We realise this might upset some of you. We've encountered game studios and game players who feel it is wrong to use AI. We understand where they're coming from. All the same, we feel it's essential for us.
But before we get to that, let's discuss our dos and don'ts.
Art and AI
We want to support the artistic community; for this reason, we have artists to create content (e.g. video, illustrations, maps) for us. On a slight tangent, we also pay them for their work. We have done so since before we were a company or had a product to sell. I myself was a freelance writer for many years, and I know it is hard to make a living that way. And so, we don't expect anybody to work for free.
These artists do sometimes use AI to assist them. Note the 'assist'. Artists are still expected to do the work. But they sometimes get help from AI to make their job easier. If they use AI to help them in the initial stages for concept design, mood boarding, etc. then we don't feel they need to disclose that.
If they use AI to help generate the final product that we see, they are obliged to disclose this to us. In that case, we'll label their artwork with 'AI assisted'. If we publish anything that is truly AI-generated, we'll label it 'AI generated'. That could happen if we participate in a project where AI content is acceptable and we want to share the results on In Other Worlds.
If an artist does not inform us that they used AI, then we reserve the right to take their work down.
Writing gets the same treatment as art. If any of the final content is AI-written, then it will get labelled as such.
How I Use AI
Personally, I do not use AI to write my texts. I write for two reasons. First, I actually like writing. I enjoy coming up with good arguments, thinking about how a line will impact my audience, seeing the page slowly fill with my ramblings. I even like editing! This is where you try to bring what you've written into line with what you meant and it can be quite rewarding.
Second, I feel my writing is both far clearer and more engaging than that output by an AI. Since I want people to read what we're writing about, that matters.
I do involve AI in planning the structure of my texts as well as critiquing my writing. Not that it's always terribly useful in that regard, but it does give me another perspective. As I don't have access to a flesh-and-blood editor, getting a second opinion has value.
An area where I do use it a lot is for research. Outside of my writing, I'll have it do marketing research and look up laws and rules that are relevant for my business in the Kafkaesque nightmare that is German law.
Within my actual world-building work, I tend to use a lot of academic research and theories as well as historical events. Here, the AI has access to more information than I do, far more quickly. I can get it to gather, summarise, and present within minutes what would have taken me days. That allows me to focus on actually building the world.
Finally, I use it to help me write code. For example, for the In Other Worlds pages.
AI and Idea Generation
One idea that gets a lot of pushback is using AI for idea generation. The belief seems to be that if you use AI for this part of the process, nothing you do is original anymore.
And that's true if you prompt it with something like, 'create a world for me where dragons rule'. I don't do that. And not because it offends people. It has a more basic reason: what I get back is bland and boring. I'm not after some generic run-of-the-mill idea. I pride myself on creating unique and distinct settings. In fact, if I had to choose one thing I'm really good at, it is this. The AI's ideas can't hold a candle to that.
What I do instead is investigate, explore, and question. The AI accompanies me as I do so. It is my sounding board and note taker. Then, after spending several days digging into a topic, it summarizes what was actually decided.
Here, I have to say it truly shines. It can cross-reference and summarize hundreds of documents and pages to create a high-quality synopsis. Sure, sometimes it hallucinates. That's why you need to check the work. But if you ask me to create a synopsis from a several-hour conversation from memory, I bet you I'd make far more mistakes and it would take me far longer.
For this reason alone, I think AI brings real value to the table.
Why We Use AI
Simply put, we don't believe we'd have a chance without it. We're a small team with limited resources. AI helps us stretch those resources further.
Here is a simple truth: If we did not use AI, this would not mean we'd bring on board more artists or content creators. Instead, In Other Worlds would simply not exist. The work we have produced over the last six months makes us believe we can ship a product in a timeframe we can afford. We have only been able to move that quickly because we use AI.
AI has allowed us to move from 'wouldn't it be nice' to 'we can actually do this'. We have decided to seize that opportunity. Because the truth is, we really love building worlds. And we really want to get our worlds out there so you can hopefully love our worlds as much as we do.
There are stories about great artists signing away their souls so they could create art. We're not (quite) making a deal with the devil. But we accept we are making a deal and we understand that some people will think worse of us because we made it. They're not wrong. The piracy, power and water usage, and unethical behaviour by the companies also concern us. I'd like to say we agonised about those questions long and hard, but the truth is we still agonise over them.
In the end, the choice was one between doing something that is tarnished or doing nothing at all. We're tired of doing nothing. I personally have spent decades finding reasons not to do the things I wanted to do. It's surprisingly easy.
This time we chose differently. This time we accept the bad with the good. This time we're stepping forward with our eyes wide open.
And that's why we use AI.