Relevant excerpt:

"[...]not only does its demo contain AI-generated imagery throughout, but even the game's key art is riddled with nonsensical buttons and mismatched stitching, as you can see in the image up top.

In response to fans instantly noticing this and criticising the team, even on Twitter, Panache have issued a statement that follows a now-familiar pattern of "Oh, how did this happen?!":

A number of people have raised questions or concerns to us about whether assets in our marketing and game use generative AI.

We have a dedicated team of over a dozen talented and experienced artists. With them, we looked into the assets in question and found that there were indeed some early versions of assets that made their way into the the prologue. This includes some in-game portraits and external marketing assets.

We are actively reviewing the assets in question. Human made versions will be released in an update dropping soon.

We own up to this oversight and apologize for any upset caused. Please be assured that the Early Access and full game will not include any assets generated by AI.

"

Please be assured that the Early Access and full game will not include any assets generated by AI.

[X] Doubt

downvote if you want but I honestly am struggling to care at this point. We need to make every studio that uses a technology that’s been around for years do this stupid dance every week?

When poor quality work gets into the game? Yeah. I'd rather just not buy new games if they're gonna give me slop like this. If they don't have the decency to care about the quality of their work, why should I?

You obviously cared enough to comment and obviously care enough about downvotes to cry about them. Maybe you can extend that to caring about things that matter, like artistic integrity.

As for me, I'll vote with my wallet. Just removed this from my wishlist.

I mean I don't hold that ai can't be used to make something really beautiful but it's most often used as a lazy way for non creative people to make art, and that is rather lazy.

It says something about the work ethic of the development team and if you put it a demo, which is supposed to get people into your game and have it have zero percent gameplay and fill of 'placeholder' ai art there's something fundamentally stupid going on, of which the ai is more a symptom than the cause.

You’re conflating things that aren’t related. if they do shit work, criticize the shit work. This is obviously rallying a witch hunt based on the tool used. You could as easily say in 1996 that Toy Story is shit and if they cared they would have bothered to hand draw all their work. it’s just a different way of making visual content, as is all the virtual content you see in any game, the textures, polygons, fake lighting, etc. all generated by a computer at the direction of a human.

eta: I’m not gonna argue with all of lemmy about this, just want to add: I wish these devs would actually just be honest, also. They keep going “I don’t know how this happened!” but obviously it happened because it was useful to the process of making games. just own up to it.

Not interested.

But it is related. Because they keep using AI and it keeps turning into low quality shit. Toy Story took effort and imagination and skill to animate, and at the end, it looked incredible. When I was a kid and Toy Story came out, I wasn't looking at it and saying "how lazy these animators are to not draw this" I was saying "I've never seen anything like this before!". They took the tools they invented and played into its strengths. It made plasticy lifeless unreal looking humans, so they made the main characters toys. Toy Story is actually the perfect counter example to this AI bullshit, because it was obviously made with skill and love, and AI use keeps showing us it is a lazy shortcut to shitty work.

I completely agree. We have had placeholder art since the 80s, and never needed AI for it. They are seeing what gets past us so they don't need to replace it.

you’re making good points, so please don’t see what I’m saying as needlessly confrontational. What I’m saying is that this happens to any game that uses it in any way whatsoever, so it can’t just be about quality, it moves into ideology.

I'm tired of having to activate detective mode on a video game every time a trailer or piece of art is released.

You could just... not. You choose the one-drop rule against the fancy denoiser.

None of the art in this game was imposed on them by aliens. A team of artists said 'we need an evocative painting for like five seconds and we'll fix it up later.' This is the very earliest look at the project. It's not placeholders making it into a finished game; it's exactly where you'd expect to see placeholders. And placeholders of the sort where stick figures won't do. It has to look polished at a glance, and then nobody should miss it when it's not in the next version. For this particular game they surely considered grabbing a Dutch master's lesser work off Wikipedia.

They do this 'we're sowwy' song-and-dance because the alternatives are even less serious. You want the whole industry to reject these tools? Ain't happening. Too useful. But they're not gonna flop their dick on the table say 'deal with it' because the performative backlash would just get louder. Weak excuses are gentle appeasement about something everyone's going to keep doing, because it works.

A studio comprised of A Guy could now crank out voice acting for an entire RPG, and unique portraits for every NPC, and animated FMV cutscenes, using little more than patience and taste. Quality's worse than hiring a thousand people for seven years. Quelle surprise. But somewhere in-between, you can spend merely five million dollars, and get a game done in a year, that feels like it took ten. If you still gag when a character's buttons are in the wrong place, at some point that's a you problem. The buttons are not really the point of the work.

Definitely agree that its the "oh, how did this happen?" that is hugely problematic.

They either knew they were rolling with AI assets, or they are so disorganized to not have known there were AI assets shipping. Either one offers players a good reason to think the game will be shit and/or misrepresented.

"Please don't use your brain and accept garbage, I just want garbage"

Great argument bud.

Understand that's what you're saying. Ai is not a tool in the same sense as 3d art compared to hand drawn animation. There is no control on output and there is no care, because nobody is doing anything, they're just taking an image spit out by a machine that outputs an amalgamation of others works. On top of ethical issues regarding stolen work and environmental destruction caused by ai. Asking others to turn off their brains and not think about what tool is being used to create these images is embarrassing

Yeh, just choose not to care. That's the best choice here.

Sure, for idiots who don't actually care about games and the artists who do work on them. Sure.

Just stop caring.

Simple

'The artists who worked on this game chose to use these tools.'

'Why don't you care about artists doing work?'

Incorrect.

If indeed any artists did work, and not just bros who think using ai makes them an artist.

Clair Obscur used these tools, for similar purposes.

Do you think that game was cobbled together by random idiots?

Clair obscure paid real artists. We have yet to see if these guys are doing so and not just using tech bros that think an ai prompt makes them and artost

And if they do have artists, this is fine - yeah? Like Clair Obscur? Or are you just saying words recreationally?

In any case it seems fucking insane to suggest the studio that made Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey in 2019 may not contain any true Scotsman, sorry, I mean real artists.

It seems insane to suggest you stop caring.

Also that game was pretty garbage. It's art direction was present.

> record-breaking award-winning artsy-as-fuck game about art's art direction was garbage

I no longer respect your opinion. Good day.

What record?

Was nominated, did not win awards except a small local award. Wasn't artsy at all, enjoys a solid 6 on metacritic.

Don't worry, I was prepared to not respect your opinion from the outset. I also don't much care about the opinions of fools.

Ohhh, you mean Ancestors, not Clair Obscur. Okay, that's significantly less what-the-fuck stupid.

Nevertheless Ancestors obviously employed real artists doing real art since it came out before these tools existed. So it's complete nonsense to scoff that 1666 must be made by, like, WallStreetBets redditors.

And meanwhile Clair Obscur still used these tools, and its Metacritic scores are "universal acclaim," and my god would it be nice if words meant anything here.

That's sound logic, and I appreciate you clarifying your tone. My apologies if I reacted too strongly! However, I would ask if there is a case of AI hate against some media that does not have poor quality AI slop in it? Not including unreleased products. My position is that I am anti-AI for 2 reasons. It is soulless and low quality. The soulless thing, sure, is ideology. But I've yet to see an example of AI art use that didn't have some inhuman flaw.

It literally takes 10 seconds to come up with a strategy that can detect whether internal preview assets are in use. They don't bother because they are lazy.

game_mode=alpha
placeholder assets are allowed

game_mode=beta
placeholder assets are allowed, warning issues during build

game_mode=production
build fails for any remaining placeholder assets

Even enterprise fucking Java has plugins that can accomplish the above with cascading resource lookups and support for build plugins, I don't see how a game engine or custom build could not do such a simple task.