Anxious and Travelling dot com: An AI-free website

We even make our own stock AI images. You'd never know this was made on MS Paint

Liz and I have mostly loved the first six months of planning and launching this website, trying to create something we hope you’ll enjoy should you happen to stumble upon it as you plan your next holiday.

But writing travel guides and posts about anxiety can be a difficult too, particularly while trying to piece together a living in my new life as a freelancer.

So it’s easy to see the temptation to use AI language models and image generators for anyone trying to get a website off the ground… particularly when AI has made it so much harder to get readers to click through to your site to check out the product of all your hard work.

The temptation is made even greater by the volume of apps and tools provided by website builders that promise to use AI to make developing your site, improving your search engine optimisation, and generating traffic through all other means, that much easier. When we were looking to add a blogging app to this site, most of the options that were presented to us advertised AI blog-writing tools - several with spirit-sapping names like “AI Bulk Blog Post SEO writer”.

And even after choosing our website builder’s own blogging platform, which didn’t quite so overtly push AI tools to us, there’s no way to avoid seeing the little ‘Content AI’ button just begging you to take a shortcut and let a language model create your next post for you.

But as increasingly hard as it is to avoid using AI, and though we couldn’t blame anyone for seeking out tools to improve as a writer or to make the task of publishing content a bit easier, we’re trying our best to continue writing and designing this site the old-fashioned way.

When I read other travel guides, I want to know they’re written by people who’ve experienced those places and felt real things about them. I want to be able to trust that the writer is jotting down their real thoughts, not the words that a data server has decided best improves their ranking on Google. And I want to see slightly imperfect photos, ones which show when somewhere is a bit too crowded to be perfect, where there are clouds overhead... photos which help me and Liz choose whether to go see what they show.

It’s even more important for that to be true when I’m writing about my experiences with anxiety or offering what advice I can to help another anxious traveller plan their next trip. You might not agree with my advice, you might not end up loving the destinations I think would be good for a first-time anxious traveller to visit as much as I did, but at least you’ll be able to have a bit more trust that I believe what I’m telling you. If the cost of that is that you’ll also have to read some of my tragic attempts at humour that an AI might know better than to write, I hope it’s worth it.

I’m not a total AI doomer. There are fields other than this one, particularly in medicine, in which properly regulated AI will most likely make a much more positive difference to all our lives.

But on a website like this, using AI would suck the joy out of what we’re trying to do. It would contribute to the mass churn of AI-generated content for content’s sake that makes it so much harder for other writers’ unique and original guides to be seen. And we’d be needlessly contributing in a small way to the damage that AI data centres are causing to the environment.

That’s why all of our blog posts and travel guides are researched, written, and edited by us, with no AI input. Everything you read on this website reflects our lived experiences, and we hope that will make our guides more helpful to you in planning your travels.

I’m stuck trying to think of a lighter way to finish this post because, as it turns out, it’s not that interesting to write about AI.

It’s still more fun than reading a website written by it, though.