Our games are not for use in training AI data. Any attempt to do so will be considered a copyright and trademark violation and will be met with legal action. Just because many of our games are distributed for free does not make them your rightful property to repurpose as you please.
As for FFG's use of AI -- or rather, refusal to use AI -- we have drawn our lines accordingly.
FFG will never directly use LLM AI tools to generate code, art, writing, or anything whatsoever. Easily done; swiper no swiping. You can't "oops my hand slipped" your way into adding AI to your game. Placeholders can be stick figures and orange squares and photo scraps with zero effort.
If a creative commons asset or purchased asset we use is marked as AI-free and later turns out to be AI-generated, we'll happily remove it. We regard AI assets as stolen artwork (our own writing has been stolen before by Anthropic) and we obviously don't wanna break someone else's copyright.
For the critical development tools we use (Windows, Photoshop, Google Docs, Bluesky, etc.) from companies that cheerfully embrace AI, we'll find less problematic alternatives where feasible or simply avoid using the consumer-facing AI components within each of those tools.
For example, we may use Google Docs for writing collaboration, but will never utilize the Gemini AI tools built into them. We will also not use Generative Fill in Photoshop for any purpose. Co-pilot has been uninstalled. Etc. We can't clean their codebases of AI-written code, that's silly, but we don't have to use their problematic feature sets and certainly will not generate assets with these tools.
For game engines we use, due to the nature of open source software, there is always a chance for undisclosed AI-generated code submissions by third parties. Because we can't know for certain and false positives are a thing, odds are some will leak in. That's outside our control.
...HOWEVER. The key difference that makes or breaks engine selection for Fiction Factory Games is ideology.
If an open source engine's development team encourages submission of AI-generated code, cheerleading it and funding it and actively deploying it... we will not use that engine. It doesn't matter if it's "vibe coded" or carefully vetted; the quality of the output is not the problem. It's not fair to force all developers using your engine to inherit your AI values.
The strongest action we've taken is to just not use AI. It's easier than you might think. Developers have made games for nearly fifty years without need for this technology and will continue to do so regardless of how "inevitable" anyone says it is.
In addition, we will no longer be using the RenPy engine beyond our current in-progress 2026 project ("The Edutainment Vortex Diner"). As of March 2026 the lead developer has been implementing LLM-based AI-written code, and according to others on the team, multiple changes in years past have also been AI-written. Thus, there is no feasibly modern and clean version of the engine to use. To avoid a fruit of the poisonous tree scenario, we must switch engines.
We won't let perfect be the enemy of good, but good certainly has other very obvious enemies. Even if 100% AI-free is increasingly difficult thanks to AI coders forcing it into everything, often undisclosed, we aim to do our best to reach towards the ideal.
Let us be clear that this is a very painful stand to take. The cost of trying to ethically develop games is high, and our lead developer is a fifty year old hobbyist disabled retiree; we don't have a team of paid coders to aid in changing engines or creating new tools from scratch. The moves we must make to maintain as much freedom from AI as is feasible may slow down development.
But we always say "never cross a bridge you aren't afraid to set on fire while you're still on it." If this eventually ends our participation in the hobby so be it, but we'll try to find alternatives so we can continue doing what we love as best we can.
And if all else fails, they can't take pencil and paper away from us.
Copyright 2026 Fiction Factory Games LLC.