Waiting for the “Whoops, we ‘forgot’ to remove it”.
Open up paint and doodle it for Christ’s sake, these guys “forget” to go back and change it I’ve noticed, so just don’t use it, boom, problem solved.
If your placeholder doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, it’s a bad placeholder. There is literally no workflow in which temporary assets shat by AI would be useful.
They just want to normalize AI use until people don’t care anymore. And with the waste of resources this shit represents, I just hope this never happens.
My question is if everything is going to be human made in the end why bother using at all? You won’t even get any of the much vaunted time savings at that point.
Every other commenter under this seems to forget that stock assets exist and worked fine for decades without involving AI slop.
Stock assets (at least if you need more than the absolutely basics) cost quite a bit. Programmer art can work, but if you want something close to the tone of the finished product, still takes time and thus money. Slop is quick and free.
Frankly, given the fact that placeholder assets are literally meant to be utilitarian, disposable, “just good enough” work, it’s actually not a terrible use case. Placeholders are meant to be slop either way, so not much is lost by automating it, so long as it is actually removed after.
Placeholder assets are generally better if they look out of place because then you don’t forget to replace them 😅
AI art generation is trained to be just good enough to fly under the rader if not looked at too closely…
It is conceivable (though I certainly understand skepticism) that they use it for concept and placeholder art, proofs of concept and the like.
As always, the question should be whether the final product is any good.
The question should be whether the final product is worth what was sacrificed to make it. That line is different for everyone, but it’s important to keep that in mind. Plenty of companies I boycott make acceptable products but are supporting a genocide.
I don’t think generative AI use is worth it however it’s employed and regardless of the quality of the final product. If enough people agree maybe they’ll stop using it.
It’s similar to the pre-vis stage of movie special effects. You’re using basically anything available to create a facsimile of the final scene, to see if your framing and pacing work the way you intend to. In film, artists will often use action figures shot with their phone, because it doesn’t matter if it looks janky since it’s not a scene going in the movie to begin with; it’s a test to see if your scene works at all. Game development and filmmaking share a lot of overlap in workflows these days.
For instance. You can try things out without first creating them by hand. Then you pick and choose and make the final version by hand.
Because development isn’t exactly asynchronous by nature. If you are waiting on placeholder assets, you are blocking everything dependent on “what comes next”. Even at the cost of going back to repopulate your assets with non-placeholders, you save a tremendous amount of time.
Well, fuck. At least we got Rogue Trader and the Pathfinder games before enshittification began.
Whelp, my interest in The Expanse Osiris Reborn has officially died…Rest in Piss, Owlcat!
On to the shit list they go.
I really don’t care what they use to make a game. I care that it isn’t shit. There’s plenty of good and bad uses of generative AI.
100% LOL
Upside, so if these guys use AI to create assets or code, none of that can be copyrighted currently under the law. Therefore if it’s not copyrightable then pirating the game and using those assets in other games is perfectly fine.
This would never hold up in court, in part due to regulatory capture, but I think this is the only thing that would stop them.
Pirating the game and using those assets was always fine, no matter the circumstances, company, artist, or developer. Copyright and intellectual property is an illusion the capitalist class uses to exclude the poor from ideas they feel they can profit from.
Welwalas.
I don’t care if it is the fucking Half Life 3 in the flesh. If a game uses some short of AI I will never buy it.
Doesn’t really matter to me, because I was going to pirate it the same as I do any game, AAA or indie.
Well… you see… 25% of the game is 100% human made!
So is every other major game company. This company just is open about it.
Only someone living under a rock can convince themselves developers arent using AI for all sorts of shit.
People are deeply unaware of the fact AI autocomplete for code has been baked into almost every major editor for almost 2 years now, and its enabled by default, opt out.
There are 3 types of game devs now:
- Those who admit publicly to using AI
- Those who have naive PR who truly dont know AI is being used a bunch
- Outright liars who lie about not using AI
Generated code is no different than generated imagery. They were both trained off stolen content and are both in a legally grey area. Both are equally immoral.
But just go with your Everybody else is doing it argument
You can’t steal something you copied, because nothing has been taken, and the concept of owning ideas is ridiculous anyway. Not to mention morality is subjective.
Pirate everything, because everything is yours as much as it is the original creators.
- Indie developers who genuinely don’t use it.
