Larian Studios The Latest To Face Backlash Over Use of AI To Make Games
from the too-much-dogma dept
I guess I’m a masochist, so here we go. In my recent post about Let It Die: Inferno and the game developer’s fairly minimal use of AI and machine learning platforms, I attempted to make the point that wildly stratified opinions on the use or non-use of AI was making actual nuanced conversation quite difficult. As much as I love our community and comments section — it’s where my path to writing for this site began, after all — it really did look like some folks were going to try as hard as possible to prove me right. Some commenters treated the use of AI as essentially no big deal, while some were essentially “Never AI-ers,” indicating that any use, any at all, made a product a non-starter for them.
Still other comments pointed out that this studio and game are relatively unknown. The game was reviewed poorly for reasons that have nothing to do with use of AI, as I myself pointed out in the post. One commenter even suggested that this might all be an attention-grabbing thing to propel the studio and game into the news, so small and unknown as they are.
Larian Studios is not unknown. They don’t need any hype. Larian is the studio that produces the Divinity series, not to mention the team that made Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the most awarded and best-selling games of 2023. And the studio’s next Divinity game will also make some limited use of AI and machine learning, prompting a backlash from some.
Larian Studios is experimenting with generative AI and fans aren’t too happy. The head of the Baldur’s Gate 3 maker, Swen Vincke, released a new statement to try to explain the studio’s stance in more detail and make clear the controversial tech isn’t being used to cut jobs. “Any [Machine Learning] tool used well is additive to a creative team or individual’s workflow, not a replacement for their skill or craft,” he said.
He was responding to a backlash that arose earlier today from a Bloomberg interview which reported that Larian was moving forward with gen AI despite some internal concerns among staff. Vincke made clear the tech was only being used for things like placeholder text, PowerPoint presentations, and early concept art experiments and that nothing AI-generated would be included in Larian’s upcoming RPG, Divinity.
Alright, I want to be fair to the side of this that takes an anti-AI stance. Vincke is being disingenuous at best here. Whatever use is made of AI technology, even limited use, still replaces work that would be done by some other human being. Even if you’re committed to not losing any current staff through the use of AI, you’re still getting work product that would otherwise require you to hire and expand your team through the use of AI. There is obviously a serious emotional response to that concept, one that is entirely understandable.
But some limited use of AI like this can also have other effects on the industry. It can lower the barrier to starting new studios, which will then hire more people to do the things that AI sucks at, or to do the things where we really don’t want AI involved. It can make Indie studios faster and more productive, allowing them to compete all the more with the big publishers and studios out there. It can create faster output, meaning adjacent industries to developers and publishers might have to hire and expand to accommodate the additional output.
All of this, all of it, relies on AI to be used in narrow areas where it can be useful, for real human beings to work with its output to make it actual art versus slop, and for the end product to be a good product. Absent those three things, the Anti-AI-ers are absolutely right and this will suck.
But the lashing that Larian has been getting is divorced from any of that nuance.
Vincke followed up with a separate statement on on X rejecting the idea that the company is “pushing hard” on AI.
“Holy fuck guys we’re not ‘pushing hard’ for or replacing concept artists with AI.
We have a team of 72 artists of which 23 are concept artists and we are hiring more. The art they create is original and I’m very proud of what they do. I was asked explicitly about concept art and our use of Gen AI. I answered that we use it to explore things. I didn’t say we use it to develop concept art. The artists do that. And they are indeed world class artists.
We use AI tools to explore references, just like we use google and art books. At the very early ideation stages we use it as a rough outline for composition which we replace with original concept art. There is no comparison.”
Yes, exactly. There are uses for this technology in the gaming industry. Pretending otherwise is silly. There will be implications on the direct industry jobs at existing studios due to its use. Pretending otherwise is silly. AI use can also have positive effects on the industry and workers within it overall. Pretending otherwise is silly and ignores all the technological progress that came before we started putting these two particular letters together (AI).
And, ultimately, this technology simply isn’t going away. You can rage against this literal machine all you like, it will be in use. We might as well make the project influencing how it’s used, rather than if it’s used.
Filed Under: ai, artists, generative ai, llm, swen vincke
Companies: larian studios
Comments on “Larian Studios The Latest To Face Backlash Over Use of AI To Make Games”
GenAI is a bubble, it is going to burst, and that is going to have a significant impact on its viability going forward.
It is possible that some limited uses of genAI, like the ones mentioned in this story, will continue. But it is not inevitable. Pretending that a short-term trend is a 100% reliable predictor of where technology is headed in the future is silly.
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I’m of the opposite opinion, the bubble bursting on AI is what will ultimately result in finding actual, successful, uses for Gen AI. We’re going to be talking about data centers full of equipment you can buy for pennies on the dollar. As a result, companies and researchers with good ideas, but are less flashy, might actually get a shot at it.
At least that’s my hope.
Thanks!
Hey there! Someone read my comment! Thanks Timothy. It was so far down the comments that I figured no one read it. Glad to see that wasn’t the case (regardless whether or not I convinced you).
The audience would probably have a better opinion of “the developers are highlighting their AI use” if it weren’t a constant trainwreck being used to cut corners where it has been implemented elsewhere within games. It also is not the audience’s role to parse PR statements to consider “well this company might use it well” in light of what AI use to date has looked like. When AI has led to multiple PR messes, be it for translations or the mess Black Ops 7 had just a month ago, and the push for AI appears to actively hurting most of the game studios under the Microsoft umbrella.
When the push for AI within this field has lead largely to PR messes and worse products, it is perfectly reasonable for efforts to highlight it leading to backlash, even if it isn’t necessarily fair for an individual developer.
Artist and good idea exploration
I believe the current use of gen ai is mainly bad in terms of direct use because of the fact that it uses copyrighted images and despite transformative possibility, the direct usage is too risky and heard some do use identical copies, creating a massive risk. Plus this usage without permission of the artists do help replace them.
However when it comes to using the tool to explore ideas and then having actual humans make their own creative intake of the idea, this seems morally equal to common history of thousands of artists downloading copyrighted images to edit, without permission, and then transforming them private and get new good ideas from it, from computer tools not 100% human crafting either.
The only time I could find this usage bad in terms the ethics of permission and usage, is if using it fuels the program itself whereas such fueling benefits malicious use from other people somehow but I don’t know if it works like that. Think of a person going to a stolen artwork page of a harmless work itself, and while taking inspiration from the work itself is harmless, the interaction with the infringer is giving more demand to the infringer which is bad.
However despite all that, some of the arguments from some of the anti-genAI folks are rotten to the core, based off falacies, reeks of massive hypocrisy, and are based off made up moral ideogy that goes avainst actual rights that exist.
One notable tweet was arguing that merely using ai no matter the purpose is bad just because it was based off works without permission, then cited moral rights and copyright. One person pointed out the fact that people often used many images all the time without permission outside of genAI but then anti genAI person said in the lines of “Uhh, that’s different because I like that there is human connection experience with how you get inspired.”…despite the fact that the foundation of copyright and moral rights make no distinction, let alone the fact that photoshop edits are already less human in some way.
Another horrible argument, and this was a dangerous horrible argument too, was that someone in the name of arvalis (guy who makes “real life” pokemon) argued that if actual human beings made 100 percent human made art influenced off an idea that came from an genAI in the first place, then the final product is still using generated ai, just because it influenced them at some point… even though the final work is based off human experienced and human made art in the last place. Same person argued you are not using copyrighted work if you made it by scratch (without ai) making him hypocritical too. This argument implied that artists who worked and gave all their blood, wasted all of their time and that their hard work is all a waste of time, the moment they are “tainted” with AI in some influence inspiration in the first place. This was one of the most disgusting arguments I’ve ever seen in probably my life and it’s sad it came from him. Like if he wanted to argue that using genAI is bad because it creates less distraction of finding concept artists (though there are some problems with that argument) but left the after fact alone, I wouldn’t be as upset.
The argument saying it creates a distraction is flawed too because public domain, and inspired laqful works also helps create distractions, same with having a crazy creative brain from indirect memory of certain works without remember names of who.
Another argument I’ve seen is that we don’t need genAI to get good. This argument misses the fact that it can still help with creative ideas in some cases and faster too. So that is another weird argument.
There are concerns about generated AI art but some of these anti generated AI art folks has gone so down in the barrel to the point of promoting harassment mob against checks notes, actual human artists. It’s gone to the point of telling other artists that their hard work doesn’t count, or doing something no different than lots of traditions is bad, or just because it’s a robot helping them. This isn’t ethical. This isn’t fighting for artists, this is just discouraging artists like her, and some others from making their own interpretation and being creative due to how they got some ideas.
Current AI art has a lot of problems and I would rather make it where it only uses lawful public domain material, and lawful AI license art, and have a credit list each result, but some of these people are out of their minds and are not fully ethical. Like wow.
Re: Grammar
Some of the words here are not spelled right. I want to point out that I was on phone, wrote a lot, and spell error checking here seems different than what I’m used to. I want to edit but it wouldn’t let me so I apologize for some of crappy grammar here. Haha
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Although likely poorly explained and disingenuously defended (I’d prefer a citation of the public conversation in question but am willing to grant that exact conversation has played out in this general way multiple times the last three years)
There is more merit to the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’ anti gen-AI argument than you, the article OP or Larian would like to believe. The effect is corrosive even if the user is wise enough to stick to limited amounts of iteration. The entire training set already goes leaps and bounds further than an artist drawing inspiration manually from other copyrighted works, if it didn’t it wouldn’t be useful at all.
There is undeniable merit to the drudgery and busywork the article OP is advocating small dev teams and solo devs skip using gen-AI or NPC LLM chatter that devs feel like isn’t adding to the quality of the final product (it is).
As for the article OP it’s probably time to politely hang up their hat and find a more nuanced AI friendly publication to write for if they feel like there’s nuanced discussion that isn’t happening (the nuance isn’t necessary and such a publication doesn’t exist so checking their emotions at the door that gen-AI usage is in fact a black and white argument is necessary and overdue for them personally at this stage.)
However, generative AI isn’t even useful for concept art, at least in most cases. This article brings up the perspective of actual concept artists, and they all say generated “artwork” only makes their jobs harder. Part of it is due to warped expectations from clients (for example, the vast majority of concept art is relatively basic rather than big fancy renders but clients expect the latter), but in general the consensus is that these generative models lack originality, require concept artists to figure out where the “inspirations” for each generation came from (which only adds to their workload), and takes out the “discovery” part of exploring concepts that is vital to creating new and interesting ones.
Generating placeholder assets? We’ve already seen how that can cause problems, since they can be potentially “good enough” for studios to accidentally forget to replace, and later cause controversy when players notice them. We’ve already seen this happen with Expedition 33 and The Alters.
Coding? “Coding assistants” more often than not tend to spit out poor-quality output that programmers need to fix anyway.
And production-level content is right out. People will notice, and it’s never as good as actual human artistry.
I’ve only found one “productive” use for generative AI in game development that doesn’t just add more work for people in the long run – generating placeholder voice lines, assuming you put them all in a “placeholder” folder that you ensure is completely deleted by the end of production, with all references to said placeholders replaced with actual production voice lines. And even then that’s not exactly new, it’s just a fancier version of using text to speech.
Generative AI is mostly just popular in the c-suite rather than with actual developers or gamers. A Quantic Foundry poll shows that 85% of gamers have a negative perception of generative AI, with 62% saying they had a “very negative” attitude towards it. “This technology simply isn’t going away” is one thing, but who will use it seriously when developers hate using it and gamers hate seeing the output?
Sure, but how? I’m not sure you can (hence the horse armor joke). It’s going to be like other tools: Does it make more money (by making a bigger/better product, shaving cost, etc)? Then the industry will move towards it. There will be exceptions, but they will be niche.
I do think a nuanced approach is best, but consumer behavior is hard (impossible?) to make nuanced. We can’t even get the industry to behave when it comes to things that hurt consumers/workers, like crunch, predatory pricing, sexually harassing female employees etc. Heck, we already can’t even get companies to use ethically sourced training data to begin with. And I don’t know if you can regulate a nuanced use.
To be clear, I don’t think you can stop it. I think maximum outrage at most gets you a slightly larger speedbump. We’re going to get whatever is market optimal regardless of whether it’s good for consumers/workers or not. There’s a reason big-time execs are positively giddy about AI, and it’s not because of indie competition. Whatever influence we have is subordinate to the mighty dollar.
One thing I worry about with concept art specifically, is how it could anchor things. An analogy I’ve seen used is it’s like watching a movie based on a book, and then going back to read the book. The movie will tend to heavily influence how your brain pictures the book. We’re kind of seeing this in other places already- people who use LLMs are starting to pick up speech mannerisms from them.
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What are you talking about? The use of copyrighted materials? That’s completely ethical on top of probably being legal.
Re: Using genAI as "exploration" is unnecessary and limits creativity
Your last point I think makes a lot of sense. The guys on the Aftermath Hours podcast were talking about this story, and they pointed out that what they’re talking about using AI for, like composition, doesn’t require AI at all. They’ve seen amazing art come from an art director drawing on a post it with stick figures to get across what they’re going for, and the concept artist can turn that into exactly what they need. And if you’re communicating at that base of a level, then you have an actual person (the concept artist) making the creative decisions, rather than the AI making the creative “decisions” that come between that stick-figure idea and the output that then becomes the concept artist’s input. And by giving up those creative decisions to AI you’re limiting the scope of creativity to what AI can do.
Thank you! This anti-AI stance in gaming has become increasingly shrill with no basis in reality, and it’s exhausting. People pretend that Larian using GenAI for menial pre-production tasks is the same as their making another Codex Mortis.
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I guess their stance is that generative AI is such a convenient tool that people may become lazy and use it too much. Then players, in many years, will have no choice but paying $60 for slop games.
I’m not talking here about some AAA studios, from EA or Ubisoft, that are already seeing AI as a new way for save money and time, but about the high quality and smaller studio, that have always produced content with hard work and a lot of love.
It’s pretty much like music, you certainly like an album because of the artist and the story behind it, but who cares if pop stars use AI to write their shallow lyrics.
History will look back on these people the same way we look back on people opposed to like, self-checkout. Any big efficiency improvement might reduce the amount of meaningless, menial work for workers to do, and thus reduce jobs. Therefore we should make sure we are as wasteful as possible to prop up the wage system.
“ Some commenters treated the use of AI as essentially no big deal, while some were essentially “Never AI-ers,” indicating that any use, any at all, made a product a non-starter for them.”
Yup, that describes me.
If you are too lazy to write your own emails, draw your own art, I will spend my money elsewhere
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“If you are too lazy to write your own emails, draw your own art, I will spend my money elsewhere”
You know, it was just a few decades ago that some people claimed the exact same thing about using email instead of writing letters.
It is always impressive how the old guard ALWAYS flips out about new innovations while insisting that everything THEY do is perfectly fine.
Douglas Adams was right:
― Douglas Adams
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Email versus letter versus text messages, it’s still a person choosing which words to use.
As regards to your quote, I am still closer to 15 than 35. And yet despise people who cannot choose their own words to communicate with
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I’m interested to hear how you plan to avoid any use of gen AI, given that nearly every developer in every company uses Copilot or Claude for, at minimum, code completion. If you’re really committed to your zero-gen-AI approach, I guess you’ll have a lot of money you can spend on non-game things. Oh, and don’t forget to make sure your bank is committed to zero gen AI (including their vendors, like whoever writes their banking app), and uninstall Windows and find an obscure Linux distro with a small maintenance team that is willing to commit to no gen AI, and don’t do business with any companies that use ChatGPT to fluff out their emails, and… It’s just not a sustainable approach.
It’s like refusing to work with any company that uses plastic: both plastics and gen AI are here to stay; and while we don’t want them everywhere, we do need to come up with reasonable, sustainable approaches to their use.
Larian didn't use AI though
They really didn’t.
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The CEO of Larian explained in detail how they do though?
There is a serious lack of nuance on both sides of the AI debate at the moment, which I guess is reflective of general online discourse about anything, and this story is just another example of that. There was never any suggestion that AI generated assets would be in the game, and it is clear that their use of AI is limited to concept art and project management tools. The vehement anti-AI crusade is only going to drive people who are sympathetic to the genuine concerns away from the cause. I’m already starting to feel exhausted from all the hand wringing on the subject.
There are genuine issues with AI but the hand wringing we get over non issue stories like this are a distraction and it will harm us all in the long run.
Soo, the record studios and RIIA et al was right when they said every copy is a lost sale? Right?
Timothy, you are using exactly the same reasoning as they do and to that I say: FUCK YOU! Do better.
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Are you seriously comparing piracy with hiring practices?
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The hiring is only done by the ship’s captain.
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I don’t think Tim is necessarily right in his assumption (it could result in shorter working weeks for existing staff for example), but it is not remotely the same as the lost sales fallacy.
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It seems like a relatively safe assumption. There are extremely few cases where companies have rewarded improved productivity by reducing work hours rather than reducing staff.
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No, I comparing the thought-process behind the argument.
The argument is that any use of AI negatively impacts hiring practices which doesn’t take into account the financial situation or the type of project it is used in. It’s the same type of fallacy that every copy is a lost sale, ie the presupposition is that everyone has the financial means to throw money at something.
There is nuance in how AI can be used, it can be used to increase productivity when resources are constrained or as an extractor of money using on our common cultural heritage.
Saying that all use of AI is bad is a stupid and simplistic take and doesn’t in any way help the discussion when it is proper to use AI or not.
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Well said.
I’m a software engineer, and workers in my industry ARE being replaced by LLMs in many businesses. The company I work for isn’t doing that (yet, anyway). It IS making Copilot available to us, which in certain circumstances is a helpful tool.
Yes, in theory they could hire a recent college graduate to do that work instead, but there is no budget for that. Companies don’t have an infinite money cheat. Either an LLM generates those unit tests (which I then double-check), or they pay a senior engineer’s salary to spend time doing dumb work.
For Larian, I doubt there was a world where they would hire extra actual people to do the kind of work they’re talking about. They probably hired all the actual people they could afford to hire. They don’t appear to be one of the “sack the humans, keep the cash, use LLMs” companies.
So, I will skip my opinion of AI itself. The problem is, maybe today they are using it and not letting people go, then the number crunchers say “Hey, we can make more for doing less! Lets get to it!”
We all know its not the lower management that makes these choices, its people who have investors to think about.
I hesitate to comment here because I’ve caught shit in the past for opposing generative AI on the grounds of “it has no soul to it”, and I feel like making that same argument again. But I think I’ve found a better way to make it, and it’s all thanks to Hideo Kojima.
But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.
First thing’s first: If there are tangible reasons to oppose generative AI, they’re already out in the open—the ethical sourcing of content for LLMs and the environmental impact of training/using generative AI tools are the two biggest, but I’m fairly sure they’re not the only ones. Point is, any argument in favor of generative AI will have to lay to rest those concerns, and I can’t think of how to steelman such arguments without sounding like an AI evangelist who thinks generative AI “art” or chatbots running on advanced LLMs are ushering in The Singularity or some shit like that.
But that’s the more tangible, less “subjective” arguments. For the one I want to make, I have to point out an interview with the co-composer for Death Stranding 2, who had this to say about a lesson he learned from Kojima (the game’s director):
I know Kojima isn’t talking about generative AI here, and I know it’s not an exact quote from Kojima himself, but there’s a phrase in that paragraph that stuck out to me: “it’s already pre-digested for people to like it”. And that gets back to the argument I want to make.
I’ve made no attempt to hide my contempt for generative AI. While I will admit to having tinkered with it in the past (because duh), I stand against it now in no uncertain terms because of the more “objective” arguments I mentioned above in addition to the “subjective” argument about how generative AI art is “empty” and “soulless”. Hell, I despise generative AI to the point where I use the title of a recent Linkin Park song (“The Emptiness Machine”) as a derisive nickname for it. But it wasn’t until that bit up there that my argument finally had a shape I could give it: Generative AI “art” is slop precisely because it’s been “pre-digested”—it’s all just art made by talented people that’s been swallowed, chewed up, and spit back out in a way the Emptiness Machine “thinks” will be acceptable to the end user.
When I used generative AI, I did generate some images that were aesthetically pleasing. And yeah, some of them were close to the image in my head that I had when I generated them. But if I were to look back on them now (which I can’t because I deleted them months ago), I’d be able to see the flaws in, and the generic nature of, all those images. They’re digital mosaics of other people’s work that were “pre-digested” and barfed back at me without any real human touch to them. I have bits of art from the furry fandom saved on my computer that are at least two decades old; even today, none of them invoke in me the same kind of boredom and emptiness as I get from looking at generative AI images.
Generative AI “art” might have some sort of future within the video game industry. It might even have a future in other creative fields, too. But the people who actually give a fuck about supporting human artists won’t give it any space because beyond the arguments about data sourcing and water usage and replacing people with an Emptiness Machine, the one thing generative AI can’t replace is the feeling one gets when they see a work of art made by an actual fucking person. That’s how I know generative AI doesn’t have a bright future ahead of it: Show me a piece of generative AI “art” that has had any kind of cultural impact beyond “ew, look at that slop, everyone bully the company who thought that was a good idea” and I can show you anything from Avengers: Endgame to Manos: The Hands of Fate in response. The fucking four-note Torgo theme has had more of a cultural impact than any individual piece of generative AI “art”. Wanna know how I know that? Most everyone will forget that shit-ass AI-generated McDonald’s ad by this time next year (other than to point at whatever McDonald’s does next and compare it to that ad), but anyone who hears the Torgo theme will have it in their head for the rest of their lives. Even one of the worst movies ever made by the hands of
fateMan, a movie where “every frame … looks like someone’s last known photograph”, has more of a “soul” than the average AI-generated “funny animal” video. Pre-digested AI slop isn’t art. Manos is art.The only genuine reason to have any kind of “nuance” about generative AI is to separate generative AI from other forms of what we’ve colloquially called “AI” in the past. In the gaming world, that can mean separating generative AI from the use of algorithms to create NPCs (i.e., making “AI-controlled” characters). Beyond that? Nah, fuck the use of generative AI. If programming and concept art and voice acting can be done by a person, it should be done by a person. And if you think there’s an excuse for not having it done by a person, you are—objectively speaking—the wrongest person on the planet.
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You need to remember that even without gen visual AI, humans had already discovered non-sense formations or ideas that were not manually crafted with full intention by another human but was able to make it a form of art via inspiration. Transforming it. This already happened with photoshop manipulation, prog. generation (think of landscapes, like Minecraft), and some included these splashes and weird formations to push with a lot of copyrighted works without permission including manual editing with transformation.
So if someone used a few extra robot codes by using a robot to experiment with mashing copyrighted pictures together to form a new idea which is then controlled and transformed, I don’t see this as any different than all that and just see another example of human experience and creativity.
That being said, the current genAI does have problems but if she used basic forms to only get an idea, they used real blood to transform it, it’s still human art in the after fact. Even if using it is fueling the current tool fueling bad actors (so ugh best not use that again), the end after result separately is still proof it’s creative so that proves it can be useful for creative aim itself. But it’s better off if it was using lawful public domain and lawful license images first at the same time.
Just a reminder that there is an analogy that does reveal the usage of AI in media development is black-and-white no nuance: The Hot Stove Analogy.
The longer an artist or dev team keeps touching the hot stove, the more permanently scarred they are and the more it mars the customers’ perception of the final product.
Corporations (Tim Sweeney) want to give gloves and oven mitts (banning mandatory disclosures on the use of AI even if the customers can guess with reasonable accuracy who has been touching the hot stove for too long with the damage on the gloves and treat it the same as scars anyway)
Meanwhile advocating touching the hot stove is advocating a faster and sloppier line cooking because you can focus on other things while touching the hot stove.
Then the customers wonder what the fuck you’re doing when you’re sucking your thumbs or have bandaged hands while moving fast between glimpses of development.
The heat of the stove, of course, is the size and quality of the copyrighted material scraped to make the training set.
You can advocate around it all you want but touching hot stoves creates fruit of the poisoned tree in the minds of the most consistent paying customers with the most money. Try to make up for that in volume with gruel for the homeless at your own risk (you already priced everyone younger than millennials out of the game development market other than indies with small unnoticeable stoves)
Why don’t you cover how Ai is being built by socializing and subsidizing the cost on the public while the only ones actually profiting are the biggest and richest companies?
I use AI to “rough in” SQL queries and code snippets. I don’t feed it any data, so I still have to make adjustments for column/variable names, among other things to make what it generates applicable to my use cases. It’s literally only useful to me for outlining syntax, but I guess some people would prefer I hire new staff to do that slower. I simply cannot afford to pay those people any mind, however, because that’s idiotic.
AI = NFT pt.2
‘AI’ is a tool by and for the profits(/’productivity’) uber alles crowd, and frankly, fuck every last one of those pychos. They and their mindset are at the root of too many of our problems.
Stolen training input not mentioned at all
A lot of the reason people have an issue with Larian using genAI isn’t even mentioned in this article — it’s trained on images stolen from real artists. There’s an ethical issue with using it at all, and it’s especially insulting to force your artists to use it.
He says that everyone at his studio is basically okay with how they’re using it, but has he done an anonymous survey? You have a bunch of employees in an industry where getting a job right now is extremely difficult, at a studio which is notoriously difficult to get a job at — have you considered that maybe they’re not raising a stink about this to you because they’re afraid of rocking the boat and potentially being replaced by someone who doesn’t?
Really recommend reading this article on how GenAI is affecting the concept art as a job.
https://thisweekinvideogames.com/feature/concept-artists-in-games-say-generative-ai-references-only-make-their-jobs-harder/
The “middle ground” in this discussion- if we want to go there- is that GenAI does not give productivity increases in its current form. It can be useful, but it does not (at least when it comes to concept art) replace people. This tracks with what Svenke said in the controversial interview, where he actually says that GenAI uses more time than otherwise.
This doesn’t mean that AI won’t replace jobs, but let’s give a bit more context: according to current people IN the concept art industry, AI is not there yet for concept art.
I think this applies to a lot of laymen’s understanding of jobs; on a base level AI replaces “the easy stuff” but I mean, has it actually replaced any jobs at say, Techdirt? I don’t think it’s there yet. Companies cutting jobs to replace people with AI are either trimming the fat, or going to swiftly run into issues. Microsoft is a potential case here, with all the issues from Win11 getting worse.
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That depends on what one means by “the easy stuff”. If we’re talking about an email template for an office-wide message? Sure, I can see how it would be helpful. If we’re talking about concept art? You can literally grab a pen and a napkin and draw your idea in the shittiest way possible, and that would still be of more value than the pre-digested AI slop that some dipshit C-suite failson got barfed back to him by an image generator.
It's too hard to do anything at all....
The lazy LOVE AI.
The think?
Its going to be Used anyway, so why not use it NOW.
Does that Justify anything?
Use for AI.
Better Multiple Sentences, and answers in games. Insted of having 3 answer to 1 question, it can have many.
Security, that it NEEDS the net to do much of anything.
Programming? Art? design?
As with most Games, once you have the Engine and basic programming, then you Build Around what you have and Make Multiple games.