was written and published on the same day I started it.
Final Thoughts on Avoiding GenAI for My Blog
As a travel blogger who doesn’t touch GenAI with a ten-foot pole, I believe that this value has benefited my writing, my blog and ultimately, my income. After having spent almost a decade in a stressful career, it feels like a dream to be working as a travel blogger for a living- especially to be doing something that comes so naturally to me.
Whether you’re a blog reader or writer or simply curious about why some content creators still haven’t jumped on the AI bandwagon, I hope that this has answered your questions, and helped inspire others who want to create from the heart and from scratch.