That was ridiculous. It’s been mentioned on social media a lot over here. They were charging £35 for the “experience” as well.
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I felt so sorry for the actors, and for the people who’d travelled a long way for it. The company had only been created in November last year and the ringleader of the whole thing is a very dubious individual indeed who sells LLM-generated material about conspiracy theories on Amazon. I hope it’s brought conversations about AI scamming into the mainstream so more people are equipped to spot red flags.
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I think what broke my brain the most was the triple-arch ‘m’ in ‘performances’. I just- how can they use an AI that bad?
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Because the AI doesn’t know what words are or what letters are. It’s just throwing together elements from pictures it’s seen. If there are words in those pictures it doesn’t recognize them as words, they’re just more shapes to it. My guess is that it’s seen a lot of “rm” structures and just kinda threw something like that in there because why not?
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I feel like broadly people are either forgetting AI isn’t a ‘thinking’ machine in the way they think it is, or, just unaware that it’s a fancier version of predicative speech models. It just copies patterns, it doesn’t really ‘know’ what it’s saying/making. And it’s these patterns that people make sense out of, and not the model.
It’s like programing a machine to mix blue and red to make purple. Does it know it’s purple? No. But the people looking at the color does. All it’s made to do is mix those two things together
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I’d expect a language model to use the actual letters used in the said language though, so that suggests the text wasn’t generated by a text-producing AI… in which case I think it did an amazing job.
I am not trying to be bitchy, controversial, or anything of the sort, but I am an indie game developer myself (I’m working in an entirely unrelated engine, RPG Maker VX Ace, so that’s just an aside note.) I’ve noticed, not only in RPG Maker games lately, but some games on this forum (and many on Itch.io) that have unfortunately used AI generation to produce some (or all of ) their writing.
It’s extremely easy to notice things of that nature, as AI adores using “amidst” and “embark” (along with “embarked”, “embarking” and all such variations.) It also churns out excessively flowery, meandering prose that ultimately has no point other than to seem “intelligent” or “elegant.”
This is an example of an AI-generated description (this isn’t from any game, I had talk ai generate some random bullshit so I could give an example of the kind of drivel AI spews):
Nestled in a lush, enchanted forest, the town of Evergreen Glade is a picturesque paradise straight out of a fairytale. Quaint cobblestone streets wind their way through the town, lined with charming cottages adorned with colorful flowers and twinkling fairy lights. The air is filled with the sweet scent of blooming flowers and the sound of birds singing in the trees. At the center of town sits a grand castle, its towering spires reaching up towards the sky, surrounded by a shimmering moat filled with crystal-clear water. The castle serves as the heart of the community, where the wise and benevolent ruler, Queen Seraphina, holds court and ensures that peace and harmony reign throughout the land. The townspeople of Evergreen Glade are a diverse and magical bunch, with elves, dwarves, fairies, and other mystical creatures all living together in harmony. The marketplace is a bustling hub of activity, filled with vendors selling enchanted goods, potions, and spellbooks. The town square is always alive with music, dance, and laughter as performers entertain the crowds with their otherworldly talents.
It’s easy to see something like that completely lacks the human touch. It sucks the spirit out of writing for your game and makes everything extremely clunky and annoying to read.
There is also this, which goes into great detail about how and why AI should not be used in any kind of game development:
If You Respect The Art of Game Development, Don’t Use AI
So yeah, as someone who enjoys playing interactive fiction games and is making her own RPG as a solo developer, I’m asking everyone: please don’t use AI in your games.
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I believe it’s more productive to give this feedback to the authors directly. That said, obviously using AI to write for you is bad–it doesn’t even make sense since it removes all the fun of the process. If someone thinks they can put out any game and make bank, they are mistaken. Indie developers rarely make bank and usually do this as a passion project. However, I do believe there are healthy and productive ways to incorporate AI into your creative pipeline. More than once I managed to get out of writer’s block by bouncing ideas back and forth with ChatGPT, for example. Or get a primer and an initial direction on a topic I know little about (like a custom search engine).
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- I agree. I’m not going to argue cause everyone does what they want. Which goes with the second point.
- You can’t force anyone to do your will even if you prove yourself 100% right. And that’s okay.
- That will happen anyway, as it is happening now.
- From my point of view, there will be a ridiculously abundant literature made by AI. People will read it for some reason or another, and then most will realize it is crap, so the wave of readers will crash and go back to the human-written literature but AI won’t disappear. After all, readers aren’t infinite, and they have a finite resource to read, so ultimately, there will be a huge surplus of AI-written stuff that no one is going to read, and the “market” will regulate itself cause it won’t be much motivation in pressing a button to write something that even the human that presses the button will not consume or get anything from it.
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Before I get into my original comment, I think I should reiterate that I don’t condone AI being a primary tool, I just thought the argument that it’s obvious isn’t entirely true. Anyways:
To be honest, I don’t think it’s fair to assume that something is AI because it sounds like it. In your example, it doesn’t sound AI to me. It sounds like it’s a kinda boring book in 3rd person. It’s a massive info dump, but AI? I wouldn’t know if you hadn’t told us. I bring this up because I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you can really know for sure without asking the author.
Like, I like “embark” and “amidst.” Purple prose is a thing. Especially in historical and fantasy books. I agree with the no AI sentiment, but it isn’t that obvious to tell it apart from other writing
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Okay but if you dont then someone else will. When AI advances further, more people will use AI. Its enevitable. Gatekeeping a tool is how you regress technology.
Now you can have the option to not use it but the people who do are going to learn from AI by example. Theres gonna be some bad writers & developers learning off of AI.
Heck I used to suck at writing IFs but I used AI to write better to the point of being servicable. Now its helping me write romance since i suck at that too.
Im sure there is gonna be a niche where there will be people who look for human created art vs AI assisted art but telling someone to not use a tool is naive.
Now if we’re talking about using AI without fiddling its result & taking it as is then absolutely, soulless. But using AI to assist, no issue there.
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Yeah, no. I am not talking about people with English as a second (or third, etc) language using something run by AI (like Grammarly) to help with spelling, grammar and sentence structure and things of that nature, or people using it in one way or another to help with plot hooks and the like. Everyone knows even those old fantasy or sci-fi name generators you can still find online are rudimentary forms of AI, after all. I’m talking about people you can tell are using AI without changing anything at all.
I’m not stupid, naive, or a gatekeeper at all. What I’m getting at is: use whatever tool you want to produce ideas and things like that, but if you think you absolutely must use it for whatever reason, blatantly copying its results, not altering anything (especially things that give it away as being AI) and claiming it to be something you’ve written or made yourself not only looks bad, but it’s extremely soulless and (I think, at least) downright lazy. (I’m using “you” in a general sense here, that word’s not aimed at you as a person 
Sometimes, it can be difficult to tell in written format ^.^ )
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Yeah, there’s no harm at all in using it as a tool, like to check your spelling, grammar and the like - or to use it to generate plot hooks and the like. There’s no harm in using it as a learning tool, either ^^ It’s the developers who blatantly use AI-generated nonsense and call it “their game” in an attempt to make bank or gain some sort of notoriety that frustrate me to no end.
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Choice of Games and Hosted Games will not accept game submissions that use AI in writing or art generation.
With that said, until they are submitted, both art and prose generated by AI is not policed on the forum.
If you know of games that use AI-generated prose or art assets, informing the authors of this policy might really help them out.
If you know of any submitted games using such, you may desire to contact support directly by sending an email to support@choiceofgames.com and Hosted Games/CoG staff would then be able to respond appropriately.
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Copy editor for CoG here. I can tell you that many flesh-and-blood authors simply love using “amidst” and “amongst.” These words are more common among British English speakers, along with English speakers raised on 19th century British novels (many of us). I haven’t seen a particular love for “embark” (at least not yet), but each author has quirks and favorite terms they may lean on heavily to get these staggering works out the door.
I personally detest generative AI and find it, in the words of Hayao Miyazaki, “an insult to life itself.” But I don’t think it’s wise or helpful to kick up witch hunts and demonize otherwise innocuous vocabulary. If you feel a game has insufferable prose, that’s a valid critique in its own right. You don’t need to tar something as AI-generated in order to dislike it.
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I’ll note that if AI has a tendency to use a certain kind of prose, then there’s also human writers who have that tendency. Because AI was originally trained on human writing.
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Now I find myself wondering if AI is any better than the average human writer at knowing when to use “amid(st)” and when to use “among(st).”
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I’m not trying to start a witch hunt by something that was meant to be a fairly innocent “hey guys, I’ve noticed this lately and please don’t copy what I’ve seen, cause it looks bad” thread; honestly (and it might sound weird) it’s easy to tell if “amidst” has been used by a human author, since everything else reads like it was written by a human (even if it was written not very well.)
This is just one talk ai example of a description that uses “amidst” in ways that give it away as being AI. I honestly don’t think even a beginner writer or someone with a more archaic, prose-filled writing style (I’ve read both multiple times in the past) would ever throw something like what this produced.
Granted, I’ve seen more of this style of AI-generated writing in some Itch.io interactive fiction than elsewhere, but still.
BlockquoteAmidst the crumbling ruins of a once vibrant civilization, lies a dystopia town where the inhabitants are trapped in a never-ending cycle of despair and decay. The streets are littered with the remnants of a world long forgotten, and the air is thick with the stench of decay and desperation. As the sun sets on this forsaken place, the people of the town embark on their daily struggle for survival, scavenging for scraps of food and shelter amidst the crumbling buildings and twisted metal that surrounds them. It is a place where hope is a distant memory, and the only thing that thrives amidst the ruins is the overwhelming sense of despair that hangs heavy in the air.
If it was just a dislike of a writing style or someone’s vocabulary though, you’d definitely be right!
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Officially you can’t publish anything that’s AI generated through HG. Unofficially I’m not certain how exactly this is policed. (There are detectors out there, but they can sometimes throw false positives as well.)
More and more, as the pressure for longer and longer games that don’t need tight editing happens, I can see this becoming a problem as people turn to AI to get their games done. Let’s face it, pushing a button and cleaning up some text, is far easier than spending a year or more manually writing something that may flop anyhows.
I agree, but I do tend to have to moderate my purple prose tendencies. Hopefully no one thinks I’m using AI just because my writing can tend towards that at times 
Edit: I did actually do a little experiment a while back where I fed an AI generator a chapter of my text to give it background, and asked it to finish it with some prompting along the way. The results were surprisingly passible. Not great (no way I’d use it personally), and it didn’t mimic my style particularly well so you could tell what parts I hadn’t written as it didn’t sound a lot like “me” (or not to me at least!), and would have needed cleaning up, but I can see people using it to write their games. What I did notice was it tended to be quite bland/predicable, rushed to a point (AI: Oh you’re prompting me that this should happen so I guess that’s right now! And that’s finished in 3 lines, moving on…) and could get repetative. Buuut, you could get a game out of it if you didn’t care too much about the output, and alternatively could use it as a “fill in the blanks” by expanding out sections. Personally I like writing and don’t particularly want a machine to do that for me, but given money and popularity are in the mix, I think we’ll see more and more AI generated books and text games moving forward, especially given how much it seems to be improving all the time.
I have seen examples that aren’t anywhere near as over the top as the example above. This seems to be a very descriptive, high fantasy, overly flowery style that would probably get you rapped over the knuckles by any editor as stopping the story for a scene description break. If you say asked for gritty cyberpunk or hard scifi you’d likely get something quite different.
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I don’t think you should use AI GENERATED content in your work, but I do think it is a useful tool for authors. It is especially good for authors whose native language isn’t english and they want help copy editing their work. If you take an already written piece of work and ask a system like ChatGPT to copy edit it for you, it tends to just clean up the grammar and punctuation without making too much in the way of content changes.
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