Hi Folks, we’ve been quiet over winter, but things are starting to shift up a gear now that the new year is upon us. The first booking deadline is 18th February and we’re planning to try and get some winds of fortune released before then.
We’ve also got a small handful of rules updates that we’re going to publish over the coming weeks as we get them completed. We’ll add these updates to the wiki page for Rules updates 2024 as and when they’re published. (Rules update 2024 - Empire).
For the last couple of months we have been looking at the issues of artificial intelligence and considering what place if any is has in Empire. There are a lot of complex challenges raised by AI, and the subject is invariably acrimonious whenever it comes up in our social media spaces. Earlier this year, we took the decision to ban AI generated art from our in-character contest to create the new cathedral of the Way. Since then we’ve been looking to make a decisive ruling on its wider use in the game.
Having had some time to consider the situation carefully, we’ve decided not to permit the use of any AI generated content while in-character at Empire. This is because Empire is a game of hard skills by design - success in most fields is meant to be based on your abilities as a player as far as possible. That is why we have always banned the use of recorded music at events. To be consistent with that approach we’ve decided to ban the use of all AI generated content in-character. Human creativity is at the heart of Empire - we want our game to showcase the abilities of the artists and writers who create art for the game - we’re not interested in creating events for machines to attend.
We’ve also chosen to prohibit the posting of generative-AI content in our forum and in our facebook groups. All AI content is highly contentious but many of our groups have a high degree of traffic already, to which generative-AI content could add a lot of noise but very little signal. This is not a conduct issue - it is fine for Empire participants to post generative-AI content about Empire if they want to do that - but the right place for anything like that is on your own personal account where you can share it with your friends who want to see that content.
We will continue to encourage all our participants to consider and support the skills of members of the Empire community for their own projects.
We’d like to thank everyone who contacted us to send feedback on this issue. As always, if you do want to feedback directly or you would like a reply, then the best way to do that is by email to feedback@profounddecisions.co.uk, because we can’t guarantee to read every comment here.
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