Statement on AI
Will to Power Games is not an AI game company. We are a small company with our sights set on competing with giants. Over the past three years of development, we've come to realize that our rhetorical goals in describing the world of Otan are met most expediently using AI-generated imagery. Since then, we've watched the AI industry change from AI being a "pretty neat idea" to a global pariah that threatens the livelihoods of us all.
Now, three years into development, we have a database of over 20,000 images... or "art assets". While we are both artists (and have relationships with artists), we did not see a way to produce this much art by traditional means. Why, if we were to go to the local kindergartens and buy up all their finger paintings, the budget required to reach 20,000 would exceed our first couple of years' revenue. We will offer a non-AI-image version, but this will certainly not be enough for those who hate AI at a political-indoctrination level.
AI as Deception
I believe that the foremost reason that the public has turned on AI is that it's being used to deceive. People and organizations have been producing works, claiming human authorship, when it is clearly AI... or, more maddeningly, when we can't tell. This has spawned fraudulent products, misinformation, disinformation, and unprecedented grift on a platform already filled to the brim with grift. AI companies and their CEOs have been lumped in with the Crypto and NFT bros, consummate scammers, and rightfully so in most cases.
At Will to Power Games, the imagery is our one dip into AI vice. There was no way to produce the number of images we desired without some sort of AI generator. We had no intention to deceive. Our images are entirely photorealistic, something artists just can't do. This decision alone makes our images recognizable as AI. On social media, we indicate in every post the generator we used. This vast trove of imagery was created to better illustrate our world; a creation over 30 years in the making.
AI in Writing
You're at work, you're expected to deliver a quarterly report, and ChatGPT will write one for you in seconds. Tempting. This does work well enough at the office, but it does not work for fantasy and sci-fi. Truly, AI text, the true cause of the world's problems can only spit out what it knows, and it doesn't know anything about Otan. If AI could create a world like Otan, we'd be seeing staggering numbers of new books and games on the market.
Alas, a lot of writing is AI-assisted. Indeed, the Grammarly program running on my browser added a hyphen to "AI-assisted" and insisted that I get rid of the word "indeed". Up above, a red line indicates that it would prefer that I replace the comma after "AI text" with an em dash. I don't use em dashes because I can't find them on my keyboard. I would have a long history of using them, but where I would use them, I use ellipses (somewhat incorrectly) instead.
AI in Software
AI is a disruptive powerhouse in the software industry and has shaken up hiring at every level. Is it good? I believe that it's a handy tool for an experienced developer to create certain things more quickly. Some believe that it can create entire applications. I believe that is complete nonsense. There is only one true player in the AI software game, Claude, and it only writes software well because it has read everything in the Github library. It's only truly good with one language, Python, and we are not using Python.
Will to Power software, while written with mild assistance from a free copy of Claude, will not have any AI behind it. No tokens will be consumed, nor will massive data centers be called upon to load a Will to Power browser page. Our site is hosted on Linux using the industry-standard Apache servers. We installed, modified, and deployed these technologies ourselves. No AI had an electronic finger in it.
The Sins of AI
We have been creating reference images for our game for 3 years now, primarily using the various editions of Midjourney. We have discussed AI use at length with some very vocal detractors, again and again, in those three years. Here are the major debating points that these detractors continue to bring up, followed by our "official" responses.
Theft of IP
AI companies have had many legal battles in the US over using human-created IP to train their models. The courts in the US and other nations have so far disagreed with this sentiment, citing "fair use" of copyrighted materials. Nonetheless, our only vice is to use Midjourney, which claims to license much of its training material regardless. I feel for digital artists who cannot compete with the swamp of AI-generated images. I rail at the disingenuous digital artists who pass off AI-generated images as their own. Meanwhile, I refer back to Will to Power's 100% transparency policy. Our images are ethically sourced.
It's Not Green
We understand from the news that, particularly in the United States, AI data centers have been built on creaky electrical infrastructure that cannot meet AI's electrical needs. Further, the heat produced by these data centers is discarded, with the region's potable drinking water serving as coolant. We also understand that these data centers have been responsible for increases in local electrical bills by as much as 500%! This is inexcusable, but this is the fault of governments and corporate green, not lone individuals googling and getting an AI-assisted answer.
Will to Power uses Midjourney, which is technically an LLM, but does not require the training needed for models like ChatGPT. Midjourney is built upon a standard AWS service and is not building data centers to destroy your neighborhood. Say what you will about Amazon. Our images are created once and will last the lifetime of our project. They are not recreated, nor will they continue to consume tokens, electricity, or other community resources.
For those of you embroiled in a data center fight in your community, we all hope you win.
Hire a Real Artist! Humans Rule!
Soon. More than one, we hope.
Real artists may never replace all 20,000 images in our repository; for the more visible of those, we Will to Hire artists, photographers and cosplayers to add to our game and future games. Once we launch, we plan to dedicate part of our budget to "real" art, which will largely be cosplay/photography in keeping with our current look. We hope to sponsor cosplays, hire artists, guest writers, and build a creative community around our beloved Otan. Right now, with only two of us and a HUGE requirement for reference illustrations, we simply don't have the budget at this time. Soon? We hope so!
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