Coffee Chat

Hello my lovely readers! Welcome to another week of Coffee Chat!

I hope you have had a great week – I spent the majority of this week digging us out from 12″ of snow! With being stuck inside, after shoveling or snowplowing, I found myself actually watching TV. Something I don’t typically do.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) … and the back story of Gathered In The Kitchen

I don’t typically watch the news, but this week I saw several segments regarding AI (artificial intelligence) and what it can do, etc. Oddly, I was interested in seeing what the news outlets had to say because this is something that I’ve been “competing” with for quite some time now in the blogging world.

Back in 2006, I began a personal blog and had no idea what I was doing. I just shared about my life, living so many miles away from family/home at such a young age. Then in 2011, when I began Gathered In The Kitchen, I had just the basic amount of knowledge needed to begin a self-hosted Wordpress site and just started.

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Back then it was so much fun. I shared about recipes, disguised my family member’s names with nicknames and was cautious about sharing about my home…because that seemed creepy to show people, that you didn’t know, rooms in your house. My pictures were less than appealing and I sometimes wrote absolutely nothing more than the recipe itself.

As the years progressed, I never had a goal in mind. I had no idea how you made money with blogging (still don’t really, lol!). I just kept blogging because it was a fun way for me to share what I was doing at home as a stay-at-home mom so many miles away from family.

I had a lot of success with my content being shared on Pinterest for years and years. I was contacted by WBTV news station in Charlotte, North Carolina to come in and do live cooking segments. I was asked by various companies to try out their products or go to their restaurant menu launches. It was so fun. All dumb luck I would say.

In recent years, I would say that the landscape of blogging has changed…particularly when Covid hit. Many people we’re looking for a way to stay busy as well as create an income. Unfortunately for me, this was when we were in the deepest part of our house fire, and blogging had to take a back burner for me.

Then came the introduction of AI companies on a mainstream level, that even I could participate in. I’ll be honest, I was skeptical and enamored all at the same time. I decided to give an AI company a try for one month and see how I liked it writing content for me.

Truth: I have ONE blog post on this blog that I had AI help me write the majority of. You probably have no idea which one it is either! lol. Mainly because I edited the heck out of it to make it sound like me – because with absolutely certainty, I am very prideful of what I have created with Gathered In The Kitchen, and all of the content here has been made by me. Something I am proud of.

Anyway, I ditched the service after that month because it just felt so unnatural for me. I didn’t start this blog thinking I had to have so many 100s-1,000s of words per post. Had to have specific words in each post for anyone to find it. Had to answer a billion questions in the post about what an ingredient was. I just wanted to share what I was doing and give you the information that I needed myself to recreate it. …and, I felt really slimy have “someone else write for me and me claim it as my own”. It felt like back in High School when I would only read the Cliff Notes version of a book instead of the real book…because I hated reading and then write a paper on it hoping that the Cliff Notes were correct! (hahaha!! who else is with me?!?!?!)

So, with that said, I would love to hear your thoughts on AI – and what you have heard about it. I can promise you this, that all of the words that I publish here, will be my own (even if AI could write it better or make sure I don’t have any grammar errors! – another bad trait, I hate editing!…or have a billion “…” in one blog post. So just forgive me in advance! Also, all of the photos – they are mine, taken by me and not generated by a computer program to make ‘the most delicious looking chocolate chip cookies ever!’ HAHA! …. in other words, sorry guys, you get the unperfected human version of me! 🙂 —> but hopefully that makes you stick around and appreciate that you know you’re getting the real deal when you come here to read a blog post.

….this also means that I am not sharing with you my bathroom or basement projects like I said I would in last weeks Coffee Chat! … because I simply didn’t write the posts…because I didn’t feel like it this week. HAHAHA. I was busy being a snow remover, neighbor, taxi driver, cook, animal caretaker, maid, mom, and much more!

Have a happy week, friends!!

xoxo, Stephanie

p.s. I should put this disclaimer in here: this is not a political post. This is not a post of whether it’s right or wrong to use AI.

Bottom line: THANK YOU for choosing to spend part of your day reading my content when I put it out. In a world where you have soooo many options of other content to read, I truly am appreciative that you visit Gathered In The Kitchen 🙂

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