How We Use AI

June 2026

At Studio Zisha we use AI to help build Stone of Commitment. Rather than leave you to guess what that means, here is the complete and specific version, in two parts: why I, Founder and Creative Director, use AI to make this game, and what the studio commits to as a whole.

AI raises real concerns that we take seriously: the environmental cost of compute, the displacement of human artists whose livelihoods depend on their craft, and the fact that most AI models were built on creative work that was used without the knowledge or consent of the people who made it. We are not outside these tensions. We operate inside them, and we hold ourselves to being honest about every choice we make.

Why I use AI

From Dani, Founder and Creative Director

I'm the person who writes this game, and I'd rather tell you how I work than let you assume.

I'm AuDHD (autistic and ADHD). I can hold a hundred threads of canon in my head at once; what's genuinely impossible for me is turning that tangle into a first draft that makes sense to anyone else. Getting the messy interior version out of my head and onto the page in a shape another person can read is the wall I hit every time. AI is how I get over it. It helps me turn the spaghetti into a rough first pass. Then I do what I've always done: shape it, rewrite it, throw out what's wrong, and decide what's actually true to these characters.

The authorship is mine. The judgment is mine. Nothing reaches a player that I haven't read, reworked, and stood behind. The tool helps me clear the runway; it does not fly the plane.

Here's the honest version: I would have quit on day two of building this game without AI assistance. The idea was too big to hold in my head, and the blank page wins every standoff it gets. What kept me going was having something to think out loud against, a whiteboard that talked back, that held the threads I kept dropping and pushed on the parts that weren't working yet. The story got made because I finally had a way to focus it. For a disabled creator, that can be the whole difference between a game that exists and one that stays stuck in your head. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I'm not going to hide behind "we" to say it.

What Studio Zisha commits to

The studio holds a set of commitments that don't change with who's at the keyboard.

The writing is human-authored and human-approved. Every character, plot beat, line of dialogue, and rule of the relationship systems is decided by a person before anyone plays it. We have roughly 800 pages of authored story canon, and every line of it passed through a human who decided it was right. AI assists the drafting; it never gets the final word.

Story, character, and consent systems are non-negotiable human territory. The canon, the characters' psychology, and the consent mechanics that govern how trust and intimacy work in this game are authored and held by people. That line does not move.

Our visual art is AI-generated right now, and here's the honest why. None of us are trained artists or animators, though we make deliberate choices about how the AI-generated art looks. We also won't do the thing small teams used to do, which is quietly "borrow" someone else's work and hope nobody notices; we're not willing to build this on top of another creator's stolen work. But games are a visual medium, and we can't playtest a world you can't see. So until we have the funding to properly pay the artists, animators, and other creators who will help us build this game, AI-generated art is the bridge we're using to get there. We're not pretending it's a permanent answer. Every AI-generated asset we ship will be labeled as such, and as funding allows we will bring on human artists to replace it, not to build on top of it.

In-game, AI drives how the characters respond, not what they're made of. The companions remember how you've treated them and respond to it across sessions, instead of tracking points on an affinity meter. That responsiveness is powered by AI. It is not a chatbot improvising your story: the writing and the characters are authored, and the AI works inside those boundaries to make the relationships feel lived-in. When the system ships, we'll explain exactly how it works.

We don't consider ourselves exempt from the hard parts. The real concerns here apply to us too: the livelihoods of working artists, models trained on creative work without consent, the environmental cost of compute. We'd rather name them and state our choices plainly than disappear into careful language.

We'll keep this page current as the game, the studio, and our understanding change. When we get something wrong, we'd rather you be able to see exactly where. That's the entire reason this page exists.