When AI fumbles, the do-over is on us

LiveTale safeguards Generative AI's output with known best practices, but the AI's statistical model sometimes generate content with noticeable mistakes. Sometimes it draws your character twice in the same shot. Sometimes it gives the villain three arms. Sometimes you pick a specific plot for the next scene and the narrator opens with a different story.

We've been discussing about how to handle those moments honestly. The conclusion we landed on: if our AI didn't deliver what it was supposed to, you shouldn't pay for the do-over.

Today we're rolling that idea out across two surfaces.

Image regen: free when the picture's off

When you click Regenerate on a scene image, we now run a quick vision check on the image before asking you to confirm. The check looks for four specific failure modes:

• Duplicate characters (your character or an NPC drawn twice in the same frame)
• Mismatched character (the figure in the scene doesn't match their portrait at a basic level: wrong race, completely different hair color, opposite gender, wrong clothing class)
• Anatomy errors (extra or missing arms, fused hands, the classic AI hand-count problem)
• Duplicate key objects (the same important weapon or artifact shown twice)

If any of those are present, the dialog shows "Issue detected. Regenerating now, free of charge" and fires off a fresh image at no cost.

If the image looks structurally OK and you just want a different take (different angle, different mood, different framing), regenerating costs 0.5 Page as before. You're paying for taste, not for our hiccups.

Opening regen: free when the plot doesn't land

The opening narration of every scene is generated from something specific: the 4W keywords you picked for a brand new adventure, a Plot A or Plot B card from the Scene Picker, or a Power Prompt you typed yourself. Sometimes the narrator wanders. The plot says "confront the broker in the warehouse" and you get a calm meeting in a coffee shop with no broker in sight.

We're adding the same kind of safety net: every opening now has a "Something off? Regenerate this opening" button. Click it and a text quality check looks at the opening narration against the plot or keywords it was supposed to deliver.

• If the narration drifted substantively from the plot or skipped the keywords, the regen is free.
• If the narration genuinely delivered the plot in some form, you can choose to pay a Page and regenerate a different take.

The "Regenerate this opening" button only shows on scene openings, not on every beat. Once you've taken an action in a scene, the opening is locked in. The regen is for moments where the scene started in a direction you wouldn't have chosen.

The principle

Generative AI shipped to players is going to fumble sometimes. We can either pretend that doesn't happen and charge you anyway, or we can be honest about it and cover the takes that weren't actually what you asked for. We picked option two.

Our backend keeps a quiet log of which regens were free, so we can see how often the AI is missing the mark and on which kinds of prompts. The numbers help us tune the underlying models and prompts over time. The more accurate the first take gets, the fewer free regens we owe you. That's the loop we want to be on.

A few small things

• The vision check on images currently runs only when you click Regenerate. We don't pre-check every image at generation time (that would be expensive and slow). It's a "fix this for me" check, not a perfectionism check.
• The opening check has a small per-scene cap on free regens to keep things from spiraling. If you're somehow on a streak of three free regens in a row on the same scene, the next one comes with a Page price. In practice that ceiling is almost never reached.

If you click Regenerate and the check feels off (a clearly broken image that got marked OK, or a perfectly fine opening that got flagged as broken), let us know via the contact form. Quality-check tuning is iterative and your feedback shapes the next round.

Cheers,

The LiveTale Team