When blogs first came to the forefront in the early 2000s, they offered a way to bring complex ideas to a wide audience, but more than 20 years later, is there a way to reinvent them? ?
Kobie Fuller, a general partner at Upfront Ventures, thinks there may be a way to harness the interactivity of generative AI to bring blogging into the modern era.
Fuller’s idea revolves around taking the concept of a blog post and turning it into a limited microtopic that users can explore by interacting with a bot. “With the power of AI, what we can now do is transform standard long-form posts into a variety of formats if we make the effort to build advanced micro-AI conversations that are adaptable. [to user queries]” Fuller told TechCrunch.
This could take the form of a text-based conversational interface or an AI-simulated podcast in which an AI interviewer asks questions of an AI expert. Mr. Fuller created the following site. kobie.ai To show what’s possible with this idea, he admits it’s still in the experimental stage at the moment, but he’s still learning what’s possible with this new format.
First, Fuller takes a blog post he wrote for TechCrunch in 2014 about how emotions drive marketing, and uses chatbots to build out interactive pieces while providing very specific prompts. I ran it with GPT-4 using: “We layered sophisticated prompts on top of the basic content as the sole source of information utilized for the AI’s micro-conversations,” he said.
Users can have an interactive chat instead of reading long blog posts. Image credits: kobie.ai
The first prompt serves several purposes. First, create an AI persona for the blog post author, while also providing a structure for the conversation (since the conversation will be led by the AI), ensuring that certain topics are covered and away from others. Fuller has strict guardrails in place to keep the conversation on-topic, and even offers multiple-choice quizzes after the discussion to ensure users understand the topic.
He is also working on developing a podcast format. This was also created with his GPT-4 along with his voice and the voices of several of his hosts who actually podcast. The result is an automated podcast. The voices sound robotic for now, but this is just another way to manipulate the same source content in a different way.
Fuller said this is more of a personal experiment than a business for now, and that he needs to be able to create original content more easily and convert it into interactive sessions and podcasts at scale. By his own admission, he’s experimenting with AI. Now, so that he can look at startups in this field and understand it better.
While the idea of rethinking blog posts is a good one, it doesn’t eliminate the need for the original long-form post. Just present it in a new way that leverages generative AI capabilities. It will be interesting to see if this and other content format experiments we see end up turning into businesses backed by people like Mr. Fuller and his company.