{"id":2071,"date":"2026-10-17T15:15:36","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T15:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/?p=2071"},"modified":"2026-10-17T16:06:57","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T16:06:57","slug":"future-no-thanks-ai-disclosure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/future-no-thanks-ai-disclosure\/","title":{"rendered":"Future? No Thanks! AI disclosure+"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"rve\" data-content-width=\"640\"><div class=\"lyte-wrapper\" style=\"width:853px;max-width:100%;margin:5px;\"><div class=\"lyMe hidef\" id=\"WYL_7k5CitWN_Wg\"><div id=\"lyte_7k5CitWN_Wg\" data-src=\"\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/7k5CitWN_Wg\/maxresdefault.jpg\" class=\"pL\"><div class=\"tC\"><div class=\"tT\"><\/div><\/div><div class=\"play\"><\/div><div class=\"ctrl\"><div class=\"Lctrl\"><\/div><div class=\"Rctrl\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><noscript><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/7k5CitWN_Wg\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/7k5CitWN_Wg\/0.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"853\" height=\"460\" \/><br \/>Watch this video on YouTube<\/a><\/noscript><\/div><\/div><div class=\"lL\" style=\"max-width:100%;width:853px;margin:5px;\"><\/div><\/div>\n<p><!-- Responsive Video Embeds plugin by www.kevinleary.net --><\/p>\n<p>Every independent gaming festival and showcase in the year 2026 requires some kind of generative AI disclosure. That is great! Slop and vibe-coded games are a scourge, AI is a technofascist, anti-human and anti-art project, and it\u2019s imperative to create spaces of resistance.<\/p>\n<p>Future? No Thanks! is a game that tackles the impact and limits of artificial intelligence head-on. It satirizes generative AI and the careless ways it can be used, even in an enlightened ecosocialist world. It also dramatizes beneficial uses, such as coordinating a planned economy, voice recognition, and talking robots.<\/p>\n<p>And yet, I can\u2019t say it\u2019s a 100% AI free game. Here\u2019s the full breakdown:<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; No art assets, words, or sounds were AI-generated.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; About 99% of its code base was written before AI was even viable as a coding tool. Development started in 2021 and the last 2 years were mostly spent assembling the many dialogue scenes.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; A tiny fraction of its code was written with AI support in the late stage. Not vibe coded, but using ChatGPT or Claude as a powerful semantic search engine. Search engines have been enshittified to death, specific technical queries don\u2019t yield meaningful results anymore. Most search engines produce low quality AI responses anyway. Such coding assistance was used for things like fixing a shader I didn\u2019t write which broke after an update, or diagnosing a one-frame loading glitch when loading sequences. Finishing touches and minor debugging. Unlike assets that can be easily swapped, AI generated code is hard to remove once introduced. I can\u2019t tell which lines I wrote, which were generated, and which were somewhere in between.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; There are two text-to-speech voices in the game. Text-to-speech used to be an uncontroversial technology and an early application of neural networks. Then the AI bros started commercializing AI voices as a way to replace human actors, so it\u2019s now problematic.<br \/>\nOver 4 hours of human-dubbed dialogues, there are about 2 minutes generated with ElevenLab voices. They are for an automated toilet and a personal assistant that mis-translates Roman idioms. The humor of these scenes relies on uncanny voices doing their job poorly. Human voices were recorded for both parts but they just weren\u2019t working as well.<\/p>\n<div class=\"rve\" data-content-width=\"640\"><div class=\"lyte-wrapper\" style=\"width:853px;max-width:100%;margin:5px;\"><div class=\"lyMe hidef\" id=\"WYL_nDD-FhqDvow\"><div id=\"lyte_nDD-FhqDvow\" data-src=\"\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/nDD-FhqDvow\/maxresdefault.jpg\" class=\"pL\"><div class=\"tC\"><div class=\"tT\"><\/div><\/div><div class=\"play\"><\/div><div class=\"ctrl\"><div class=\"Lctrl\"><\/div><div class=\"Rctrl\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><noscript><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/nDD-FhqDvow\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/nDD-FhqDvow\/0.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"853\" height=\"460\" \/><br \/>Watch this video on YouTube<\/a><\/noscript><\/div><\/div><div class=\"lL\" style=\"max-width:100%;width:853px;margin:5px;\"><\/div><\/div>\n<p><!-- Responsive Video Embeds plugin by www.kevinleary.net --><\/p>\n<p><em>(Above, the translator voiced with uncanny text-to-speech)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&#8211; Early demos used to have 2 short music loops generated with Suno. They were fake doo-woop tunes whose lyrics said \u201cAI\u201d. They were supposed to make fun of losers who listen to slop. The self-referential lyrics were conceived as a kind of mandatory watermark this future society imposes to AI-generated music. I thought they were hilarious, but over time the association with a plagiarist tech company started to bother me so I replaced them with royalty free loops. By the way, royalty free samples that are certainly AI-free are increasingly hard to find, but I found an old site untouched since 2016.<\/p>\n<p>I know that these marginal uses disqualified the game from various opportunities and diminished it in the eyes of some of my peers.<br \/>\nThe 100% no-AI stance\/requirement is very recent, and the game was being developed before a consensus emerged. I\u2019m grateful to those who allow some nuance in approaching the issue, especially regarding coding.<\/p>\n<h4><strong>Some extra notes<\/strong><\/h4>\n<div class=\"rve\" data-content-width=\"640\"><div class=\"lyte-wrapper\" style=\"width:853px;max-width:100%;margin:5px;\"><div class=\"lyMe hidef\" id=\"WYL_T3HpJmxBmls\"><div id=\"lyte_T3HpJmxBmls\" data-src=\"\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/T3HpJmxBmls\/maxresdefault.jpg\" class=\"pL\"><div class=\"tC\"><div class=\"tT\"><\/div><\/div><div class=\"play\"><\/div><div class=\"ctrl\"><div class=\"Lctrl\"><\/div><div class=\"Rctrl\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><noscript><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/T3HpJmxBmls\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/T3HpJmxBmls\/0.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"853\" height=\"460\" \/><br \/>Watch this video on YouTube<\/a><\/noscript><\/div><\/div><div class=\"lL\" style=\"max-width:100%;width:853px;margin:5px;\"><\/div><\/div>\n<p><!-- Responsive Video Embeds plugin by www.kevinleary.net --><\/p>\n<p>I believe it\u2019s important to push against the inevitability of an AI-driven future, but I don\u2019t expect any new game above a certain complexity to be completely AI-free. Games rely on engines, libraries, plugins, and a whole technological infrastructure made by non-creative coders (&#8220;non-creative&#8221; for the lack of better words). These professionals are overwhelmingly embracing AI, or forced to adopt it.<br \/>\nAI for programming works exceedingly well or \u201cwell enough\u201d depending on who you ask. Unlike AI art, AI code it\u2019s indistinguishable from the user side, and you can easily deny its existence. AI programming is more likely to be a hybrid human-machine collaboration. There is a wide spectrum between tasking an agent to decompile an existing game, and asking Claude to generate a utility script under specific specs, saving a couple of hours of research, typing, and copy-pasting.<br \/>\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I teach a lot of talented English-as-second-language students, and it\u2019s truly daunting to navigate the grey area between asking the chat to spellcheck an essay, and fully fabricating one. I wish this technology didn\u2019t exist. I wish students cared more about learning and less about grades, or making a good impression. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, outside of education, if a programmer doesn\u2019t care about learning or retaining skills, it\u2019s ultimately their choice. I\u2019ll simply judge the results.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>I admire and support developers that commit to an AI-free practice. It\u2019s the only truly ethical position at this point, and has innumerable cognitive and creative benefits. But it can\u2019t be the only path forward. Individual choices and consumer-side battles have delivered very few victories on the environment, GMOs, health, labor, or human rights. If the problems with AI are related to energy and water use, IP theft, cheating, unemployment, spam, and so on, we have to address them as such. Energy consumption wouldn&#8217;t be as much as a problem if we used renewables; IP theft wouldn&#8217;t be as grave if we all benefited from these remixing machines; unemployment is a capitalist feature not an AI one. In other words, we need structural changes in all these domains and democratic control over these technologies.<br \/>\n\u201cThe problem is capitalism\u201d is not an excuse for inaction, but a reminder that holding your fellow artists to the highest ethical standards won\u2019t stop the actual bad actors. You might have more leverage to change things by starting with your own progressively minded community, but it can come at a high cost of division, suspicion, and bad vibes.<br \/>\nLike everyone who lives in front of a computer, I have so much more to say about generative AI, but I\u2019ll probably just wait for the bubble to pop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Watch this video on YouTube Every independent gaming festival and showcase in the year 2026 requires some kind of generative AI disclosure. That is great! Slop and vibe-coded games are a scourge, AI is a technofascist, anti-human and anti-art project, and it\u2019s imperative to create spaces of resistance. Future? No Thanks! is a game that &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/future-no-thanks-ai-disclosure\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Future? No Thanks! AI disclosure+&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5,10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-games","category-politics","category-tech","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2071"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2081,"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions\/2081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.molleindustria.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}