It’s Hard To Resist When Artificial Intelligence Offers to Write Your Blog Post

I came close to caving in. But I’m not ready to do it yet…

Today, an old marketing tagline popped into my head. It was from the 1960s, an era when I was watching plenty of Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear on TV, and Kellogg’s Cereal was the superstar advertiser of all those cartoon shows. Each ad for their sugar-sweetened apple-flavored crunchy cereal ended with “Apple Jacks will not be sold to bullies.”

I thought that line, nostalgia for the 60s, and commentary for the current day would make a nice amalgamation for a 500-word blog post. It should have been easy. But then I checked my files and saw that in the past year, I have written two posts about bullies, beginning with a holy terror from my high school days and concluding with the unholy Donald Trump. I didn’t see how I could drink from that well a third time.

But we are in 2025, not 1965, so I decided to see what AI would say. I clicked ChatGPT’s tab on my toolbar and gave the program the following instructions:

Create a blog post relevant to today, recalling the old tag line of Apple Jacks cereal that “Apple Jacks will not be sold to bullies.”

In less time than it took for me to type the prompt, the chatbot produced a well-executed, near publishable version of what it thought I wanted to say on the subject.

It wasn’t perfect; for one thing, it was loaded with em-dashes, the trademark of AI. And the first version was too preachy. But with a few rounds of suggestions and responses, I had a piece that met my standards to deliver to the Substack world.

I could have justified the post as the best of both worlds, a plug-in hybrid, combining my gas with the website’s electricity. But unlike Oscar Wilde, I can (sometimes) resist temptation.

So I’m not using the Frankensteinish creation. This is my post, all my own words, that you are reading. Every mistake, cliché, and bad simile is mine and mine alone.

Maybe someday I’ll discover something new I want to say about bullies. Until then, just keep eating your Apple Jacks. A bowl a day might keep Presidents and AI away.