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?
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.