Don’t dismiss AI as a creative tool

The backlash is in full force. I see more negative stories about AI than I do positive ones right now.

That’s understandable. Concerns about copyright, jobs, environmental impact, weaponisation, security are all sensible. But we shouldn’t ignore the fact that AI is also an incredibly powerful creative tool. One that doesn’t just regurgitate but allows the creative remixing of knowledge - with the right operator at the controls. I don’t believe this generation of AI can ever generate true originality. But as a tool it can be used to realise original things, incredibly quickly.

Here’s an example from this weekend.

Gaslands

I’m a nerd. A nerd who likes cars. And sci-fi. And games. So it should be no surprise that I like sci-fi car games.

The cover of the rulebook for Gaslands Refuelled, a sci-fi car game.

Gaslands is a sort of DIY sci-fi car game. They provide the rulebook, you bring everything else. All the dice, tokens, scenery, and toy cars you need to make it work. Ever see either of the Death Race films (original or remake)? It’s that: racing and jousting with armed cars.

I played it with a friend for the first time on Friday night. And it’s brilliant. We raced around his table using candles and fruit as obstacles.

The only challenge was the rules. There are a lot! And the first time you play it through, it’s a lot to get your head around. Plus, we were drinking and chatting while playing. Sometimes it was a little hard to remember where we were up to.

Bonjour Claude

So, on Saturday morning I started throwing some ideas into Claude Code, the AI-assisted coding tool. What if we could have an AI games master that we could talk to. That recorded where we were at, acted as a verbal resource for the rules, and allowed us to just focus on the play. Even better, what if it took on a role from the game’s world? A sort of adjudicator in both function and tone?

This is the sort of thing I could have imagined a long time ago. And given enough time, I could probably get close to building something pretty shonky. But with Claude Code I had a slick, functioning prototype - with voice commands - within an hour or two.

Screenshot from Gaslands Control, an AI games master application

Let’s be clear: I might have been able to make this without the AI assistant, trawling through forums and help docs to work out how to do it. But I never would have been able to find the time to get it to the level of polish it is at now, after just a couple of hours. Without AI it would have taken me months.

And yes, I am going to go the whole hog, and customise the old laptop it runs on to make it feel in keeping with the game. Other possible future upgrades include adding computer vision so that it can ‘see’ the game space and keep track of what’s happening.

Tools for anyone?

People say anyone can do this now, and that’s not quite true. My coding skills may be awful (once described by a more proficient friend as “making his inner geek sad”) but I know enough to understand what it is that Claude is doing (mostly), to tell it to stop when it’s going wrong, and to help it understand why things aren’t working when they don’t. I have the infrastructure to run this stuff and I understand how it works - servers, domains, ssl certificates etc.

But none of that stuff is particularly hard to learn. And once you’ve got it, you have just about the most powerful creative tool ever imagined.

All you need is an idea.