How Nexus uses AI

The short version

You run the game. Nexus carries bookkeeping. AI appears in narrow places, such as drafting a name, finding a rule, or summarizing a session, only when you ask. Nothing enters your campaign unless you accept it, and the product remains useful with AI switched off.

Five commitments

1. The GM owns the story. AI suggestions are drafts to take, edit, or throw out. There is no automatic publishing and no auto-running your game.
2. We do not train models on your content. We do not train models on your campaign, compendium content, or anything else we hold; our providers process API requests under terms that prohibit training on that traffic. The one carve-out is BYOK: that traffic runs under your own agreement with your provider, not ours. Read your provider's terms before connecting a key.
3. Your campaign stays yours. An AI request carries the context it needs and nothing else. We tune features on aggregate outcomes, not campaign content. Each request's prompt and response are also recorded in PostHog, our analytics processor, so we can debug failures. Those records never train a model.
4. AI costs are visible. Usage is measured in the product. Standard bundles a pooled AI allowance into its flat monthly price with no overage charge; BYOK runs your own Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini key and passes that provider's cost through with no markup.
5. AI can be off. Campaign-level switches govern text, image, and transcription features. Compendium, maps, campaign management, and live play continue without an AI request.

Check our work, don't just trust it

Every AI-generated image produced since September 2026 ships with a signed C2PA provenance manifest recording that it was AI-generated, which provider and model made it, and — where the image was generated from a licensed artist reference — which artist's reference it was derived from. That manifest is checkable by anyone who reads it back out of the file, not just asserted by us. See Security if you find one that doesn't hold up. Images made before September 2026 are labeled but carry no signature.

AI-generated content is labeled where you see it. You always know when you're talking to the co-pilot instead of a person, and public compendium images generated by AI stay visibly marked as such until a human artist supersedes them.

Narrative Nexus is listed as a conformant Generator Product on the C2PA Conforming Products List. To check any file yourself, drop it into the Content Credentials verifier.

We built that signing pipeline before the EU's AI-labeling requirement took effect for us, because a product that touches art and text needs provenance on its own merits, not because a regulator asked. That's an engineering commitment, not a legal certification — no such certification exists to hold, and a signed manifest is one piece of what the labeling rule asks for, not the whole of it.

Tools are not creators

A tool that finds a rule or drafts a recap leaves creative decisions with a person. We do not want an AI game master, AI players, or a substitute for the person behind the screen.

We do not sell AI-generated art. Our compendium uses original writing and openly licensed material, with attribution shown where it appears. Books we do not have the right to use are not fed into a model or reproduced in the product.

Human art has a different boundary

Public compendium placeholder images that are AI-generated remain visibly disclosed. They may only be superseded through approved human-art controls; a generated image is never silently presented as a human-made commission.

When an Artist Network commission is delivered, it is signed with a credential that names the artist, and deliberately carries no AI digital-source-type — the platform did not watch the work get made, so it does not assert how it was made. We mark what's AI so what's human stays credible.

Artists can tell us how they want to participate in the Artist Network interest intake. That intake is not an account, commission offer, license, or request for artwork. It does not grant us training, reference, publication, or other rights in an artist's work. Invited beta artists can keep portfolio pieces, drafts, experiments, references, and works in progress private in Studio unless they later approve an exact controlled public derivative.

Why use AI at all?

Some narrow uses help people stay in the game. A running recap lets a table pick up the thread after a missed week. Transcription helps when speech moves faster than attention. Rules lookup keeps play moving. None of that replaces a creator. It clears the path back to the table.

We use the smallest practical model, retrieve instead of regenerate, and cache aggressively. The campaign master switch turns off that campaign's AI features, and the rest of the product keeps working. It is campaign-scoped, not account-wide: safety checks on uploads and features outside any campaign keep running.

Questions we expect

Changelog

• 2026-09-19: Disclosed that each AI call is recorded in PostHog, our analytics processor, for debugging, and corrected the master-switch and data FAQ answers to say what the switch does not stop.
• 2026-09-08: Every AI-generated image is now signed with a C2PA manifest by a trust-listed certificate, not just licensed-reference artwork. Added our C2PA Conforming Products List listing and a link to the public Content Credentials verifier.
• 2026-08-22: Added the provenance section: signed C2PA manifests on licensed-reference AI artwork and Artist Network commission deliveries, and a BYOK carve-out on the no-training commitment.
• 2026-07-27: Added per-ruleset AI feature switches and the creator policy page at /creators. Stonetop is switched off across the board.
• 2026-07-24: Added the Artist Network interest path and the boundary between private artist materials and disclosed public compendium placeholders.
• 2026-07-23: First published.