Blaugust 2026 has added some rules regarding use of artificial intelligence for content included in the festival. Magi over at Indiecator had an excellent overview of his thinking on the topic, which inspired me to do a bit of my own soul searching.
Blaugust 2026 AI rules
The full 2026 rules and festival details can be found on Krikket’s post here. But the crux of the AI specific rules boils down to two sentences:
Blaugust celebrates human creativity, personal expression and the shared experience of making and publishing something of your own. Participants are welcome to use AI tools for assistance, but the substantive creative contribution to a Blaugust post must come from the participant.
So AI can be used for things that supplement the blogs content, but shouldn’t be the core of the content itself. I can use an AI generated image if I like, or use AI to check the grammar of my post: but the post itself should come from me. This makes sense to me, and also matches how I use AI today.
The rough edges
It is easy to find edge cases that challenge basic assumptions. As one blogger mentioned, we now have rules around AI use but no rules around content itself. What prevents a blogger from posting one word a day for 31 days? Nothing, really: we also don’t police blogs for plagiarism which is arguably worse than AI content. Blaugust relies heavily on the honour system, but now we have a rule set specific to one technology that some might not agree with.
And then there is the matter of people for whom the AI rules themselves aren’t strict enough. Some would prefer a zero-tolerance rule for AI content: that would probably kick me out of the Blaugust club since I use AI regularly to generate header images for my posts. I wouldn’t be happy with that.
My personal thoughts
In general, I try not to take a strident “my way or the highway” approach to things. I do still perceive a use for AI as much as I dislike current generative large language model AI as a concept. I don’t think it should be a $5 trillion industry consuming 50% of our technology sector investment. The scraping of public text and images to feed the AI models is also extremely disturbing.
But if AI can be helpful for things like blog production. I know, for example, that blog posts with an image are several times more likely to attract someone’s attention than one without an image. I lack time and artistic skill to create my own images, but I can craft a prompt and get a suitable illustration in seconds. This is hard to ignore, and I will continue to avail myself of the AI services that provide image generation from time to time.
I know, continuing my example, that Magi has stated that he won’t visit blogs that use AI generated imagery. I try to be pretty up-front about my use of AI and will continue to be so, which means I may lose people like Magi who have strongly held opinions from my audience. This saddens me.
I could point out that my use of the occasional AI generated image comes from a guy who also spends $10 or so a month on webcomic ‘subscriptions” via PayPal, supporting honest to goodness artists. If I had a huge library of images I could subscribe to somewhere and use that instead of AI art I’d probably do that: instead the costs for commercial artwork are prohibitively expensive for someone like myself running a zero-income blog.
I think that the rules the Blaugust mentor community agreed to around AI are an excellent compromise. A basic guideline with some working examples of acceptable use of AI is exactly what was needed and it is what was created. Greater strictness or detail would likely stand to simply exclude people for having a different opinion, which quickly becomes counter-productive.
Conclusion
Blogs are generally speaking personal expressions of an individual human. They should be reflections of that person’s thoughts with limited reliance on external automated content generators. I hope that Magi and folks like him will continue to visit my blog despite my use of AI to create header images, but I can’t control their thinking on the matter.
And for now we are in agreement that the Blaugust 2026 AI rules are good enough: Blogs that are clearly entirely AI generated are excluded from the festival, and some use of AI is still permitted. Like all good diplomatic solutions, everyone involved is left a little bit unsatisfied.
I think there is nuance to the whole debate about AI, but the world’s biggest forum – the internet – is ironically the place you might be least likely to find it. In my experience the majority of people are either okay with it or against it entirely on two extremes of the spectrum.
I think in it’s current form it is bad and can be unethical, and I steer away from it. But I also know the technology isn’t going away. It is here and here to stay, so finding a good use for it and finding a way to make it more ethical is important. I think if everyone stopped assuming the people with opposite opinions were just ignorant idiots and actually tried to understand each other, we could probably come to some consensus on it more easily. But the fact most AI is operated by huge soulless corporations and questionable billionaire personalities makes it very easy for the folks against AI to be positioned as unsung heroes sticking it to the man, which in fairness they are. Wherever we are with AI currently, it’s not a place where either side is willing to debate nuance openly and in good faith.