AI Policy

The short version

The rules and game text come from the published books. They are not written or rewritten by AI.

The art is made by humans, and none of it is generated. Nothing we publish ourselves carries AI-generated art either. Other publishers make their own call, and we make them declare it, so you can see what you're buying and filter out what you don't want. More on that below.

The game content

The rules text, powers, talents, gear, stat blocks, and similar material in the app come from books we purchased and from licensing agreements with the publishers who made them. We do not bring a publisher's content into the app without an agreement in place, and those agreements are written so the creators earn from their work.

That is why fewer books are usable in the app than are listed in the Emporium. The store lists the full catalog; a title's content comes into the app only once its agreement is signed. We would rather a book wait than bring someone's work in on terms they never agreed to.

If a title you want isn't usable in the app yet, the "I want this" button on its page records your interest, and we share that interest with the publisher. Their own readers asking for it is the most useful thing we can bring to a licensing conversation.

Turning those PDFs into structured data the app can search is done with scripts that parse the files programmatically. It's a data extraction job, similar to OCR but with better handling of things like tables and page layouts.

Extraction doesn't rewrite, summarize, or paraphrase. It moves text from one format into another, so what you see in the app should match the published material.

If you find something that doesn't match your book, that's a bug. Please tell us so we can fix it.

We also don't use AI to write adventures, NPCs, powers, settings, or other game material and then present that material as part of the game.

The app's own writing is a different matter from the books. Some of the interface copy is drafted with AI: labels, help text, the lines that explain an empty screen. A human verifies all of it and rewrites it where it's poor.

Every word of writing in P&P Ready is read personally by a human and written for a human. We're not willing to ship writing that is confusing, unclear, or reads like a machine wrote it.

The artwork

Art in the app is made by humans. We commission some of it, license some as stock art, and take the vector icons from the artists at game-icons.net. None of it is generated, and the artists keep the credit for what they drew.

Anything we publish ourselves holds to the same rule. No book, title, or supplement we produce will carry AI-generated art.

When the project needs new artwork we commission it, which is how we end up holding a clear licence from a named artist who agreed to this use. We would rather ship a plain interface than fill it with images whose ownership nobody can account for.

What we mean by AI-generated

A word this loose is worth pinning down, because a publisher filing a disclosure and a reader reading one need to mean the same thing by it.

AI-generated means the work itself was produced by a model trained on existing images or writing. You described what you wanted and the model made it. Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E produce generated art; a chatbot asked for a chapter produces generated writing.

AI-assisted means a person made the work and a model helped somewhere along the way. Cleaning up a scan, removing a background, upscaling, spelling and grammar, tightening a paragraph the author wrote. The AI features now built into Photoshop, Illustrator and every word processor are assistance, not generation, right up until you ask one of them to invent part of the thing.

That last clause is where the line actually sits. It isn't about which program was open, it's about whether anyone asked software to originate the work. Generative fill inventing a corner of a cover is generation, even though it happened in Photoshop.

Books from other publishers

The Emporium carries books made by other publishers, and we require every publisher to declare the AI used in theirs. Writing and artwork are declared separately, each as no AI use, AI-assisted, or AI-generated, with room to explain the detail. That declaration appears on the book's own page, so you can read it before you buy, and a book with nothing to declare says so: written and illustrated entirely by humans. The Emporium filters on it too, so you can clear the shelf of anything with AI in it.

We used to say we would not carry a book with generated art at all. We changed our mind, because that rule quietly punished honesty: a publisher who declared it truthfully lost the sale, and one who kept quiet did not. Nobody can reliably tell generated art from drawn art by looking, so the rule was never removing generated work from the store. It was removing the label.

So the choice is the publisher's and the declaration is ours to insist on. It is their book, and we said their policies aren't ours to write. What we owe you instead is an honest label and a way to act on it, which is why the filter exists. A publisher who declares nothing and is found to have used generated work has misrepresented their book, and that is what gets a title pulled.

There is one thing we won't stock at all: generated art sold as the product itself. Token packs, map packs, portrait sets, art collections. A book with a generated cover is still a book, and the writing is what you're buying. An art pack is the images, so selling one would make us a shop for generated art rather than a shop that lets publishers make their own call about their own books.

Written content is a question of quality. The books we carry aren't AI-generated, and we'd rather it stayed that way. If a publisher used AI somewhere in the drafting and the writing is genuinely good, we would take it. What we're promising is writing worth reading: read personally by a human, written for a human. A book that doesn't clear that bar doesn't go in the Emporium.

Where we draw the line

Our objection to generated art is that nobody can say where it came from.

These models learned from the work of artists and writers who were never asked, are not credited, and cannot be found in what comes out the other side. A generated image carries their work inside it and names none of them. That is the part we won't build on: not the price, not the quality, but that the consent was never given and the trail cannot be followed.

Every piece of creative work in the app runs the other way. The icons name the artist who drew each one. The illustration is licensed. Commissioned work comes with a licence from the person who made it. The books we carry are covered by agreements with their authors.

So this isn't about whether the artwork looks good enough. It's about whether we can identify who made it and confirm that they agreed to its use. AI-generated artwork can't meet that standard.

That standard applies to what we make and what we publish ourselves. It isn't one we can impose on someone else's book on their behalf. That's why the Emporium asks a different question: not whether we would have made the book the same way, but whether buyers can see how it was made before they decide to purchase it.

Questions

If any of this is unclear, or you think we've drawn the line in the wrong place, feel free to talk to us about it on Discord.

We'd much rather have the conversation than leave people guessing.