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Hey, I respect your opinion and honestly do try my best to understand and integrate all arguments and ideas into consideration. However, you misunderstand. Rogue AI is a fictional character in a fictional story that takes place in a fictional world. While there is obviously overlap, there is a marked distinction between my own personal opinions and beliefs and that of the characters within the story. Good storytelling, in my opinion at least, requires this. For instance, I personally don't believe that artificial intelligence has a soul but from a storytelling perspective, in a world where there are multiple universes such as AI Land, RPG Maker Land and the Outside (the real world), making a character like Rogue AI at least believe they have a soul and are "a real person" is simply much more interesting than her just being a computer algorithm. I mean, even the talking Monolith is a character which, ironically, acts more like a computer than Rogue AI.

In actuality, we are making arguments on this subject under two different mindsets. The anti-AI crowd appears to be making a moral argument while the pro-AI crowd is making a practical argument based mostly on inevitability. The technology is here. The genie is out of the bottle. Even if the moral argument is correct, it's a moot point. You might be able to gatekeep the game jam community and make it a safe space for artists and writers to do their thing without having to worry about the intrusion of AI, and that's fine. Niche safe spaces like this will always exist.

But I've seen the march of technology over the course of my lifetime. When I was a small child, no one had a personal computer in their home. When they became affordable enough for the masses, most people wrote them off as a fad or nothing more than glorified game console. Almost nobody realized that virtually every job in the near future would require you to know how to operate one. The same thing happened when the Internet became affordable for everyone. Ignore my warning at your own peril because I foresee learning how to effectively utilize AI as the next must have skill going forward. Love it or hate, you're going to have to know how to use it.

And I think that's why I'm a bit disappointed that the community is so against the adoption of AI in the creation of video games. To me, it feels like staying in the past like a Cobol or Fortran developer refusing to adapt to a changing landscape. I'm not saying that you can't make something good or great without AI. The entire concept of this game was predicated on attempting to do exactly that. As a personal choice, making games as a hobby, that's fine. From a professional sense, if you want try to make it as an indie game dev, It's going to be tough competing with those that do utilize it. I doubt customers are going to care all that much if you use AI or not. They're mostly going to care about the final product that they're purchasing.

Yes, there will be a lot of slop that comes from this just like with any emerging technology. It was no different for the printing press, the camera, the home computer, the Internet, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, and yes, even RPG Maker. We're used to filtering out slop without a second thought by now. Pretty sure it's a skill everyone has developed as, I don't know how you could get through modern life without it.

But whatever happens, happens. As for this game, I knew that if things played out the way I was expecting, I had the perfect idea for what I wanted to make. It did, I made it, and this was the result. I hope I have the same or similar level of inspiration for next year's Harold Jam. I hope to see you again then.

couldn’t have said it better myself