.: Our (TastySpleen Studios) Generative Content Policy :.

At this present moment, there's a lot of noise and confusion over the capabilities, boundaries, and hidden costs of language/diffusion-model generated content. This extends to images, video, text, audio, the whole works. The most drama I'm seeing as a result of these things is simply that of not having a defined stance around these topics, so it seems prudent to have one. This seems like a difficult task with the pace of evolution, both technologically and socially, these technologies are experiencing; it may be better in the long run to identify some failure states and maintain some guiding principles even as the situation changes.

Quake, in the broadest sense of the word, is a collaborative scene. This can be generalized out to any gaming scene with an abundance of player-driven activity and content. For myself and many others, the games of id software represent this in the strongest possible way: over the years we have built communities, map packs, authoring tools, tournaments, LAN events, and a whole damn industry. Doom and Quake are foundational, and they have remained so purely on the back of those who carry domain knowledge and pass that torch forward. 

It would be impossible to describe here the number of ways this manifests, but if you're reading this, there's a good chance you know what I'm talking about. Whether you're mapping, making textures, tinkering with engine forks, maintaining websites and ladders, streaming, hosting servers (and so on), you have been able to access a body of knowledge established by those that came before you. If you're of a certain age, you've likely enshrined some of that knowledge yourself, and seen the positive effects it has on others. 

I'm far from the only one who's life has been significantly altered by this mountain of technical and artistic wizardry. Like many others, my interest and career were jump-started by people willing to show me the ropes, or at least inspire me to accomplish something with a well-worn path in front of me. Being able to do this is increasingly rare as commercial games tend towards being locked-down and immutable, culling any potential for enthusiastic players to really get involved. Being able to learn from others and contribute to the scene is important and something I'd like to maintain.

Which brings me to the heart of my stance on generative content. A lot of output can be spun out at rapid pace, and I'm not going to call any of it entirely worthless. There's value in being able to see an idea come more-or-less to life in front of you almost as fast as you can think about it.

However, I cannot help viewing generative content as having an inherent cooling effect on collaborative efforts. There is a break in the continuity of learning skills and tools that can be passed on to the next person, and this is what I want to protect. This is far from an objective (or permanent, as things evolve) stance, but it's one built from my observations on how people receive such works. The spark of "that's cool, how'd you do that, how can I do that" starts to fade when every form of that has the same answer. The need to reach out for help on the things you aren't as good at gets diminished, and everyone is given a lot of agency (heh) to take their ball and go home. Not that this doesn't happen already; not everyone gets along, but insofar as creators are made to rely on each other for support and guidance, that's something I'd like to protect. 

At this time, I'm not making an argument from the standpoint of quality, ease of use, 'gatekeeping', or any other elements to this puzzle that I think will change rapidly. I do however think that the issues surrounding co-dependence for the community will persist, if not worsen. 

All that said, we will maintain our blanket ban on generated content presented as contributable assets. Midnight Guns has a few stray assets of this nature from a few years back, and they'll be scrubbed out. At the time, novelty overshadowed some of the emerging issues, and now's the time to get ahead of them.

Note that this policy is meant to establish our stance on ingame assets, tooling, website design, etc. This does not, in itself, cover related topics like memes, codebases (avoiding libraries is going to be increasingly tricky) or other aspects of this brave new world we're entering. I'm only trying to draw a circle around the content we create for others to enjoy and hopefully participate in.

-- jehar