This year, we have some news and updates on the usual rules. I think that the last year was a culmination of something I’ve been talking about all these years, about stretching the boundaries between international communities and such. And so, with the success of the past year, the rules of this year are a continuation of those. Plus one addition:
This year, generative AI is completely prohibited. As always, this competition is designed for the community; there’s no sense in having machines competing in.
Also, all ECTOCOMP games in both cathegories cannot be updated/upgraded during the competition (refer to the rules for more details).
And finally, this year I am not alone. @alyshkalia and @malacostraca are helping along! So hopefully this edition will be better than ever.
That is, you can start joining and planning your spooky games.
The comp page still has some loose ends, so please be patient. Alternatively, you can report any issues to us via private messages, through this channel, or by email. Thanks!
Really interested in submitting my supernatural IF dating sim to this game jam.
I was wondering if y’all have exclusivity rules? I couldn’t tell from the itchio page if I could submit to other jams as well.
I also wanted to check that NSFW is permitted so long as appropriately tagged with clear warnings on it.
I’m not into body horror (or other NSFW style of horror/spooky) so no promises, but perhaps I’ll donate a little “out-of-comp” work (of course uploaded on the IF archive and in the announcement thread here)
I suppose translation tools use generative AI, so it’s difficult to completely prohibit it for those who want to offer a game in a language that isn’t their own.
I have no idea what translation tools use. I normally use Google Translate and it does a fair job, but it’s sometimes laughable, so I don’t think it uses generative AI. Does anyone know what Google uses?
Anyway, you’re only using translation tools to translate text that you wrote yourself, so I’m sure that would be fair use.
What if someone decides that their English could use a little polishing up, so uses an LLM-based translator to translate it into French and then back into AI-polished English?
I was under the impression that generative AI is specifically used to generate something wholesale, and if taken that way the rule as written would seem to allow AI translation (or AI upscaling of an existing image to use as a game cover). “AI” is more a marketing buzzword than a specific technology anyway.
Without derailing the thread too much, machine translations and grammar/spelling checkers do use large language models and other tools considered to be part of “generative AI”. With this in mind, a full prohibition would be like saying never use your smartphone spell-checker if you want to avoid generative AI.
There are other ethical problems with machine translations, but like Damon, I was under the impression that EctoComp and other competitions and jams were against wholesale generation and not derived from your work.
Quality? No. Sort-of-if-you-squint-just-right things that appear complete and gamelike? Possibly, yes. (There were a couple of IFComp entries which used some kind of chatgpt-based system to generate a playable series of prompts, for instance.)
Confused about the confusion re: the AI rule. “Generative AI, for game text, art, or coding, is strictly forbidden” seems quite clear. I know this tech is still new, but “what about spellcheck” always feels like such a bad faith response in these types of discussions. (Is anyone honestly worried that games will be DQ’ed for spellcheck?)
I’ll echo what others have said, which is that generative “AI” is, per IBM, software that “can create original content such as text, images, video, audio or software code in response to a user’s prompt or request” (emphasis mine). Both in the wording of the rule and the context of community discussions about this kind of thing, the organizers’ concern is clearly the creation of original content. Spellcheck may use machine learning, but it’s applied to content that a human user created (even if it’s sometimes transformative in suggesting a different word or sentence structure); ditto translation programs (more transformative than spellcheck, but they still don’t create the content that’s transformed).
So let any honest anxiety over spellcheck evaporate, and have a good think about whether you want to trust your writing to the mangle of translation software that you can’t adequately review, haha.
No need, AI tools like Grammarly will already do that with no intermediate step needed.
I’ll defer to the organizers but other comps with AI bans typically make an exception for AI translation and spelling/grammar checkers if only because it’s increasingly hard to find a version of them that doesn’t leverage AI. I think this is ideologically consistent since the goal is to touch up your original work instead of creating it for you wholesale, but I’m also cranky because in my opinion the older tools were better.
I look forward to it! Ectocomp and Spring Thing are my two favorite interactive fiction events. I hope we get lots of support from authors and players. Perhaps we could get some discussion threads, too!
Thanks also for—derail potential aside—taking a position regarding generative AI (I applaud Spring Thing here, too).
Yes, what we’re prohibiting is the use of generative AI to create new code/text/art. Translation services that use AI tools aren’t wholesale generating new content, so they are allowed under the rules.
(As a reminder, we aren’t here to police entries, but we do reserve the right to disqualify any entries that are clearly trying to skirt the rules or push the limits of what’s allowed. The spirit of the genAI ban is “you should be the author of what you submit”!)
