You know what? It’s about time DDNet had an AI policy

If you’re on a certain social media platform owned by a ketamine-addicted fascist (and you know all know which one I’m talking about – ask yourself why we all know that), then you’ve probably seen a new phenomenon sweeping across the techbro accounts. One of that mob released a new update to one of the image-generating AIs, allowing people to turn photos into “Studio Ghibli” art. And so they’re all doing it.

In less than a week I must have seen hundreds of thousands of these things. Never mind that Hayao Miyazaki, one-half of Studio Ghibli’s energy and creative drive, absolutely loathes the use of technology in his art (he called it “an insult to life itself” in a famous documentary clip). Oh no. The techbros don’t have enough respect for the artist to consider their feelings about AI, much less pursue permission before plagiarising the style. “Better to ask forgiveness than permission,” as they say in the libertarian techbro wank circles.

Techbro and “AI artist” parasites using AI to take what they want (for their profit) are nothing new, but there’s a particular glee that has crept into this latest blatant disregard for basic ethics and decency. Emboldened by the fact that a certain government is never going to regulate them, they’re now outright laughing in the faces of everyone who dares to point out that none of this is respectful or professional. It’s particularly nasty this time around, and it’s reminded me that I need to set down a formal policy for games made with AI at DigitallyDownloaded.net.

My anger about AI is, in part, personal. I’ve spent the last three years, and more than $75,000 of my own money to produce a visual novel that means a lot to me. There is not a word, pixel, or musical note in The Last Waltz that AI has touched. I’ve worked with a team of 20-something people to create something that people created. And I did all of that because art is a human experience and process and should never be left to machines to do for us. Unfortunately, actually working on something takes time, and meanwhile other visual novel “developers” are spitting out dozens of them per month, with the person involved endlessly typing prompts into these machines and throwing the lot into a game that they’ve clearly never even read themselves.

Mine’s a better work of art than theirs. I know that. Even if players don’t ultimately enjoy The Last Waltz (and of course I hope they do), it is at least my creative project, and it is unique to me. You can’t use AI to generate what I have done.

But when I release it, the game’s going to sit on the digital (and perhaps even physical) shelf against a total tsunami of AI-generated crap. Unless I can pick up a big publisher, it’s not going to have a chance at finding its total audience. Already I know that people see indie visual novels that they may have otherwise been interested in and overlook them. They do that because they assume that AI’s had something to do with them.

So, yes, it’s personal. At a personal level the use of AI in game development by others is undermining my own project. But it’s also professional. DigitallyDownloaded.net cares about the art and artistry of video games. The book I published nearly a decade ago was titled “Game Art” for a reason. We are here to celebrate human creativity. And AI slop is the antithesis of that, and it needs to be pushed back against. So with that in mind, here’s the policy:

1) We will, in fact, review games that have AI content in them. There are other excellent websites out there that have decided to not review games with AI-generated assets in them, and I totally agree with their decision. We’re going down a different path because of reason #2:

2) Going forward, a game that has AI-generated assets in it automatically gets a 0/5 score. If you’re not going to invest in your game and you’re going to be a parasite that leeches off the work of other people because you’re too lazy or incompetent to create for yourself, then you’re going to get a score that reflects the effort you put into the game.

Given that our reviews are listed on Metacritic, I would suggest to developers that you don’t want to reach out to us if you’re going to produce games using AI-generated assets.

3) If a game includes AI-generated assets, then we will not publish news, trailers, or any other coverage of the game. We’ll only review it, and see point #2 above.

4) Finally, as a note to PRs: We expect you to declare any AI generation before you contact us with your game. If we discover after the fact that you’ve used AI and not declared it, we will make the deception public, and I will issue formal complaints to the platform holders, publishers, and whoever else I can think of. Who knows if that’ll do anything, but we’ll do our best to give you a headache.

Now to be clear, this policy applies to the use of Gen-AI tools to produce assets that are seen or heard in games. There are many valid and valuable uses of AI tools (spell checkers, for example, or AI use an early stage research tool). Basically, where AI supports the artist rather than doing the work for them, it’s useful and uncompromising to the art work. Our only issue with AI in the context of video game development is where it is being used to replace any stage of human creativity and artistry.

I do expect that it will become difficult to tell, especially as the larger developers and publishers start rolling out gen-AI tools into their teams for relatively minor things, like grass textures or icons in the interface or whatever. Given that AI disclosures are currently voluntary, I expect that there will be times where we accidentally overlook a game where AI has been used but not disclosed. However, I can promise the DDNet readers that we will do our best effort to capture any use of gen-AI and we will not compromise on this.

DigitallyDownloaded.net might be a small player in the grand scheme of things, but unless we as a community start taking a zero-tolerance stance to this deeply anti-human, anti-creativity, and unethical application of technology, we’re all ultimately complicit in allowing the techbros to unleash Skynet on the arts.

(And you better believe they’re working on Skynet AI for everything else, too. Techbros can’t help themselves).