by Doc – Owner, Founder, Has Gotta Admit It’s Kinda Funny That The Website Made Around “Amiibo AI” Is Now Disavowing Real, Actual AI
So for a while now, at least a year and maybe two, I have included at the top of every page on the Amiibo Doctor website a mention that this website is never AI generated. Yes, we are the home of all things amiibo, and powered by Amazon Affiliates, but it is just as important for you to know that the content on this is my own production and comes from my own brain. Kurzgesagt did a video the other day talking about how the death of the internet is impending because people will no longer know who or what to trust, and that has motivated me to produce this post. Basically, I want to explain my reasoning as to why I do not use AI content on this blog.
Disclaimer: Some of my writing is transcribed from my oral speech, as is this very post. Due to a physical injury it is far easier for me to speak my writing instead of typing all of it out by hand, and I paste the transcription into AI to have it output as HTML code that I can plug into WordPress to create a resulting post. The end result is effectively a proofread version of what I’ve written without changing the actual words – AI just fixes capitalization, punctuation, etc. that one would expect from a cell phone transcription software. So if you consider that to be AI generated… fine, I guess it’s AI generated. But I don’t think that counts.
Here’s why I don’t use AI content.
When I first started this website for amiibo training almost 8 years ago now, I did it because there were precious few reliable sources of amiibo training information on the internet. There was effectively no commentary outside of closed off Discord servers regarding the amiibo training community (the amiibo subreddit is irrelevant, as amiibo training discussion is inexplicably banned, and Reddit sucks anyway), and so I was afraid that amiibo training as a hobby would die for lack of exposure. Amiibo Doctor was primarily my way of enshrining into the internet as much information as I could enshrine about the amiibo training hobby that I loved so much. The same was true for the Amiibo Doctor YouTube channel, which is much more focused on amiibo training than this website has now become.
Basically, this website was supposed to be a human source for niche information that not only promoted what it talked about but was also an alternative to the generic “guide” websites that have no personality and serve only to rack up revenue for their owners. It’s supposed to be fun to read Amiibo Doctor instead of boring like those other guys.
Fast forward a few years. Smash Ultimate has released, all of the amiibo for that game have come and gone and have training guides and are well understood by the community, and now where’s amiibo training? There’s not much more to be discussed about amiibo training that would appeal to the broader world. I feel strongly we are at the end of the line for interesting Smash Ultimate amiibo content, at least content that would appeal to people not currently into amiibo, because everything that could capture the attention of the broader world has already been tried and saturated.
However, there is still a lack of what I call “personality content” on the internet, especially now that blogs are even more economically unviable than they have ever been historically. This website pulls in hundreds of thousands of hits a year, but it barely brings in enough revenue to pay for the $100 a year subscription to WordPress that I pay for. I’m not complaining one bit (in real life I make decent money) but it seems to me that these economic circumstances predate even the rise of AI taking over the world of internet content. Blogs take money, and sustaining a blog requires revenue. To make revenue, you have to show ads, and to show ads you have to get traffic. The end result are websites who exist solely to produce traffic and revenue, instead of putting one’s personality out there for others to interact with. That’s a shame.
Most gaming websites these days are significantly more concerned with making ends meet than they are with displaying personality. That’s understandable, I don’t blame them. They have mouths that they need to feed. But this has been severely expedited with the release of LLM AI a few years back, which has resulted in gaming websites practically automating their content production and running everything through an AI to output directly onto their website. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t proofread. They don’t check with people who do know what they’re talking about. They just have ChatGPT write up a web post and push it out there as God’s honest truth. Then other people, not aware of the falsity of the information, rely on those posts and take them at face value, destroying the knowledge base for that game, and the reliability of the internet as a whole. All it takes is for one person to put out a few false facts and that’ll get circulated until kingdom come.
I think that’s stupid.
I’m not “anti-AI”. I use AI extensively for work and it’s made me quite successful compared to my peers. But there is no amount of prompting and context that can replace the intelligence and work of a gamer researching his meta as passionately as gamers do.
So while this website sometimes strays from amiibo training and veers off into writing about other games that I find enjoyable, such as Pokémon Scarlet, Megabonk, TCG Card Shop Simulator and other random nonsense that I like to write about, the original purpose is still the same: Amiibo Doctor is a personality website, written by humans, to be shared with humans, for the enjoyment of humans. Sometimes my opinions will be wrong – there is always a lot of argument over the amiibo tier list, for example (though that is decided by a council of amiibo trainers, not me). Sometimes my opinions and strategies will be quite unique. But rest assured that they are all mine (or in the case of the amiibo training guides, those of the author) and will continue to be mine for as long as this website is up. I will gladly pay for this platform for as long as I can just to make sure there is a human voice on the internet.
I encourage you to do the same. Don’t engage with AI generated content. Don’t watch AI slop. If you have unique opinions or strategies on a game, write about it somewhere. Heck, write about it here! If it gets fed into an AI without consent then it gets fed into an AI. But at the end of the day, at least you used your voice when so many other people opted out for the sake of convenience.
Amiibo Doctor 