"The goal is to put creators first and make sure their work is protected"
Olivia Tunkelo and Jari Pauna tell us how Brimstone AI will help writers plan and improve game narratives.
Welcome to the latest edition of the AI Gamechangers newsletter. Each week, we’re sharing exclusive interviews with industry leaders who are working at the intersection of AI and games.
Today, we’re speaking with the team behind Brimstone AI, a narrative tool for game writers. We talk about their privacy-first editorial assistant and their focus on analysing and improving content rather than generating it.
Scroll to the end for hot news on SAG-AFTRA’s latest AI protections, web3 games, layoffs at AMD, and more, including a 40-minute video to watch from October’s Big Screen Gaming Summit.
Feel free to forward this to your colleagues, and please check back next week when we will meet Davy Chadwick of PopScreen Games.
Olivia Tunkelo and Jari Pauna, Brimstone AI
Meet the CEO and COO of Finnish startup Brimstone AI. Brimstone AI is a real-time narrative editor with proprietary tools that are designed to save content writers time. It’s not about generating text. Instead, Brimstone AI helps maintain accuracy and consistency across big projects. If you’re at the Slush event this week, look out for the Brimstone AI folk!
Top takeaways in this interview:
Brimstone AI positions itself as a writing assistant that protects creative ownership - using private LLM model instances for each user with no data retention or training on your content.
Rather than writing text for you, the platform focuses on providing editorial feedback and checking for consistency (valuable for studios managing complex narratives across products).
The platform offers collaboration features with configurable access levels. And it achieves good performance with significantly less training data by focusing on analysis rather than generation.
AI Gamechangers: Olivia has a background in esports and TTRPG campaign writing. Could you share that story and how it led to your founding of Brimstone AI?
Olivia: I was working on a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign and was looking for apps that would better help with organising a large project and help speed up working on lots of different characters and backstories. When looking on the market to find one, all the tools left me wanting more, which led to the original idea for a great world-building tool.
After showing the idea to many industry professionals, the feedback indicated a strong demand for modernised tools that respect the creative ownership of written works. I then sought out Diego [Gil] and Jari to partner up with and begin building our own take on a writing support platform with modern tools.
With your combined backgrounds, how did you come together to work on Brimstone AI? Please talk us through how you set up the company and what its mission and purpose are.
Olivia: I felt strongly about putting creators first when building this app, so I first sought out technical expertise and found Diego, who has extensive experience as a software engineer and startup founder.
“Human creativity is unmatched, and AI can only create what has already been created. This is why AI will most benefit users in research, editing and fact-checking”
Olivia Tunkelo
I then approached Jari because of his background in game development and, specifically, game development with a more out-of-the-box modern technology. Between the three of us, the understanding of the different markets and the needs of future customers became clear. After iterating many times on the initial idea, the MVP development started.
The goal is to put creators first and make sure their work is protected, and their jobs are made safe in the growing push for AI to replace them.
What specific gaps did you identify in the market that Brimstone AI aims to fill?
Olivia: We believe that the boom of LLMs generating entire text for users is completely skipping over the creative writer market. While LLMs can be useful for smaller businesses and people with limited resources, large companies will still need to use real creative writers to achieve the expected level of quality for their projects. Those professionals do not want to use LLMs due to their unethical use of training data and copyright approach. That entire market is currently uncatered to and we aim to fill that void.
Ethics are a big issue when it comes to AI. Could you elaborate on your approach to data protection and how you ensure writers maintain full ownership of their work?
Olivia: We do not use user data to train our base models. Each user will have a unique branch where the model uses their data as context to better serve their needs. If a user wants to delete their branch, they can do so and the data as well as that model are deleted from our end, too. This gives users full control and confidence that nobody else can steal their work or their data and plagiarise it under the mask of AI-generated works.
There's concern in the creative community about AI training on copyrighted works. How does Brimstone AI address these ethical concerns in its development and operation?
Olivia: Instead of buying data from third-party sources where we cannot verify the ethical origin of it, we are training our own models, and hiring writers for the explicit purpose of making models where all the training data comes from a known source.
“Brimstone AI does not generate text for users for them to claim as their own. Instead, it simply analyses and gives feedback”
Olivia Tunkelo
Since we don’t generate the entire text for our users, our models require a lot less data to perform at the highest level.
When OpenAI and other LLM giants are spending billions to reach their performance goals, we can achieve that with a fraction of the cost. This ensures that any help our users receive comes from an ethical source.
How do you balance AI assistance with preserving the authentic creative voice of writers?
Olivia: Brimstone AI does not generate text for users for them to claim as their own. Instead, it simply analyses and gives feedback, much like an editor from a publishing company would. This means that any changes the user makes based on the AI feedback is still their own. We want to champion human creativity and allow them to decide what pieces of feedback they want to use.
How do you see Brimstone AI specifically benefiting game development studios?
Jari Pauna: Writing for video games is often difficult, and especially in narrative-led games, there’s a huge amount of text, usually with branching and interconnecting storylines. When a studio or publisher is fortunate enough to create sequels or long-running franchises, this complexity is multiplied.
Brimstone AI can take care of consistency, spot errors, and check facts, among other things. All of these are of paramount importance for players as they don’t want anything to break the immersion. Using a tool like Brimstone AI would save both time and money.
Your platform mentions collaboration features for editors, publishers, and fans. Could you walk us through how these different stakeholders might interact within Brimstone?
Olivia: Most professional writers must go through multiple review processes or simply want to share their work in an easy manner. Brimstone allows for sharing at different levels, where the original author controls how collaborators can interact with their story. They can publish a read-only version for users to read or add options for comments or edits depending on what type of stakeholder is working on it. We want to make sure that it is also very transparent when someone uses feedback from Brimstone AI so that there is no confusion.
Where do you see AI-assisted creative writing tools heading in the next five years? Which disciplines or skill sets stand to benefit most from AI?
Olivia: We believe that the future of AI sees more tools that simply help guide writers rather than replace them. Human creativity is unmatched, and AI can only create what has already been created.
“We do not use user data to train our base models. Each user will have a unique branch where the model uses their data as context to better serve their needs”
Olivia Tunkelo
This is why AI will most benefit users in research, editing and fact-checking areas for writers. These skills can be easily substituted to allow people to do what they excel at – coming up with new ideas.
Brimstone AI will be at Slush this month, in Helsinki. And you were just at PG Connects Helsinki, too. Finland has such a strong presence in the games industry. How do you envision Brimstone AI contributing to (and even transforming) the Nordic creative tech ecosystem?
Olivia: We’ve shown demonstrations of Brimstone AI at work to creative writers in different industries in Nordics and the rest of the world, and the feedback has been unanimous – they want it now. The hunger for a tool that can help writers compete with AI generation is strong, and we believe that we are building the new standard for the entire industry. Game development has always been at the forefront of many technological advancements, and we plan to be the next step in writing!
Further down the rabbit hole
Your handy digest of what’s new in the world of games and AI this week:
SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents actors and other entertainment professionals, has introduced its new “Independent Interactive Localization Agreement”, which includes AI protections. Over 130 video game projects are now signed to SAG-AFTRA's interim and independent agreements.
The BlockchainGamer.biz site canvassed a number of industry leaders about what impact they think AI will have on web3 games. It’s a great long read with some big names in blockchain discussing AI’s role as a transformative force. The site followed this with an opinion column by Corey Wilton of Mirai Labs, discussing autonomous AI characters and how they might work with hypercasual games in the TON web3 ecosystem.
There are two weeks until Immersive Tech Week in the Netherlands. The Rotterdam conference features AI as one of its topics alongside its regular VR and AR content.
The grand Slush event takes place in Helsinki this week! The programme includes a number of AI items, including a panel on Wednesday on “Policy, Privacy and Progress: Europe's Vision for AI” featuring Google DeepMind, MIT Technology Review and the Centre for European Policy Studies, and two days of AI showcases on the Startup Stage.
Chip maker AMD, which has struggled to make progress in AI chip sales against its big rival Nvidia, is laying off 4% of its workforce.
At the Big Screen Gaming Summit in Helsinki last month, there was a panel entitled “How the Newest AI Models Can Benefit Your Game Production” featuring Dave Bradley, Jari Pauna, Oz Silahtar, Tomi Huttula and Nasser Elmasri. The panellists discussed AI's role in enhancing productivity rather than replacing human input, how small teams can leverage AI to compete with larger studios, how quality continues to improve, and the next focus areas for AI development. You can see the recording here: