Picture this — you have a super niche question about one of your hobbies and can’t find any reliable info from a reputable website. You find a blog post from 5 years ago that does answer the question, but you don’t know if you can trust it.
Then you remember that you can ask ChatGPT the same thing, and, surprise, surprise, it gives a different answer. Which one can you trust more?
ChatGPT isn’t more trustworthy than a blog, but it’s not far off. If you’re looking for a reliable answer based on human experience rather than “facts,” a blog is more likely to be helpful. Likewise, if you need an unbiased fact or even an opinion, ChatGPT could be more trustworthy.
If you want to see what I mean by human experience vs. “facts,” check out the 5 tests I did in Is ChatGPT A Reliable Tool For Bloggers? I tried to stick to the sort of experience that I personally had, allowing me to directly assess how good ChatGPT’s answers were.
The rest of this article will discuss whether you can trust the information you find on a blog in the first place, when to resort to ChatGPT, and the pros and cons of each.
Are Blog Posts Even Trustworthy?
Blog posts are trustworthy pieces of content for the most part. A well-written blog post on a successful blog is more likely to contain correct information or sound advice than an auto-generated ChatGPT answer or a random forum post. Blog posts are sometimes more reliable than reputable websites.
Okay, the last one was a bit of a long shot, I’ll admit. The thing is, even reputable journals with a good track record will sometimes make errors or wrong assumptions. It’s inevitable. Even scientific studies can be grossly inaccurate, which John P. A. Ioannidis famously pointed out in his essay in 2005.
Many biases affect our writings and research. Things only get worse when money and sponsorship deals are involved.
Both small-time and highly successful bloggers are unlikely to have an agenda. They seldom make money off of sponsorship deals but rather from ads, affiliate links to products that they actually like (in most cases, at least), etc. And because they mostly make money from affiliate links, they’re unlikely to recommend a product or service that you won’t buy because that means they won’t make money either.
All this is to say that it’s in a blogger’s best interest to provide you with accurate, reliable, unbiased, and up-to-date information.
Still, blogs aren’t perfect, and you probably already know that.
There is just as much BS on blogs as on any other website. While some are undoubtedly AI-generated nonsense (you can often tell because they have like 50 questions with 1-2 paragraph answers), a lot of them are not. Don’t get me wrong, some are great (like this one, hopefully), but for every great blog, there are 3x as many bad blogs/blog posts.
So, how can you know if the article on a blog you’re reading is even remotely reliable? Here are a few telltale signs of an unreliable article:
- Contains major grammatical errors.
- Stays surface level.
- Excessively repeats information.
- Overly pushy with selling you something.
- Aggressive ads.
- The owner’s name is hard/impossible to find (many corporations start blogs to further their agenda or sell stuff).
- The About Us page is blank, missing, or doesn’t contain any real information.
- Complete lack of links or sources.
Note that even some reliable blog posts may have the About Us page missing because the owner wishes to stay private, or they may want to sell you something to make money. However, if more than 1 of these problems is present, click away.
If you often find yourself resorting to Reddit, Quora, or other forums to dig for information, then you understand why blogs need to exist. A blogger can find the information you need and combine it with their experience to give you a meaningful answer in seconds.
For example, if you need to find a quick solution after spilling coffee on your keyboard, you’d rather have a blogger who went through the same problem answer the question than AI. They might have some tips and tricks they discovered that could prove helpful. And yes, I’m using this example because I spilled coffee on my keyboard yesterday (and successfully rescued it).
When to Resort to ChatGPT
At the time of writing, ChatGPT is not meant to be a reliable source of information, but that may change in the future. It even comes with a warning that it may output incorrect or harmful information. It’s pushing the industry forward with its impressive ability to generate human-like content in seconds.
If you’re a software developer, ChatGPT can be a real “work monkey” for you. If you’re working on a large project and need a quick code that you can’t be bothered to look up online, you can ask ChatGPT to do it for you.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to create code for a calculator, and it did just that:
And if you’re a blogger, I really do believe in the power of ChatGPT to generate ideas, but please don’t use it to write your blog posts in any meaningful way, shape, or form. Google may penalize your website if it detects AI-generated content that doesn’t add any substantial value to the reader (which often is the case, at least for now). And their toolkit is likely to get even more robust with the advent of AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
Essentially, whenever you need to compile information in seconds, you can resort to ChatGPT.
But you won’t be able to find the sources of the information, which is a massive downside. This means that you can never know for sure if the info is good at face value, and you won’t be able to dig deeper without doing manual research.
That’s why, for now, the best use case for ChatGPT is when you need it to do some simple compilation or generate ideas on the spot, as outlined in Income School’s video:
For demonstration purposes, I asked ChatGPT to give me 10 subheading ideas for this very blog post, and I actually really like some of them:
The Pros and Cons of Blogs
Pros
- Experts with on-hand experience run blogs.
- The answer is generally correct and often contains additional precautions.
- Many articles contain answers to follow-up questions, so you don’t have to do any further research.
- Blogs often cite their sources, allowing for further reading.
- If you find a blog in a particular niche that you really like, you can subscribe to it.
- Discussion is a thing (Although ChatGPT can do some critical thinking, I found it incapable of genuine human discussion, e.g., this article).
- You can find a list of great products to buy (ever looked up something like “top 10 budget gaming headsets?”).
- The content has “emotion” (i.e., interjected humor, remarks, etc.), giving an article cohesion.
Cons
- There are a lot of bad articles with wrong information, and they sometimes rank high on Google, giving a false sense of security.
- Many articles are poorly written — poor grammar, repetitive, boring, fluffy, don’t answer the question, etc.
- Some blogs are cluttered with ads or want to sell you something without regard for the quality of the product.
- Some blogs don’t have any sources.
- A confusing layout makes for a difficult read.
As you can probably tell, the cons are closely tied to the quality of a given blog.
If it’s run by somebody who just wants to pump content out and/or buys low-quality ghostwritten articles, it’s most likely an untrustworthy blog.
The Pros and Cons of ChatGPT
Pros
- ChatGPT can give you an answer on virtually anything in seconds.
- It’s faster to ask ChatGPT than browse through convoluted articles.
- You can click on Regenerate response to get more answers.
- No grammatical, punctuation, spelling, or similar errors.
- Free to use (paid professional plan coming soon).
- Good at answering follow-up questions and providing more details.
Cons
- Lacks human experience.
- Unreliable and potentially harmful information at the time of writing.
- Product recommendations (e.g., if you ask for the top 5 gaming headsets) aren’t custom-tailored and don’t have comparisons written by a single reviewer.
- Repetitive.
- Vague, relatively short answers.
- Can’t give opinions or discuss topics in-depth.
- No sources or links.
By far, the biggest disadvantage of ChatGPT is that it can’t experience anything. This is never going to change (at least sure hope so), which means that it’ll ultimately rely on humans to provide information.
In addition to the example of reviewing and comparing different products, it can’t experience, well, life.
Another example of the lack of experience in a niche is that it can’t provide answers to some questions. I asked ChatGPT how large trout in the Euphrates river are, and it didn’t know. But you can bet that an experienced fisherman from the area would know the answer — both from fishing and talking to their friends.
Wrapping Up
For now and many years to come, reputable blogs supported by well-written content won’t be displaced by ChatGPT. Although ChatGPT is generally more trustworthy than some random blog with questionable content, there are some terrific blog posts out there. Blogs are especially reliable if you want to find extremely specific answers to questions, need detailed guidelines, or want to read an opinion piece or topic discussion.
On the other hand, ChatGPT is awesome because it can generate and regenerate answers fast, can compile information from many sources, and doesn’t have an agenda.
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