Our Games & the Magic of Human Creativity on Artix Entertainment

"Artix Entertainment recognizes the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance creativity, optimize workflows, and ultimately deliver more engaging experiences to our players. These guidelines are crafted to ensure that AI is leveraged responsibly and ethically, serving as a powerful tool to augment our human artists and developers, not to replace them. Our core philosophy is to strike a compromise: utilize AI to streamline repetitive tasks and generate initial concepts, thereby freeing up our talented team to focus on high-level artistic vision, nuanced design, and the unique human touch that defines Artix Entertainment's games."

OK, AI wrote that.* Now let's real.

TL;DR: Our guiding light is to protect our artists and other creative team members, and keep them employed and making games.

Artix Entertainment loves artists, creative people, and painstakingly handcrafted art. We have been doing it for nearly 25 years. AI slop presents a real danger to the future of our games. It is a deep fear that people wielding an AI prompt will be able to create 1000 times the content we can. What we think is that there are people like us to still value art made by real people. That is why Artix Entertainment games will not be allowing AI art into our existing 2D Flash games.

Recently, we received our first-ever submission from a contributor which appeared to use AI art. We declined the submission and as a result are crafting this policy for how we move forward. When you play a game like AdventureQuest, DragonFable, MechQuest, AdventureQuest Worlds, and EpicDuel -- know that every single piece of content in that game was created by from the endless creativity and mouse-clicks from our corps of artists and game designers.

"But hey, Artix, (you say) I noticed you said 'existing' and '2D' up there? What's up with that?"

Currently, every item in AdventureQuest 3D was created by a real person. (Except for that one blip with the posters in that burger joint map. But we made that right by replacing them with community-submitted artwork.) And this continues to be the plan for now. But the tools we use -- including Photoshop -- are changing so fast. For example, even the content aware fill tool -- is basically AI. This tool allows you to extend the background, for example. Or the healing brush, which allows you remove small imperfections. Which again, is technically AI. I'm including this small disclaimer because I don't want to be a hypocrite.

While Artix Entertainment continues to be AI-resistant, we would be absolutely foolish to not realize that the future is coming whether we like it or not. Our guiding light is to protect our artists and other creative team members, and keep them employed and making games. As long as we are transparent with what we do in our current and future games, you should feel proud to contribute to, play, and enjoy our games.

* An LLM writing a policy about using artificial intelligence... is that meta**? Or just the world we live in now?
** Not the company formerly known as Facebook. Meta, aka "self-referential." Originally short for "metaphysics," a subject covering things a level above physics. Now it means when you use a word to refer to itself.