You may have heard a lot about AI and Halcy-Con 3 lately. Here are the plain facts.
People made Halcy-Con 3. Our cast, crew, vendors and volunteers, and every passenger who came aboard the Starship Aurora, were the show. We partnered with artists from our own community on the Nav’s interface and achievement icons, the unlockable poster art in the Nav, and many of the set backdrops.
We also used AI tools, like much of large-scale entertainment today. The CVC Navigator was designed by our team and built with AI. AI also helped us plan and run a show of this size and complexity with a very small crew.
Why the Long Road of Veyra paintings used AI. Nine high-quality, large-format illustrations were beyond the budget of an event already running at a large loss. Time was the other reason. The paintings kept changing as the story and Veyra’s puzzles developed, and some had to show physical pieces that hadn’t been built yet. Commissioning and then reworking them, again and again on that schedule, wasn’t possible within our budget or our timeline. Even so, every painting took a great deal of human work: we designed, directed, composited and finished each one ourselves, and the most complex were built up from many layers and composites.
One line we will never cross. We will never use the likeness or voice of a live performer without their express written permission. That held for everything we made this year, and it holds for everything we make from here on. Our cast, crew and show partners will work under the same rule.
About the vendor rules you may have seen. Our vendor, exhibitor and programming guidelines have carried a no-AI rule since Halcy-Con 2. When we updated those pages for 2026, we never revisited that line. It wasn’t the only thing we missed. Our website fell behind across the board this year while we focused on building the event; one show partner’s page still carried its 2025 details a month before the event. That’s on us. There was no double standard and no intent to hide anything.
We used these tools for one reason: to create more of the experiences that bring us together.