Humans Still Needed: ‘Firmament’ Players Complain About Game’s Lore Content Written By AI
from the beep-boop dept
You can’t walk out of your front door these days without tripping over someone ready to tell you about the next great thing in artificial intelligence. And, hey, it’s for good reason. The last few months have seen an explosion of new tools that have come online and are capable of some seriously amazing things. But for all of the hand-wringing over where humanity will even fit into the world any longer now that ChatGPT can write me a three stanza poem about how great encased meat is (yes, I did this for real), the current generation of AI tools are not such that they globally apply to replacing human work anywhere and everywhere.
Cyan Worlds, the game studio that became a sensation in the early 90s after it released the original Myst game, has since been releasing games more recently through Kickstarter campaigns. The studio’s latest release, Firmament, has been on the receiving end of some relatively mediocre reviews. Negative comments on the game have commonly centered on how the game’s world feels under-realized, especially when it comes to the kind of in-game text and lore that Cyan Worlds made its name on.
For a studio with such an illustrious history, the decidedly mixed reviews for Firmament should be something of a surprise. Fans are down on some of the puzzle design, but they also repeatedly mention how flat the game’s world feels, how poor the narration is and the sparsity of Firmament’s in-game lore, which really stand out when compared to Cyan’s 90s blockbusters.
Some curious folks started poking around to see what the reason for this deviation in lore quality might be. And that’s when they came across this screen from the game’s credits.
That certainly explains what buyer’s of the game are seeing. When asked to comment by Kotaku, Cyan Worlds made the point that all of this went through human quality control, and even that much of the content wasn’t wholly, or even mostly, derived using AI. For example, the voice narration in the game was written and performed by human beings, but an AI tool was used to modify the audio of that narration for pitch, timbre, etc.
But in the end, the things about the game customers are talking about hating is the content that has been in some way touched by AI.
This sucks! This is the third game in a month we’ve had to highlight for either featuring or standing accused of featuring terrible, obviously machine-generated content. The feedback in each instance—even on this game’s Kickstarter page, where many backers pledged their support years ago, before AI-generated content was even a thing—has been clear: people do not want this stuff in their games!
These are new tools that need to be explored and modified to make them better. But when it comes to creative expression to be consumed by humans, it sure does seem like humans want other humans to do the bulk of the creating.
Filed Under: ai, ai content, firmament
Companies: cyan worlds