Blaugust: Live long enough to become the villain

I am a victim in the AI wars. Or the aggressor. I haven’t quite decided which.

I’m going to admit, right up front, that I am an avid and enthusiastic user of what we’ve come to call “AI”, the billion-parameter knowledge sets that complete prompts in ways that seem almost human. Almost. We’ll get to that.

Back in 2022, just before ChatGPT was released to the world, where LLMs could only generate maybe a sentence or three at a time and would lose their memory after just a couple of paragraphs, I used AI to generate descriptions and art for 31 games, all based off the day number. The game rules didn’t make any sense. The art was terrible. I had fun with it, but there was no way that the tech of four years ago would ever be in danger of replacing any written or painted work.

A lot has changed since then! Now the US economy is dependent on using AI as much as possible, regardless of the costs. Data centers to support AI are crushing rural communities all over the nation; they are using up all the power to run the CPUs and all the water to cool them. They want to litter outer space with these, too. The biggest corporations in the country are playing hot potato with the billions of dollars in investments that they make in each other’s companies in order to pretend someone is making money. It’s all going to come crashing down. AI is ruining the country, the climate and the world and the only real question is whether or not the plates will come crashing down before the country does. The rich people will stay rich, of course; don’t worry about them. It will be the people with retirement plans and the people who have little savings at all that will pay the price.

So don’t tell me that I don’t understand the downsides of AI. I won’t even mention all the authors and artists that have had their life’s works stolen to train these models, or the overseas workers making pennies to categorize the images and other works so that they can be ingested by the models.

Okay, so I did mention it. I have no control over all that, though. Nothing I do or don’t do will affect any of this in the slightest. In fact, like millions of other knowledge workers, I am required to use LLMs at work and part of my compensation is based on using it a lot. I’d rather not, to be honest.

Last week, we were in PI planning, and management was telling us how programmers were learning all sorts of new skills by using AI to code for them, and then they would learn from the generated code. I offered that that wasn’t how this worked at all. Since they are giving us more work to do, there is no time to learn. There’s only time to write prompts, confirm the code matches the spec, and move on to the next. People are writing programs in programming languages that they don’t even understand. And at the end of the day, they still don’t understand them.

But hey, even knowing all this, I like having AI help write programs for myself, and generate cool images. If OpenAI and Anthropic and all them disappeared tomorrow, I’d just write programs entirely by hand and make my own images or steal them from the internet, like before.

So: AI and Blaugust.

It’s weird that the only introduction on the Blaugust sign-up form is a caution on using LLMs during the challenge.

Use of AI as a Blaugust Participant

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.

Posts that are wholly or substantially generated by AI should not be submitted as Blaugust content or counted towards Blaugust awards. This includes supplying an AI system with a prompt, notes or bullet points and asking it to produce, substantially rewrite or expand them into a finished post. Lightly editing an AI-generated article does not make it human-written.

A simple rule of thumb is – AI may assist your creative work, but it should not replace your creative contribution.

I’ve got no problem with this, by the way. Community organizers are free to make the rules for their communities; if people don’t like them, they do not have to participate. I wasn’t thrilled when Wes Fenlon denied me a spot in his gaming blog webring because I use AI-generated images, but it was 100% fine for him to choose with whom he associates, and I could just not use AI-generated images and be golden. We make our choices.

Here’s my finely-grained dividing line: I don’t agree that entirely AI generated posts should be verboten. And this isn’t just because I spent an entire Blaugust doing precisely that. I’ve come around to believing — my own personal choice — that I should not be putting my name on any AI-generated writing. I can’t draw; writing is really my chosen way to present myself and my ideas to the world. One can look at the earliest posts on this very blog to see just how far I have come as a writer, largely via blogging.

But this is my choice.

There are people on my Daily Blogroll who use AI to write some of their posts and own up to it, and there are people there who use AI to write some of their posts and do not. But I believe that in both cases, people are not trying to generate slop content for clicks and lols, but are trying to express thoughts and ideas they find hard to express in any other way.

If people are generating bad content, nobody will read it. People will choose not to read it, perhaps because it is AI generated, perhaps because it just isn’t interesting. One thing I have noticed about both AI-generated writing and images. AI cannot be creative. It just can’t. It can only reshuffle something that someone else has already created.

And so, this is my argument: Blaugust should be an expression of your creativity. It should be personal. Every one of these thirty-one posts should, explicitly or implicitly, tell me something about you. If a post says nothing about you and your personal experience, then I don’t care if the post was AI generated or not; it will be boring and I will not read it. If your post feels like you’re making a connection to the reader, showing us something new, bringing us along on something you have discovered — well, I’m there for it. Right next to you. I won’t ask how much was AI generated because I’ll know that whatever tools you used, they worked because now I know you a little better.