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?
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.
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.
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 can cannot 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’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.
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
Well that author is not playing any games any time soon. Or he probably will after this artificial rage topic is gone.
GenAI is here to stay and it makes stuff way easier and way faster.
No no, please give me those vast definitely not procedural generated landscapes of open world games - no even better give me the infinite world of Minecraft that is just procedurally generated and those wall and floor textures that some poor overworked artis generated by putting a noise filter on gray and brown squares.
Oh you can’t imagine how much I love the dialogue choices that totally make sense.
And the always identical animations of every character I meet in my games
But I really despise this regurgitated stuff from an AI, especially the translations of languages that I don’t understand. Or variated character models or some textures that I usually only notice if they were missing.
Raging about AI is a trend. It will go away like gamergate, shutting down reddit 3rd party apps and removing porn from Flickr.
Those who add value to their products with GenAI will prevail.
So rage in harmony with other haters instead of improving by being constructive.
I don’t play Minecraft. I don’t like procedural generation. I didn’t bring them up.
GenAI is a lazy shortcut for the untalented or dispassionate. It can help in wireframing for an idea, sometimes, but any more than that and it falls down, in my opinion.
The personal touch was underpaid workers doing cookie cutter work that was hardly better than AI does but more expensive. I don’t see actual talented artists complaining all that much about AI it’s always the assembly line video game artists or even worst some furry fucker who didn’t even have their own style to begin with with. Ie the people who AI was created to replace because they bring nothing to the table.
Dude, just let AI fuck your wife too. It can probably do it better than you can.
especially the translations of languages that I don’t understand.
God forbid we dignify those people with a personal touch. Yeah, just let google translate do it: a technology famous for giving really good translations.
Dude, just let AI fuck your wife too. It can probably do it better than you can.
Given your mom provided the training data it probably could. But that’s not the point
God forbid we dignify those people with a personal touch
Nobody said that there will only be GenAI generated games. There will be generated stuff in games. It’s not going away. You are allowed to hate that but it won’t change the industry.
Those are all still here in one form of another. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is as strong as it’s ever been. But you do point at how this will go. Soonish there will be less overtly AI products as we realize that it is not the be all end all, and instead it will be yet another technology that we can use to achieve various goals. But moving forward it will probably be embedded in the background of most things, as it had been for almost a decade before gen ai.
As opposed to the human made slop that permeated the industry? Just because a human made it doesn’t mean it was good for fucks sake. At least now we can make mediocrity at scale.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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…
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.
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.
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.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.
Im sorry. But this is pathetic if it’s true. And I mean that on part of the players.
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
Well that author is not playing any games any time soon. Or he probably will after this artificial rage topic is gone. GenAI is here to stay and it makes stuff way easier and way faster.
Mmm just give me ladles of that easy quick slop mmm yes please just pour it down my gullet, all that regurgitated mashed-up machine bullshit mmmmmm
No no, please give me those vast definitely not procedural generated landscapes of open world games - no even better give me the infinite world of Minecraft that is just procedurally generated and those wall and floor textures that some poor overworked artis generated by putting a noise filter on gray and brown squares. Oh you can’t imagine how much I love the dialogue choices that totally make sense. And the always identical animations of every character I meet in my games
But I really despise this regurgitated stuff from an AI, especially the translations of languages that I don’t understand. Or variated character models or some textures that I usually only notice if they were missing.
Raging about AI is a trend. It will go away like gamergate, shutting down reddit 3rd party apps and removing porn from Flickr. Those who add value to their products with GenAI will prevail.
So rage in harmony with other haters instead of improving by being constructive.
I don’t play Minecraft. I don’t like procedural generation. I didn’t bring them up.
GenAI is a lazy shortcut for the untalented or dispassionate. It can help in wireframing for an idea, sometimes, but any more than that and it falls down, in my opinion.
I’m going to steal this
Ironically, I won’t credit you
The personal touch was underpaid workers doing cookie cutter work that was hardly better than AI does but more expensive. I don’t see actual talented artists complaining all that much about AI it’s always the assembly line video game artists or even worst some furry fucker who didn’t even have their own style to begin with with. Ie the people who AI was created to replace because they bring nothing to the table.
I know many talented artists that very much do not care for AI slop.
For the thousandth time: Translation is not a 1:1 formula, that can be easily automated by a machine.
They’re not translating Brothers Kamarazov here, you can chill.
Dude, just let AI fuck your wife too. It can probably do it better than you can.
God forbid we dignify those people with a personal touch. Yeah, just let google translate do it: a technology famous for giving really good translations.
Given your mom provided the training data it probably could. But that’s not the point
Nobody said that there will only be GenAI generated games. There will be generated stuff in games. It’s not going away. You are allowed to hate that but it won’t change the industry.
Imagine saying this about asbestos, lead, freon, bitcoin, or cigarettes.
You don’t want it to go anywhere, why the hell would I listen to you?
Those are all still here in one form of another. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is as strong as it’s ever been. But you do point at how this will go. Soonish there will be less overtly AI products as we realize that it is not the be all end all, and instead it will be yet another technology that we can use to achieve various goals. But moving forward it will probably be embedded in the background of most things, as it had been for almost a decade before gen ai.
As opposed to the human made slop that permeated the industry? Just because a human made it doesn’t mean it was good for fucks sake. At least now we can make mediocrity at scale.
What did I say that makes you think I’m in favour of bad things that humans made? I’m anti bad things.
It was all bad anyways so we might as well make it efficient. Games are products. If you want art go to an art gallery.
It sounds like we disagree on some fundamentals here, so I’m happy to bow out. Have a good midweek! ✌️
Yeah, it makes stuff way easier and way faster to arrive to a result of mediocrity, at best.
Way fucking shittier too. You conveniently left that part out.
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.
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.
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.
Putting AI stuff in the foreground is probably not the best idea, though developers should be allowed to use AI for grunt work like creating textures.
Getting really tired of this moral performance people put on to look cool to their peers.
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
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.