At some point a human has to step in and write something. At least for the foreseeable future.

That being said, computers can and already have replaced much of the echo chamber. I don’t see that as a bad thing wholly. As you said, there are many lazy bloggers out there and their roles can easily be replaced by machines.

Machines may, some day, replace those bloggers. They already have in my world. I use Technorati watchlists and and Google Blog Searches to find new posts of interest, I don’t reply on copyright digest blogs though they do exist. I used my watchlists to find this post and others like it.

Bloggers that put time and care into their posts likely will not suffer that much. I pen over a thousand words a weekday for my blog. I owe any success I have to my writing, research and effort. I don’t think a machine could replace that, not yet anyway.

The less creative and lazier you are, the more likely you’re going to be replaced, it’s that simple. The more machine-like your blog, the more likely a machine can fill its function.

All in all, I agree with Baldur. Machine writing is scary, but only to those who are writing in a way that can be replaced by a machine.

Humans can and should use this as a tool to be better writers and to free up our echo chamber to actually produce something new.

It sounds like, in the long-run, it could be a win-win.

As far as the content-theft issues go, that is a completely separate issue to me. If a machine can write on its own, that’s one thing. If it simply takes my writing, that is another.

The law agrees with me there.

There are two ways of looking at machine-generated writing. One is to view them as a threat. Another is to view them as a very efficient algorithm for detecting exactly the sort of writing that shouldn’t be done by humans. It’d raise the bar on writing for the web and for interactivity which is only a good thing.