AI on the box, only when it's in the product

Take two 7Sail products built with AI, and two opposite ways of talking about them. Grimoire Culinaire, a recipe app in private beta, puts AI capture at the heart of its pitch: you photograph a handwritten recipe, dictate one, or paste a URL, and the app turns it into a structured card. Galactic Rogue, a roguelite published on itch, does not say a word about AI on its page. Yet I used it heavily to build the game: review agents, multi-perspective audits, an entire production pipeline.

That is not an inconsistency, it is a decision. In the first case, AI is a feature the user touches. In the second, it is a manufacturing tool the player will never see. The box talks about the product, not the workshop.

Disclosing and selling are two different acts, and I treat them differently. On disclosure, my position is simple: yes, always when it is necessary. When a platform asks, when generated content ships in the distributed package, you say so.

I have already written about shipping AquaTube, my media player: at publish time, itch asks whether the product contains AI-generated content. The app icon came from a generative tool. Box checked, without hesitation. Not because the platform requires it, but out of consistency: transparency about how something was made belongs in the same file as licenses and assets. Hiding the AI to look more handcrafted would stain the very file I had just put in order. Hiding it: no, never.

The selling point obeys a different rule: AI only goes on the box if it genuinely adds something to the final product.

Grimoire passes that filter. The user triggers the capture themselves, and behind it, the app routes calls between OpenAI and Gemini, a primary provider and a fallback. If I cut those calls tomorrow, the app's core promise would collapse: no more photo capture, no more dictation, no more structuring. The AI is the feature. Putting it front and center is not opportunistic marketing, it is describing the product.

Galactic Rogue does not pass it. AI sped up my production, reviewed my code, audited my plans. But the binary the player downloads embeds no model and makes no calls. The player never touches it. Talking about it in a technical devlog, gladly: that is honest material about the making of the game. On the game's page, no. That would be selling the workshop instead of the game.

To decide, a single question: if I removed the AI tomorrow, who loses what?

If the user loses a feature, the AI is in the product and it has earned its place on the box. If I am the only one who loses something, production time, tooling comfort, then it deserves a disclosure line wherever one is required, and nothing more. Grimoire falls in the first case, Galactic Rogue in the second, and that is all it takes to explain the difference between the two pitches.

This position annoys both camps, which is probably a good sign.

On one side, the AI-powered badge slapped on anything and everything, as if the presence of a model somewhere were a quality in itself. That is a lie by inflation: selling a manufacturing ingredient as product value. On the other, total denial to flatter the ambient anti-AI mood, up to and including hiding a disclosure checkbox or dressing a tool up as handwork. That is a lie by omission, and it is even more fragile, because a single question is enough to crack it.

Both postures lie about the product. Mine is less spectacular: AI is a very good tool when you know how to use it. Not a magic wand to wave around, not a shame to conceal. A tool. You judge the result, and you say how it was made when it needs saying.

Three verbs, three rules. Use: freely, wherever the tool makes the work better or faster, with no soul-searching. Disclose: systematically whenever it is necessary, because transparency about the making belongs to the same hygiene as licenses. Sell: only what is true, meaning only when the user touches the AI and depends on it.

A studio does not need a position on AI in general. It needs a rule that decides, product by product, what goes on the box. Mine fits in one question: who loses what if I take it out?