Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone would never use AI, instead wants to rely on human creativity—'I feel like that should take priority over a soulless machine'

Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone, creator of Stardew Valley, one of the most impactful indie games of the last decade and dev behind the upcoming highly anticipated Haunted Chocolatier, knows a thing or two about being creative. And like many other creatives he's recently been touting the importance of human-made art and listening to your gut instead of relying on a machine to drop prompts in your lap.

"I think anything’s lost when you use AI for any creative thing, any step of the way—unless it’s being used for very specific zoomed-in cases, maybe," Barone says in an interview with GameInformer. "You’re offloading creativity to an algorithm, which I think is always gonna undermine the pure and authentic human element of what you’re doing."