Ai

Marcus Pemberton had always been a man of systems. He colour-coded his socks, alphabetised his spice rack twice weekly, and maintained a spreadsheet for optimal toothbrush replacement frequency. So when the Aggregate Intelligence Corporation released ARIA-7, promising to synthesise any amount of information into digestible summaries, Marcus saw not just convenience— But destiny. “Right then,” he announced to his empty flat, adjusting his reading glasses with surgical precision. “Time to understand everything....

The Australian Public Service’s (APS) official culture of AI adoption is not found in the glossy press releases of its ministers. But we’ll get to that shortly. The real story of AI adoption is revealed in the quiet, conflicting, and deeply secretive actions of its most senior bureaucrats. A case in point: Hamish Hansford. Hansford is not a mid-level manager; he is the Department of Home Affairs’ Head of National Security, the Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, and the National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator....

While the rest of the world loses its collective mind over artificial intelligence, Tasmania is sitting on an amazing competitive advantage… and might be about to throw it away by jumping on the AI bandwagon. Everything that makes Tasmania economically successful is the exact opposite of what AI represents. And if Tasmanian businesses start chasing AI “efficiency” instead of leveraging their authentic advantages, they’ll transform from premium producers into generic commodity suppliers....

I get it. I disagree with it, but I get it. The tech industry is throwing obscene amounts of money at LLMs. VCs are salivating over AI startups. The big important executives are regularly bleating about how “we should integrate ChatGPT into our game” because they read some Medium article about the future of interactive entertainment. But as narrative designers, we need to call this what it is: a massive distraction from what makes game characters work....

The Deeper Problems with AI in Creative Work “But AI will get better at writing stories, won’t it?” This response to my rant about AI-generated content misses the point entirely. Even if AI writing improved dramatically tomorrow, fundamental problems would remain that no algorithm refinement can fix. The environmental cost alone should give us pause. Training even a small LLM produces carbon emissions equivalent to the output of several cars, over their entire lifetimes, and each query consumes significant energy....

“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....