No Gen AI Will Be Used In This Game

Hi! I’d like to post this now for people to refer to throughout development. These are standards I think should be upheld by all game developers from solo, indie, to AAA.

Here's my stance on Generative AI:

I’ve done my own research over the past few years to come to these opinions. You may not agree, or have seen research suggesting otherwise, and that’s okay! I’m open to hearing it. But this is an opinion I’ve formed by talking to fellow artists and developers, following news, listening to experts, and being surrounded by the inescapable influx of AI in our society lately. I acknowledge I could be wrong, but my opinions haven’t changed on this topic much in the last few years ever since generative AI started booming.

• Generative AI is harming our environment. Forests and farms are being bought out to be demolished and replaced with data centers because of the massive amounts of electricity needed.

• The training data is unethically stolen from artists. Many artists have pointed out their work was used to train machine learning without consent. Anyone can easily train an AI on an artist’s work and ask it to recreate images in the style.

• It’s harming the job market. CEOs are deciding they can get away with laying off and not hiring junior positions and replacing workers with AI. Customer service roles are almost entirely handled by AI now unless you ask to speak to a human.

• It’s making people dumber. Students are asking ChatGPT how to ask a question during class. Essays are generated. Bosses are sending employees generated emails rather than thinking about how to respond. Sure, humans have always been lazy, but it’s allowing people to get away with not using their brains at all.

• It’s gotten very annoying. It’s everywhere. Every website asks if you want to generate a post. Do you want to have AI recommend you something. An ad to use the new AI app for your smart fridge to decide what to eat. Leave me alone.

• There are a few positives, such as glasses for blind people that use AI to generate audio descriptions of your surroundings. But the majority of ways it’s being used today is unnecessary and in many cases unethical. AI should be used for tools that supplement humans, not replace them.

• I want to live in a world full of human creativity and expression, not a synthetic one.

My Pledge:

The Tennis Academy is NOT created with AI.

To the best of my knowledge, I will not be using AI in any way during the creation of this game. Here is every way in which I plan to NOT use AI:

• Production: I do not use AI to plan my day, make to-do lists, or manage what to do. I wake up each day and I make a to-do list on an index card by hand. I manage the game in Google Sheets/Docs. I have a journal with each week’s plans. I use a giant bulletin board with index cards to plan the game’s story.

• Communication: Any communication I make to a contractor, 3rd party, player, or journalist is all hand-written without any AI assistance. Any email or DM I read will be self-processed in my brain without “asking Chat to summarize” or “grok is this real”, and all of my responses will be thought-out and hand-written. Sometimes painstakingly for hours.

• Art: All art is drawn by hand in Procreate on my iPad, I will not use any "prompt engineering" to create concepts in Midjourney or similar tools. Most references I use for inspiration are either hand-taken photos by myself or by friends. (I do use Google Images and Pinterest for inspiration, which has increasingly been riddled with AI references. I’ve done my best to limit the generated images I see via the settings, and if I learn a reference is AI generated I stop using it.)

• Programming: I mostly code the game myself; when I'm stuck I ask my local programmer game dev friends for help or search forums for solutions. I don't ask Copilot or ChatGpt to generate code, I write everything by hand, sometimes on paper first. People in the Godot community generously share free shader code to use, but I don’t use them if they’re AI generated.

• Music: Composer Piero has also pledged he does not and will not use AI in the creation of any music for this game. I don’t use any free sound or music if I know it’s been AI generated.

✅ The Tennis Academy DOES include the traditional meaning of "AI" as it has long applied to videogames - I spend many hours developing the non-player characters' "artificial intelligence", i.e. the enemies' and your doubles partners' ability to play a game of tennis with the player in a way that seems intelligent. NPCs should not only challenge the player, but create a sense of immersion that you are really fighting a character who wants to win. They employ classic tennis strategies, as well as use powerful tenergy abilities in appropriate situations.

As has been the case for decades, it is possible to create convincing NPCs by coding them to have a variety of responses to different situations, no need for an LLM!

@ AAA Studios: If a solo developer can fully make a game without AI, so can you!