AI Policy

Let’s talk about the nuclear powered infinitely large mechanical elephant in all rooms….

Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming a fact of life. At work, at school, during sporting events, while cooking, and during every other aspect of our lives where we allow it to enter. That of course has led to a futile resistance aimed at repelling the advances of technology, science, knowledge and productivity. Especially in the tiny but disproportionately important segment of society that enjoys board games.

Gaming conventions have tried to ban companies that use any form of AI from presenting their games. Players have posted online rants deriding even a single pixel of AI induced art in any game. Artists have lamented the possible extinction of their own artistic endeavors (and therefore the destruction of the entire concept of Art, and of all Art that ever actually mattered).

For that reason, Take That Board Games felt it was our duty to enact and plainly state our own company policy regarding the use of artificial intelligence in the creation, production, distribution and enhancement of all of our games:

1 – For starters, this page was hand-written by a human and no generative text or other AI was used in any way to create our artificial intelligence policy. This was done to prevent the many delusional errors AI interjects into its text, and also to avoid the eye-rolling hypocrisy that everyone would have pointed out if we used AI to write this policy, no matter how much time and effort it would have saved us.

2 – Take That Board Games DOES use AI in many ways. Read that again. Yes, we freely admit it. In fact, we use AI in ways we don’t even know about or understand. When we arrange to ship our games, we suspect AI is being used all along the supply chain to smooth out logistics on shipping container vessels, airplanes and elsewhere. We know AI is being used heavily in the banking industry and expect it has in fact taken jobs from people who would otherwise have helped us process payments, stock warehouses, and so on. Internally we refer to this as our external use of AI. We see this as unavoidable, unknowable and probably in some ways at least somewhat helpful to our overarching goal of making the world’s greatest games and delivering them to the world’s most attractive players.

3 – We also go a step further… and this is when you should probably start cringing. Take That Board Games uses AI to speed up our iteration process and more. If we were a giant bazillion dollar corporation making dozens of successful games and could afford a horde of talented human employees, we would like to think we would have the good sense to utilize as much humanity as possible in every game that we make. Sadly, none of you have bought enough of our games to fund that approach. Seriously, do you even own more than one copy of Honor Among Thieves in your collection?

4 – That said… we do have a very talented artist who we employ as often as it makes sense to create wholly unique images by hand, to edit images the AI can’t make the way we want them to be, and to give us great ideas that we can use to enhance the art found throughout our games. His name is Hammad Hassan and he is located in the country of Pakistan.

That brings up whether globalization is devaluing Art because he is very happy to be paid significantly less than a digital artist in San Francisco would want to be paid… we know because we checked. Since this page is about our AI policy, we won’t also take on the very tangled web of ethical decision-making intertwined into the economics of globalization. Whew!

We will say instead that if you like a particular part of our game art, you should email HamadHassan@TakeThatBoardGames.com to see if he made that image by hand or if it was created by using AI. When you send him a piece of art he made and tell him how great it is, he is overjoyed for days if not weeks afterward. It’s as if his entire artistic identity is being ratified and acknowledged on a massive global scale.

However, if you send him a piece of Art that was actually made by AI and mistakenly attribute it to him… he kicks wastepaper baskets around the office like Pelé on a drunken bender, as he cries out into the uncaring emotional abyss in his recurring attempt to quell the existential angst that we all feel about the impending doom of the oncoming AI apocalypse we are facing.

5 – What you really need to know is this. If we didn’t use AI we wouldn’t be able to create or produce any games for anyone. While many think about the fact that AI stifles some very talented artists, they also lose track of the fact that AI empowers other much less talented artists like us who would otherwise never be able to contribute our talents to the fragile ecosystem of human ingenuity… before our fast-approaching AI overlords destroy that ecosystem completely.

We are the cute, but not overly competent, rag-tag band of rebels you cheer for in sci-fi films, and this is our own last-ditch effort to make great games for you to play before AI replaces us. Put simply, either you buy our games right now, or you let the AI win.

Help us [insert your name], you’re our only hope!