Blackwatch uses artificial intelligence.
It uses AI in the creation of music. It uses AI in the creation and animation of imagery. I use it while developing ideas, testing concepts, researching, revising and working through problems.
I don't hide that, and I don't intend to.
I am a single author. I cannot sing. I cannot compose an orchestral score. I cannot paint. I cannot animate. I certainly cannot employ a film crew and build a medieval border keep in the wilderness.
What I can do is tell stories.
And for the first time in my life, technology has made it possible for me to take a world that existed largely inside my head and express it through several different forms at once: prose, music, images and eventually moving pictures.
That is what AI is doing here.
It isn't the reason Blackwatch exists.
It is the reason you can see and hear it.
The criticism of AI is not entirely wrong
There is a strange tendency in discussions about artificial intelligence for everyone to be required to occupy one of two trenches.
Either AI is the miraculous solution to everything, or anyone who touches it should apparently be drawn and quartered somewhere in the public square.
I don't find either position particularly useful.
There are legitimate ethical questions surrounding generative AI.
The most obvious is training data. Artists, writers, photographers, musicians and others created work that was used in the development of some generative systems without necessarily having meaningful control over that use, receiving attribution, or sharing in the value subsequently created.
I think that concern deserves to be taken seriously.
The second concern is simpler.
AI is going to replace some paid work.
In some areas it already has.
There is no intellectually honest way around that.
Years ago, I paid around $1,500 for artwork for a professional project. The artist worked hard. The process took weeks. The final result was competent.
It also wasn't quite what I had imagined.
That wasn't really anyone's fault.
The artist could not see what was inside my head, and I could never describe it with enough precision to make our two mental pictures identical. After enough revisions, friction inevitably develops. The person commissioning the work feels they are still not quite there. The artist quite reasonably becomes tired of making yet another alteration.
Eventually everybody wants the thing finished.
Generative tools change that equation enormously.
I can now pursue an idea through twenty, thirty or fifty iterations without exhausting another human being, spending thousands of dollars, or eventually accepting something simply because continuing the process has become impractical.
That inevitably changes creative industries.
I understand why people within those industries are frightened or angry about it.
But we have seen versions of this transition before
For much of human history, access to information was expensive.
Books were expensive. Encyclopaedias were valuable possessions. Specialist knowledge was difficult to acquire. Tutors and teachers were sometimes the only realistic way to gain access to information that today can be found in seconds.
Then came mass publishing.
Then computers.
Then the internet.
Then Wikipedia, YouTube, online courses, forums and search engines.
Every step made something that once required a specialist easier for an ordinary person to access.
Artificial intelligence is a much larger step, because it doesn't merely retrieve information. It can increasingly help people do things with it.
Creative work is now experiencing a transition that other information-based professions have already been living through for decades.
That doesn't make the consequences painless.
But pretending the transition isn't occurring doesn't make it disappear either.
I use AI in my other life too
When I'm not writing Blackwatch, I work as a doctor.
AI has already changed the way I practise medicine.
One of the least glamorous but most consuming parts of medicine is documentation. Traditionally, that means dividing your attention between the patient and a computer screen, trying to listen, examine, think, remember details and simultaneously produce an adequate record.
AI-assisted documentation allows me to spend substantially more of that consultation actually looking at the person in front of me.
I can listen.
I can examine.
I can think.
At the end, the system can produce a structured draft from the consultation, which I then review, correct and accept responsibility for.
The AI doesn't become the doctor.
I remain the doctor.
Its suggestions are not automatically correct. I reject them when they are wrong. Sometimes it notices something useful. Sometimes I notice something it missed.
That is exactly how I think these tools should be understood.
AI does not remove responsibility from the human using it. It increases what that human can potentially do.
The same principle applies here.
So who actually created Blackwatch?
I did.
The world, characters, themes, history, geography and stories of Blackwatch weren't generated by asking a machine to:
"Make me a cool medieval fantasy universe."
Blackwatch has been built through an absurd number of decisions.
How far one settlement is from another. Where the river runs. What the Crown claims and what it can actually control. How many riders constitute a line. What people eat. Where they sleep. How the walls are constructed. Why a character behaves a particular way. Who dies. Who survives. What somebody thinks they heard while half-conscious. What another person cannot bring themselves to say.
The songs come from those stories.
The images come from those stories.
The music is directed by those stories.
AI participates in turning those ideas into things that can be heard or seen.
It does not decide what Blackwatch means.
I do.
And, very often, the process is anything but instantaneous.
An image may be generated repeatedly because a face is wrong, a wall is wrong, a piece of heraldry is wrong, a road runs in the wrong direction, somebody is standing where they should not be standing, or a castle has suddenly become three times larger than the settlement established in the canon.
Songs go through the same process.
Lyrics are written, rewritten, discarded, reordered and tested. Arrangements are generated and rejected. A technically impressive result can still be useless because it tells the wrong story.
There is curation, revision and direction involved at every stage.
That doesn't make me a singer.
It doesn't make me a painter.
And I have no interest in pretending otherwise.
But neither does pressing a shutter button make the camera responsible for the photograph.
Tools matter. So does the person deciding what to do with them.
Why bother doing any of this?
That probably deserves its own page eventually.
But the short answer is that Blackwatch is interested in ordinary people.
Fantasy is filled with chosen ones, kings, legendary warriors and heroes whose destiny apparently began before they were born.
Blackwatch contains extraordinary people too.
But they are extraordinary mostly because ordinary circumstances eventually demand extraordinary things from them.
That interests me far more.
Medicine has allowed me to see versions of that throughout my adult life.
I have watched apparently ordinary people encounter moments that would break most of us.
I once saw a man brought into hospital from the dance floor at his own wedding under CPR.
He died.
His wife arrived still wearing her wedding dress.
Only hours earlier she had begun what was supposed to be a completely different life.
There are images from medicine that never really leave you.
What remains with me from experiences like that isn't simply death.
It is what people do around it.
Families arriving.
Someone putting their own grief aside because another person needs them more.
People demonstrating courage that they never knew they possessed because circumstances have left them no alternative.
Beauty and tragedy can occupy the same moment.
So can fear and bravery.
So can weakness and extraordinary strength.
Those are the stories that interest me.
Music reaches somewhere prose sometimes cannot
I have always thought music can reach emotional places that writing and imagery struggle to reach alone.
A novel can explain something beautifully.
An image can freeze a moment.
But sometimes a song can make somebody feel the idea before they have consciously articulated what the idea is.
That was one of the reasons the Blackwatch Songbook began.
These aren't intended merely as fantasy songs about swords, castles and battles.
They are another way of exploring the people who inhabit this world.
A rider opening the gate again despite knowing that eventually probability will collect its debt.
A woman doing the work that must be done because everyone else is occupied with surviving.
A community remembering those who did not come home.
The tools used to create the music are artificial.
The reasons for creating it are not.
AI has given me back things I abandoned
I used to write.
I began stories and novels when I was younger and, like many people, gradually allowed the practical demands of life to displace them.
A career in health takes time.
Training takes time.
Family takes time.
Becoming competent at one thing often means accepting that you will never become competent at twenty others.
For a long time I thought that was simply the bargain.
Recently, I changed my mind.
Passion matters.
I came back to flying. I came back to writing. I started building things.
AI has accelerated that process enormously.
It doesn't give me another lifetime in which to become a composer, illustrator, animator, programmer and filmmaker.
It gives me enough leverage that I don't necessarily need those additional lifetimes.
And I think that is genuinely remarkable.
The democratisation of imagination
This is the part of AI that I think gets lost beneath the argument about productivity.
For most of history, there has been a massive gulf between imagining something and being able to show it to somebody else.
You might have an entire world in your head.
But unless you could paint it, compose it, finance it, code it or persuade other people to help you build it, that world largely remained there.
That barrier is falling.
People who cannot draw can create images.
People who cannot sing can explore music.
People who cannot code can build software.
People who would never have called themselves writers can discover that they actually have something they want to say.
Some of what results will be terrible.
Of course it will.
Human beings have been producing terrible paintings, terrible novels, terrible films and terrible songs since the invention of paintings, novels, films and songs.
The existence of bad work has never invalidated the medium.
And yes, you are free to hate it
Some people will see the letters AI and stop there.
That's fine.
I'm not going to persuade everyone.
If somebody wants to call this AI slop, they're welcome to.
Blackwatch isn't being made to win an argument about artificial intelligence.
It's being made because I wanted to tell these stories.
Without AI, there would probably still be a manuscript somewhere on my computer.
With it, there can also be songs.
There can be portraits.
There can be places.
There can be moments from these stories that exist outside my imagination.
Eventually there can be movement, voices, landscapes and scenes that I could never have created alone.
I think that's worth doing.
So, the disclaimer
For anyone who simply wants the answer without the essay:
Blackwatch uses generative artificial intelligence extensively and deliberately.
AI tools may be used in the production of artwork, music, animation, video, research assistance, development, editing and other supporting creative work.
The lore, characters, narrative, themes, worldbuilding, creative direction, selection, revision and final responsibility for the project remain mine.
I do not claim to have painted images I did not paint.
I do not claim to have sung songs I did not sing.
I claim to have created Blackwatch.
And these are some of the tools that finally allowed me to show you what was in my head.
Still We Keep
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Mira
Anya
Brenimir
Draven
Katya
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Roderik
Marek
Pavel
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Greta
