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Regarding “AI Assisted Content” in Firmament
As many of you have seen or noticed, our credits in Firmament mention “AI Assisted Content”. This has been present in the credits for Firmament since release day, and we have never hidden this information:The contents listed as "AI Assisted" in the credits are "Journals, logs, checklists, newspapers, stories, songs, poems, letters, loosely scattered papers; all backer portraits; all founders portraits; the "sunset" paintings; the art-nouveau wallpaper in the Swan dormitory hallways; propaganda banners; coastal spill decal kit; all voiced mentor, announcer, founder, and other speeches; backer-exclusive content".
“AI Assisted” does not mean wholly AI-generated. Unfortunately, there have been articles published recently which have implied (especially in their headlines) that Cyan generated much of Firmament using AI tools. This is categorically false and misleading, and we are disappointed and frustrated to see this happening.
Some folks may be concerned about our usage of AI, so in the interest of clarification: The voice performances in Firmament were voiced 100% of the time by a talented member of our development team who elected not to be credited by name. Their voice was simply modulated for the final product with one of these tools (and with their full permission and control). This same member of the development team has elected not to be credited in prior games of ours as well, for privacy concerns, and not anything to do with tools usage in our games.
Additionally, our narrative team elected to use AI writing tools to ideate and experiment with how information they wrote themselves is presented in the game. The artists who used AI tools to assist in the creation of assets (itemized above, as well as in the credits) used them solely to ideate on texture assets for very specific scenarios. Other than the small handful of textural assets described, no AI tools were used in any aspect of Cyan’s world-building or art creation efforts.
Cyan has a talented team of individuals (all human beings) with a breadth of skills and experience who have been working on this game for over 4 years, from scratch. We are disappointed to see their contributions minimized and overshadowed by egregious speculation about our usage of AI tools. Although individuals on the team did leverage AI tools to help with the development of the contents listed above, absolutely nothing in this small fraction of content for the game was generated and used outright from these services without extensive human oversight and revision.
For those who are disappointed in our use of these tools, we hope you have a better picture now of how we used them to assist with Firmament’s development. To our disappointed Kickstarter backers, we hope you understand that none of these tools even existed when we Kickstarted the development of the project, but understand why you may be disappointed that we did not disclose our usage of them in the last year. These tools land in a gray area for many, but we hope that some accurate context (instead of a spicy headline) helps clarify this for you.