The Idles is a game conceived as a satire of AI and capitalism. As such, we have taken the artistic liberty to use genAI in order to create its illustrations. No AI has been used in any other area of the making of the game, nor on our digital platform, Babll. If this is relevant or of interest to you, we encourage you to read the following statement.

There are many factors that contributed to this decision; to cite a few:

• Artistic Intent: The Idles is a game that puts a critical perspective on AI, the mandate of productivity, and capitalism. As such, we have decided to use genAI for the subversive artistic value it provides in this context.
• Historical Context: The chosen art style is that of 1950s US advertisements, used primarily to manipulate the general public into a consumerist lifestyle. These adverts belong to the companies that ran the campaigns back in the 50s; thus, making satirical versions of them is both aligned with the intent of the product and greatly minimizes the risk of trampling over the IP of any contemporary artist.
• Supporting Artists: The game was originally developed with a different theme. More than 120 original illustrations were commissioned (and paid for) to Adriano Villarraga. We have chosen to open-source those illustrations, which you may find here. The only requirement is that you attribute the artist for them. The motivation for this decision has been purely political - we do not have any monetary incentive for doing so. On the contrary, we are completely aware that doing so poses a greater risk in the current climate, but it is also a good opportunity to propose the conversation that follows.
• Community and Lore: The game is supported by Babll, a platform developed in-house to allow users to contribute to both the game and its lore. We want to incentivize discussion and build a narrative together with the community, hopefully sparking critical thinking in the process. As such, we see the use of genAI in this context as an enabler to collaboratively build this critique.

At this point, it is important that we all stop and understand that 'AI' is just a marketing umbrella term for a series of different computational techniques that have seen a boost in recent years, such as LLMs or Stable Diffusion. Currently, there are thousands of AI models in existence. We didn’t ask for this, but the truth is, most of us have to use AI for our work. Not doing so is an ever-scarcer privilege. For The Idles, we have voluntarily decided to waive that privilege to be faithful to the artistic and political vision of the game. Only by demystifying AI and being pedagogical about what it is and what it isn’t can we all be on the same page and have meaningful debates.

We believe that we are in dire need of reframing the current AI discourse toward more politically productive goals, beyond a simple rejection of the tech. Guardrailing the tech is a necessity, but it won't solve many of the issues it poses. AI is not going away. Once we accept that, we must also accept that placing the burden of using it on the end users is both polarizing and non-conductive towards relevant political goals - this is a systemic issue, not an individual one.

Reframing the Conversation

Our goal as humble artists is to contribute to reframing the conversation. To give a few examples of what we believe to be more constructive conversations around AI:

• Workforce Impact: AI, coupled with robotization, is expected to destroy countless jobs in the near future. If that is true, and before it happens, we believe a large redistribution of wealth should be a central part of the conversation - wealth taxes to fund UBI or the abolition of waged work.
• Accumulation of Power: One of our largest concerns about AI is how to make sure the power it yields does not exclusively end up in the hands of already monopolistic and large corporations. We propose AI models should be open-sourced (model, training data, and weights). It is about time we move on from the era of privatization to the one of the commons.
• Environmental Concerns: It’s widely documented that AI data centers weigh heavily on an already critical environmental situation. We believe the larger conversation here should be about fixing the negative incentives of our extractivist capitalism, making sure companies are not allowed to externalize their costs to the environment.
• Bloated Internet: The billionaires that run tech companies clearly have no interest in nor incentives to control the current situation of manipulative content. Maybe it’s time we stepped away from the current platforms and worked toward a decentralized internet?

We hope that this statement helps you understand which side we are on regarding AI. Many of the issues AI is creating are not new, but it is greatly aggravating existing issues in the system. This is where we believe board games, like any other form of culture, have a responsibility to bring these debates to the table - and serve as a rally call in the class war offensive we are living.

The Idles is a provocative and one-off game in many ways, and the only game in our roadmap where we plan to make use of genAI to produce final artwork. Regardless of our best intent, we fully understand anybody deciding not to engage with The Idles. We can only hope that this decision is made after giving full consideration to and understanding our vision.