The NaNoRenO competition explicitly bans any use of Generative AI, which does kinda annoy me but we'll cope, and I hope we can deliver a compelling experience without any cybernetic augmentation.

I imagine this is a conversation that's been going on behind the scenes for a long time and nothing I say is going to affect policy or change anyone's mind, but I still feel the need to share my perspective.

I can understand they don't want to be inundated with slop, since that's what'll happen if they open the floodgates to it.

But people (most of them, admittedly) using AI to attempt to replace creativity are using it wrong. That's not what it's good for.

I find unilaterally banning it to be an ableist policy. AI when used properly is an extension of the human's will, capabilities and vision; not a replacement of human artistic expression, but an augmentation.

Some people can't write coherently enough for their ideas to be given any merit, despite how intelligent and creative the person is. Some people can't draw well enough to realize the vision they want to communicate, due to inexperience or neurological or physical disability. AI can be so extremely helpful for filling in those gaps, but everyone's so sick and tired of corporations and hordes of bad-faith unimaginative grifters shoving it down our throats that they either consider it a threat or a nuisance and ignore all the good it can do.

I admit that I'm biased in this regard. My husband is the artist and mastermind of our little project here, and he suffers from a progressive neurodegenerative autoimmune encephalitis - his brain is constantly on fire because he's basically allergic to his own brain. He has a brilliant mind, locked behind layers of disability like the constant epileptic seizures which thankfully anticonvulsant medication can somewhat mitigate. It's always been a struggle to express himself, and most of his life he's been treated as less than human because of it.

Hopefully the art that ends up in the game can actually help, with its limitations, to convey the tone of the story, but I do fear that our work will unfairly be dismissed as amateurish instead.

this isn’t a competition, don’t worry. i’m sure your husband’s art is great, and even if some people don’t like it, some people don’t like [[insert interest of yours]]! you don’t have to pay any attention to them whatsoever, or if you and your husband are comfortable with it you could even share that on the game’s page, or maybe in the credits, as a form of support? sorry if that sounds insensitive.

if you can’t write then that’s why you do it as a team. i think the point, too, of the ban, is partially cause some AI is made with stolen content, which is obviously against the rules. it’s ok if you want to use AI in personal projects, but to make sure no one is offended it’s not allowed in this. …again, i’m not actually the creator but this is how i see it

Oh, we do everything as a team. Just as I help him to fill the gaps among shattered fragments of his identity after a lifetime of violence and abuse, and become a complete person, he does the same for me. This game is his vision, his story. I'll be helping with the writing and scripting of it all.

I can totally understand why some people are opposed to Generative AI - there's not a frontier model on the market that wasn't trained on every bit of data the corpos could scrape from the internet, intellectual property be damned. But as I am ethically opposed to intellectual property already, I do not find this an ethical dilemma - I believe information wants to be free and ideas belong to everyone, and my actions reflect this as everything developed by our studio is fully open source and public domain.

That being said, my personal ethics should not be imposed on others - that's violence, and I abhor violence. It's even been somewhat of a drama for our studio's main project, as writers who have been contributing to the worldbuilding for years have to contend with the idea that I'm now using their ideas to feed an LLM with flavor as I collaborate with the AI to expand our worldbuilding.

One writer really hates the idea of having a sort of digital effigy, constructed by an inscrutable algorithm, attempt to replicate her voice and spout a poor imitation of her own ideas. I've had to temporarily remove her contributions from the work I'm doing with AI, and let her do the work herself later of integrating her faction and ideas back into the world and without the robot's interference.

Another writer contributed a major faction within the world, forming a powerful vision of what extreme authoritarianism with a soviet flavor might look like in a post-scarcity world. I'd already done some AI-assisted expansion on his ideas and how his faction integrates into the timeline, by the time he came back to discuss his consent on the AI problem. He was very reluctant, not wanting his name to be associated with any LLM-derived content, considering either relinquishing ownership or coming to some sort of deal (he's already written a short story in this universe, which has been published in an anthology). Then he read what I've done with it so far, and he says we can keep it, as "the level of integration and development in this iteration appear to have massively built upon them to the point of novelty", and that it definitely aligns with his vision while developing it much further.

Sorry for the long tangent. Could you clarify what you meant by "if you and your husband are comfortable with it you could even share that on the game’s page, or maybe in the credits, as a form of support? sorry if that sounds insensitive". Are you referring to the neurological and mental health struggles? Well, since this psychological horror visual novel is basically about his life before we met, I can definitely say that it's all relevant.

Thank you for sharing your experience. The ban exists for a myriad of reasons that I'm sure you already know, but I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective. 

I would like to offer encouragement regarding your concerns. NaNoRenO is, at its heart, "amateur." It was born from a hobby community, and it predates the days of (English) visual novels being about polish, scale, or money.  It's not a competition. There are no prizes, and nothing is ranked.  There is a wealth of creative commons content made specifically for jams like NaNo to help people with art, music, even code. But it's been my experience that even my own extremely okay scribbles have been warmly welcomed every time I've taken part, and I suspect anything you make will surpass my own attempts back in the day. I am looking forward to seeing what you make.