I wouldn’t say „precisely“ as those are (plausible) speculations.

No, I just don't know that I should avoid a product if I don't know the ethical problems with it. That's how boycotts work...

I don’t think it’s important where the placeholder assets come from, or that mistakes will be more common when someone used gen AI instead of non-licensed stock image from a web search.

You're right. It's an opinion and only as important as the one having the opinion decides it to be.

That's like saying you boycot Nestle but won't stop using any of their subsidiary products unless you accidentally find out that a brand not named Nestle is actually owned by Nestle. You had a bridge to sell to anyone with the naivete to believe it's the only place AI was used. What about your naivity of believing that other games are not using AI, unless of course you stumble on the information about AI usage? Seems hypocritical to criticize others for giving the benefit of doubt while giving the benefit of doubt to all other developers simply because you don't know any better?

It probably uses a GPT of some sort at this point, tbh. There is no reason whatsoever using Google's ML translation or ChatGPT's ML translation should make any bit of difference to people who are actually upset over this if they have given any thought whatsoever to their concerns.

No, it's like saying I boycott Nestle and will stop using their subsidiary products *when I find out that they're Nestle subsidiaries.* I don't know if other games are using generative AI. Maybe they are. If I find out they are, I will not buy them. If I don't find out that they are, *how would I know that they're using it?* The fact that I'm not able to detect it 100% of the time doesn't make me okay with it when I don't know it's there. What in any of my comments has made you think I have a " I don't care as long as I don't notice it" attitude???

Very soon protesting the use of LLMs is like going to be like protesting the advent of the television. There is no stopping it. We should endeavour to ensure it is used ethically rather than becoming puritanical about its use.

The difference is that you know you are watching TV. Just say you used AI.

Nope, fuck that, fuck genAI it is unethical by virtue of stealing to train and vastly draining resources to power slop garbage. Television was a medium, communication. GenAI is not communicating shit, it's trash sold on a lie.

There's still plenty of people who don't watch TV.

It will take a fundamentally different algorithmic approach to make further progress in ML. We have never figured out a different approach since it's inception in the 60s

Like procedural generation, generative assets that are done well will be either indistinguishable from hand work, likely because there will be some involved, or will be incorporated in a way that they mesh well with everything else. Everyone *hated* the procedural generation in no man's sky, for example, until enough work was done to make that just a piece of the game.

No Man's Sky was one of the most hyped video games in history due to procedural generation. The fact that they botched it on release is not relevant.

> Television was a medium Yeah. We called it that because it was neither rare, nor well done. Bad writing has _always_ existed. > it's trash sold on a lie. You sweet summer child... The French have an expression for this: _Plus ça change_

I don't agree at all, the hype was evident, sure, but the procedural generation was largely the reason people didn't like the game. You stated that procedural generation isn't hated, but 'botching' the usage of it at release is the piece that irrelevant. The people hated it because of the, admittably bad, procedural generation.

> How the fuck would I boycott a brand for being owned by Nestle *before I find out that it's owned by Nestle?* Consumer research, look up the brands you don't know before you buy them, the corps aren't generally out here running shell companies to hide relationships. Im not being snide and I don't care about the rest of the argument with OP, this is the literal answer to that one question, that's all.

The translation flub is the only part that mattered here. The Alters was getting a ton of praise and good press for its story, characters, mocap, VA, mechanics, visuals, you name it. Finding out that someone used GPT for some glorified lorem ipsum to paste on a random background object doesn't change the quality one iota. The art team for this game was paid and hired and they did a phenomenal job with the game, but one of those paid artists took a shortcut for some assets. It's not a "the ayy eye is letting corpo CEOs skip out on paying real human artists!!!" situation here. Do you know what else paid artists / game studios do other than pay a human to create an asset from scratch? They buy models and textures on the Unreal/etc asset store. The same exact boulder model is present in everything from ffviiR to Clair Obscur to Death Stranding, because it comes free with the engine and is "good enough" just like an AI generated rock texture would be. However, using machine translation without even a *proofreading pass* is hilarious. Using a conversational model for translation is double hilarious. Surely purpose-built translation tools exist and are more efficient than "asking" chatGPT to "translate this line into Brazilian Portuguese".

The guy who used ai to make some technobabble lipsum for an asset was an artist hired by the company. You can see a huge list of the artists that worked on The Alters in the credits. They all got paid. This artist would take home the same wage for typing "gshsjajfkfksiwn" in that asset, or copy and pasting some numbers that were in a readout from a space telescope, or literally using lorem ipsum. If we're really micromanaging every art shortcut as "potential pay to hire *more* artists" now, why not start counting how many rock/plant/sky/water textures and models in The Alters (or FF7 Rebirth, or literally any UE5 game) are pre-baked assets included with the UE5 license? Game devs *actually* use those instead of billable hours / salaried hires.

I love seeing these outside views from folks who aren't developers Gen AI is pretty well integrated into development pipelines at this point. In ways that are subtle and quite useful. Especially autocomplete as you write code, and boiler plate autofill. These used genai, are subtle and not necessarily intrusive, and are pretty widely integrated across the development ecosystem. Like everything the poison makes the dose. The larger the dose of genai the more poison you are introducing into your work.