Hey, Game Devs: The ‘Placeholder Assets’ Excuse For Using AI Is Running Really Thin
from the be-better dept
We’ve been talking a lot of about the use of artificial intelligence lately, for obvious reasons. Many of those conversations have revolved around the video game industry and I’ve been fairly vocal about pushing back against the “all AI is bad everywhere forever” dogma that I see far too often. There are plenty of folks in our community that don’t agree with me on that, and that’s fine. But if the picture you’re getting is that I’m an AI evangelist, that’s simply not true. There are potentially good uses of AI in my view, as well as a whole lot of potential negative outcomes of its use. I’m not blind to that.
And, in the video game industry specifically, one bit of pushback that seems to be sorely needed is on game developers that use generative AI in their games, fail to say so, and then excuse its use as accidental after the fact. That is becoming as common a refrain from game developers as the laughable excuse in trademark instances that is, “Well, I have to be an aggressive jerk about my trademarks or else I lose them.” Neither is true.
The most recent version of this concerns the recent hit launch of Crimson Desert. In what is becoming something analogous to the antiquated process by which people who watch golf tournaments on TV looking for missed rules violations could then send into the PGA, which I’ve coined as McPromptism, new game releases get put under a microscope by people looking to find AI uses within them. Crimson Desert went through this process and, wouldn’t you know it, people found clear uses of AI-generated assets in the game.
The game’s extremely high fidelity and impressive graphics are a big part of the sales pitch, which made it all the more disappointing when players began to come across what appeared to be AI-generated artwork littered throughout the game. In light of the disappointment, developer Pearl Abyss has apologized for including the slop in their game, promising to remove and replace all of it.
“We also acknowledge that we should have clearly disclosed our use of AI,” the Crimson Desert account posted on X. “We are currently conducting a comprehensive audit of all in-game assets and are taking steps to replace any affected content. Updated assets will be rolled out in upcoming patches. In parallel, we are reviewing and strengthening our internal processes to ensure greater transparency and consistency in how we communicate with players moving forward.”
Like I said above, this excuse is getting old. Very old. Game developers and publishers will be more than aware at this point that a sizable percentage of the gaming public is very allergic to the use of AI in games, particularly when that use is not acknowledged at the forefront. If placeholder assets generated by AI are to be used at all in the development of a game, it is inexcusable for a developer to not have a process to remove them in place of human-created art before the game is published. That’s sloppy at best, and a lie of an excuse at worst.
Especially because it’s not like there aren’t other options that have nothing to do with AI.
The practice is becoming more common in AAA developer spaces, but critics argue that setting aside the use of AI in your game, it’s pretty foolish to use temporary assets that don’t call obvious attention to themselves. In games of such massive scale, BRAT-green blocks that scream “DO NOT USE” are much easier to flag than something approximating the final product.
I’m struggling to come up with a counter-argument to that.
I’m still in a place where I think there are valid uses of AI in gaming development. If a dev or publisher wants to explore those uses and, importantly, is upfront about it, there may be a place for that.
But the excuse of laziness when it comes to stripping AI assets out when their use was not intended is lame and needs to go away.
Filed Under: ai, crimson desert, placeholder, slop, video games
Comments on “Hey, Game Devs: The ‘Placeholder Assets’ Excuse For Using AI Is Running Really Thin”
Instead of placating the mob with “placeholder” lies they should double down and own it. Gamergate showed that if you give an inch, gamer nutjobs will take a mile. Don’t negotiate with terrorists.
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What concessions did gamergate win? They’re still making the same complaints every time a new game comes out not showing what they deem to be enough boob, they just made a bunch of women’s lives unbearable for nothing. Also the criticisms of AI usage aren’t even remotely comparable so sod off with that, covered up midriffs, non white game protagonists and women with realistic builds aren’t comparable to billionaires stripmining art and culture, environmental disaster and the push for fascism and mass unemployment.
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That’s a weird-ass juxtaposition, but ok.
a counter argument
One argument that comes to mind is that having such obvious and obtrusive temporary assets makes it very hard to tell if the art direction is working well or not.
evaluating things like “does this scene work” or “does this level reflect the themes and settings desired” gets appreciably harder when there’s a bunch of obtrusive assets lying around.
for example, a designer goes to evaluate a new horror themed level, but both the monster and 1/2 the miscellaneous assets are “BRAT-green blocks”. that makes it hard to tell “is the level the right amount of scary”.
Do the devs really need to have an automated process tagging all the AI generated pieces, and have it throw regular alerts about anything remaining in the latest build? yes. Do the devs still have legitimate use cases for AI generated placeholders. also yes.
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If an obtrusive placeholder asset can wreck a game’s art direction, it probably didn’t have much of a direction to wreck in the first place.
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Plus, you can have your cake and eat it when it comes to textures, it’s called a watermark, we’ve had it for years. Just add a translucent text overlay on the texture that will wrap around the model, indicating it is such. Boom, you can test it in situ to see if the general look of the scene holds together, without missing it when it comes time to finalise those assets.
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Reminds me of the ‘concept art look’ origin of Borderland’s art style.
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If the assets you have are going to be replaced, you might get a misleading indication of whether the level is the right level of scary whether they were AI generated or green blocks.
Basically as old as game dev
When I first started in the industry about 25 years ago, it was at BioWare. Folks had noticed that one of the plain text files had a string in it (a comment, I think) that said, ‘ass-plugging cum bubble’.
We (as an industry) haven’t always been super-careful with all our temp assets, and it’s gotten harder the bigger games get. I think probably there should be a standard auditing procedure (and I’ve seen games with rigorous pre-ship audits) but this isn’t unique to this era of AI assets.
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If there was only some kind of commit and versioning system for software… or two or three.
I submit that placeholder art could be knocked together quickly and flexibly by actual humans and sidestep the entire issue.
AAA game dev is getting too large for humans to perform. The teams required are too large to be managed effectively. The pace of output is too quick to be sustained. All this corner cutting isn’t because the industry is lazy or cheap. It’s because price pressure and output demands make it impossible to do anything else.
That doesn’t make it acceptable, but it means there is hard cap (quality/size/fidelity/etc) on what the general public can reasonably expect a AAA game to look like that no amount of advances in technology will ever overcome. Eventually, the burden of adding one more developer to the team will not provide more value than it adds management complexity and QA requirements.
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Then scale back, instead. You don’t need unmanageably large amounts of ‘stuff’ to make a good game.
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To wit: Balatro.
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I’m sure somewhere in the back of your head agreeing with the more detailed comment by restating the implication out loud was clever, but this definitely wasn’t one of those times.
Some commentary doesn’t need clarifying replies from agreement and can stand on its own merits.
The AAA dragon is getting killed by venture capitalist firms and public financing due entirely to their own mismanagement and outsized expectation on returns. Meanwhile, independent developers able to make dice rolls are blatantly obviously higher quality than smarter teams by simply adhering to deadlines or not seeking development financing too early and operating on zero cashflow invisibly for a while, and in some cases not taking loans to cover living expenses or free up time on day jobs.
It hurts developers that probably should have gone independent or pressed harder for unionization before now, but I say let the dragon die or lose to Eastern developers for a while (everyone will get tired of their equally aggressive FOMO monetization shortly after the collapse of the Western dragon.)
The most straightforward solution is to just stuff all “placeholder” materials into a folder called “PLACEHOLDER” in your project, and then delete the folder when you’re getting close to concluding development. This is especially useful with engines like Unreal, which will actively tell you if those assets are being referenced by anything so you can replace the references.
That being said, depending on the size of the project, that might require strict project management to ensure that team members are putting placeholder assets in the right place. And sometimes someone might get lazy and use AI generation without telling anyone, which can be frustrating.
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Its funny when people who know nothing about game development are commenting on things.
“just add everything to placeholder folder”
like jesus christ that’s one of the most retarded things you could do.
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Like, there’s a file structure for a reason, you can’t stick stuff in other folders or the whole project becomes a mess.
Similar to how you can’t just append a string to every placeholder and do a search pass for them, because there’s more to it than just replacing placeholder.asset with final.asset
Something you’re missing here is that… they don’t have to do any of this. Nobody’s forcing them to keep going bigger and shinier. They’re doubling down on what a shrinking percent of gamers actually demand.
The AAA market is stagnating. Indies and smaller dev teams, making smaller and/or less technically/graphically intensive games, are experiencing much greater growth. A quick Google about market trends returned 8% growth to 22%.
For myself, I’ve already gotten out of AAA games almost entirely. They’re too bloated and too bland, for too high a price, for me to be interested anymore. I don’t give a shit about massive worlds with hyper-realistic graphics. (I’ll add here that while I can appreciate the technical skill required for realism, it’s nonetheless the world’s single most boring visual style. …imho.)
I just want something fun and interesting. Cutting-edge graphics aren’t a requirement. Massive isn’t a requirement, and can even be a detriment.
I wish you people would stop clutching your pearls over ai.
I don't get it
I understand why there is pushback in surveillance, stalking uses, legal industry hallucinations, autonomous killing, attempts at law enforcement, therapy, abuse material, and medicine. But I don’t get the pushback in gaming.
Are AI-savvy game developers possibly using AI bot nets to try to prevent layoffs? From a player’s perspective, I don’t see drawbacks to AI-generated content.
Maybe I just haven’t seen enshittification yet.
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Microsoft is developing an in-game AI “buddy” to hold your hand as it either tells you how to play a game “ideally” or plays the game for you, which…well, if Microsoft thinks gamers really want that sort of thing, that says a lot about how Microsoft views gamers.
Numerous companies (and individual developers) are turning to AI slop as a means of replacing work that would normally be done by people, whether it’s voice acting or texture creation or something else, because doing so is technically cheaper than paying people for that work.
Gamers have a visceral reaction to AI slop and to “let’s replace people with AI” nonsense because, like everyone else, they’ve all seen the mediocrity that the Emptiness Machine generates. If you can’t understand that reaction, that’s on you. The direction of the gaming industry turning to “AI in everything whether you like it or not” won’t end well for the industry—especially when the AI bubble inevitably bursts.
Want the asset to be a placeholder, mark it as such, either in the filename, file descriptor or on the image itself.
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They should probably start marking half-assed placeholder code as well.
As much as I want to agree. This isn’t new. A few companies over the years have left everything from no texture, to test textures in their games. Numerous games have left “dev” art in the game, sometimes causing legal issues , or just containing something inappropriate.
Then of course games have been released all the way back to the snes days with unused and unfinished content.
When you have tens of thousands of assets and a time schedule, things get missed or forgotten.
The truest thing in software is that temporary is the best way to become permanent. AI just makes this problem easier.
It would be trivial to add steganography or metadata to indicate AI-generated placeholder assets.
But have you considered that all “AI” IS bad everywhere forever?
Seriously, I’ve yet to hear a good counter to the ecological and labor issues alone that this tech invites beyond “it’s neat.”