Hey Luke, why aren't you publishing new content? I am... but it's different in the age of generative AI. You don't see most of what I'm publishing these days and here's why.
The Ask Luke feature on this site uses the writings, videos, audio, and presentations I've published over the past 28 years to answer people's questions about digital product design. But since there's an endless amount of questions people could ask on this topic, I might not always have an answer. When this happens, the Ask Luke system basically tells people: "sorry I haven't written about this but here's some things I have written about." That's far from an ideal experience.
But just because I haven't taken the time to write an article or create a talk about a topic doesn't mean I don't have experiences or insights on it. Enter "saved questions". For any question Ask Luke wasn't able to answer, I can add information to answer it in the future in the form of a saved question. This admin feature allows the corpus of information Ask Luke uses to expand but it's invisible to people. Think of it as behind-the-scenes publishing.
Since launching the Ask Luke feature in April 2023, I've added close to 500 saved questions to my content corpus. That's a lot of publishing that doesn't show up as blog posts or articles but can be used to generate answers when needed.
Each of these new bits of content can also be weighted more or less. With more weight, answers to similar questions will lean more on that specific answer.
Without the extra weighting, saved questions are just another piece of content that can be used (or not) to answer similar questions. You can see the difference weighting makes by comparing these two replies to the same question. The first is weighted more heavily toward the saved question I added.
Using this process triggered a bunch of thoughts. Should I publish these saved questions as new articles on my blog or keep them behind the scenes? What level of polish do these types of content additions need? On one hand, I can simply talk fluidly, record it, and let the AI figure what to use. Even if it's messy, the machines will use what they deem relevant, so why bother? On the other hand, I can write, edit, and polish the answers so the overall content corpus is quality is consistently high. Currently I lean more toward the later. But should I?
Zooming up a level, any content someone publishes is out of date the moment it goes live. But generated content, like Ask Luke answers, are only produced when a specific person has a specific question. So the overall content corpus is more like a fully malleable singular entity vs. a bunch of discrete articles or files. Different parts of this corpus can be used when needed, or not at all. That's a different way of thinking about publishing (overall corpus vs. individual artifacts) with more implications than I touched on here.