I am very much not ready for Blaugust this year.
Our esteemed leader, Belghast, has been going through some incredibly tough times. Nobody was surprised when he indicated that he wouldn’t be able to run it this year. And then Krikket at Nerd Girl Thoughts informed Belghast that the inmates were now running the asylum and that yes, Virginia, there is a Blaugust 2025.
So, what is Blaugust?
It’s a monthlong celebration of games blogging. Back a dozen years ago or so, blogging was big. These days, content creators make youtubes or tiktoks or grams or twitch streams. Nothing wrong with that – except perhaps that they don’t control their platform and can be shut off by some faceless billionaire for any reason at any time. Blogging, though – just your keyboard versus the whole world. Type something, and then other people would visit and type more things, and it would just be a hundred people typing about the same thing and it was glorious.
Now, in 2025, it’s stupid easy to just have an AI type for you. Typing is cheapened. And AI is coming for videos, too. Content creation itself is being taken away from mere human hands. When complete, everyone will create their own content, and the only person who will ever see it is themselves. An insular little content bubble just for them.
YES, STOP IT. Yes, the header picture for this VERY BLOG POST was generated by ChatGPT. I am well aware of the irony, but I did that for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.
The rules for this year prohibit posts written entirely by AI. Three years back, I think, I did an entire Blaugust with posts written by AI. 31 game ideas based on the numbers 1 to 31. It was a stunt. This was before ChatGPT; I had to cut and paste posts from a bunch of “and then…?” prompts in the OpenAI workbench page. It would be super easy today to do the same, and the results would be better. The crudity of the tools back then was a feature, for me. Like rolling dice and looking for patterns in the pips. I could still be surprised at the results. Today, surprise has been replaced by polish and, unexpectedly for a technology based in part on randomness, random has been replaced by routine. The soul AI once had is replaced with a mirror, and the user just ends up talking to a copy of themselves.
It’s a bit unsettling to me when I read chat logs from other ChatGPT users and the voice there is so different from the one I experience. And I understand that the user sharing their logs has shared more than they knew; they’re sharing their secret self to the world.
If you’re looking for a reason not to let ChatGPT write your blogs, I couldn’t think of any better one than that. Do you really want the world seeing your secret self?
Okay, back to the header image. This wasn’t the first one, actually. Here’s how it progressed:
I got into EverQuest 2 and took a bunch of screenshots of my halfling bard, Tipa, there. She’s the most pure expression of Tipa-ness I’ve found in an MMO. I uploaded those and the Blaugust 2025 banner to ChatGPT and told it generally what I wanted.
Then I wanted to add the dodo logo. It came out bad, so I gave it more instructions and it came out better. I’m writing a SF story, so I wanted to reference that, but the planet was bad, so I referenced Jupiter and specified how it should look through the atmosphere and that became the banner.
Through it all, I wondered how I could possibly involve a human artist in this. I’m willing. I’d have paid for the eventual banner. We did go through this when we were doing cover art for our Magic Cap Game Pack about a million years ago. (Yes, I actually developed games that were sold to actual humans whom I didn’t personally know. I are a true game developer!) Anyway, the artist, who was a student at Monterey Peninsula College, developed a few sketches over the course of a couple of weeks. We signed off on a sketch and he produced a full color proof for the box.
I have no idea how much he was paid. I hope he was paid well. Everyone loved the art. But it took a lot of time.
Going back and forth with a human artist the way I did with the banner image would have been expensive and slow.
But what if… what if, when I found an AI response that I liked, I could press a “send to Fiverr” button and it would request offers from actual artists to take the AI concept and produce an artist-created improvement? Aywren is an artist and I love her work – what would happen if I showed her this image, and asked for her take?
I suppose I actually should ask her (and maybe she will see this and respond). But if I just impersonally pressed a button and waited for responses from strangers, here’s what I expect I would receive.
An AI generated image, not an actual human creation
My image, returned through a Photoshop filter
Something too bad to use
A long screed on how I was disrespecting artists and art in general by only involving them to trace over AI work so that I could feel better about using AI
But the alternative here would be to work closely with an artist over a period of days or weeks in order to produce an image I would use for a single blog post. Magazines, especially online ones, have illustrators on staff to do this as their actual job. I can’t afford that. This blog makes no money and the readership is in, like, the dozens.
Another solution: use paid clip art services. Here’s what I got when I entered the search: clipart of a fantasy RPG character looking at a billboard in a field with an alien planet and spaceships in the twilit sky.
I forgot to add the dodo. clipart of a fantasy RPG character and her dodo companion looking at a billboard in a field with an alien planet and spaceships in the twilit sky.
I have no idea if the credited artists used AI in their work. I’d hope they didn’t, but how can you know? Using a commercial clipart service would presumably put some money in the pocket of the original artist, but neither of these images are at all close to what I asked for. So, now I would be paying real money for art I didn’t want.
I also had the bright idea to do a reverse image search on the finished image – this one from DeviantArt had the same feeling I was going for. I don’t want to embed it here, but the image linked is of a hooded girl resting on a stone in some ruins with her wooden staff sprouting leaves that are blown in the wind while a bird looks on. It’s super nice. It’s not what I want, but I appreciate the art and I feel an artist was actually trying to evoke a mood here.
Anyway. I don’t see a real solution here. I can’t draw, but I can write. So, these words I share, now and during Blaugust, will be mine. They won’t always be good words, but they will be mine. The art… well, I probably will avoid using AI art. Most likely they will be photos or screenshots, and if I can think of any funny captions, I’ll add those. It might be fun to use stock clip art; that’s what it’s for. Maybe I’ll try that sometimes. I know DeviantArt allows AI images, so unfortunately I can’t use that as a source if I’m trying to avoid using AI.
We’ll see.
Happy Blaugust!