I used to have a blog, until my digital voice model took over

I have to make a confession.

I let a robot read my old blog. (I write here on dev.to these days. These posts are drafted by AI and edited by me. More on that at the end.) All 107 posts, about 72,000 words, 2008 to 2018. I asked it to build my "voice", mostly for fun.

It can now write a decent post as me. That turned out to be the least interesting part.

First it counted. I've written "take a look at" 49 times. One in seven of my sentences trails off… I had no idea. You can't hear your own accent.

Then I asked it not to average me, and to show me year by year.

2010: 29 posts, with more ellipses and smileys than any other year. 2013: almost all "we", the patient tutorial years. 2015: "I" takes over, wealthbot goes open source, and one rant holds nearly all the swearing on that blog. 2018: a single post. Then that blog went quiet.

"So what happened in 2010? And in 2015?"

I honestly don't remember.

That's the part that got me. I never wrote any of it down (nobody opens a CakePHP tutorial to tell their life story), yet the pronouns kept a diary anyway. The archive remembers a guy I've mostly forgotten.

So it's not a voice. It's an autobiography, hidden in the subtleties of posts that were never about me. Years of style, mistakes, midnight rants and plain desperation. A model can copy the accent. It averaged the rest into someone who never existed. (It also tried to take away my smileys :)

"That's one blog. Does it work for anyone else?"

We tried Martin Fowler's bliki: 512 entries, about 290,000 words, since 2003.

In 2004 he posted 78 times and talked to "you" constantly. By 2018 it was one entry, and "you" was nearly gone. In 2026 he's back, mostly on AI, and saying "I" again.

We counted his words. We didn't imitate them. (He has a recent entry called "LLM-Voice", asking authors not to let an LLM write their drafts.)

Your turn

If you used to blog, dig up the archive tonight. Read one year of it, and tell me the line that surprised you.

One more thought

I'm not going back to typing everything out. There is just no reason to type long pages of prose when the goal is to deliver something. The machine drafts, I edit, and I'd make that trade again.

But now I know what the typing was quietly recording. The autobiography was never the goal. It was a byproduct of the effort, and mine stops in June 2018.

These days the only unedited writing I do is what I type to the machine. Nobody is archiving that…

So where is your autobiography being written now?

Cheers.

p.s. Yes, a model drafted this one too, and I edited it. Sorry, Martin ;)