My GenAI Experiment:
Building a Website with Authentic Content and AI Support
The “GenAI” experiment is underway and has pleasantly surprised me. My new website is live and will now be the focal point of my contributions. On LinkedIn—and likely in the future on X—only links will be published. What was particularly important to me when creating the site was to incorporate AI that is useful for my purposes. And it worked wonderfully.
The content of my articles is exclusively written without AI. That is the decisive factor for me, where I focus my efforts. Everything else is framework, representing the tedious grunt work. I’ll briefly explain what this means in detail.
First, about the site itself. Without using a ready-made component library, I would have to write all the stylings myself. While that’s possible, it’s not the focus of my content. This is where the collaboration with AI began. Both for styling with SCSS and for Astro elements like paging, DeepLink supported me. I had to refine my requests step by step, though often the first attempt yielded a truly usable result. Very little required manual correction on my part.
DeepSeek also assisted me with the logos for my site and its sections. Based on my explanation of what to expect in each section and the description of the scene composition, I received suitable logos. However, DeepSeek did not generate the images itself but provided prompts for Gemini. From there, I obtained the image material. Admittedly, I had to make many attempts in some cases before I was satisfied.
Using the content of my articles, the color scheme of my site, and a description of the style, I also received images for each of my texts in the same way. This ensures that all images across the site follow a very similar style.
Similarly, based on my texts, I had DeepSeek create excerpts for the article lists and short summaries for the article introductions. Admittedly, inspired by its results, I now also use em dashes because they simply look neater, as well as proper quotation marks. There are already rumors on the internet that these are signs of AI-generated text. 🙈 But that’s definitely not the case with my articles. 😎 Oh yes, I also let DeepSeek generate the tags.
Since it’s easier, I often write my texts in German and then translate them automatically. Here, a mix of tools is used, as the results are not always equally good.
What do I take away from this experiment? Authentic content, whether textual or technical (code), is not for GenAI. It either becomes generic or doesn’t work at all; at best, it might be mediocre. But if you know exactly what to expect or already provide the content yourself, you can make life easier with the supporting elements. This is how I’ve long viewed AI, which is why the collaboration has been a success for me.
My conclusion: Stay true to individuality while keeping the focus on what truly matters.
Of course, I am completely transparent about the site’s concept, as the interplay between my content and AI is the very purpose of the site. Hence, the dedicated page: “Credits: How This Site Was Made”.