Blogging in the GenAI Age: Why Writing May Still Matter in 2026

Blogging in 2026 looks questionable. Most people no longer read blogs and long posts. Information is searched, skimmed, or delegated to generative AI. Even thoughtful posts may attract little attention, while AI can generate fluent text instantly. Against this background, blogging no longer functions reliably as a communication channel. The relevant question is therefore not how to grow a blog, but whether blogging still serves a meaningful purpose.

One answer is epistemic. Blogging has increasingly become a way of documenting reasoning rather than broadcasting information. Generative AI produces language at scale, but it does not assess novelty, truth, or justification. It optimizes for plausibility, not for being right for the right reasons. When humans write carefully, make assumptions explicit, and acknowledge uncertainty, they leave traces of reasoning that are qualitatively different from synthetic text. Blogging, in this sense, preserves human judgment in public form.

This matters not only for readers, but also for the stability of AI systems. A 2024 Nature paper showed that when generative models are trained recursively on content produced by earlier models, performance degrades, diversity collapses, and errors reinforce over time. This phenomenon is known as model collapse. The study is not about blogs specifically, but it highlights a general mechanism: if new data increasingly lacks grounding in human experience, experimentation, and reasoning, systems become self-referential and brittle. The disappearance of human-authored reasoning from public spaces removes precisely the kind of epistemic input that synthetic systems cannot generate on their own.

At the same time, public writing and blogs can not be treated as reliable input. A 2024 ACM study examining Common Crawl, the largest public web dataset used in AI training, shows that blogs and other websites are included not because they are verified or correct, but because they are publicly available. Publication is treated as implicit permission. As a result, careful reasoning is mixed with speculation, error, and noise. Human-authored text may be necessary to prevent epistemic collapse, but availability alone does not guarantee quality.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the relationship between blogging and AI is unresolved rather than obsolete. Human writing may still be needed to introduce new experiences, reasoning paths, and interpretations into the public record, while the mechanisms for incorporating such material into AI systems remain an open challenge. How this exchange develops will be one of the more interesting questions to watch in 2026.

From the author’s perspective, epistemic motivations do not exclude pragmatic ones. Blogging can also support visibility or credibility, and in some cases writers become trusted one-person commentary channels through consistent, responsible publication. These outcomes are exceptions, but they show that epistemic and practical intentions can coexist.

Blogging in the GenAI age is therefore neither obsolete nor guaranteed to matter. Its value depends on whether human reasoning continues to be expressed publicly, even when attention is scarce and automation is easy.

References:

• Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y. et al. AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature 631, 755–759 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y
• Stefan Baack. 2024. A Critical Analysis of the Largest Source for Generative AI Training Data: Common Crawl. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2199–2208. https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3659033