Human Content Policy
Why humans?
You may not know this, but the first writers were actually humans. All the way back to Mesopotamia (ie: Ancient Iraq) around 3400 BCE.
There’s a whole big debate on when proto-writing became “true writing”, but that’s a conversation for another day. We’re more concerned about where writing is going, rather than where it’s been.
This year, well over 5 millennia since writing began, ChatGPT took the world by storm. Suddenly everyone thought A.I. could write anything and everything. And, as writers, we had a whole slew of clients asking us if we could just “ChatGPT it” and save them some time and money.
“Just have ChatGPT write it” became an all-too-common refrain in 2023.
Well, for starters, artificial intelligence doesn’t write anything. It never has. It compiles. It collects. It steals. Then it twists and twirls and synonymizes until it spits out words in newly arranged sentences and paragraphs.
But it doesn’t have a brain.
It doesn’t have opinions or courage.
Or insights or passions — or heart.
A.I. is like a 3-headed beast — like a Chimera or Cerberus — composed of the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. (Anyone who wants to draw a picture of said beast, we encourage you to do so and ask that you please send us a copy!)
Therefore, in light of these endless requests to “touch up” what the robot wrote, we decided to create something that bucks this unfortunate internet zeitgeist.
We don’t want to see a world in which there are just a bunch of robots writing for robots. But that’s where things are heading, and they’re heading there rather quickly.
So, we’re slowing things down. We don’t use text spinners or A.I. to write our content. And we don’t write for algorithms. We’re humans writing for humans. (For that’s what human content means to us.)
Our content ̶m̶a̶y̶ does not come out as fast and we don’t produce as much. But what we do produce is well-researched and as accurate and up-to-date as we can make it. And we hope that you find it informative, engaging, and interesting.
As far as we know, we’re the first organization to have a Human Content Policy. (After all, we did just make up the term.) But we’re hopefully not the last. And we hope to see more in the future.
If you like what you see, please share it with other humans who you think may also enjoy our content. Or if you just want to share your thoughts with us, we’re always open to hearing from humans. (Bots need not reply.)
Our Oath
In our quest for a better internet, we make every effort to keep our wonderful human content as accurate and up-to-date as possible. And we’ll make it clear if an article is old. After all, it’s not that hard to put the proper date at the top of an article.
There’s nothing more annoying than reading a super-long article and realizing at the end that it’s from 2009. Except for reading an article that doesn’t get to the point until halfway down the page. So, all our posts will have a Table of Contents right at the top so you can jump straight to what you’re looking for.
Nobody in 2023 wants to get to the end of an article and see it reference Google+. Just like most people don’t care that a food blogger loves cheesecake in September because it reminds them of — Who cares?! Just show us the recipe!
With these ideas and others in mind, we pledge to:
- Provide human-written content
- Provide first-hand experiences and knowledge
- Tell the truth when something isn’t good
- Get to the point (or provide a way to jump straight to it)
- Put accurate and honest dates on all of our content
—Team Toobzee, August 2023
(Updated: January 10, 2024)
