Some video games have been trying to use generative AI for years now, and for the most part people simply have not been having it. Why would we? It’s lazy, it’s ugly, it’s an ethical black hole and it’s being driven by an executive class desperate to lay off even more workers. While earlier and more brazen attempts at employing the tech were obvious, lately it’s becoming more common for studios to slide a little AI-generated content in without drawing attention to it.
Jurassic World Evolution 3 launched with some AI-generated character portraits, then got bullied into removing them. Clair Obscur, which will be a lot of people’s game of the year, appeared to quietly launch with some AI-generated art then just as quietly patch it out. I was going to review the city-building grand strategy game Kaiserpunk until I saw they were using AI-generated images for their dialogue sections, after which I promptly uninstalled it.
The latest culprit is The Alters, which has found to have shipped not only with AI-generated placeholder text in-game, but also employed AI-generated translations in some of its side content as well. None of this was disclosed prior to the game’s release; it was all discovered later, by players, and has prompted an explanation of sorts from the developers which tries to calm everyone down, but which has just made things worse, because if it took people discovering these specific instances to find that 11 Bit had used AI-generated content in the game’s development, how do we know there’s not more of it?
If you can’t tell it’s AI, then it’s a problem entirely made up in your own head.
It’s still an ethical dilemma
Surprising amount of comments that are OK with this and completely missing the point that Steam requires disclosure of AI asset usage. The devs neglected to tag it as such and people are rightly getting refunds for it.
I saw some early demos and hoped that AI could bring about a revolution in on-the-fly procedural generated content for gaming to do things that would be literally impossible by other methods. But no, instead it has been used to replace artists to produce poor-quality pre-generated static content and I couldn’t be more disappointed.
That’s because they keep trying to push AI into the foreground, not the background where it belongs
I mean, this article was spawned by The Alters, which had a bad machine translation segment (a thing since long before we called it AI) and… Some lorem ipsum in a background texture.
It’s already in every game in the background. Do you think paid graphic designers are instructed not to use the AI features built into Photoshop/Illustrator?
Hard to convince a studio to embrace it if this article is the kneejerk response to some PNGs.
Which leads the loudest complainers to act vindicated, because what could it possibly be good for, except the few PNGs they notice?
Nah, the problem is that AI is only being used to generate static content, “finished” assets. Where are the npcs with organic dialogue and more realistic reactions to player input? That’s the AI that I’ve seen being promised and not being delivered anywhere.
… right, and the reason nobody’s done that, despite the aggressive availability of local models, is that even a few static assets lead to shrill backlash. Like this article. My man is frothing at the mouth because a complex systemic city-builder used a program to draw the “you can’t cut back on funding!” guy.
We can assume the same people would screech that any game with generative dialog was “written by AI.” Like a text parser being able to respond to insults means the whole plot came from a ten-word prompt. It’s not a rational environment for selling studios on a multi-million-dollar investment.
Gaming is the one place generative AI makes the most sense, imo.
Personally, I want to see the Holodeck from Star Trek. That entire concept is generative AI.
In a world that artists don’t need to make money to live this works but I feel we will never get there.
There already exists no shortage of ways for corporations to exploit artists.
Fight for what you’re actually talking about: fight for better wages and unions for artists and creatives and fight for a better social safety net. Trying to pick a fight with a glorified screwdriver isn’t going to solve the ails of capitalism.
I would really like to see both: Artists creating their vision, drawing and sketching out ideas. Then using their own work, bring that to life with generative AI. Train on their drawings and work alone. Use it to help with rigging and modeling. Use it to take mashes and apply them in the holodeck as it is generating the world you are exploring.
It is not just one or the other. It just become a little more complicated.
that sounds like an ethics problem, the solution to most of those is to get rid of ethics
Most people are ignoring it these days anyway…
Complete overreaction, but I agree that commercial games should not be using GenAI art. If you’re making money out of selling your game, then don’t use something which abused to commons to do so. If you’re making a FOSS game, I don’t see a problem with it.
Are you okay with AAA studios using GenAI that was trained only on licensed works?
I’m not OK with any business practices of AAA studios, and I don’t think there’s a way for them to get enough educated consent for creations (i.e. not just someone accepting a shitty TOS on deviantart 6 years ago) to make a good GenAI model. But if I were to put aside the first part and assume a magical reality where the second could manifest without coercion and lies, I would theoretically be OK with it as long as that model passed to the commons when the works it was trained on did as well.
Fair point, I should have asked about commercial games in general
That said I didn’t mean that the game studio itself would do the AI training and own their models in-house; if they did, I’d expect it to go just as poorly as you would. Rather, I’d expect the model to be created by an organization specialized in that sort of thing.
For example, “Marey” is one example I found of a GenAI model that its creators are saying was trained ethically.
Another is Adobe Firefly, where Adobe says they trained only on licensed and public domain content. It also sounds like Adobe is paying the artists whose content was used for AI training. I believe that Canva is doing something similar.
StabilityAI is also doing something similar with Stable Audio 2.0, where they partnered with a music licensing company, AudioSparx, to ensure that artists are compensated, AI opt outs are respected, etc…
I haven’t dug into any of those too deep, but they seem to be heading in the right direction at the surface level, at least.
One of the GenAI scenarios that’s the most terrifying to me is the idea of a company like Disney using all the material they have copyright for to train their own, proprietary GenAI image, audio, and video tools… not because I think the outputs would be bad, but because of the impact that would have on creators in that industry.
Fortunately, as long as copyright doesn’t apply to purely AI generated outputs, even if trained entirely on your own content, then I don’t think Disney specifically will do this.
I mention that as an example because that usage of AI, regardless of how ethically the model was trained, would still be unethical, in my opinion. Likewise in game creation, an ethically trained and operated model could still be used unethically to eliminate many people’s jobs in the interest solely of better profits.
I’d be on board with AI use (in game creation or otherwise) if a company were to say, “We’re not changing the budget we have for our human workforce, including for contractors, licensed art, and so on, other than increasing it as inflation and wages increase. We will be using ethical AI models to create more content than we otherwise would have been able to.” But I feel like in a corporate setting, its use is almost always going to result in them cutting jobs.
video games in their current market might be one of the only areas that I’m tentatively okay with ai work.
Stasis Bone Totem had some hideous applications of it but the studio was using it to fill out supplemental art for puzzles and items that could’ve eaten up their budget. it kind of gives smaller studios a way to punch up when their vision is exceeding their budget for things like piles of gore on the ground or bundles of wire.
that said I only make that particular defense under late stage capitalism which is proving to be poisonous to art. not to mention that for every Bone Totem there’s 108 employees that Ubisoft is going to lay off because they think ChatGPT can do their job
Bruh even fucking Kaiserpunk? I was super excited about that game.
Fucking hate this timeline man.
So I’m in two minds about this. I am a software engineer by trade and have an idea for a game I’d like to try making.
The problem is that I don’t even really know how to make games, not do I have any artistic abilities myself. I can’t afford to pay a load of artists for work for a game that might never be finished and might never make money.
So I’m stuck in this hard decision of do I try and make my game, invest a lot of money and potentially lose it all, or do I try and find a publisher who can front the money but lose creative control of my game? Or do I use AI to give me a head start in building something that I can use to garner interest in, in the hope that enough people like it that I can fund the development?
Essentially, AI offers me a way to create something that I would not otherwise be able to create and that’s really hard to accept.
The 20-80 rule really saves your ass when you’re a solo dev.
Be really good at the one thing, nail the game mechanics, and then learn the 20% you need to be 80% good at everything else. If the game is kick ass, it’ll be forgiven if everything looks like stick figures(but well drawn stick figures, mind)
Yeah I’ve never been able to draw in my entire life, believe me I tried. I have an eyesight impairment and that doesn’t help.
My guy you can literally use MSpaint and circle tool and eraser to clear some lines to make a guy. I conceptualized and drew this in like 5 minutes. Some angel platformer fighter character. I imagine the bandana flowing and trailing behind the character as they jump. Could probably use the halo as a weapon or something. The hardest part was the bandana which was the only part I did free hand. This is obviously a first draft concept art and needs to be seriously polished and prepped for animation, but in the second picture I shrunk it down to 64x64 and a lot of the flaws disappear. You just need to learn some technical stuff about composition and color theory to make something that’s even half decent and it will be enough. Or hell, literally steal this character idea because I’m not doing anything with it. Here’s you’re written permission.
Make a cool game and put MSpaint art in it! (but actually use a better program because MSPaint kinda sucks.)
I don’t know. I think you used a computer. That is going to put people out of work. As a former graphic artist, this really shits on my field. That no longer exists, because computer.
I kind of am joking around, but I really used to do this stuff and we debated what was acceptable using “clip art” books vs hand drawings. That was a physical thing back in the day, and people worried about mass produced clip art ruining everything.
Yewahh… How does that help?
I’m just showing you there’s ways around limitations.
I appreciate that, but that isn’t really a solution for a saleable game. Concept art sure but that’s it.
To me there’s a difference between using assets that were generated by AI and a game using generative AI to create assets.
A person hired as an artist to make dialogue portraits could have shoveled some slop to meet a deadline. That’s a production issue.
But if the games are being integrated with a generative AI model to cover minor assets, that’s a fundamental development issue and I
cancannot possibly see how that’s good for anything.Huh, it’s almost like this new tool is fine for placeholder art, and placeholders can be good enough to ship.
Did you know The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” was supposed to have a brass section? That driving riff with the fuzzbox guitar was a placeholder. They released it as-is, the song hit #1, and distortion became mainstream. At what point do we stop lamenting all the horn players who were robbed?
I don’t really care? Is that allowed? 🤷
I’m old enough to remember when computers started to be used for art, and how traditional artists were complaining about how soulless the end product would be, and how unskilled people could ‘fake’ being good artists because the computer does most of the work for them. I mean the undo function of a computer on its own is putting incredible creative power into the hands of even the most useless digital artist, power that da Vinci himself would have creamed his little loincloth over. And the copy & paste function - and all of the other everyday functions all PC users depend on - cut down the production time by orders of magnitude compared to traditional painting/drawing. This isn’t even getting into the incredible transformation tools on offer in Photoshop (or even MS Paint 1.0).
Remember matte painters who painted incredible photorealistic chunks of the screen in films? Do Photoshop users of today feel any qualms about having extincted the fuck outta those people? Would they have even entertained the woes of those artists if they were around at the time? Would they have been calling for government intervention to prevent non-traditional matte painters from taking those jobs?
What about sculptors and stop-motion pros? Movies have been riddled with worse-looking CGI replacements for those things for half a century. Any shits given about those artists who spent their lives perfecting their craft only to be supplanted overnight by a cunt with a Pentium who produces objectively worse results?
AI is just the latest sabot-magnet disruption, and it won’t be the last, despite the apocalyptic language around it. Either find a way to live with it and exploit it, or lay down in the Artists of Christmas Past mass grave and pull the clay in over yourselves. Or, you know, go ahead and try to uninvent it or whatever it is you’re proposing 👍 And if you really wanna go hardcore, uninstall all of your digital art tools, get yourself an easel and see what you can do in the “real world” with your “real talents” without recourse to time-saving, labour-deleting, instantaneous bespoke-brush-manifesting technology.
It’s not allowed.
There’s only one opinion on AI allowed on social media: It’s the worst thing to ever happen and produced by stealing from starving child artists. The ouput is somehow simultaneously the worst quality imaginable with no redeeming qualities and also about to put every creative out of a job by next quarter.
The fact that you don’t hold this opinion tells everyone what a horrible person that you are for not knowing the right opinion to have.
Enjoy being downvoted out of the conversation between tech illiterate children who believe everything they’re told and tech illiterate creatives who haven’t found a hyperbole that they cannot employ in their Luddite quest to stop advanced linear algebra
Yeah and I am also real scared about this “green screen” technology in movies, as if they fake stuff you know.
Fake stuff? Next you’ll tell me that the dragons in that new How to Train Your Dragon movie aren’t really dragons.
They are in fact, dressed up hamsters.
I don’t care about AI in video games, seems silly to give a shit.
I DO care if they are using AI to analyse or harvest my data. Otherwise… its a freaking video game. Whatever. Is it a good game?
And I say this because I know people who really have interesting ideas, but they cant afford artists, musicians, and some even need a little help creating meshs and rigging. I would hope they are honest about it, but if they use AI as a tool to bring their vision together that seems fine. If they do translations it definitely would be worth saying “AI generated” as it never is as good as a native speaker. But it is something that is better than nothing.
And I will add: If you are concerned about the “executive class” and workers, you shouldnt be buying from the big studios anyways.
Edit: I guess the down otes indicate that you don’t give a shit about artists, you just have a knee jerk reaction to technology. Probably because you do not even understand it.
It sucks that players are having to scour every asset and line of dialogue
Im sorry. But this is pathetic if it’s true. And I mean that on part of the players.
Getting really tired of this moral performance people put on to look cool to their peers.
