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?
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
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! ✌️
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.
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?
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.