‘Tomb Raider’ Remake Developed Using Some AI, Everyone Freaks, Crystal Dynamics Responds, And I’m Confused
from the none-of-this-makes-sense dept
Full disclosure: this post is going to pose way more questions than answers. That’s because the story of the Tomb Raider remake being produced by Crystal Dynamics and its inclusion of an AI disclosure on Steam makes no sense to me.
So, let’s start at the beginning. Crystal Dynamics is making an updated version of the first Tomb Raider game and it looks pretty great from what I’ve seen. But, as gamers are now accustomed to doing, the public came to notice that the game’s Steam page included one of Steam’s mandatory AI disclosure notices. It reads thusly:
AI-assisted tools were used during development to support some early exploration and temporary development content. Any AI-assisted assets were either replaced or refined by humans in order to maintain the creative and artistic vision of the development team.
And from there, because, of course, everyone freaked out. Comments from all the corners of the internet began flooding in, swearing off ever touching this game because it was developed using AI. What AI? We don’t know. How much was it utilized? No real content there, either. But is the game going to be good? It doesn’t fucking matter, because AI was used and that’s all you need to know in order to know that this game is going to be artless pap fit only to be mocked and laughed at.
Even some gaming journalists have gotten into the habit. This is from Kotaku:
GenAI slop potentially showing up in Tomb Raider is disappointing but maybe less surprising than it should be. Phil Rogers, CEO of Crystal Dynamics’ parent company, Embracer Group, last year called genAI a “powerful technology” for “driving efficiency.” Crystal Dynamics has also undergone several rounds of layoffs, completing three just last year and one earlier in 2026.
Here you have a writer who has already reached their conclusion while having almost zero information on which to base that conclusion. They haven’t played the game. They’ve barely seen the content in the game, save for some trailers. They don’t know thing one about how AI was used, where, and in what way. But it’s probably going to be “GenAI slop”. As if there is simply no other possible outcome.
But it gets at least slightly stranger with Crystal Dynamics having responded to some of those concerns over at Eurogamer.
“At Crystal Dynamics, we leverage AI tools to help our teams iterate on ideas faster and more efficiently, while ensuring that all finished content in the final product is human-crafted. Our goal is to empower the creativity and flexibility of our developers to deliver the highest-quality experiences for players everywhere.”
This is where I get confused. If all of the content that is going to make it into the final product is “human-crafted,” then they shouldn’t even have needed to add the disclosure to their Steam page. Back in January, Steam updated its rules around its AI disclosure such that a game with an AI disclosure must have AI-generated content that is either in public marketing materials for the game or in the final product and with which the player of the game interacts in order to require the disclosure.
In its submission form, Valve now specifies that game publishers must disclose pre-made generative AI assets only when used in marketing materials or content that “ships with your game, and is consumed by players.”
In other words, Steam’s disclosure requirement is not concerned with generative AI tools used behind the scenes for efficiency gains (presumably including coding helpers) or office work, but with things like final art, sound, and writing.
Now, I’ll just note that there is a subtle difference in the disclosure notice and Crystal Dynamics’ statement. The former indicates that the game may include AI-generated assets that were then iterated upon by a human developer. The latter seems to say the opposite, where everything in the final game will be “human-crafted”. So… which is it?
As I said from the start, more questions than answers is all I have at the moment. But if the gaming public is going to freak out at the mere mention of some AI being used in some way, somewhere within every new video game that comes out, then this is going to be a very annoying time in which to be a gamer.
Filed Under: ai, tomb raider, video games
Companies: crystal dynamics
Comments on “‘Tomb Raider’ Remake Developed Using Some AI, Everyone Freaks, Crystal Dynamics Responds, And I’m Confused”
The Deal Is...
We’re seeing massive layoffs in favor of
inflating CEO bonusesincorporating AI toreplace human workersempower employees and increase productivity, and gamers, more than many, are highly aware of this. We love games and know AI is absolutely not ready for primetime. We love games and love the artists that make them so beautiful. We hate greedy corporations and moronic CEO’s and beancounters that looks only to the next quarter and performance bonuses. Thus, we despise AI in its current state, as it is little more than an excuse to fire employees and work whatever is left until they burnout.Re:
What are the absolute figures for this in the games industry?
Because most firms “AI-washing” their layoffs tend to be companies that were already overstaffed.
I’m not buying the AI cynicism so far.
I do have an objection to games using AI: the image and video generating versions of AI have a significant demerit that goes beyond the concerns of whether or not something has artistic merit.
They are incredibly energy hungry to make happen. To the point where I believe they’re actively harmful to our environment just because of what it takes to actually run them.
On that score, I don’t think anyone should be using them – not until the environmental concerns are no longer a problem. It’s for that reason that I would happily give a miss to any game using AI-generated art assets in any part of its development.
Yeah, this is what gamers should have done about lootboxes way back when.
The disclosure says the gen AI content is “either replaced or refined.” To me that is pretty clearly saying there is gen AI content in the game. Refined gen AI content is still gen AI content. So the Kotaku story doesn’t seem to be jumping to any conclusion that isn’t evidenced.
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The writer is already condemning the product based on tools mentioned in the manufacturing process.
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If part of a car was made with a tool crafted from the bones of a dead human child, even if the car ended up being the safest car imaginable and affordable as hell, the company making it should still be condemned for its use of that one specific tool.
The end product is irrelevant if the tools used to make it are so horrific from a moral and ethical standpoint that they can be condemned without issue. And given only the environmental impact of generative AI and the industry surrounding it, if you can’t condemn AI, you may want to reëxamine your morals and ethics.
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What are the particulars here? Because so far a lot of them (especially water use claims) seem to be very exaggerated so far.
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Aside from water usage, there’s also noise pollution and increased heat production (which raises temperatures in the surrounding areas). Chemical pollution is also a strong possibility, though I haven’t heard much about that particular issue.
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So I already know the water issue is pretty much a myth…
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use-statistics/
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers-a-water-footprint
…what are some sources/stats on noise, heat changes, and possible chemical effects?
There seems to be a sea of people repeating claims they’ve heard other make that aren’t actually sourced from anywhere. I’d like to know the specifics before making a call one way or another here.
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Noise pollution? Could you make it any more obvious that you are grasping at straws to rationalize a decision you already made and aren’t reasoning? That is what NIMBYs use to claim wind turbines are bad. Likewise the whine about energy usage for production of something with multi-million units shows a fundamental mathematical illiteracy.
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The disclosure says that “all finished content in the final product is human-crafted”, so Kotaku suggesting that “GenAI slop” is going to be in the game is still a conclusion without evidence.
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“Human-crafted” is a weasel phrase that could mean “a human did some photoshop work on the genAI image.”
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If there was no genAI content in the final game, they would say there is no genAI content in the final game. The fact that they are using all this PR speak makes it pretty clear that’s not the case.
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The point isn’t whether there is or isn’t GenAI content in the final game, it’s that Kotaku decided to call it GenAI slop with no evidence of what GenAI has even been used for in the development process.
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It’s worse than that because AI is not used to test the final game or upscale some textures, but from the start “to support some early exploration” that could define how the final game will look or feel.
Now if Crystal Dynamics said “we’re using AI to generate crate, rock and tree models from talented artist drawings because hell we don’t want to pay dozen 3D artists to spend weeks making them by hand when AI has already generated a bunch of them that are pretty nice, but we’ll never use AI during any artistic process”, nobody would have complained about it.
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They’re toeing the line in a very PR sort of way, but this seems to land on the “our environmental texture guy showed us a swatch of grass textures (that were generated), then he ran with the top three picks.” I try and support a positive middle ground of “replace the brush, not the artist” when it comes to genAI usage, nobody was screaming about the horrors of Content-Aware Fill when Photoshop added that feature years back. The genie is in any case way out of the bottle, as with any powerful new tech we’ve gotta figure out how to harness it productively and positively.
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The problem is that there’s no productivity gain that offsets the electricity and water cost of these models. Image and video generation in particular are incredibly outsized in terms of energy cost compared to what they can return – and that exact energy cost is not something humanity can afford.
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The upside and downside there is that the generative tech has no path to productivity, period.
It’s wholly financially nonviable and the switch of all these services to usage based billing is showing the emperor has no clothes and it’s all been a massive investment scam all along.
The catch of course is when it goes away, it will be a massive shock tot he economy, but the sooner it happens the better, ideally before the conmen make off with another round of money from the IPOs that their own CFOs are saying they’re in no fit state to perform.
Why?
Companies making dumb and cheap choices that produce low quality results is standard fare.
Do you honestly think corporations that will screw their own workers and customers over will suddenly do better with AI?
If you think that at all you truly are an idiot.
Fruit of the poisoned tree.
I thought AI-generated VFX was the one thing we all absolutely wanted AI for in the first place. Now people are getting all whiny about not enough humans in the creative mix. Screw ’em.
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Who is this ‘we’ because I have never seen or heard this demand for AI visuals from websites, forums or from the gamers in my life.
It has already been very annoying for a while now.
Honestly don’t care if it’s going to become an “annoying time to be a gamer” boo-fucking-hoo if companies don’t want the backlash stop using in your game development.
The idea behind a trailer is to garner interest in an upcoming game. When the vast majority of AI use to date hasn’t been to make a batter game, but rather to cut corners usually with poor results once it hits the end user, I don’t blame users not being excited for a game talking about how they are using AI during development.
Perhaps when it comes out it will be outstanding and people will think differently, but there is no obligation for the public to buy into or be happy about an upcoming title from a major franchise that appears to be using a significant amount of AI during development.
Kane Parsons, the director of Backrooms (and now the youngest person to have ever directed a box office–topping film), had this to say about generative AI:
And that’s the problem people who are against generative AI have with generative AI: If someone didn’t care enough to make all the choices in their art and have any intent behind making it, why should anyone care about that “art”? Like, cool, you can tell a computer to spit out an image. Bully for you. But I can ask an artist about their influences and processes, and I can figure out the intent behind the choices they made with their art. No AI can do that because it doesn’t have an intent. It just does what it’s told and spits out a best-guess result.
Using AI as part of pre-production is still using AI. It’s still ridding the process of intentional artistic choices—and the people who make them. C-suite bozos and AI evangelists might not care about that stuff. But they don’t, can’t, and damn well shouldn’t speak for everyone.
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If you are under the impression that, before AI, every piece of contents contained only details that were consciously inserted by an artist, your are telling me you never worked with kids or animals. Sure, the director may add some detaisl in the background of a specific scene for artistic purposes, but often they do NOT have control over every detail. Far from it. Imagine trying that with a scene where hundreds of extras are doing something in the background. Same goes for many assets in computer games. Before AI, there were plenty of tools for generating textures. Besides photos there were algorithms that could spit out textures. Not AI, but the only ‘ artist’ choice was which one of the generated textures to pick. And possibly some retouching if they needed to.
So where is the difference? Where is the line that You May Not Cross?
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Kids do have intent with their art. What they generally don’t have are the skills to expound upon that intent—to express, verbally or artistically, exactly what they wanted to draw. That’s part of the process of art: building those skills through practice and repetition until one gets good enough to express one’s self with honed intent. That process is what generative AI skips, and it’s why I refuse to use “artist” in reference to anyone who uses genAI. Why should I care about art someone didn’t make if they didn’t care enough to put some intent behind the placement of lines or the use of certain colors? Even children can do that, by the way. Their art might just be scribbles and such, but they could probably still explain why they did what they did. Show me a genAI model that can do the same without being told what to say.
They…kind of do, though? Like, if there’s a detail that’s “off” to them, they can ask to have it altered or removed. Of course they don’t have time to do that for every last small detail, but generally, if it’s a glaring detail for one reason or another, they’ll have enough control to say “hey, this is kinda fucked up, fix pls”.
I mean, it’s been done before. But also, we have CGI and VFX artists to do that sort of thing. We don’t need genAI to create a bunch of Backrooms People for that purpose.
And believe it or not, I have no problem with that, because there’s still a person involved in the process who is making intentional choices about what that algorithm spits out and whether it’s useful in their work. GenAI use doesn’t really equate to that.
Generally, I see art as the product of intentional choices by people to express an idea that can’t be expressed any other way. Sometimes that art is work-for-hire. Sometimes it’s a labor of love and/or the byproduct of personal passions and obsessions. (To wit: Steven Spielberg’s four separate alien movies.) But in general, it’s about an artist using their skills for the purpose of expressing ideas. Key word in that sentence: skills.
GenAI isn’t a skill. It’s not art. It is the product of a large language model’s best guess at “understanding” a prompt and spitting out what it “thinks” is the result someone wants. The LLM can’t “think” like a human does because it doesn’t “understand” what makes for aesthetically pleasing art. It can’t even explain its own “reasoning” for its “artistic” decisions without making up that reasoning. At best, it is a lazy person’s shortcut to “art”. At worst, it is an climate-destroying technology with fewer upsides than pretty much any technology before it and even fewer reasons to need its use. Any company that can’t afford to pay an actual person for their artistic skill deserves nothing less than scorn and derision.
Only the incurious, the untalented, and the gullible—i.e., people who have little to no interest in what other people think or feel—are impressed by AI. They’re people who want to be artists without actually putting in the time or effort to be artists. They don’t want to evolve their ability to communicate ideas and express their own thoughts and feelings. The commitment to being an artist of any kind, and the work that goes into becoming an artist, doesn’t exist with genAI because it’s a shortcut for hack frauds.
An image generated by what we colloquially refer to as an “AI image generator” is, at its core, a statistically optimized mosaic of noise created by feeding the output of other people’s hard work into an enormous pattern-matching algorithm that will try to give you any “answer” that will satisfy you. GenAI commodifies and artificializes elements of humanity that shouldn’t be commodified and artificialized; it strips away the beauty of the expression of someone’s skill and turns it into slop. And it’s doing so because rich motherfuckers at the top want to replace people so said motherfuckers can take in more profits without having to worry about things like “paying wages” and “taking care of other people” and “society”. That’s on top of the damage being done to the environment, our sociopolitical landscape, our mental health, and God knows what else.
My line is that any use of what we know as generative AI should be considered a red flag for anyone—but especially corporations that have enough money to pay human artists for access to their time and skills. Either they don’t know about the damage genAI does or they know but don’t care. And if they’re not willing to care even after they know? They’re not worth anyone’s time, and neither is their “art”.
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You are absolutely correct. But neither is a paintbrush or a pencil. They are tools.
The skill, the ‘art’ is in the person using them. I don’t think any game creator that uses AI in the development and drafting stages is claiming they’re done after the AI spits out its first reply or image.
But once mastered, these tools can be used by artists to help them “to express an idea that can’t be expressed any other way”.
Some artists will be better at it than others, and some of the public will always exclaim that “this, to me, is not art!”
I’m certain that claim is as old as art itself.
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But unlike generative AI, one has to become skilled with a paintbrush or a pencil to produce quality work. Generative AI can produce what looks to the average person like quality work. The issue, then, is that using genAI cuts out all the need to become skilled at art and, for large corporations that are totally into using genAI, cuts out the need to hire artists if some slop will work just as well and ends up being cheaper than paying someone a living wage.
Not yet, they aren’t. But the companies that are bullish on genAI will almost certainly push development in that direction, if they haven’t already done so. That was effectively the promise of genAI from the AI evangelists: that “democratizing creativity” would mean not having to deal with people and all the messiness therein because genAI would make all the “art”.
I have ideas. If I want to write them and I think I have the skill, I’ll do it myself. If I don’t think I have the skill, I’m not going to use genAI as a way of faking that skill. And if my ideas are visual in nature, I can draw them (poorly) or, should I have the money, pay someone to draw them for me. What I won’t do is use genAI as a shortcut to getting that image into a “fixed” format.
That’s all genAI is: a shortcut for people unwilling to either build their own skills or pay people for access to their skills.
Piss Christ and Duchamp’s Fountain have more of a claim to being art than any genAI slop will ever have.
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Neither do you need much skill to take a picture with your phone.
But to take one that is a piece of art and expresses some creative idea will take skill. Or luck. (Maybe both.)
Same with using an AI. Having it spit out a picture of a cat is easy. Having it spit out the picture that coveys the feeling the artist wanted to express takes skill and practice. Or a lot of post work to transform the thing the AI produced into the idea of the artist.
Either way, the AI is a tool. Just like your phone camera.
Easy to use? That was the goal. Lower the threshold as much as possible. Not to lower the quality of artist’s work, but to invite more people to try and express themselves.
If I don’t have the skills or want to take the time to learn how to draw and paint a dramatic sunset that I’m seeing, I can use my camera to snap a picture.
Maybe afterwards I’ll do some retouching in Photoshop to try and get the light to be as vivid as I remember it, maybe edit out that one detail that spoils the feeling. Perhaps I’ll succeed. Depends on my skills, both with the camera and Photoshop.
Maybe I didn’t have my camera with me and now I want to use an AI to recreate the scene. I’ll have to write a prompt and tweak that prompt until I get something that resembles the image in my mind. And then I’ll probably still fire up Photoshop to push it closer to what I remember. Perhaps I’ll succeed. Depends on my skills, both with the AI and Photoshop.
Is the picture art? Is it the result of an artist trying to express a feeling? Is the photo?
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And now you can see the end result of all that “democratizing creativity”: slop taking over the Internet, virtual NCII/CSAM made using photos of real people, jobs being slashed due to AI, environmental damage on a level that should be concerning everyone, chatbot “psychosis” that sometimes results in people killing themselves…and I’m sure others could come up with other negatives that I haven’t listed. Point is that “lower[ing] the threshold as much as possible” isn’t exactly a good thing, and it’s also fooling people into thinking mediocre slop can be good art.
Congratulations, you can go generate an image! You want a fuckin’ medal for that? Because I ain’t gonna give you one. GenAI “art” is about as divorced from the artistic process as you can get. Even with a phone camera, you still have to point the camera and hit the button, and you have to have a good sense of timing and composition and whatnot to take a quality photo. With genAI, you don’t need any artistic sense. You just have to press a button and let a machine pour some slop down your throat.
Back in the infancy of generative AI as a mainstream trend, you might have been able to convince me that it could’ve been something useful or interesting. You might have been able to make me believe all that “democratizing creativity” bullshit. But now that I’ve seen what genAI can do (including from personal experience), you won’t ever pull that off. If you want the Emptiness Machine, you go ahead and use it all you want. But don’t say I didn’t warn you about every negative of genAI, including the destruction of any real artistic soul within you. I did call it the Emptiness Machine for a reason.
Re: Re: Re:5 Film and Digital cameras
We’ve been having exactly this debate for generations, ever since some people started taking photographs instead of painting landscapes and portraits.
And then again when people started using digital cameras instead of film.
And thirdly when professional photographers realised they could make very good photographs with iPhones.
Can you take sloppy pictures with a phone camera that are worthless when compared to a Van Gogh? Of course, but it seems the mainstream has moved on to understand that, with a great deal of artistry and skill, one can take extremely artistic photographs with a pin-hole camera.
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This sounds like “labor theory of value” reasoning and not a practical critique of the tech itself.
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You want a practical critique of genAI?
GenAI is a giant pattern-matching machine and that’s it. It doesn’t understand art in the sense that it could ever tell you why it put certain pixels in certain places in the same way an artist could tell you why they chose a certain color or put a certain line where they did. That’s why it sucks for making art: There’s no process, no evolution, no actual learning going on. It’s a mosaic of noise produced as a best guess at whatever the model, the prompt, and possibly some extra plugins like a LORA say the picture should kinda-sorta-maybe look like.
Even if the generated image is passable enough, chances are that it’ll still have visible flaws or a style that marks it as genAI slop. Outside of what I’ll now call “Backrooms People” fuck-ups like extra fingers or eyes or whatever, slop has certain aesthetic tells—e.g., lighting, a kind of glossy “shine”, color usage, perspective fuck-ups—that can only ever be “fixed” by effectively painting over those tells, whether in the generator itself or by hand. (And if you’re good enough to replace those tells by hand, why the fuck would you need or want genAI other than laziness?)
None of that even gets into the critiques of the AI industry’s effect on the environment, the economy, and politics. Trust that those are plentiful and deep if you don’t want to excuse the people making those critiques as “silly” or “automatically biased”. And precisely none of those critiques, or my own in this comment, have little (if anything) to do with whether/how we value the labor of artists.
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…I feel like the problem is, a lot of the arguments in defense of AI imagegen are crap and a lot of people use none of the good ones.
Like, AI image generators can be run locally without using much more electricity than any other compy program, and even with regards to training the Chinese models have shown it actually requires a lot less than the industry would have you believe. Their rollout of data centers is not out of necessity for imagegen/videogen but actually a part of a bunch of other nastier agendas we should be focusing on.
Also, there are tools beyond text prompting for using it with more intent, like on Midjourney alone there’s:
-Image prompting, that allows the combination of images in ways text could not cover, including images you’ve made.
-Moodboards for curating collections of images that alter the output to a specific aesthetic range, along with the settings that allow you to select
-Inpainting, which allows for erasing and reprompting areas, which it tries to fit into the rest of the image as best it can. In Midjourney you can also layer images to combine them or generate new designs out of parts or even “seed” something you want into an image by adding a fragment at the center of one of the erased bits like sand to form a pearl.
-Externally manipulating an image in GIMP
And that’s before you get into combining those programs! And like, that’s why people would get into GenAI beyond laziness, same reason a traditional artist would get into photomanip or sculpture and combine it with their other skillset.
Multimedia and mixed-media is the uniting factor behind a lot of existing artists I’ve seen doing anything worthwhile with imagegen.
I feel like the fact that people defending imagegen don’t talk about that but instead talk about just reducing effort or the joys of text prompting are a damning indictment of what the industry is selling. I think there’s a potential for imagegen to find a niche in art, but it’s not going to happen until this bubble pops.
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I’m a little confused by this argument. If the output is “slop” then people won’t like it and the problem takes care of itself.
If the output is quality then… what does it matter what tool was used to produce it?
I agree that much of the “art” produced by these tools is shit, but that’s a problem that solves itself over time. But I’ve also seen skilled artists use the tools well to produce real art. The underlying factor is that they are actual artists who have an artistic vision and know how to properly use the tools, combined with their own artistic sense, to produce something artistic.
To me, it’s still just a tool. And if it is in the hands of an artistic person they can make art. If they can’t and it’s slop then it will be ignored because no one wants slop.
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It matters because it’s going to be used to justify getting rid of jobs that would otherwise be filled by people. Have you seen how many VFX studios have closed in recent years after they’ve been part of highly successful movies? Imagine most of the rest of them either closing or severely cutting the number of people they employ because genAI gets good enough to duplicate their work with a fraction of the time and (most of) the quality staying at that level. The only people benefitting from genAI then will be rich motherfuckers—who, oddly enough, are largely on board with the idea that genAI should be replacing people in artistic fields.
That besides: If genAI is capable of quality output and the people using genAI should be proud of that output, why is it that every game studio caught with undeclared genAI assets in their games always falls back to the “we only used this in early development/as a placeholder” excuse? And moreover, if genAI is only used in that context (and considering how prices for genAI services are rising), wouldn’t using genAI as part of “pre-production” be more of a waste of time and money if an already-employed human artist can do the same work without needing to create dozens of iterations of the same idea or (worse yet) cleaning up/“correcting” genAI slop?
The problem I have with “genAI is a tool!” arguments is that it’s not so much a tool as it is a cheat code. It doesn’t make people better at their work—it only makes them faster at the cost of learning the real skills beneath the art. An AI image generator can’t teach you composition or color theory. It can’t evolve your skills as an artist for you. All it can do is spit out slop that may or may not be to your liking, then wait for the next press of the button. It doesn’t understand aesthetics or artistic evolution or experimentation. It can’t do any of the things people do to further their exploration of art, artistry, and themselves. It disconnects the person from the art and makes every artistic choice arbitrary instead of intentional.
I’ve admitted to using genAI in the past. For a time, it was nice to finally put some of the images I’d had in my head into a fixed form. But continued use of genAI didn’t make me feel like an artist. It didn’t make me feel anything about what I was generating other than a mild flicker of interest that soon disappeared. It went from being kinda-sorta neat to being boring and meaningless—empty, one might say. I stopped using genAI because if I’d kept using it, I’d end up disconnected from any impulse to pick up an analog tool and draw or write or whatever. That (and my appreciation of Linkin Park) is what made me start referring to AI as “the Emptiness Machine”. GenAI is not a tool, not to me. It is a shortcut to an achievement I didn’t actually achieve—a path to artistic output in which I didn’t give any real input. Why the fuck would I ever want to be a bastard who claims credit for something I didn’t actually do?
As I’ve said before, there will be good uses of the technology we colloquially refer to as “AI”. Replacing artists? That sure as shit won’t be one of them.
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Ah the luddite fallacy. I am sure you would also need far more workers by doing all of the pencil strokes with the pencils shoved up their ass – does that mean that using a pencil in hands is stealing jobs?
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I’m sure you thought this was a coherent retort, but I’m sitting here wondering why you think I said anything about people shoving pencils up their ass.
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This is so good that it bears quoting in full:
“Only the incurious, the untalented, and the gullible—i.e., people who have little to no interest in what other people think or feel—are impressed by AI. They’re people who want to be artists without actually putting in the time or effort to be artists. They don’t want to evolve their ability to communicate ideas and express their own thoughts and feelings. The commitment to being an artist of any kind, and the work that goes into becoming an artist, doesn’t exist with genAI because it’s a shortcut for hack frauds.”
I’ve worked at being a musician for over half a century, and I’m still working on it. I also happened to have studied AI (and neural networks, and machine learning, and pattern recognition, and all the rest) at the graduate level, so unlike most of the people using AI (1) I know how it works and (2) I’m perfectly capable of building my own from scratch.
So I could do (2), and I could use it to compensate for my shortcomings as a composer and a musician. I might even be able to do it well enough to keep anyone from detecting that I had done so. But I won’t — because then the result won’t be mine. And I very much want it to be mine, for better or worse, with its features and flaws, because the music I’m making is a part of me. I take pride in my work, not because it’s great — it’s not — but because I’ve invested myself and my time in creating it.
If I used AI, I’d be cheating the listeners — and more importantly, I’d be cheating myself. I’ve worked too hard for too long to do that.
Re: Your choice
If you don’t like AI, don’t use it and don’t purchase things that do.
Stop trying to rally people against it to make yourself feel better.
Re: Re:
Whats wrong with trying to convince others, to be a bigger change for good in the world.
Would you say people upset about how politics or the environment is going shouldn’t try to convince others?
Do you see a connection between the spread of AI slop and our deteriorating environment and political discourse?
Re: Re:
‘Stop making people question their choices when I just want them to consume!’
They won't thank you for demonstrating the truth.
1) Write a game, without AI used at any level, for any reason.
2) Duplicate all elements of the game into a separate folder.
3) Use AI to change the name on the title screen (and, -perhaps- on the PR material).
4) Publish both games. Flag one as “AI assisted”.
5) Wait for the reviews.
6) Reveal that both games are identical (except for the title).
7) Watch the audience writhe, attempting to justify their actions. That is, the ones that don’t angrily lash out, blaming you for their lack of judgement.
Bonus points if the one you flagged as “AI assisted” was the one that did not actually have AI assisting.
Re:
The beautiful thing is that no one is going to put in the work to do that with a high quality game.
If you have researchers doing it it’ll probably be a shitty phone game/idle game. The ‘human made’ one will have 3 mediocre reviews and no attention, and the ‘AI assisted’ one will have 14 reviews, most of them a. negative and b. complaining about how repetitive it is.
Simply put, no one has the time, money, and energy to do this with a game like BG3
Re:
That’s some crypto enthusiast level hoop jumping, ‘well, if you don’t tell theme it’s Blockchain and hide that it’s Blockchain by disabling the Blockchain until after they’ve paid, they won’t care that it’s Blockchain so clearly that means Blockchain is good and they’re hypocrites in this scenario that only happened in my head, checkmate hypocrites!’
Re:
“Use the general negative attitude towards generative AI to ragebait people, then reveal that you were bullshitting them the whole time. This is an excellent plan that will surely build trust between you and your potential audience.” — you, probably
Re: Re:
He’s not wrong though. People often claim their criticism of AI is due to the quality (or lack thereof) of the end product but that’s probably not the case. Run that experiment on a small scale and see what happens.
Re: Re: Re:
The problem isn’t the quality of a game. The problem would be the trust you’ve destroyed with your potential audience. If you say you made a game with AI, then say later on that you made it all by hand, how is anyone supposed to trust that you actually did make it by hand—or trust that you’ll be telling the truth going forward?
Trust is like a spine: it takes a moment to sever, it takes a hell of a lot of work to repair, and it’ll never work the same even if you manage to repair it. Why would you wreck the trust people could have in you for the sole purpose of “proving” some inane point about genAI?
Re:
There had been minor social media experiments like that with images (human art by famous painters presented as AI-generated). The results were quite hilarious.
Keep in mind how many games have been burned for accidentally including AI content without a disclosure. If you were a risk-averse studio, would you include no AI disclaimer on the off chance that you managed to successfully remove all of the AI-generated content, even from dataminers and exploit hunters?
Who cares
You just ignore these luddites. They will always exist. They will never be right.
So ridiculous. The quote is “GenAI slop potentially showing up…” And yet you somehow take that to mean “it’s probably going to be “GenAI slop”. As if there is simply no other possible outcome.”
No! They literally did not say “probably” or even imply it! They said “potentially”! As in, they very clearly believe any other outcome is also possible!
And you think they’re the ones freaking out lmao my god
None of this seems contradictory, either: the Steam disclosure says “refined or replaced.” Crystal Dynamics clearly uses AI assets in development, and they plan for final assets shipped to be “human crafted.” In other words, the AI assets are replaced–hence the wording of the steam disclosure. I see no contradiction here.
God is it frustrating how Techdirt has turned into LLMs little cheerleader
Re:
Techdirt has always been about an optimistic view of technology with the recognition of how companies, governments, and others can fuck it up if they’re not careful about it.
Nothing has changed. We haven’t “turned into” anything different than we’ve been all along. We’re not cheerleaders for LLMs, and we have pointed out (as we’ve done with other tech before this) both the potential benefits and the potential downsides while trying to explore ways to get the benefits without the downsides.
It’s so weird how people who just showed up to Techdirt in the last couple years seem to think they know what a 29 year old site’s viewpoints should be.
Re: Re:
If you don’t want to be thought of as being a cheerleader for Crypto 2.0, stop cheerleading.
Re: Re: Re:
Your reading comprehension could use a serious upgrade.
The problem is that there is a group of people, apparently including yourself, who takes “exploring where and how the tech can be useful, while still openly discussing where it can and does go wrong” as blind cheerleading.
It’s so fucking stupid and wrong and you should stop it.
Re: Re: Re:2
Speaking of what’s “fucking stupid” is your championing of autogen garbage that’s objectively going to pollute our media for centuries and undermine quality and trust in literally everything.
This, except without the sarcasm.
The only way to stop the destruction of human creativity is to take a firm, zero tolerance stance against it and here you are acting all shocked pikachu face meme when people do so. Disappointing, but unsurprising I suppose. There’s an unfortunately high number of tech pundits who haven’t reacted to the infiltration of autogen AI in all creative fields with outright horror.
And people wonder why I’m suicidal. The only thing that gives me joy is the certainty our species will utterly fail to colonize any other planets and will go extinct without spreading our stupidity throughout the universe. Phew!
Re: Re: Re:3
If a tool can destroy human creativity it was already dead to begin with. And most people who take a zero tolerance stance against AI don’t actually understand that there are nuances and have reduced the topic to “it’s all bad, hurr durr!”.
Seek help.
Great, so you are a doomer who gets satisfaction from the human race genociding itself so why the fuck do you even care about creativity because in that context of genocide it is totally irrelevant? Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Re: Re: Re:2
Look, you’re the one who blogged about your kids project in lieu of covering either Microsoft’s pricing changes. And the one who dismissed the views of the Pope as ‘irrelevant on tech’ (but also, somehow, also something so well-covered elsewhere there was nothing left to say). And the one who gave space to someone who compared autistic people to these machines. And the one who tried to cudgel people with a ‘think of the children’ argument against trying to hold the makers of this responsible for the harms it causes.
You’re a cheerleader. You can lie to yourself about having a nuanced understanding, if you like, but people have pattern recognition.
I await the next entry in the rapidly-growing Techdirt Friday tradition of ‘Disliking AI: A dumb overreaction’.
Re: Re: Re:3
Yeah, that was…a really bad decision, there.
Re: Re: Re:3
Maybe make actual rebuttals to what he covers instead of saying you just don’t like the conclusions on this site?
I don’t agree with every take on Techdirt either but I don’t come here expecting a safe space for whatever I already believe about any given issue. That’s not what any good tech/law/policy site should even be.
Re: Re: Re:
He’s too invested to back off now, all he has left is to double down.
Re: Re: Re:2
It’d be nice if there was word fucking one on TechDirt about the large scale implications of the heedless rush to AI, like e.g. what’s been going on with RAM pricing, or the circle-jerk of funding between the major players, or Microsoft and Anthropic hiking their prices dramatically and what that is doing, etc.
But instead we get “my kid made a thing” and “this one person in Hollywood said something vaguely positive about it” puff pieces.
Re: Re: Re:3
You are free to make your own site. Until you own this one, you are not the editorial director. I write what I want to write. I don’t write about what I don’t find interesting.
It’s great that you find other things interesting. Go write about it.
Re: Re: Re:4
MM: “I don’t cheerlead for AI, why do stupid people keep thinking that?”
AC: “Among other reasons, your choice of stories to cover.”
MM: “Fuck you, I write what I want.”
Like okay but you do get how that doesn’t address the point raised? People are perfectly free to judge you on what you do and do not choose to put on this site, and unless I missed a stealth rider somewhere, also to comment here expressing those thoughts.
(I tried to respond to this once before, but it never appears to’ve gone through. I suppose the website ate it.)
Bunch of snowflakes crying about ai
Here you have a writer who has already reached their conclusion while having almost zero information on which to base that conclusion. They haven’t played the game. They’ve barely seen the content in the game, save for some trailers. They don’t know thing one about how AI was used, where, and in what way. But it’s probably going to be AI apologia. As if there is simply no other possible outcome.