I've been keeping an eye out on AI disclosures on Steam (https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...). While it's unsurprising that devs are using it, what was surprising was the number of games that disclose it. I believe, as of November, it's up to 8% of the while library. The biggest game to disclose AI use right now is Stellaris (with many many millions in sales), though having initially launched many years ago, their GenAI usage is in product updates.
Maybe it is a good strategy. Haters will more likely to steer clear instead of raging in comments and others will be less surprised over ai typical inconsistences and issues.
Many years ago I was watching a video of some sculpture being done. I was quite unimpressed with the art itself.
Then the video zoomed out, and I saw that the guy had spent like 2 years making it out of individual toothpicks.
Suddenly I was amazed, right?
With AI it's kinda the opposite process, right? You see something, it's impressive, maybe you even like it personally, and then you realize orders of magnitude less effort went into it than it looks like "should" have, based on the result.
So we seem to have here the "direct experience" of the art itself, and then a "narrative layer" which obscures that. And we seem to value the latter more highly.
A related example is those pages selling "handcrafted" leather bags and they have an life story about Grandma Williams and suddenly the bag is worth a billion times more to the buyer.
Most of the focus on this isn't the code. It's the art and music that make up the experience.
This is discussed right in the article.
> For Kanaris-Sotiriou, the question of adopting the use of gen AI to make games was an easy one to answer. “The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork [...] are unfair,” he says.
I personally think using AI assistance for the code is much less intrusive than using AI for the art and music -- the code isn't as directly experienced by the player as the art.
Much of it comes from people feeling challenged and threatened by the new tech so they construct elaborate philosophies to justify how they feel, but this rapidly crumbles when you look closer. For instance, artists felt threatened by generative AI and came up with a narrative about copyright stuff. But then Adobe comes along with generative AI which doesn't have the copyright issue and how do those same artists respond? With a loud "fuck you" to Adobe, because the root of their objection was never copyright but rather what the new technology would do to their established careers.
In this atmosphere, I think it's easy to perceive an implied rejection of and threat to AI generated code, even if the focus is on art assets, because people aren't being entirely direct and forthright about exactly what it is they're upset about, and that makes for a landmine field.
Yeah nah. The core reason they’re pissed is the blatant theft of their work to train these models without compensation or permission (the age old “if it’s on the web it’s free to use” bullshit argument), with “artistic merit” being a distant, but still critical, second.
If you can actually write stories or create art, you can see the “seams” in generative content and it gets to be quite nauseating. The fact it was trained on your own output by a trillion-dollar megacorp via theft while you scrape money for rent is the injury to the former’s insult.
Yeah, no. The example of Adobe neatly illuminates what's actually going on. Arguments about copyright are the Motte; a seemingly defensible position people can fall back to when challenged. Instead of defending the position of opposing non-infringing models, which Adobe created, AI opponents ignore that argument and fall back on copyright (you just did this, ignored the point about Adobe and reiterated the Motte arguments.)
Now, as for "seams" in generated out: insofar those seem are visible to the general public and not only those with artistic talent of their own, the seams are reassuring to artists concerned about tge future commercial value of their talents. But insofar as those seams are only apparent to the artistically trained, that concerns artists because if the buyers of art won't necessarily perceive it.
Arc Raiders has 160k Steam reviews (which is a lot) and 90% of them are positive. It also has an estimated >4M owners despite a high price tag and is currently the #4 most played game on Steam globally. The AI nay-sayers are a vocal minority - and likely just terminally online Twitter people that do not even play the game, the rest of the players are too busy enjoying the game regardless of whether it's made with AI or not.
I think it's more that the use of AI is in an unimportant part of the game. They could have zero AI voice overs without impacting the game in a meaningful manner. They're pretty bad though and I've definitely seen them getting mocked.
I haven't seem a game voice every fucking item pickup or mini location callout like arc raiders, so it's a quality win for me. I didn't care about the voice performance of "lets head to the olive grove" ever
I kinda see your point. The warm feeling of knowing a real human told me "die, bitch!" isn't a feeling I've ever taken away from playing UT.
On the other hand, lots of AI-generated VO is very easy to spot, and sounds awful. It stands to reason it could meaningfully take away from even a completely plot-free game. If I were a voice actor, I'd feel insulted that anyone would find it comparable to my work.
It really depends on the voice. For some reason, AI impersonations of Dagoth Ur are remarkably accurate even though Dagoth Ur has only a few sentences of dialogue. I've listened to several audiobooks made with his voice and they're very close to dead on, just with some cadence issues and occasional heterophone fumbling.
Other voices cloned with the same tech are usually much worse. There's something about the nature of Dagoth Ur's voice in particular that makes it work well.
I don't know if that's what you were already referring to, but for me, the shout-outs for "Double Kill, Multi Kill, Ultra Kill, MONSTER KILL!!!" account at this stage for probably a majority of the nostalgia for the original Unreal Tournament. Of course it didn't hurt that the game was phenomenal and a great fit for its time, but still, I think that the quality of voice lines can make or break a game.
To be fair I think if there is any kinda okay use of GenAI is being able to get some images and such without needing the money to hire an artist.
Maybe that allows for way more niche games.
In other words: It's the whole package. If I get something unique, and the dev used some "AI" for translation or to make some avatar image for a character I am happy this game is allowed to exist.
If I see a AAA studio putting out the hundredth iteration of the same old game, of some franchise that used to be good and interesting in the 90s and then doesn't even bring actually new art to the table it's a huge disappointment.
But here we are. EA cannot even manage to fix their basic bugs (like players running into nets or a new kickoff for less than a second) after a dozen of new expensive releases.
Non-indie games have largely been a complete farce for decades now.
For what it's worth it spawned a lot of quality software as a side effect. And served as an educational platform for a lot of programmers that felt that there's something wrong with modern day software and python/javascript low quality garbage they did at their day-to-day job, but couldn't quite put their finger on it.
Turns out you can both fail, and yet succeed in 10 different ways at the same time.
We of the hand crafted software guild (HCSG) vow to not use too much tools and automation.
Sure, you may use a compiler to magically transform your source code into real executable software or use some Adobe product to transform your ugly concept drawing into something amazing, but we draw the vague limit at outsourcing too much to automation at AI generated or curated content.
One can only respect the trade if one works extremely hard, drew blood and shedded tears and sweat from one's very overworked body. AI is just creepy and has no soul. Did the great artists, developers and programmers copy paste a lot of each others work and call it a day? We think not!
Here we do not re-invent the wheel or copy someone else's wheel. You will be obligated to design, develop, program and come up with your own wheel, even if you have a copy of the best wheel possible for your program.
We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches so the high quality of software is always preserved. Your parents and great-parents will be proud and shed nostalgic tears when using your software. Everything should be as it was and everything should be traditionally awesome.
I'll be more inclined to believe the hype when we start measuring accuracy and predictability like SLOs and holding the companies accountable for bad results.
I've been working with a partner on a game and we decided that AI assets are acceptable to use for targeted scenarios like localization and accessibility (text-to-text, text-to-speech).
The red line is AI cannot be the prime generator of content. For example, the text that is to be localized must be authored by a human. Using ChatGPT to generate scripts from a brief prompt and then feeding that into another AI tool is an example of strictly prohibited use.
You can have an actual human redo the translations or voice lines without much frustration (i.e., if we actually make any money). Anything further than that gets a lot more invasive in terms of rework.
I think you’re making a big mistake with this one. Assuming it’s being used for anything other than eg placeholder before real translation/localization.
Even decent professionally translated games get this stuff wrong sometimes and irritate their audiences, I can’t imagine how badly AI will bungle it
I think in this case the choice is between AI localization and no localization at all. If that is the case, I actually think that users will appreciate localization with minor issues over doing things in English.
Anecdotally, I have found AI translation to be perfectly acceptable for the languages that I do know, on par with a human translation service, at least. This may be different in a game with e.g. fantasy vocabulary that is made up.
The “they’re just jelly that we can do better than they with AI” camp really needs to spend more time hanging around artisans in general, instead of flouncing into comment sections and evangelizing the AI-booster groupthink.
Artists and creators are, broadly, incredibly pissed that their output was used to train these models without compensation or consent by trillion-dollar megacorps and VC-funded startups. That is, and remains, the core grievance. People who already make a pittance by devoting themselves to the creation of art are now forced out of art entirely because programmers just couldn’t be bothered to - GASP - have an original thought and commission someone else to execute it for them.
A distant, but still important, secondary concern is the quality of the slop itself (or lack thereof). Anyone who engages with art sufficiently can see the “seams” in generative content, even in state of the art models: perspectives lack consistency across key frames, anatomy isn’t grounded in reality or bends in ways befitting of a horror movie, geometry and materials that do not “graft” together due to a lack of negative space. These models are garbage because they don’t recognize core artistic concepts, only haphazardly reassemble pieces by prompt.
I challenge the AI crowd to actually go to an art faire, or commission a custom piece of your idea. Have something you had to contribute more than a simple prompt, to. Identify styles you like and artists that work within them. Take the chance to make more human connections and bond over shared creativity.
The artists will thank you, and you’re likely to enjoy the resultant output far more.
At this point, I just assume anyone who advocates for the use of AI is actually just an output from some AI. Given that "human-sounding speech" is the thing that AI is most easily able to produce, and how many different AIs are out there, and how beneficial an army of never-softening commenters can be for any specific pet cause you like, I can't think of why it wouldn't be statistically irresponsible to not assume that.
I've met enough real humans with completely self-important defenses of it that I know that they exist, so I'm willing to at least give them doubt. But the assumption is that they are AI and they need to prove being human. To assume otherwise is unreasonable.
I debated a bit about how to answer this, because I've seen this idea so much after stable diffusion came out. I have a serious answer, and a sarcastic one. I'll go with the serious one. The sarcastic bit was just replacing coders with artists in your text. You can imagine it, I guess :)
Why are "artists" special? Why did you feel the need to type these 4 thoughtful (but overdone imo) paragraphs, defending "artisans"? Why are they special, when compared to coders? Why do the artists get to use ever better tools designed to help them, but when the other side gets the same kinds of tools, it's suddenly faux pas? Is it just "AI hate" or is it something else? Can you at least see the double standards that you apply in your post, as I can see it from outside?
It used to be that games were coded by passionate people. People who knew how to code. They'd painstakingly find ways of making ascii characters do silly things on a screen that wasn't necessarily designed for what they were doing. Later, they started playing with pixels. But they were still coders. So they coded away until the pixels started doing funny things on the screen. You talk about "art"? Hah. THAT was art. The ability and tech knowledge to make those early systems do those things with pixels is something that we just don't see today. And we don't see it, in large, because coders did what coders do and made it simpler for anyone else to do those funny things with pixels on a screen.
At every step of the way coders built software to help other people. They built engines. Then they built harnesses for the designers, animators and so on. Then they built simplified engines. The endless RPG generators, and so on. Then they built "no-code" solutions. Here, friend, you take this piece of code, plug in your art and you have a game! And they were happy to do that, because it was enabling other people to do their thing. With code they wrote. And many of them free of charge!
But now, when suddenly coders have a tool that they can use themselves, to empower them with things that they couldn't previously do, now suddenly there's a problem? Why is one artist's output "art", even if the game code is shit, while the opposite isn't? Why can't a coder enjoy creating a game, with help from tools that do something they simply don't care about? They want to do the logic behind the things moving on the screen, and can't / won't spend time creating the art. Why should they be shunned? Why not enjoy the experience for what it is? Is it just AI hate? If so, perhaps you should disclose it. Dunno, this whole take of yours feels mighty high-horsey for my taste.
While I can see where your argument comes from (because up until about ten years ago, I would’ve written it verbatim myself), I must respectfully disagree with it. Some programmers build tools to help people, but most do not. They build tools for surveillance, engines for advertising, exploit human psychology with patterns and site designs that deliberately hinder users, not help them. Most programmers never contribute to Open Source, but instead go to work for tech conglomerates to make money, because that is what society demands of us and coding - until recently - was a solid path into Middle Class status.
I question the sincerity of this narrative that the AI companies are doing this to “help” us, when their actions say otherwise at every turn. I also question that diffusion models and LLMs “enable” programmers to somehow create things others could do with a pencil, paper, and practice. I question this notion that a human must be able to be entirely self-sufficient through technology rather than cooperative with their fellow man, or that every skill must be commoditized for maximum extraction of wealth instead of respected as expertise within a community. I do not hate AI because to do so would be to hate a hammer, or a screwdriver.
Where the hate in my heart lies are towards those who demand we reduce humanity, its chaos, its ephemeralness, its qualia, to a mathematical model devoid of entropy. I hate that because these people - not the tools themselves - deign themselves superior men who are somehow above or immune to the fundamental force of reality (entropy), devoid of responsibility or accountability for their actions or harms.
A true AI booster should be screaming angry that this compute capacity is being squandered on shitty image generation and chatbots that convince teenagers to commit suicide or psychologists that they’re discovering inter-dimensional communication. These vaunted tools should be used to balance the economy, uplift the populace, hold the powerful to account, mediate disputes, improve outcomes in quality and longevity of life.
They are emphatically not being used in this capacity, and their owners have made it abundantly clear through their repeated actions that said outcomes have never been, and never will be, their intent.
There's a spectrum of human involvement in producing a thing, and art is possibly the last thing I want to see automate.
In the end, art is about human connection. There's a difference between an print of some generated AI slop found online, a painting made in a Chinese factory for a big store, and the scribble your friend made when they went through depression.
You can make a game with all three process. They are not the same.
I can understand people who are upset about AI being used to generate artwork or more "creative" tasks that lean into other people's work, but using this to paint AI as "bad" as a whole is simplistic.
There are a million things AI can do that wouldn't fall into this category (repetitive, time-consuming work) that technically wouldn't make the product "AI free."
It's about as smart as hearing a phone was used to plan a bank heist, therefore we need "phone free" communication.
A huge amount of music now is “copy and pasting samples” in FL studio or GarageBand and that is considered 100% human so I would say the line is very clear. The line is at “did it matter that you did this, or would any layperson in your stead have been able to make pretty much exactly the same thing (qualitatively judged)?”
I like AI to figure out complex issue or something I would just find on stackoverflow. It's great for doing boiler plate crap that I don't want to do anyways. But when you need it to do something that it hasn't found in a git repo, it struggles.
"Normal" people will just buy the game if it's good.
So it's irrelevant if it uses AI or not. Ie. it's not a sales pitch and not part of decision making process when making the purchase.
There are increasingly more games that use some form of AI generated content, voice lines or otherwise, and nobody could care less, except the people outlined above.
By your own admission its not irrelevant, there are a small group of people who do care about that kind of thing on either side. For an indie dev, that matters. AAA studios can pretty much guarantee at least a few thousand sales, indie devs, especially the less established ones, have far less. For first timers, there'll be none at all.
The thing is though, appealing to the pro-AI crowd is much more difficult. They want a game thats a shining example of what AI can be in gaming. The anti-AI crowd doesn't need that, they've got examples of that for decades. A few AI generated voice lines won't do much to appeal to the pro-AI crowd.
Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd" (whatever the fuck that even means) when they use AI tools.
If an indie (or even less of an indie) is using AI generation, they are doing so to save costs or work around their very limited budget. Or using it to work around some limitations where voicecasting every line would be infeasible, etc.
And losing the small portion of the miniscule-vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are - wasnt part of their audience to begin with), to be able to use AI-gen is not a loss at all.
Data on Steam is telling, these tools are becoming increasingly prevalent.
Oh yes they are, there's a lot of games (or at least, promises of future games) that promise to be 100% vibe-coded or that make heavy use of AI in a way thats very prominent to the player. There was an example just last week:
> And losing the small portion of the vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are, wasnt part of their audience to begin with), is not a loss at all.
That seems like a very different crowd to me. I've been around the industry long enough to see the signs of that, and I don't see that much from the anti-ai crowd, or at least not in any more significant numbers. See: the project zomboid AI art issue
But like I say, for an indie, yes losing a small audience can still be a big loss.
It seems like you're way too bought into warring internet-weirdo tribe dynamics.
If you use or don't use a tool (your choice), it doesn't make you pro or an anti.
It's basic pragmatism, if a tools is useful to you, you use it, if it isn't, you don't.
The consumer base mostly doesn't care, nor should they. They care about end result.
Or else nobody would buy iphones, nikes and what not.
The moment you bring up "pros and antis" and tribe dynamics, I smell a brainrot from a mile away. You do you I guess.
Only a small number of indie games will go mainstream enough for that to matter, I think. If your likely outcome is selling 10,000 copies getting in with the reviewer and blogger crowd is probably helpful.
Slop is slop because it's slop. Sounds tautological, but AI is orthogonal to the problem. Before AI, there were and are Unity/Unreal "asset store piles" which grab a bunch of (mostly free) assets from the engine's store and slap them into a game. Nothing looks coherent or cohesive. AI has made that a lot more easy and customizable, of course, but the end result is the same: a bunch of disparate elements coming together incohesively, making for a poor player experience.
In the end it's about taste. People with poor taste will make bad games, whether they use AI or not. AI has certainly accelerated the rate at which bad games can be made, however.
Personally I'd rather play an indie game made by one person who uses GenAI to help build out their coherent, unique, and personal vision, rather than an entirely handmade yet another soulless Roguelite Deckbuilder, 2d pixel art platformer, or extraction shooter.
I think it's so interesting that people want to know something is created by AI to not consume it. Personally I don't care if something is made by AI or not. If I like it I like it. If not, then I don't. At this point at least I don't like bad usage of AI. But there has been some absolutely bangers of content created by AI. My previous background was AI generated for example.
I'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can become a crutch that hurts rather than helps.
I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a remarkable difference between AI being used for the software engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop count as Gen AI? How could it not?
In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a somewhat painstaking creative process.
I think of it more like Ikea furniture produced in a factory vs an artisans hand-crafted chair.
One of them is made with love and care, the other is an industrial product, one of millions.
The difference with video games is the artisan's chair is cheaper than the Ikea product.
The problem with AI isn't really the tool itself, it's the fact that the tool is only able to produce because it has stolen the work of real artists to rip them off, and then take their jobs...
You understand the difference? Instead of improving your skills, you just spin the prompt roulette and hope the AI gods gift you with something palatable.
I've been keeping an eye out on AI disclosures on Steam (https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...). While it's unsurprising that devs are using it, what was surprising was the number of games that disclose it. I believe, as of November, it's up to 8% of the while library. The biggest game to disclose AI use right now is Stellaris (with many many millions in sales), though having initially launched many years ago, their GenAI usage is in product updates.
Maybe it is a good strategy. Haters will more likely to steer clear instead of raging in comments and others will be less surprised over ai typical inconsistences and issues.
Many years ago I was watching a video of some sculpture being done. I was quite unimpressed with the art itself.
Then the video zoomed out, and I saw that the guy had spent like 2 years making it out of individual toothpicks.
Suddenly I was amazed, right?
With AI it's kinda the opposite process, right? You see something, it's impressive, maybe you even like it personally, and then you realize orders of magnitude less effort went into it than it looks like "should" have, based on the result.
So we seem to have here the "direct experience" of the art itself, and then a "narrative layer" which obscures that. And we seem to value the latter more highly.
A related example is those pages selling "handcrafted" leather bags and they have an life story about Grandma Williams and suddenly the bag is worth a billion times more to the buyer.
This is the sad reality. Because things can go the other way as well. Something can be amazing but beaten down because - AI.
Here's a video which was discussed by VFX artists at Corridor Digital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43h61QAXjpY
This is so much creative work. But once people know that genAI and ComfyUI might be involved they might beat it down.
Absolutely. It's the same reason I won't watch woodworking videos that incorporate CNC. I am here for the craftsmanship, not just the end result.
I literally do not care what tools you use to write your code.
Most of the focus on this isn't the code. It's the art and music that make up the experience.
This is discussed right in the article.
> For Kanaris-Sotiriou, the question of adopting the use of gen AI to make games was an easy one to answer. “The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork [...] are unfair,” he says.
I personally think using AI assistance for the code is much less intrusive than using AI for the art and music -- the code isn't as directly experienced by the player as the art.
Much of it comes from people feeling challenged and threatened by the new tech so they construct elaborate philosophies to justify how they feel, but this rapidly crumbles when you look closer. For instance, artists felt threatened by generative AI and came up with a narrative about copyright stuff. But then Adobe comes along with generative AI which doesn't have the copyright issue and how do those same artists respond? With a loud "fuck you" to Adobe, because the root of their objection was never copyright but rather what the new technology would do to their established careers.
In this atmosphere, I think it's easy to perceive an implied rejection of and threat to AI generated code, even if the focus is on art assets, because people aren't being entirely direct and forthright about exactly what it is they're upset about, and that makes for a landmine field.
Thank God the benevolent Adobe shareholders have swooped in to protect us from people who have learned a skill.
So is it about protecting the commercial value of artistic skills, as I said, or is it about copyright?
What about both?
Stego-tech assures me it isn't both!
Yeah nah. The core reason they’re pissed is the blatant theft of their work to train these models without compensation or permission (the age old “if it’s on the web it’s free to use” bullshit argument), with “artistic merit” being a distant, but still critical, second.
If you can actually write stories or create art, you can see the “seams” in generative content and it gets to be quite nauseating. The fact it was trained on your own output by a trillion-dollar megacorp via theft while you scrape money for rent is the injury to the former’s insult.
Yeah, I don't understand why anyone would support this
https://x.com/_muds_/status/1992982113763865028
Yeah, no. The example of Adobe neatly illuminates what's actually going on. Arguments about copyright are the Motte; a seemingly defensible position people can fall back to when challenged. Instead of defending the position of opposing non-infringing models, which Adobe created, AI opponents ignore that argument and fall back on copyright (you just did this, ignored the point about Adobe and reiterated the Motte arguments.)
Now, as for "seams" in generated out: insofar those seem are visible to the general public and not only those with artistic talent of their own, the seams are reassuring to artists concerned about tge future commercial value of their talents. But insofar as those seams are only apparent to the artistically trained, that concerns artists because if the buyers of art won't necessarily perceive it.
Arc Raiders and The Finals got some controversy lately for using AI voice acting. Those games don't have any "normal" vocal performances.
Arc Raiders has 160k Steam reviews (which is a lot) and 90% of them are positive. It also has an estimated >4M owners despite a high price tag and is currently the #4 most played game on Steam globally. The AI nay-sayers are a vocal minority - and likely just terminally online Twitter people that do not even play the game, the rest of the players are too busy enjoying the game regardless of whether it's made with AI or not.
What do you mean by "high price"?
"Normal" price for a AAA game is more like $60, and Arc is 40.
Sure, indie/2D can be had for less (like Factorio or Silksong), but I would not expect an <$40 price tag for a 3D game like that.
Helldivers 2 which services the same niche goes for the same price.
I think it's more that the use of AI is in an unimportant part of the game. They could have zero AI voice overs without impacting the game in a meaningful manner. They're pretty bad though and I've definitely seen them getting mocked.
I haven't seem a game voice every fucking item pickup or mini location callout like arc raiders, so it's a quality win for me. I didn't care about the voice performance of "lets head to the olive grove" ever
Those games are shooter-slop anyway.
I can't remember the last time I cared about voice lines in Quake or Unreal Tournament or any other multiplayer shooter.
It's not an RPG or a rich-story genre game, so who cares.
I kinda see your point. The warm feeling of knowing a real human told me "die, bitch!" isn't a feeling I've ever taken away from playing UT.
On the other hand, lots of AI-generated VO is very easy to spot, and sounds awful. It stands to reason it could meaningfully take away from even a completely plot-free game. If I were a voice actor, I'd feel insulted that anyone would find it comparable to my work.
It really depends on the voice. For some reason, AI impersonations of Dagoth Ur are remarkably accurate even though Dagoth Ur has only a few sentences of dialogue. I've listened to several audiobooks made with his voice and they're very close to dead on, just with some cadence issues and occasional heterophone fumbling.
Other voices cloned with the same tech are usually much worse. There's something about the nature of Dagoth Ur's voice in particular that makes it work well.
I don't know if that's what you were already referring to, but for me, the shout-outs for "Double Kill, Multi Kill, Ultra Kill, MONSTER KILL!!!" account at this stage for probably a majority of the nostalgia for the original Unreal Tournament. Of course it didn't hurt that the game was phenomenal and a great fit for its time, but still, I think that the quality of voice lines can make or break a game.
Arc Raiders has NPCs in the game hub which deliver quests and exposition, its not entirely within the context of a raid.
To be fair I think if there is any kinda okay use of GenAI is being able to get some images and such without needing the money to hire an artist.
Maybe that allows for way more niche games.
In other words: It's the whole package. If I get something unique, and the dev used some "AI" for translation or to make some avatar image for a character I am happy this game is allowed to exist.
If I see a AAA studio putting out the hundredth iteration of the same old game, of some franchise that used to be good and interesting in the 90s and then doesn't even bring actually new art to the table it's a huge disappointment.
But here we are. EA cannot even manage to fix their basic bugs (like players running into nets or a new kickoff for less than a second) after a dozen of new expensive releases.
Non-indie games have largely been a complete farce for decades now.
The "hand made" era of software
And this when "Handmade Hero" was abandoned over two years ago, after not really getting anywhere over the course of 9 years.
For what it's worth it spawned a lot of quality software as a side effect. And served as an educational platform for a lot of programmers that felt that there's something wrong with modern day software and python/javascript low quality garbage they did at their day-to-day job, but couldn't quite put their finger on it.
Turns out you can both fail, and yet succeed in 10 different ways at the same time.
Haven't you kept up with the social media status, and the conferences that came out of it?
Artisanal!
I remember when artisanal Doritos came out. That felt like the end of that.
We of the hand crafted software guild (HCSG) vow to not use too much tools and automation.
Sure, you may use a compiler to magically transform your source code into real executable software or use some Adobe product to transform your ugly concept drawing into something amazing, but we draw the vague limit at outsourcing too much to automation at AI generated or curated content.
One can only respect the trade if one works extremely hard, drew blood and shedded tears and sweat from one's very overworked body. AI is just creepy and has no soul. Did the great artists, developers and programmers copy paste a lot of each others work and call it a day? We think not!
Here we do not re-invent the wheel or copy someone else's wheel. You will be obligated to design, develop, program and come up with your own wheel, even if you have a copy of the best wheel possible for your program.
We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches so the high quality of software is always preserved. Your parents and great-parents will be proud and shed nostalgic tears when using your software. Everything should be as it was and everything should be traditionally awesome.
/s
I'll be more inclined to believe the hype when we start measuring accuracy and predictability like SLOs and holding the companies accountable for bad results.
> We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches so the high quality of software is always preserved
I see the `\s` but this part at least is literally what we need to do!
You do realize you can copy digital stuff as much as you want? :)
Is that fact meant to be hidden or put aside here? I am not sure I see that.
I've been working with a partner on a game and we decided that AI assets are acceptable to use for targeted scenarios like localization and accessibility (text-to-text, text-to-speech).
The red line is AI cannot be the prime generator of content. For example, the text that is to be localized must be authored by a human. Using ChatGPT to generate scripts from a brief prompt and then feeding that into another AI tool is an example of strictly prohibited use.
You can have an actual human redo the translations or voice lines without much frustration (i.e., if we actually make any money). Anything further than that gets a lot more invasive in terms of rework.
> like localization
I think you’re making a big mistake with this one. Assuming it’s being used for anything other than eg placeholder before real translation/localization.
Even decent professionally translated games get this stuff wrong sometimes and irritate their audiences, I can’t imagine how badly AI will bungle it
I think in this case the choice is between AI localization and no localization at all. If that is the case, I actually think that users will appreciate localization with minor issues over doing things in English.
Anecdotally, I have found AI translation to be perfectly acceptable for the languages that I do know, on par with a human translation service, at least. This may be different in a game with e.g. fantasy vocabulary that is made up.
The “they’re just jelly that we can do better than they with AI” camp really needs to spend more time hanging around artisans in general, instead of flouncing into comment sections and evangelizing the AI-booster groupthink.
Artists and creators are, broadly, incredibly pissed that their output was used to train these models without compensation or consent by trillion-dollar megacorps and VC-funded startups. That is, and remains, the core grievance. People who already make a pittance by devoting themselves to the creation of art are now forced out of art entirely because programmers just couldn’t be bothered to - GASP - have an original thought and commission someone else to execute it for them.
A distant, but still important, secondary concern is the quality of the slop itself (or lack thereof). Anyone who engages with art sufficiently can see the “seams” in generative content, even in state of the art models: perspectives lack consistency across key frames, anatomy isn’t grounded in reality or bends in ways befitting of a horror movie, geometry and materials that do not “graft” together due to a lack of negative space. These models are garbage because they don’t recognize core artistic concepts, only haphazardly reassemble pieces by prompt.
I challenge the AI crowd to actually go to an art faire, or commission a custom piece of your idea. Have something you had to contribute more than a simple prompt, to. Identify styles you like and artists that work within them. Take the chance to make more human connections and bond over shared creativity.
The artists will thank you, and you’re likely to enjoy the resultant output far more.
At this point, I just assume anyone who advocates for the use of AI is actually just an output from some AI. Given that "human-sounding speech" is the thing that AI is most easily able to produce, and how many different AIs are out there, and how beneficial an army of never-softening commenters can be for any specific pet cause you like, I can't think of why it wouldn't be statistically irresponsible to not assume that.
I've met enough real humans with completely self-important defenses of it that I know that they exist, so I'm willing to at least give them doubt. But the assumption is that they are AI and they need to prove being human. To assume otherwise is unreasonable.
I debated a bit about how to answer this, because I've seen this idea so much after stable diffusion came out. I have a serious answer, and a sarcastic one. I'll go with the serious one. The sarcastic bit was just replacing coders with artists in your text. You can imagine it, I guess :)
Why are "artists" special? Why did you feel the need to type these 4 thoughtful (but overdone imo) paragraphs, defending "artisans"? Why are they special, when compared to coders? Why do the artists get to use ever better tools designed to help them, but when the other side gets the same kinds of tools, it's suddenly faux pas? Is it just "AI hate" or is it something else? Can you at least see the double standards that you apply in your post, as I can see it from outside?
It used to be that games were coded by passionate people. People who knew how to code. They'd painstakingly find ways of making ascii characters do silly things on a screen that wasn't necessarily designed for what they were doing. Later, they started playing with pixels. But they were still coders. So they coded away until the pixels started doing funny things on the screen. You talk about "art"? Hah. THAT was art. The ability and tech knowledge to make those early systems do those things with pixels is something that we just don't see today. And we don't see it, in large, because coders did what coders do and made it simpler for anyone else to do those funny things with pixels on a screen.
At every step of the way coders built software to help other people. They built engines. Then they built harnesses for the designers, animators and so on. Then they built simplified engines. The endless RPG generators, and so on. Then they built "no-code" solutions. Here, friend, you take this piece of code, plug in your art and you have a game! And they were happy to do that, because it was enabling other people to do their thing. With code they wrote. And many of them free of charge!
But now, when suddenly coders have a tool that they can use themselves, to empower them with things that they couldn't previously do, now suddenly there's a problem? Why is one artist's output "art", even if the game code is shit, while the opposite isn't? Why can't a coder enjoy creating a game, with help from tools that do something they simply don't care about? They want to do the logic behind the things moving on the screen, and can't / won't spend time creating the art. Why should they be shunned? Why not enjoy the experience for what it is? Is it just AI hate? If so, perhaps you should disclose it. Dunno, this whole take of yours feels mighty high-horsey for my taste.
While I can see where your argument comes from (because up until about ten years ago, I would’ve written it verbatim myself), I must respectfully disagree with it. Some programmers build tools to help people, but most do not. They build tools for surveillance, engines for advertising, exploit human psychology with patterns and site designs that deliberately hinder users, not help them. Most programmers never contribute to Open Source, but instead go to work for tech conglomerates to make money, because that is what society demands of us and coding - until recently - was a solid path into Middle Class status.
I question the sincerity of this narrative that the AI companies are doing this to “help” us, when their actions say otherwise at every turn. I also question that diffusion models and LLMs “enable” programmers to somehow create things others could do with a pencil, paper, and practice. I question this notion that a human must be able to be entirely self-sufficient through technology rather than cooperative with their fellow man, or that every skill must be commoditized for maximum extraction of wealth instead of respected as expertise within a community. I do not hate AI because to do so would be to hate a hammer, or a screwdriver.
Where the hate in my heart lies are towards those who demand we reduce humanity, its chaos, its ephemeralness, its qualia, to a mathematical model devoid of entropy. I hate that because these people - not the tools themselves - deign themselves superior men who are somehow above or immune to the fundamental force of reality (entropy), devoid of responsibility or accountability for their actions or harms.
A true AI booster should be screaming angry that this compute capacity is being squandered on shitty image generation and chatbots that convince teenagers to commit suicide or psychologists that they’re discovering inter-dimensional communication. These vaunted tools should be used to balance the economy, uplift the populace, hold the powerful to account, mediate disputes, improve outcomes in quality and longevity of life.
They are emphatically not being used in this capacity, and their owners have made it abundantly clear through their repeated actions that said outcomes have never been, and never will be, their intent.
And that is the source of my personal hate.
There's a spectrum of human involvement in producing a thing, and art is possibly the last thing I want to see automate.
In the end, art is about human connection. There's a difference between an print of some generated AI slop found online, a painting made in a Chinese factory for a big store, and the scribble your friend made when they went through depression.
You can make a game with all three process. They are not the same.
I can understand people who are upset about AI being used to generate artwork or more "creative" tasks that lean into other people's work, but using this to paint AI as "bad" as a whole is simplistic.
There are a million things AI can do that wouldn't fall into this category (repetitive, time-consuming work) that technically wouldn't make the product "AI free."
It's about as smart as hearing a phone was used to plan a bank heist, therefore we need "phone free" communication.
When you copy paste assets in UE that's AI free but is that really "hand made"? I don't know where is the line https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoY062kY1s
A huge amount of music now is “copy and pasting samples” in FL studio or GarageBand and that is considered 100% human so I would say the line is very clear. The line is at “did it matter that you did this, or would any layperson in your stead have been able to make pretty much exactly the same thing (qualitatively judged)?”
Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets" of 1950s yawn
I like AI to figure out complex issue or something I would just find on stackoverflow. It's great for doing boiler plate crap that I don't want to do anyways. But when you need it to do something that it hasn't found in a git repo, it struggles.
It's the sales pitch that doesn't work for "normal" people, but only artsy-fartsy people and "games journalists".
Ie. a vocal and mostly irrelevant small minority.
Never forget who your main audience is.
But normal people also arent pro AI. Thats again a very small, vocal and irrelevant minority.
The main audience isn't going to not buy a game because it doesn't use AI
"Normal" people will just buy the game if it's good.
So it's irrelevant if it uses AI or not. Ie. it's not a sales pitch and not part of decision making process when making the purchase.
There are increasingly more games that use some form of AI generated content, voice lines or otherwise, and nobody could care less, except the people outlined above.
By your own admission its not irrelevant, there are a small group of people who do care about that kind of thing on either side. For an indie dev, that matters. AAA studios can pretty much guarantee at least a few thousand sales, indie devs, especially the less established ones, have far less. For first timers, there'll be none at all.
The thing is though, appealing to the pro-AI crowd is much more difficult. They want a game thats a shining example of what AI can be in gaming. The anti-AI crowd doesn't need that, they've got examples of that for decades. A few AI generated voice lines won't do much to appeal to the pro-AI crowd.
Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd" (whatever the fuck that even means) when they use AI tools.
If an indie (or even less of an indie) is using AI generation, they are doing so to save costs or work around their very limited budget. Or using it to work around some limitations where voicecasting every line would be infeasible, etc.
And losing the small portion of the miniscule-vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are - wasnt part of their audience to begin with), to be able to use AI-gen is not a loss at all.
Data on Steam is telling, these tools are becoming increasingly prevalent.
> Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd"
Oh yes they are, there's a lot of games (or at least, promises of future games) that promise to be 100% vibe-coded or that make heavy use of AI in a way thats very prominent to the player. There was an example just last week:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3730100/Whispers_from_the...
> And losing the small portion of the vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are, wasnt part of their audience to begin with), is not a loss at all.
That seems like a very different crowd to me. I've been around the industry long enough to see the signs of that, and I don't see that much from the anti-ai crowd, or at least not in any more significant numbers. See: the project zomboid AI art issue
But like I say, for an indie, yes losing a small audience can still be a big loss.
It seems like you're way too bought into warring internet-weirdo tribe dynamics.
If you use or don't use a tool (your choice), it doesn't make you pro or an anti. It's basic pragmatism, if a tools is useful to you, you use it, if it isn't, you don't.
The consumer base mostly doesn't care, nor should they. They care about end result. Or else nobody would buy iphones, nikes and what not.
The moment you bring up "pros and antis" and tribe dynamics, I smell a brainrot from a mile away. You do you I guess.
If I had to guess, and this is just a wild guess, I would assume the average consumer cares if a game is good, not what tech was used to make it.
Only a small number of indie games will go mainstream enough for that to matter, I think. If your likely outcome is selling 10,000 copies getting in with the reviewer and blogger crowd is probably helpful.
> It's the sales pitch that doesn't work for "normal" people
it's anyways about gamers and of that only gamers that are reachable for not yet successful indie games
I'm surprised nobody's touched the ethical angle of this yet.
Like fairtrade... this code was produced without exploiting enslaved human knowledge ;)
Seems like a misguided fight.
Slop is slop because it's slop. Sounds tautological, but AI is orthogonal to the problem. Before AI, there were and are Unity/Unreal "asset store piles" which grab a bunch of (mostly free) assets from the engine's store and slap them into a game. Nothing looks coherent or cohesive. AI has made that a lot more easy and customizable, of course, but the end result is the same: a bunch of disparate elements coming together incohesively, making for a poor player experience.
In the end it's about taste. People with poor taste will make bad games, whether they use AI or not. AI has certainly accelerated the rate at which bad games can be made, however.
Personally I'd rather play an indie game made by one person who uses GenAI to help build out their coherent, unique, and personal vision, rather than an entirely handmade yet another soulless Roguelite Deckbuilder, 2d pixel art platformer, or extraction shooter.
Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets" of 1950s
I give it a year or two and people will stop caring
I think the next decade will be one that values anything provably authentic and it will keep becoming more and more rare.
I think it's so interesting that people want to know something is created by AI to not consume it. Personally I don't care if something is made by AI or not. If I like it I like it. If not, then I don't. At this point at least I don't like bad usage of AI. But there has been some absolutely bangers of content created by AI. My previous background was AI generated for example.
https://archive.ph/20251125055632/https://www.theverge.com/e...
I'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can become a crutch that hurts rather than helps.
I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a remarkable difference between AI being used for the software engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop count as Gen AI? How could it not?
In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a somewhat painstaking creative process.
It just seems weird to me.
It's like a carpenter saying they're power tool free.
You have an amazing tool to speed up your work why wouldn't you use it?
I think of it more like Ikea furniture produced in a factory vs an artisans hand-crafted chair. One of them is made with love and care, the other is an industrial product, one of millions. The difference with video games is the artisan's chair is cheaper than the Ikea product.
The problem with AI isn't really the tool itself, it's the fact that the tool is only able to produce because it has stolen the work of real artists to rip them off, and then take their jobs...
All science and art comes from people before you.
There's a term for that
"Built on the shoulders of giants"
Generative AI isn't a tool, it's an oracle.
You understand the difference? Instead of improving your skills, you just spin the prompt roulette and hope the AI gods gift you with something palatable.