No Creative AI

From a technical standpoint, Generative AI is genuinely a great achievement. The capability of a computer system to process human language and perform tasks with some accuracy was a hard problem, and this is technically an impressive solution. If the companies who built it wanted to use the technology ethically, they could have.

Instead it is the product of years of secret piracy — reading and incorporating everything on the internet regardless of who owns the data, with the express purpose of replacing every creative and interesting role out there, and with no plan for what to do after all that theft. They stole every piece of artwork proudly shared by its creator on places like ArtStation and Twitter. They stole every book they could get a digital copy of, and bought penny copies of physical books to scan and ingest. They mass-copied music from places like YouTube and Spotify. None of these acts were necessary to teach a computer to understand and respond to text commands. Avenues existed to do it ethically.

For these reasons, we commit to not using AI in pre- or post-production creative work. Using it in pre-production is a slippery slope. Mistakes get made and the content slips to live. The pressure of intense scheduling might make someone cut a corner. By keeping the games free of all creative GenAI content, there is no risk of accident or negligence resulting in inferior, unethical work.

We keep saying creative GenAI because there is one important place where we will use the unethical product. Maybe one day there will be ethically sourced GenAI models that run on local hardware with the coding capabilities of Claude Code, but until that day, the benefit of quickly writing code is too powerful to dismiss.

In game development you have two camps of developers: coders, and non-coders. While developing a game, the entire team is waiting on the coders to make it possible to incorporate their work. The non-coders aren't just sitting around — there's plenty to do — but they're still hostage to the coders. At the end of the day, the non-coders' work will never be seen without the work of the coders.

Coders became the rock-stars because they had THE critical skill. Their salaries were multiples of an artist with equivalent years of experience. Learning to code is incredibly challenging and takes years of practice. So does beautiful art, music, narration, and every other discipline.

Gen AI coding levels the playing field. A tester can work with Claude Code to explore the source of a bug they are seeing, even test a fix right then and there and check it in. A technical artist can design and deploy a tool that helps them visualize their shader in different conditions in the context of the game.

There are great software engineers out there. We don't want to see them put out of work. But we do want their share of the budget to shrink. We do want them to better cooperate with the rest of the team. We want the balance of the team to better represent what the player experiences — and we can accomplish that with fewer dedicated software engineers than in years past.

We draw a red line dividing the creative uses of GenAI from the noncreative, productive uses. We'll support the most ethical choice when it comes to picking models. Right now that's picking the least murderous pirate. In a few years that will be a less harsh choice.