Belghast, who runs Blaugust every year, wrote today about his complicated feelings regarding some participating blogs that were using LLMs — large language models, what most people these days call “AI” — to generate their blog posts.
Condemnation was swift. Bel’s blog, Mastodon and BlueSky were filled with bloggers carrying torches and pitchforks, yelling for the villain to be dragged into the street and publicly shamed.
I also asked for the blog, mostly because I wanted to see if it was any good. My experiments with AI writing anything have been indifferent, at best. But, Bel stayed silent, and I suppose I could find out for myself by going through all the participating blogs and looking for the tell-tale signs of AI-generated text. Perfect spelling, perfect grammar, perfectly organized thoughts and flow. Better than I could ever write.
Have I used AI in Blaugust?
You betcha. Two years ago, every single day was AI generated, AI illustrated, and I had the AI generate the title and excerpts, too. Whoever is using AI now, I used it more. I was open about it. The whole point was to see how AI would handle a specific concept — games designed around the date. It was fun, I don’t regret it. I haven’t done it since, in Blaugust, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it in the future, if I could think of an angle that might work.
Back then, AI was booming; now, there’s a backlash.
The case for AI
I was thinking through what the purpose of writing is. Recording and distributing information, sure. If I want to know a fact or how to do anything, I really don’t care if a human pressed the keys or an LLM did, as long as the information is accurate (which is, admittedly, a challenge for AI). It’s at least guaranteed to be readable.
The AI almost certainly would have gotten these facts from something a human wrote at some point, and that human may have been wrong, or sarcastic, or intentionally messing with the reader; the AI can’t know that. That gets back to the accuracy, but also to what some feel is a form of plagiarism. If I write a game guide, and that is built into an LLM, and now if anyone searches for information the LLM gets it and my game guide is never seen again, I guess I’ll feel pretty bad. Especially if I make corrections while the LLM gives the old, incorrect, information.
Still, for purely informational work, AI is fine.
Busy work
There is rote writing. The classic case is writing newspaper articles about sports scores. People don’t like looking at tables of names and numbers, unless they play EVE Online, anyway. But the facts of a game, plus a few interesting details about it, can be fed into an AI, and it will write a nice article. The reporter can spend their time on more interesting work, and readers will get information more easily read.
Blogging
I’m just going to skip over creative writing, because I feel AI doesn’t really have a place in writing books for sale. I will mention that there have been for years text generators that will produce works in the style of any given author, that long predated ChatGPT. I haven’t tried any of them, because I don’t care to read what they output. The works would be, at best, a parody.
Call me Ishmael. Or don’t—call me anything you damn well please. I was drifting through the smog-choked streets of Manhattan, my brain buzzing like a hive of angry bees. It was one of those days when the city seemed like a sprawling madhouse, and I felt a desperate urge to escape the concrete jungle and its legions of lunatics.
Moby Dick (in the style of Hunter S. Thompson)
Okay, I take it back. Having ChatGPT write out the first chapter of Moby Dick in the style of Hunter S. Thompson was pretty fun, actually.
Anyway.
I don’t blog to inform anyone of anything. If anyone wants to find out anything, this blog is the last place they’d go. I don’t play games well, and when I do, I mostly mess up. The games I do play have been well-documented everywhere else. I can’t even get my family or friends to read the blog, and my most popular posts have been about cheating at Wordle and stuff like that. So: not informing anyone. Don’t need AI for that.
Rote writing — busy work? Nah, there’s no mandate for me to write anything. Nobody is looking for this blog for scores or anything. My most read work was when I was writing about the adventures of my old EverQuest guild, Crimson Eternity, and that’s because people were interested in what our guild was doing. But, that’s long in the past.
No. I write because I am sending messages to my blog’s number one reader — me. Future me, actually. I read the old posts and remember who I was when I wrote that. Heck, most of the times I don’t remember the event I was writing about, or it reminds me of some game I played that I really liked, or that time I worked for Massively. So most of the time, when I blog, I’m blogging for me.
I don’t need AI for that.
This is my blog. If I want to use AI to send future-me a message, I will. If some other blogger wants to send messages to their future self using AI, more power to them. If they say, pay me money because I totally wrote this perfect piece of prose using my own two brain cells, cool. If someone wants to pay them for that, yay, they both win.
AI-using blogger, you won’t read this. But just know, I’m rooting for you. This year you use AI, maybe next year you’re confident enough to use your own words, maybe the year after that, building on this foundation, you’re earning money with your own thoughts and ideas.
Or maybe you don’t. It is your life. I’m not going to tell you how to live it. As long as you don’t hurt anyone, do what you want.
I love this post – and I think you’ve worded things pretty close to my own thoughts when it comes to AI and blog posts. Now, I do have a *very* different take on AI in the art world, but that is a moral fight inside my head that no one besides me really has to deal with. I’m also in the “I don’t care if there are paid ads on the site” frame of mind, having accepted many of those types of posts over the years. To be honest, I don’t really care what everyone else is doing on their blogs, or how they do it. If I enjoy the writing, I’ll read it. If not, I won’t. I like the ‘human’ touches to writing that AI can’t come close to, yet. I really wish people would pay greater heed to their own actions / reactions and care less about what everyone else is up to. At the end of the day, I’m not OK with AI art, so I don’t use it, and I don’t promote it. The fact that someone else is OK with it doesn’t change my own stance, and it’s not like I suddenly shame them for using it. It’s just not for me, for my reasons.
OK enough rambling.
Great post!
I follow a few authors and artists on Mastodon and BlueSky, and I can’t think of any of them that consider how LLMs are using their works any sort of a good thing. Those big name writers and artists aren’t going to be personally affected, but… I can see the work the AI game news blogger is pretty much the same sort of stuff I was doing day-to-day at Massively. The bread and butter rewriting of press releases, not the features and the fun stuff. If there were a job someone was doing that was just that, that job is gone now.
I think AI is fine for personal blogging, absolutely. But I don’t think it is a total good in the world. Sadly, it exists and is not going away.
I can appreciate a good thought experiment or technology experiment and messing around with AI at this stage of the game can be both. What I appreciate even more is community and I don’t want community with no stinking AI model. I want real people with real foibles and real opinions. I think we can have both on the Indy Web if we have honesty to go with it.
That was the controversy with that AI ad where a dad was telling AI to write a letter from his daughter to a sports star she liked. Nobody would want to read that letter. AI has no place with real human emotions. I don’t really want to read AI stuff unless it’s unique in some way.
BUT — those people who feel they really cannot write, maybe they have a disability that makes that hard — AI can be their voice. AI isn’t out there doing stuff on its own; for now, at least, there’s always a human starting things off with a creative decision.
“People don’t like looking at tables of names and numbers, unless they play EVE Online, ”
This made me LOL, so thanks for that!!
Also if you are a “bad” gamer then I don’t want to know what I am!!!!
Oh, I absolutely suck. You, though — I’ve seen you play Snowtrucker or whatever game that was. I gave up on that, you powered through and found the heart of the game. You have my total respect.
I like the way you put things, Tipa. Less about the AI, more about the context it is used in.
For #Blaugust, I think posts should be written by a human. I’m not concerned about AI being used to ‘improve’ human-written posts e.g.: it doesn’t bother me if someone uses AI to ‘review’ their work for tone or grammar, or if they create a couple of images to intersperse in the text.
But I’m not raising my pitchfork above my head and looking for blood. Especially if the blog is clear about the AI source of its content.
I don’t think we’re too different here. When I read a blog, I want to know about the writer. I don’t want some glossy text over glossy facts. I want to make a connection with the person at the keyboard. I’m totally fascinated by that person.
I think AI has a place, there. I dunno. I have tried to teach AI my writing style — it can’t learn it. Everything it writes seems like it was beamed in from out of space with no connection to me. So I don’t use it more than sparingly in my own writing; more as a source of ideas — I’ve read many people who say the same thing.
AI usually has bad ideas, but they often make me think of better ideas, and so it has a place.
I do think back to that Blaugust where I had AI write the blog posts. Those weren’t fire and forget; it would come up with dozens of ideas for each day, I’d pick the ones I liked, and then would shepherd it into providing details and depth. At the end, I felt like what ChatGPT produced sounded like something I would come up with. I believe that using AI as a collaborator, as a way to focus and refine a writer’s own thoughts, is valuable and I don’t mind seeing that at all.
Bel had a very very busy day and another one shaping up that way. I was on an incident response call until after 7 pm last night and was back on one at 5:45 am so yeah I was real slow responding to anything. I eventually responded on Bsky with a link to the blog in that spurred this, which also called out on the About page that it was entirely AI-generated.
Mostly I was trying to get a discussion going because I have complicated thoughts. It seems I succeeded at that at least.
Yes, you have đŸ™‚ I’ve been loving the conversations here and on other people’s blogs!
I one hundred per cent agree with everything you said. Getting mad at AI is like getting mad at a hammer because you hit your finger. It’s a tool. If you can use it to make something useful or entertaining or fun then fine. Mostly, if you’re going to use it for that, you’ll be doing a lot of the work anyway. The whole thing reminds me of the 198os and the “No Synths” labels some bands stuck on their albums.
The issues over attribution are another matter but I suspect that horse hasn’t just bolted, it’s beyond the horizon and still going. The courts are going to have to sort that one out, which is going to take years, if they ever can.
As for who’s using AI in Blaugust, I think the name of one blog kind of gives it away: href=”https://mmorpgai.wordpress.com/”>AI MMORPG News .
Bleh. Cut & Paste error! An AI woudn’t have made that mistake!
By “some bands” you must mean Queen, Night At The Opera era. đŸ™‚
Synths? Remember when drum machines were the devil?
When I was a kid, I was in love with a guitar god — Mike Oldfield.
He did three albums (Tubular Bells, Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn), pronounced himself out of ideas, and started using a Fairlight synth for everything from then on. Fans were livid. I thought it sounded okay. He eventually went back to the guitar sound and when I saw him on the Five Miles Out tour, he was on guitar the whole time.
I was happy. No synths.
I think the difference lies in why people read a blog post, or a blog, or follow a person (or maybe let’s say, an account).
If I am looking for (hopefully correct) information, I don’t mind reading AI-generated or -fluffed up stuff. I’m here for the information, but I’m also the weird person who would accept a whole blog post without sentences and just bullet points.
But for blogs (and 90% of my social follows, Twitter in the past, fediverse now) I’m mostly about the people. If I like your style and content, I will read it. Maybe not 100%, but at least at all. If something in your style is off or I don’t like it, then sorry, no matter how good the info might be, I’ll probably never come back. (Or actually, I might, years later, and then something is different and I do follow you). So in that case, using AI-generated stuff is a bit of a deal breaker.
That is also an opinion, not a recommendation, but it certainly influences what I read for enjoyment.
If someone’s blogging style, whether AI assisted or no, is not to your taste, you SHOULDN’T waste your time there!
If I loved a blog post, and someone said, “that was AI written, btw”, I wouldn’t turn around and start hating it, but I would definitely feel differently about going to that blog for more information in the future.
Significantly, I have not read more articles from the AI blog.
I’ve had a draft post about generative AI ongoing for like a year now. It’s just too complicated of a topic, legally and ethically, to ever get done. But generally speaking I’m also in the “AI is just a new tool for the toolbox” camp. I’d evaluate an AI-generated blog by the merit of its content just like any other blog.
I completely agree. AI is just a new tool, and a lot of the applications people are complaining about seem at worst gray areas to me. That said, of course don’t use it for something illegal like clear copyright infringement.
However, whether an AI produces anything that is worth the time it takes to read is another matter, and I completely agree that it tends to depend on the application. AI is fine for a Google summary (that you have to take with a grain of salt). However, your playful posts excepted, I find it hard to believe that a blog post or any commentary written by AI is going to be worth my time (certainly not if my experience with LLMs is any guide).