Stardew Valley is pure pixel art paradise. You can live the life you want to, decorate your farm how you want, fall in love with whoever your heart desires (within some limits). And, for creator Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone, it’s been his creative passion project for over a decade.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, in an interview with Game Informer (paywalled), the developer is pretty firmly against the use of AI in any creative endeavour. (via GamesRadar).
“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,” Barone told the outlet, emphasising that he wouldn’t ever want to use AI for any sort of creative thing.”
No need to worry about AI in any future patches, or in the upcoming Haunted Chocolatier, then. “My goal is to express myself in a creative way. Why would I let an AI do that for me?”
While Barone acknowledges earlier in the interview that he understands AI’s appeal in “very specific zoomed-in cases, maybe,” (note that maybe), he is very much in-favour of human input.
“At the very least, let another human being express themselves if you need help… There are plenty of humans out there that would like an opportunity to express themselves.” And human expression can lead to human error and human quirks, things that an algorithm will never be able to replicate.
His last words on AI are ” I feel like [human creativity] should take priority over a soulless machine,” which for some reason, feels like a breath of fresh air in 2026.
We know plenty of developers and studios who are taking a firm stance against AI, but it’s hard to escape when studios like Square Enix and legends like Yuji Horii are pushing for genAi and chatbot inclusion in games, or when Sony talks up using AI in game development.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of games that don’t use genAI to replace human creativity, and Stardew and Haunted Chocolatier are just two of them.
In the same interview, Barone teased a little bit more of his follow-up life sim, which is still a ways off of releasing. He said it’ll be “way bigger” that Stardew, which is pretty impressive considering how much has been added to the farming sim over the years.
