AI in Blaugust

8 July, 2026. 1,269 words.

Bhagpuss reminded me that Blaugust has been fairly anti-AI in the past, and here I am running around crowing about all my fancy schmancy new AI tools to help me blog more efficiently to get ready for Blaugust.

Past Controversy

I don’t think I was involved in Blaugust last year at all, either reading or writing, as it was about two months after my cancer diagnosis and brain surgery and I was in no condition to do much of anything but put one foot in front of the other to get through each day.

But I do remember the year before there was some controversy about a blog entered in Blaugust that was entirely AI generated. I think it was some kind of gaming news summary site.

I can only speak for myself, but to me, what they were doing with AI and what I’m doing with AI are two entirely different things.

Mediocre AI Writing

Having AI write the blog for you is exactly the kind of thing that AI is not very good at. Or, let me rephrase that: It is actually good at it, but it’s good at producing mediocre, forgettable writing.

Sometimes that’s all you need. If your goal is to blast out something to a billion people in the hope that a thousand of them click through to your web site, AI writing is a fantastic choice.

If your goal is to create yet another news aggregation site, one that is no different from the millions of other such sites out there, in the hope that maybe a handful of people accidentally click on yours instead of the others so you can generate a few cents of ad revenue, AI writing is probably going to work for you.

If your goal is to write something you’re proud of that you actually want to read again later in life, that you think is reflective of your own personality and your views, and if you, you know, enjoy writing, AI writing isn’t a great choice.

My Use of AI

So back to how all this relates to Blaugust. After the changes I talked about, is my blog AI-generated now? Definitely not. I write all of my blog posts myself. If there is any AI-generated content within the boundaries of the article itself, I’ve always marked it as such.

It would be pointless for AI to write my blog for me. But wait: Maybe I can setup something to have AI continue writing the blog after I’m dead. That would be pretty funny. (But only for me.)

But does AI now assist me with the parts of blogging I don’t like doing? Definitely.

I don’t like writing titles or summaries or picking tags or images. Many, many, many of my posts are delayed or abandoned because of that. I’ll get to the end of writing a post, realize I’m not actually done and I have to come up with a title and a summary and an image and I’ll just say, “Screw it then, I won’t post this.” It’s happened dozens if not hundreds of times over the years.

I consider those things “metadata.” You could argue that the title is a part of the article itself, and I could probably be convinced of that. But not the summary, and not the tags.

As for the image, I consider that metadata as well, and not part of the article. If it were up to me, I would not put a featured image on every blog post, but reality demands that every blog post in an RSS feed have an image associated with it. Occasionally I need to embed an image within an article to illustrate something, which I do consider part of the article, but it’s fairly rare the way I write.

What’s Blaugust For

Blaugust was originally about challenging people to write a blog post every day. Everyone has to come up with a different system for doing that.

A very common system is to “bank” a series of blog posts beforehand, so you can publish those on the inevitable days when you don’t feel like writing. Is that cheating?

If the goal is to encourage people to write every day, to establish a writing habit every day, then yes, that’s cheating. But if the goal is simply to publish a post every day, then no, that’s not cheating, that’s smart and necessary time management.

I personally have always taken the Blaugust challenge quite literally to mean “write and publish a blog post from scratch every day.”

That’s challenging for me, and that’s the challenge I try to take on for myself. I want to maintain a habit of writing something every day. Merely publishing something every day is less challenging, because you can pull from drafts and any number of other sources to come up with something. But to write something interesting on a blank page every single day for a month? Big challenge. (See: NaNoWriMo.)

Blaugust Efficiency Workflows

But since I’m a busy adult, I can’t be spending all day on a single blog post. I need to get them done and out the door as fast as possible so I can move on with my normal day.

So in order to facilitate that, I usually gear up for Blaugust by creating a workflow that I think will give me the best chance to efficiently put pen to paper and write every day. I usually take the Blaugust opportunity to try something new, and see if it makes my blogging life better or worse.

This year, there are two new things: One is some AI-assisted tooling to help with the tedious metadata and file management associated with every blog post, which increases the speed that I can publish. The second is a new way of writing in honor of Belghast: Sitting down in the morning and banging out a post with no pre-planning, like this one.

This Year’s Blaugust

I would encourage this year’s Blaugust leadership to define the rules and attitudes regarding AI very clearly, with examples.

If it’s just “don’t use AI” then that’s extremely vague and open to interpretation. These days, that might also exclude spell checking and grammar checking.

I haven’t seen WordPress in a while but I’m confident they would have added a fair amount of AI tooling in there. Even if you can’t see it in the UI, you surely have to know someone is utilizing AI in the WordPress code that displays your blog, or in the creation of the ads that your free WordPress site shows. To say nothing of all the AI used at the network level.

In any case, if this year’s Blaugust powers-that-be consider “AI assistance” the same as “AI generated” and that gets me kicked out of Blaugust, so be it. It’s not the same, but I’m too old to be bothered trying to argue or explain what should be obvious with a little research.

I would still write a post every day in August to honor Belghat’s memory, with or without the Blaugust label.

I feel like I’ve been extremely clear about what I use AI for and what I don’t use AI for, so readers can be confident about what they’re reading. I even added a footer at the bottom of every page to announce it.

I have nothing to gain by “tricking” visitors to my site. There’s exactly zero effort put into marketing my blog, and I honestly have no idea what the stats are for my posts.

Okay I’ve gone on about this way too long this morning.