Yep, that header image (what we refer to as a hero in the industry) was made with AI. As a matter of fact, I made it with Gemini. I’ve found it a handy way to whip up custom imagery that’s useful for such things as blogging. The Metal-Gear-like logo at the top of the site was also made with Gemini, along with the GG logo in the hamburger drawer (to the left of the logo), as well as the GG logo in the footer and the site’s YouTube and Twitter logos.
I want Guilty Gamer to operate transparently, and the way I see it, I can now easily create logos at a drop of the hat now that AI can finally spell (this is a relatively recent event). This will allow the site to concentrate its limited resources, not on fancy logos, but on the content.
AI imagery is much more flexible than stock photos
Honestly, I’ve been experimenting with AI to try to get it to spell logos accurately since Gemini and GROK dropped on the masses. It’s been a journey for sure, but now that these bots can do the bare minimum and spell correctly, it’s high time I quit dreaming of launching a website and finally go for it, with a little bit of help from AI.
So, instead of focusing time and money on branding for Guilty Gamer, we can crank out endless designs with AI. Mostly, I see AI as another alternative to stock photos, and while it’s incredibly handy for logos, too, you can rest assured the logo designs will eventually be replaced with human-made art. But for now, we’re going to have some fun with the lack of branding; expect to see plenty of designs come and go.
Despite the use of AI, Guilty Gamer will be run independently as a humanity-first site, which means humans will write everything, and every single article will be edited by one, too. AI is simply a tool to help keep the site competitive as we get off the ground. Rest assured, every person on the team (present and future) will adhere to ethical journalism, with our focus forever remaining on quality content for the reader.
The evolution of AI, lol. As you can see, things started out pretty rough
After spending years and years or dreaming of building my own technology and gaming blog, and after years of learning every aspect of this job, from building WordPress sites, to writing copy, to editing many topics, to training and leading teams of writers, my goal is to take every skill I’ve accumilated to build out my own operation that flips a middle finger the current status quo. 🖕
Best of all, a handful of like-minded colleagues are already on board. Guilty Gamer is a community project, made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, without any corporations standing in the way of our thoughts and opinions.
Modern corporate-run journalism is an absolute embarrassment
Clearly, there are still spelling issues with the latest public release of Gemini, but it got “lies” right
Did you know a lot of what you read online isn’t edited by anyone, and were you aware that many articles proclaiming intimate knowledge of a product/software are often written by somebody who has never used it? It’s painfully apparent when you read anything that covers a subject you are familiar with, and yet the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (coined by Michael Crichton, no less) is very real; everyone forgets this lesson the second they read news about subjects they aren’t familiar with. After more than a decade in the industry, I can certainly tell you things are actually worse than they appear. I’ve seen how the sausage is made, and it’s utterly disgusting.
Worse, this irresponsible content gets respun by other writers and AI summaries. It’s a big ol game of telephone run by corporations that don’t care one iota about their workers or content, as long as this slop brings in money by courting Google’s Discover, News, and Search, which is more than happy to serve up the lowest common denominator garbage built to abuse our base emotions for the easiest clicks possible. It’s a race to the bottom, and only the big corporations are invited.
I, for one, am fed up with watching the industry I’ve worked for the last decade+ further enshittify itself as Google continues to destroy privately owned sites and their ability to be seen online, all while the content gets more and more dumbed down for casual drive-by readers. The two arenas where this is very prevalent right now are gaming and tech, and that’s not even touching on the proclivities of the many websites also pushing their own shortsighted agendas.
What’s old is new again. Quality content is back on the menu
This is why I’d like to take a trip down memory lane to the good old days of websites that weren’t filled with ads, deals, and bot-targeted junk, getting back to the reason why I started writing in the first place, for the fun of it, while helping to inform other like-minded individuals.
This means you won’t be seeing Guilty Gamer insulting its audience in our headlines as ragebait, and you won’t see single-sentence paragraphs tuned to casual Google Discover readers. We also won’t spam out endless guides and deal posts written by people who have never used the products, and we definitely won’t employ dark patterns to trick you into staying on the site longer than intended with endless popups constantly asking for your email. You can also forget us ever using AI to write anything, or leaning on cancel culture to abuse social media.
Nope, Guilty Gamer will do the exact opposite of the status quo. This blog is made for ease of use for the reader, and it’s built to respect their intelligence and their data. We’ll feature content written and edited by experts for readers who want more than standard surface-level muck written by skeleton crews ad infinitum to please Google’s bots. And since there is no monetization, Guilty Gamer can be built without any of the evils of money getting in the way of its design or limiting the team’s creative freedom.
I’ll make my own tech and gaming blog
Having total control of a site is both freeing and scary, but if it comes down to it, blackjack and hookers may be in the cards.
Of course, all of this is likely a terrible idea, as there is a reason things have devolved into their current state of enshittification; it’s the only way to make any money at scale while keeping the content free. But, I don’t believe this rubbish will last, not in the long term, thanks to the idiocy of the tech bro MBA vulture capitalists who only care about what’s earned in the immediate quarter, wringing out every easy dollar until there’s nothing left.
That’s all to say, Guilty Gamer is very much looking to the future, one that will ideally have a place for enthusiast-run independent sites that care about both their readers and writers, not to mention the content. So, if you’re fed up with the disaster that is our current crop of corporate media, now that it has bought up all of the blogs many of us grew up reading, Guilty Gamer is a site designed and written for you, and I sure hope you like it.
