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?
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?