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A little while ago I picked up a troll on Wayfarer's itch.io community forum. This person was angry at Wayfarer's game design, and wrote at length about their issues with it. Now, I think if someone doesn't like my game or my writing style or my design choices—that's fine. Wayfarer is not going to be everyone's cup of tea. But what I do take issue with (aside from their behaviour—criticize my game all you like just don't be a misogynistic asshat or I will block you) is that they began their post by claiming that my game is obviously written by an LLM. Any pushback given by other forum users resulted in them doubling down on it, including the claim that because Wayfarer is an in-browser HTML game it must be AI, along with a number of other pretty nasty things intended to make me upset.

I started this project well before the use of genAI was widespread. Wayfarer has been in the works since 2019. The original concept and prototype were done Oct-Dec 2019, I spent 2020 reworking things and writing the game's opening, and I spent 2021 pushing towards its September release. I have written every word of Wayfarer myself (yes, all 1.8 million of them if we're including Episode 3). My UI is adapted from an open-source template created by a human developer, and the game artwork was drawn by human artists and graphic designers, all of whom are credited in the credits.

If there are mistakes, errors, or inconsistencies in Wayfarer's design, if the lore and worldbuilding is derivative or tropey, that is due to my very human mistakes and decisions. If there are elements of my UI that look bad or don't function smoothly, it's because I am a self-taught coder and I am doing the best with the skills I currently have. I am one person writing and coding an interactive fiction game on my own.

It is mindboggling to me that I even have to say that.

em dash

“not x, not y, but z”

short sentence stacking as a stylistic choice

none of these belong to ai. these are all what human writers have been writing since day one, way before ai was invented. ai was trained to mimic how human writers write — so em dash, not x not y but z and short sentence stacking would never have been used by ai at all if ai hadn’t learned and mimicked them from human writers.

no, you are not “fighting against ai” by accusing every work that has em dash, not x not y but z or short sentence stacking in it as ai-generated, you are helping ai harm the writing community by engaging in witch hunt and scaring human writers away from creating/sharing their works for fear of being wrongly accused of using ai.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Herald/Sidestep (Fallen Hero), Herald & Sidestep (Fallen Hero) Characters: Herald (Fallen Hero), Original Characters Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Years Later, Nostalgia, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied Relationships, Male Sidestep (Fallen Hero), Unnamed Sidestep (Fallen Hero), Whump, Bittersweet Summary:

falling back onto my seph-hermes habits (likely place for me to be frankly) for @chrysanthemumgames 's 6th anniversary, went back and forth trying to figure the what, and rifling through various fine art references. i settled on klimt's the kiss, which is the very obvious inspiration!

was thinking about doing something big and blowout-y for only the release, and leaving the anniversary, since i feel like i'm all over the place right now. buuuut i realised this will very likely be the last 'foa anniversary' while a book is still being written, i am very wistful and bittersweet about it all. in the end, i wound up opening a document and thinking, 'no, i've got to do something!'

Today is, in fact, the 6th anniversary of me starting FoA, and I don't have anything for it except to say that I'm still making my way through writing the epilogue of BotL.

tense negotiations part 2 a different angle