Getting really tired of this moral performance people put on to look cool to their peers.

Surprising amount of comments that are OK with this and completely missing the point that Steam requires disclosure of AI asset usage. The devs neglected to tag it as such and people are rightly getting refunds for it.

Wait really? I use (((triple parentheses))) quite often to indicate sarcastic emphasis on a word. Damn racists ruining my punctuation >

What? No. It’s just the online left is just a mass of contradictions so I like to emphasize that.

What is the oversimplification? The tech exists, once it’s out there you can’t stop it so you might as well find how to put it to good use, and this is a good use. Protecting jobs is not an argument, it’s just reacting to perceived threats emotionally.

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.

They’re not translating Brothers Kamarazov here, you can chill.

Exactly, this.

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.

Are you okay with AAA studios using GenAI that was trained only on licensed works?

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 possibly see how that's good for anything.

I'm not OK with any business practices of AAA studios, and I don't think there's a way for them to get enough educated consent for creations (i.e. not just someone accepting a shitty TOS on deviantart 6 years ago) to make a good GenAI model. But if I were to put aside the first part and assume a magical reality where the second could manifest without coercion and lies, I would theoretically be OK with it.

It sounds like we disagree on some fundamentals here, so I'm happy to bow out. Have a good midweek! ️

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?

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?

> It sucks that players are having to scour every asset and line of dialogue Im sorry. But this is pathetic if it's true. And I mean that on part of the players.

So I'm in two minds about this. I am a software engineer by trade and have an idea for a game I'd like to try making. The problem is that I don't even really know how to make games, not do I have any artistic abilities myself. I can't afford to pay a load of artists for work for a game that might never be finished and might never make money. So I'm stuck in this hard decision of do I try and make my game, invest a lot of money and potentially lose it all, or do I try and find a publisher who can front the money but lose creative control of my game? Or do I use AI to give me a head start in building something that I can use to garner interest in, in the hope that enough people like it that I can fund the development? Essentially, AI offers me a way to create something that I would not otherwise be able to create and that's really hard to accept.

The 20-80 rule really saves your ass when you're a solo dev. Be really good at the one thing, nail the game mechanics, and then learn the 20% you need to be 80% good at everything else. If the game is kick ass, it'll be forgiven if everything looks like stick figures(but well drawn stick figures, mind)

Yeah I've never been able to draw in my entire life, believe me I tried. I have an eyesight impairment and that doesn't help.

Fair point, I should have asked about commercial games in general That said I didn’t mean that the game studio itself would do the AI training and own their models in-house; if they did, I’d expect it to go just as poorly as you would. Rather, I’d expect the model to be created by an organization specialized in that sort of thing. For example, [“Marey”](https://nofilmschool.com/marey-ethically-trained-ai-video-model) is one example I found of a GenAI model that its creators are saying was trained ethically. Another is [Adobe Firefly](https://helpx.adobe.com/firefly/get-set-up/learn-the-basics/adobe-firefly-faq.html), where Adobe says they trained only on licensed and public domain content. It also sounds like Adobe is paying the artists whose content was used for AI training. I believe that Canva is doing something similar. StabilityAI is also doing something similar with [Stable Audio 2.0](https://stability.ai/news/stable-audio-2-0), where they partnered with a music licensing company, AudioSparx, to ensure that artists are compensated, AI opt outs are respected, etc.. I haven’t dug into any of those too deep, but they seem to be heading in the right direction at the surface level, at least. One of the GenAI scenarios that’s the most terrifying to me is the idea of a company like Disney using all the material they have copyright for to train their own, proprietary GenAI image, audio, and video tools… not because I think the outputs would be bad, but because of the impact that would have on creators in that industry. Fortunately, as long as copyright doesn’t apply to purely AI generated outputs, even if trained entirely on your own content, then I don’t think Disney specifically will do this. I mention that as an example because that usage of AI, regardless of how ethically the model was trained, would still be unethical, in my opinion. Likewise in game creation, an ethically trained and operated model could still be used unethically to eliminate many people’s jobs in the interest solely of better profits. I’d be on board with AI use (in game creation or otherwise) if a company were to say, “We’re not changing the budget we have for our human workforce, including for contractors, licensed art, and so on, other than increasing it as inflation and wages increase. We will be using ethical AI models to create more content than we otherwise would have been able to.” But I feel like in a corporate setting, its use is almost always going to result in them cutting jobs.