Blaugust 2026 and AI

Disclaimer: This post reflects my own opinions as an individual, blogger and Blaugust participant. It does not represent an official Blaugust statement or the stance of the whole team. If you have any criticism about these views or any thoughts on the matter, feel free to discuss them here. Please, don't harass people over any of this.

If you’ve read my blog before, you’ll probably know that I’m not exactly enthusiastic about generative AI. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m an avid opponent of the technology, and I’ve got something of a mega essay coming out eventually that has been in the works for most of this year, actually, so we’re not discussing why I think AI is bad in this post.

Either way, this post is about Blaugust and the somewhat controversial statement regarding the use of AI in this year’s event that has sadly drawn the ire of some people who decided to harass people over this policy. I want to address the situation to hopefully direct the ire to me instead, since other people have too few spoons for this kind of situation. I also am writing this since I don’t condone the harassment and bullying that they’re facing over this. So, if the people in question wanna voice their concerns or keep up this campaign, feel free to do it here instead of the other places.

With that context out of the way, I also would like to mention that I still *love* using these terrible edits and paint drawings of my OC/character/persona in these posts. Just know that they’re old, but they make me happy.

Blaugust is at its best when it celebrates people creating something of their own, whether that’s thoughtful essays, short stories, game, book or movie reviews, travel journals, artwork or simply the personal posts that get shared within the community. It’s what drew me into the community in the first place.

When I first participated in the event (right after I started this blog) back in 2019, my writing wasn’t particularly good. For the longest time, I thought “alas” just was a fancy way of saying “also” or “furthermore”, which makes some articles sort of confusing. The paragraphs were enormous, my English was far from polished (it’s my third language after all), and I somehow managed to stab my own hand badly enough that I had to write all 31 posts I published during Blaugust one-handedly. Looking back, I cringe a little at many of those posts… but I also treasure them.

They’re imperfect, often quite awkward, and unmistakenly mine. My views have changed over the years and my style has gotten better, I think, and so it shows growth and a journey. These old posts show how much I’ve grown both as a writer and as a person, which is something that AI-generated articles can never replicate.

Last year, we had folks participate with fully AI-generated slop that most of the community didn’t want in the event or community. Blaugust is about humanity, creativity, and connection, and whatever those posts were manufacturing was so void of said creativity, humanity and connection that we knew that we needed to have some kind of guidelines in place in this year to prevent those from even making it to the starting line. Personally, I’m very against AI-generated anything. It doesn’t have a stake in the event whatsoever and is a detriment to humankind.

That said, why doesn’t the policy simply ban every possible use of AI?

The simple answer would be that it’s impossible to do so. Writing a policy like that and enforcing a policy like that are two very different things.

Over the past couple years, AI has quietly and not so quietly become embedded in the very software and hardware that many of us use every day. Operating systems (i.e. Windows), search engines, language learning apps (i.e. Duolingo), blogging platforms, grammar checkers, image editing software (like Photoshop), dating apps (rip Bumble, you used to be a good one), and even accessibility tools increasingly include AI-powered features.
Sometimes those features are optional, yes, but a lot of the time, they’re turned on by default, and you have to either manually disable them or look for an alternative. Heck, I learned recently that there is some AI component you have to opt out of in Firefox. Why opt-out rather than opt-in? The lack of transparency is frankly jarring. Most folks won’t even realise that they’re using these features because of how innocuous it all is.

If we were to ban every possible use-case of it, where would we have to draw the line?

Is correcting spelling mistakes acceptable? What about generating a title? What about suggestion tags? Are accessibility features that many disabled people in the community use prohibited? Can you use Google’s summary? What about people on Microslop’s Windows operating system? What about people who take photos with their phone camera, which oftentimes has an AI-enhancing feature built-in that can’t be turned off?

Different people would draw the line in very different places, and while this doesn’t mean that every use is equally appropriate, I personally still believe that there is an enormous difference between asking software to help catch a typo and asking it to write your blog post for you. Drafting that line in a way that’s both fair and enforceable is much harder, though, than it sounds. That is just the practical reality of running a volunteer community event like Blaugust.

Last year, nearly 200 people signed up for Blaugust, of which around 170-ish folks actually submitted any blog posts. Simply tracking everyone’s post counts took hours of volunteer work for multiple people working together, including me. Reviewing every single article, every image, and every sentence to determine whether AI played a role is simply not realistic on that scope, especially given that there may be many more people signing up this year. Furthermore, current AI detection tools are far from perfect and can’t be entirely trusted to make those kinds of judgements with confidence, either. Any type of writing that is somewhat eloquent can get detected as AI-generated writing.

On a side note, I hate that an expression I used so much in the past (“It’s not X, it’s Y!”) is something that has been co-opted by LLMs. Contrasts are easy to establish and make the writing look kinda smart, you know? How else am I supposed to flex my writing skills? Do I actually have to gid gud at blogging now? Jeez.

Either way, because of the sheer amount of work that would entail and the fact that all of this is not enforceable, the current policy was born. It’s not perfect by any means… but it does establish some ground rules that focus on transparency, creativity and human authorship – the very things that make Blaugust Blaugust.

First, meaningful AI use should be disclosed transparently. Second, the creative work needs to still belong to the participant.

Roger from CMP obviously wrote more in that statement, but I feel like those two principles are the most important aspects of it. They won’t satisfy everyone, of course, and they aren’t my personal ideal solution either… but I believe that they are a reasonable enough starting point for a community event that never needed rules of any kind and has always operated on trust and good faith rather than strict policing. More than anything, the only (unwritten) rule has been not to be a dick, which is a rule that some people have broken, honestly. Beyond that, the policy isn’t set in stone either. If it proves inadequate, we can revisit it after the event and take any constructive criticism and feedback to heart for the next events to come. Again, that’s much more feasible and much fairer than rewriting rules days before the event begins.

What has disappointed me far more than disagreements about the policy has been seeing volunteers for this community-led event become targets for personal attacks. It’s completely fair to disagree with the guidelines and it would be entirely reasonable and very much in the spirit of the event to write a blog post about why you think that they’re too strict or too lenient. It’s fair to decide that this year’s policy doesn’t align with your own principles and that you want to instead sit the event out. Perfectly okay thing to do.

What’s not fair is directing anger toward volunteers who spend countless hours organizing an event like this in their free time on top of having real life matters to attend to, including work, family, health issues, and more. I hate the fact that some of these folks would rather want to have no event at all for the whole community than this event. These volunteers (including me) tried to solve a difficult problem and while you can disagree with the result, that doesn’t mean that you should insult folks, let alone indirectly compare them to fascists. Yep.

I hate that this has to be said but don’t harass folks. Don’t be a dick. It’s the one long-standing rule that has remained in place for over a decade now, and nobody ever had the need to have it spelt out to them… except now, apparently:
Don’t be a dick.

Again, personally, I don’t like generative AI. It’s unethical. It also removes much of what makes creative work personally meaningful. It also is getting used for heinous things. So, personally, whenever I spot people using generative AI, especially to generate images, I just don’t read those people’s articles anymore. I don’t support that, which is just my personal boycott. I don’t expect everyone to do as I say but generally speaking leaving angry comments on people’s posts is not okay…

Instead, if you don’t like the policy, share your thoughts and write a blog post about it. If you have a platform, then use it to do the thing that this event is about… Blogging. As in, share your thoughts. Why is it bad? What should be different in your opinion? Why do you feel this way? et cetera

In the end, whether you agree or disagree with the policy, it’s not final. We’ll make changes to it in the next year. For the time being, it’s a good starting point and nuanced enough to allow us to figure things out during the event. The fact that there was no policy in place last year was mostly due to nobody expecting someone at Master Chef to show up with a pizza from Pizza Hut or whatever. You didn’t write it so you can’t get an award. Duh. This, in turn, has caused issues because there was no policy. I doubt we even needed this one as most sign-ups so far seem to be entirely human-authored, but it’s good to have a safety net.

I hope that we can assume positive intent where possible, approach one another with generosity and kindness, and that we all remember that there are real people behind every blog and username. Constructive criticism makes Blaugust better. Harassment doesn’t.

TLDR: Don’t be a dick.

This post was originally published on Indiecator.

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