Room Escape Artist

An increasingly common question that I get asked is, “How does Room Escape Artist use AI?”

It’s a reasonable question for a website on an internet increasingly filled with bot-made nonsense.

The short answer is that we do not use generative technology to produce any content. The long answer is a bit more interesting and nuanced.

REA’s AI Policy

The stated policy in our internal reviewer/ writer training is:

“REA work is made by people as an act of creativity and expression.” Put another way, we do not allow anyone on the team to use generative tools to substitute for their own creativity, ability, or expression. If one of our writers is struggling to produce, we have people and systems in place to help them through the writers block, find the right photography, or produce the appropriate audio or video content.

Escape rooms are made by people for other people to enjoy. So is our content.

We have multiple training programs to develop the skills of our people. We’re always looking for more ways to help our team develop their talents because we want to make escape room and immersive gaming content that does our community proud. We don’t simply want to be the best within our niche; we want to produce work that stands out in general. This is not possible without skilled, thoughtful, and knowledgeable people.

Generative vs. Software

We draw a strong distinction between generative tools and software in general. What’s the difference?

❌ Generative: tools that mimic human creativity, usually through prompting

✅ Software: programs that support, speed up, or otherwise enhance human work

Put another way, tools that help a person create their own work faster are great. Tools that replace or diminish the role of the creator are not ok.

With this in mind, here are some acceptable uses of AI tools:

• Spell & grammar check
• Image enhancing
• Audio repair
• Transcription
• Ideation

Here are some unacceptable uses of AI tools:

• Writing whole pieces or passages for publication
• Generating images whole cloth
• Generating podcasts or video

Humans Making Things For Humans

A very large portion of the Room Escape Artist Team (including both founders) have backgrounds in tech and Lisa literally trains large language models for a living. We aren’t going to avoid tools that help us do our work better or faster, but we refuse to remove ourselves from the work and the creativity.

At its core, playing an escape room is a deeply human experience. Solving puzzles, playing with friends, and experiencing another person’s act of creation are not the business of bots. Our message to our entire team is that if you reach a point where you’re not enjoying the work, then it’s ok to stop. It’s better to stop than it is to attempt to outsource to a bot who was not there, and cannot comprehend the joys of human experience.

11 years into all of this, we still love the work of Room Escape Artist, and we have endless appreciation for the REA Patreon Members whose financial and moral support make everything that we do possible.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: David, Athena War, Billy Paraskevopoulos, Jacky Chang, Captain Mew, JensenODell, Kelsey Ziegler, Juan Eduardo Elías, Niklas, and Eric Desatnik

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.