“Are you going to add AI writing to Yarn Spinner?” It’s a question I hear almost weekly these days. Whether at game development conferences, online, or during meetings, there’s an assumption that every tool is racing to implement some form of generative AI. I understand the curiosity—we’re living through an unprecedented wave of AI hype, and there’s genuine confusion about where these technologies might fit into creative processes. So I thought I’d share some thoughts on why we’re taking a different path.
As co-founder of Yarn Spinner, I’ve reviewed countless examples of AI-generated narrative content. The verdict? Uniformly disappointing—derivative, hollow, and lacking the coherent creative thread that defines meaningful human expression. This isn’t just opinion; it’s why we’ve taken an uncompromising position: Yarn Spinner will never integrate AI that writes for you.
What strikes me about AI-generated stories, dialogue, and characters is their inherent mimicry. These systems don’t create—they rearrange existing patterns from their training data. The results feel like pale echoes of authentic work, with a distinctive blandness that comes from averaging thousands of human voices into statistical patterns. Even the most “impressive” AI-generated narratives fall apart under scrutiny. They meander without purpose, introduce plot elements they forget about, and create characters without consistent motivations. The creative thread—that intentional through-line that guides meaningful work—is conspicuously absent.
This isn’t merely a technical limitation to be overcome with more data or better algorithms. It’s a fundamental issue: AI systems lack lived experience, cultural understanding, and authentic purpose—all essential elements of meaningful creative work. When humans craft stories, they draw upon personal struggles, cultural tensions, and genuine emotions. AI simply cannot access these wellsprings of authentic creation. It can only simulate their surface patterns, producing work that feels uncanny and hollow—recognisable as creative work in form but not in substance.
Beyond the quality issues, we must confront the ethical problems. These AI systems are trained by scraping millions of human-created works without permission or compensation. They represent a massive appropriation of creative labour—taking without giving back. Using such systems means benefiting from this problematic extraction. It legitimises a model where human creators are exploited rather than valued.
To be crystal clear: Yarn Spinner has absolutely no plans to incorporate generative AI into our products—not now, not ever. We’ve seen the disappointing results these systems produce, and we’ve witnessed their failure to generate narratives with the depth, coherence, and meaning that human writers create naturally. Some suggest AI could have limited applications as tools under human control. But even for these narrow use cases, we remain unconvinced at the moment. The risks of normalising AI in creative processes outweigh any marginal benefits these systems might offer.
What troubles me most is how AI threatens to devalue human creativity by suggesting that the creative process itself—the vision, the intention, the evolution—doesn’t matter. When we pretend an AI can write “good enough” stories, we misunderstand what stories are: not just words arranged in pleasing patterns, but acts of human connection and meaning-making.
Every game narrative created by a human writer carries their unique perspective and intention. Players don’t just experience content; they engage with another human’s vision of the world. No algorithm can provide this human-to-human connection, regardless of how statistically sophisticated its output might be.
The game industry faces a choice between expediency and authenticity. The path of least resistance leads toward automation—replacing human creativity with algorithmic approximations. This path (questionably) promises cost savings but delivers creatively bankrupt experiences. At Yarn Spinner, we build tools that amplify what creative people can do, never tools that attempt to do the creating for them. We respect the creative process too much to automate it away.
As more creative tools rush to integrate AI that produces weak, derivative content, our stance becomes clearer: we stand for authentic human expression in an industry increasingly willing to settle for less. I invite others to join us in drawing this line. Not because we fear technology, but because we’ve seen what AI-generated content actually delivers—and it’s simply not good enough. Human creativity, with all its messiness and brilliance, remains irreplaceable. And that’s something worth protecting, even when—especially when—the technological tide pushes in the opposite direction.
Cover Image by Patrik Houštecký from Pixabay