Hi all! I thought I would do a quick blog about how I have been using AI in what I do in blogging and vlogging. I remember an interesting post from the awesome Rochelle from Adventures from Elle – Will ChatGPT and AI Replace Bloggers? – from a couple of years ago now, and I have been using a little AI here and there and I thought now might be a good time to write a short blog post on how I use it because a couple of tools have been useful, to some extent and that was worth sharing I thought.

So firstly I should start by saying – I do not use any AI to write blogs for me! I mean, that’s probably obvious because I don’t really proofread my blogs and they only stem from my personal experiences, but I wanted to put that down on record. The only AI I use in blogging really is contained in the WordPress features.

WordPress have a side bar these days when you’re preparing your post with several AI options to aid the blogger – ‘Title Optimization’, ‘Generate Image’ (to create a thumbnail), ‘Generate Feedback’ (this I think critiques what you have written) and writing an ‘Excerpt’. I have only used a couple of these features, once or twice I have used the ‘Title Optimization’ out of curiosity and went with their suggestion, and I have been using the ‘excerpt’ feature for a year and half at a guess. Really this is to give the potential reader a little blurb, and I occasionally had written them myself but there is a lot of work and time going into the vlogs and blogs and honestly, I can only spend so much of my free time on them! So this was an easy choice for me and I felt that I started to get more readers once I did this. I’m not always happy as it writes in third person a bit, but it seems to help!

Another AI tool I have just started using is Google’s Gemini, which I gather is a similar thing to ChatGPT. Not much really, but I did generate an AI summary of Andy’s World Journeys which I thought was a cool way to use it and also I tried to use it to create some thumb nails, it’s worked at times and then not so much at other times. This one image is one that I did with Gemini which I didn’t mind. Using Photoshop to pop me into images, which I do as a rule on vlog thumbnails it takes a bit of time to remove the background. So if AI can help me on this, that’s something I would be happy to use it for. I still want to use my own photos/images of course. There are of course a number of apps that create thumbnail images for people. I’m not sure I’m keen to use them they will use their own templates I think and I’m just looking to create the image and then adding the branding etc which is quick enough in Photoshop.

My third dalliance in AI has been using a platform called ‘Mureka’. It has been a bit of fun really I trialled it and had fun creating little theme tunes that I used last year in my vlogs. Basically it’s a music platform and you enter in the style you want and some keywords and it will create a piece of music for you, and you can enter lyrics and so I got theme songs that way and now this year I’ve created theme songs for flight and hotel reviews which was fun to do. I’m paying around $10USD a month and not sure I really get good value out of it, you get four hundred creations a month and I’m lucky to use four so probably I won’t continue the subscription. I’ve been using and continue to use Epidemic Sound which is a platform that licences music that I use and that music is created by actual people who make money by putting their work on the site. Of course you have to find the right piece you want to use but there’s a wide selection there of different genres. It won’t create your own theme song with lyrics for you though lol…

Anyways, I am sure there are other ways I could be using AI to simplify blogging and vlogging, but I still enjoy editing and that stuff so for now I don’t have plans to use it more, but who knows. The content will, of course, be written/created by me! Thanks for popping by and having a read today! Take care and May the Journey Never End!