Welcome to my little piece of real estate on the World Wide Web.
I am no stranger to publishing dispatches on the internet. From 2009 to 2015, I maintained a blog—also published under a domain based on my name, Kevin-Goodman.com—that achieved a considerable readership, averaging around 500 daily visitors and occasionally peaking at more than 2,000. The site accumulated 8,282 inbound links from 670 unique referring domains and attained a Google PageRank of 7. Some of its original content remains documented by the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org.
My hiatus from public writing was largely due to my work in public service as a child protection specialist, a role in which discretion was required. Over the past five years, I’ve been able to turn my passion for liqueurs, spirits, and cocktails into a career developing innovative cocktails for one of the most acclaimed craft distilleries in the Midwest. I’m now turning back toward academia and planning to pursue doctoral research examining the social and psychological economics of American craft whiskey.
Because my prior blog was largely motivated by academic interests as I pursued two master’s degrees, it feels as though I have come full circle. Writing is certainly the one constant in my life. But much has changed since I last managed a personal blog. The biggest structural change is artificial intelligence.
I admit that I play around with it a lot, but I have also been terribly disappointed by it. For instance, I find that it struggles to construct an essay around an original observation when that observation challenges convention. As technically sophisticated as AI may be, this renders it mediocre in some important ways.
But I don’t mean to disparage generative artificial intelligence. I use AI for a variety of tasks: editing, restructuring content, summarizing long-form documents, conducting web research, and generating images. Ultimately, however, I prefer to write for myself.
In an ironic twist, I took something I had written for my blog in 2012, retrieved it from web.archive.org, and ran it through the Originality.ai detector. It was flagged as 91% likely to have been written by AI. Mind you, it was written ten years before ChatGPT was released to the public.
I used to be a strong critic of the polygraph because its science was flimsy and rested upon too many variables capable of producing false results. I am naturally just as skeptical of AI detectors. But the larger question for the future is this: How do we cope in a world of uncertain veracity?
Now, more than a decade out of practice, I’ve learned that a blog is no longer called a “blog.” Blogs still exist, of course; it is simply more fashionable to call them something else.
Welcome to my Observations.