Rejection of the use of AI

Dawnsbury Days doesn't use, has never used, and will never use AI as a matter of principle.

This post is for two reasons:

• to assure players that Dawnsbury Days is developed entirely by humans and doesn't use AI anywhere in its production, so that you can feel safe that you're not supporting AI, if that is a concern to you;

• to give some emotional support to other developers with similar attitudes to AI, to show that they are not alone, in an industry that increasingly pivots to being centered on the use of AI.

In my view, human creativity embodied in natural activities such as drawing, painting, acting, writing, and imagining, is an important part of the human condition, and is something to be cherished. Generative artificial intelligence threatens the creative industries, and further, threatens the ability of humans to use and enjoy their creativity.

The creative expression one makes when interacting with generative AI, whether it's crafting prompts, engaging in AI chat, or working with an AI tool, is, I think, limited and is a poorer expression than a work created using a more basic tool without intelligence of its own, and should not replace it.

Further, the ability of AI tools to quickly produce creative content of high technical quality threatens to reduce, in the eyes of humanity, the value of art, which I think would be a sad outcome. Art and artists should be cherished; it doesn't seem right that they should be replaced.

For these reasons, in addition to my personal distaste for AI and in addition to the reputational damage Dawnsbury Days would incur if it used any AI-assisted content, Dawnsbury Days must never use AI art or AI voices.

To ensure it won't, we've always been careful and taken precautions.

• Everyone who works on Dawnsbury Days is contractually required to not use AI assistance in their work on Dawnsbury Days. And while I don't inquire into artists' personal beliefs, I would not be surprised if many of them had some kind of stance similarly rejecting AI in art.

• I analyze any stock asset pack I use in Dawnsbury Days for signs of AI generation, I review its reputation and history, and get in touch with the asset creator if necessary, and take great diligence in ensuring I don't accidentally use AI-generated art. We also never use AI-generated art as references.

Dawnsbury Days goes further and bans any use of AI assistance, even for brainstorming or coding assistance (such as "whole line completion" or tools such as GitHub Copilot).

I recognize that this is a more extreme anti-AI stance than might seem warranted. I understand the lines are more blurred in this case, and that many game developers do not see an issue here, and only consider final asset creation to be problematic.

After all, software engineering as a worldwhile industry is moving away from "manual" code writing towards AI-driven agent-written code. I understand that my position here is a minority position and I often doubt myself as well.

But returning to the ethical principles stated above, I just don't see that much of a difference between AI art, AI voices, and AI concept generation and coding.

Brainstorming and creating concepts is still a fundamentally creative activity, a human activity. Coding, while it might seem pedestrian, is, to me, still a creative pursuit.

Replacing the creativity and intelligence used in these activities with an artificial intelligence is not something I'm interested in.

For these reasons, I look with sadness at the transformation of the software engineering industry and in the context of Dawnsbury Days, I reject it.