Super duper closeup of an elephant giving us all the stinkeye has been downloaded, royalty-free from Pixabay (vinayakharshvardhan). Even as I’m sitting down now to type this, I think it might be a Very Bad Idea indeed. Let’s see where we end up, shall we? There’s been a lot of folks talking about the “policy” that was appeared at the end of this year’s announcement post, but I’ve noticed that not everyone is getting the chronology right. So that’s where I’m going to start. In 2024, we had two bloggers on the participants list who disclosed that their blogs were fully AI generated. At that time, it hadn’t occured to Belghast that any kind of guidance on the topic was required. I know this, because he mentioned it in his wrap up post that year, and it came up in our mentor group chat after the end of that year’s event. A screencap from Blaugust 2024 in Review from Tales of the Aggronaut. In 2025, I offered to take point on the event while Belghast was dealing with the recent sudden passing of his wife. Remembering how he felt about fully AI generated content the prior year, and his intent to put a policy in place, I opted for the following short disclaimer. A screenshot from my own post Blaugust 2025 is Coming! I believe I ran it by the other mentors before posting, but I cannot swear to that. It sounds like something I would have done. Either way, I will take full personal responsibility for last year’s “policy”. At the time, I do not recall anyone participating, or in fact, anyone not participating, having any issue with the above statement. In the lead up to this year’s event, which I had not planned to even participate in, never mind facilitate, there was some discussion from at least one long-standing Blaugust participant on the topic of what is or is not in the spirit of the event, in which he made what seemed like a very reasonable request for further clarification from the Blaugust leadership on AI usage. A screenshot from the post AI In Blaugust by UltrViolet on Endgame Viable. And you know what? I largely agree with him. A full blanket AI ban is not only unenforceable, it is absolutely exclusionary in a way I am not comfortable with. WordPress has AI functionality. Canva has AI functionality. Goddamn iPhone photos have AI functionality. How do you prove that someone who used any of those bits of software didn’t use the parts that utilize AI? You don’t, and there are a lot of people out there on the internet who don’t even fully understand how the tools they use work, myself very much included in that category. So right off the bat, there was no “policy” that would be enforceable. We were already scrambling to pull an event together that none of us expected to be working on, while also working through personal grief. There seemed to be a need to expand our thoughts on the topic from last year’s very basic disclaimer, and I will admit, this was not something I was willing to prioritize. I said that if someone else wanted to write something we could all mostly agree with, I’d put it out into the world. But as a group of people who, to the best of my understanding, do not personally care for or knowingly use AI ourselves, any effort was probably going to be woefully inadequate. In fact, another long time Blaugust participant addressed this in a post a few days after the announcement was posted. A screenshot from the post GPT-4o: Letter 11 – You Are Not a Human Resource by Jeromai on Why I Game We had one person who signed up for the event, joined the Discord, and then asked to rescind their signup when I explained that we would not be changing the guideline this close to the event. I received comments on the announcement posts from two people who went from expressing disappointment with our guideline to becoming borderline abusive when I attempted to respond with professionalism. I seriously considered whether or not I was willing to subject myself to being the target of the anti-AI folks ire by continuing to run point on this event in the future. Blaugust 2026 was stitched together by a bunch of people who had just lost their friend, doing our best, and I felt like people hated us – and especially me – for doing so because we weren’t doing it perfectly the way they would have. So. That’s how it happened, with a not insignificant amount of editorializing (it’s my blog, I can do that), and screenshots to back it up. I wanted to only provide screenshots from publicly posted blog entries – there’s been more in Discord and in various blog comments and in private chats that I don’t feel is something I can share here. At least one of the other members of the Mentor team who has been working on administrative Blaugust tasks has posted his personal opinions of the controversy here: Blaugust 2026 and AI. And now I guess there’s nothing left but to post my opinion on the topic, which is what I promised at the outset. My very first visceral reaction to the statement drafted by Roger Edwards of Contains Moderate Peril was “Oh, I hate this.” Now, I didn’t say that. I wanted to see what points other people brought forward. And there were Very Good Points made. That AI “assistance” is part of many frequently used software. That AI is an integral part of many accessibility options that people have for putting content on the web, and also for consuming said content. That we certainly didn’t have the manpower to manually check every blog entry from every participant to “disqualify” anyone who admitted to using AI, and that we didn’t have the skills to necessarily be able to tell if they did if they didn’t disclose. And because this really isn’t a contest, we just weren’t interested in witch hunting people we felt were “cheating”. After the discussion, this felt like a safe middle ground. We want to hear your voice, but beyond that? You blog the way you want to blog. We accept you as you are, and welcome you into our community. In the end, even though I don’t love our guidelines, I think we mostly made the right decision. Maybe it would have been better to just stick to talking about editing, software with AI components, and leave all discussion of images out of it entirely. But even if we did, I’m sure someone somewhere still would have been mad about it. There was not – there is not – an answer to this question that is going to satisfy everyone, so the best we can hope for is to alienate the least number of people on either side of the fence. I am very much aware that this is nothing more than a polite ask. We cannot make anyone not use AI. We cannot force anyone to disclose their use of AI. We cannot mandate anyone use a specific piece of software, or not use it, or anything at all really. Everyone’s blog is their own, and we are just trying to facilitate connection. No matter how carefully we tread, someone is going to be upset. If I am involved in organizing this event next year – and that is absolutely not a certainty – I think I would like to revert to a simpler statement, maybe not quite the original that I threw together in a panic, but something more like the following. At the heart, Blaugust is about self-expression, and it is not the place of the organizers to mandate how you choose to express yourself, or the tools you do or do not use in that pursuit. We want to celebrate human creativity, so if you choose to join this community and participate in the event, that’s what we would like to see on display, but what the exact parameters are that define that are solely at your discretion. We’re just happy you choose to share with the world. I don’t know. Maybe that’s not enough. Maybe it’s still too much. But if my choices are to make this into an event in which every word needs to be rigorously policed to eliminate any scrap of AI that may sneak in, to make this into an event that excludes people for using a workflow that allows them to share their thoughts on their own blog? That’s not an event I want to be a part of, never mind help run. As much as I personally do not like what AI is doing to artists, writers, and creative spaces, I can’t get right with being the arbiter of personal expression either.