Damn guess they shoulda paid artists huh
in my experience, a lot of the game devs using AI would normally try to do the art themselves, but think AI is “better” than what they could do… Then they throw together a collage of mismatched art that has no cohesion and call it a day, and get upset when they get called out for it, thinking it’s just some anti AI thing.
People love to take shortcuts then hate when people tell them they sacrificed quality to do it.
Even if AI could perfectly produce art for a video game - it would lack a lot of what makes indie games charming.
Part of that discovery process is so valuable to the charm. “I don’t know how to do art! The fuck is this shit! How do I 3d model? I guess that works, it’ll do. Hey actually it’d be kinda cool if I based the general aesthetic of the game around this kinda look.” Boom, unique art emerging from their constraints. They had to work to get there, but their work is infinitely more artful as a result
As a gamer (and an artist in my spare time) I don’t think this is true. I’ve played and loved lots of charming games, but I almost never think about the process as an element of that charm. The charm is in the details of the final product - and a perfect simulation from an AI would (by definition, if it existed) perfectly produce those details.
To be clear, I’m not saying the process is the charm. I’m saying the process leads to a product that is charming, as a result of having had restrictions.
An AI that could perfectly produce what the dev desires would not lead to this innovation from constraints.
I love how easily the billionaire sloplords adopt language implying that they are oppressed.
Maybe we should start doing just that
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“Data analyst finds that “diarrhea stigma” in bakeries can reduce the number of reviews a cake gets by around 53%–and the reviews it does get are more negative.”
Stop putting diarrhea in the cake and people will both review them more often and review them more highly.
I’m sure it has nothing to do with AI games being bad.
You say stigma I say quality control issues.
who otherwise would have succeeded
Buddy is in his own little assumption fantasy world
Yes, because gamers are ever so slightly more tech savvy than your average project manager. They are fully aware that LLMs and diffusion models are just expensive plagiarism engines at best and slop factories the rest of the time.
When Valve updated the policy for games published on Steam to include disclosure of Ai usage in the games, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney responded in the public that this should not be done and just hurts the industry. It would generate unneeded backslash, as everyone will use Ai in development, according to Tim. Fast forward to today, turns out Epic plans on integrating Ai tools into Unreal Engine 5.
its a stigma now? and not hesitency?, i dont people see it as a taboo. its obnoxious, a plague and polluting to the environment, plus its being weaponized.
What I’d really like to know is whether this is because of AI use, or merely because they disclosed AI use. I’m sure there are a lot of games on Steam with undisclosed AI use. How do those score?
They tested where AI use is disclosed.
On Steam, if you use AI, and don’t disclose, that’s literally a breach of contract with Steam.
But you’re basically asking for a study on a likely unstudiable thing, at least not directly. What, are you gonna … ask every game dev team on Steam if they knowingly lied to both Steam and their players?
Its like the question on your taxes that asks if you are currently a felon with an outstanding arrest warrant.
Yeah, you might catch some absolute total morons, probably not anything close to the entire demo you’re ostensibly trying to poll.
I think it’s pretty obvious some folks get away with a little bit of AI art if they’re able to do most of the art themselves to create a cohesive art direction.
But if you have a cohesive art direction, it’s pretty much a guarantee you didn’t use AI for the art in general. It just isn’t able to perform that well yet, and it’s clear the non artists who use AI don’t have the eye for what makes it so bad.
Maybe a shortcut for a decorative item here and there, but it’s almost pointless if you already have the talent to make original assets.
My experience of AI image generation is that there are a lot of controls on style. I don’t really see how art direction is more difficult, in the light of that.
Here’s a great browser extension that searched the steam store pages for the AI declaration and pops up a giant warning when there is one and shows you the text or it.
In a way, this only punishes devs who are honest about it.
How is it punishing, if the entire reason of Ai declaration is to be seen? And this is a way for someone who really cares about this to not overlook it by accident. We call this “an informed decision” before buying something. It’s the same reason why developers or publisher have to declare anti cheat usage or third party account requirement or any DRM too.
People who really care about it are still going to be exposed to games that contain “undeclared” AI assets.
Yes. Just because some break rules does not mean we should have no rules. I mean obviously there will be some who hide this fact and hope nobody notices it, this is without saying. So I don’t understand why you specifically bring this up.
Edit: Let me make an example. Some games or applications may collect your data. What we are asking is, please tell us, force them to tell us. There might be some who don’t tell us and collect data without we ever noticing. So that would be those people similar to “undeclared” Ai assets.
Good
Good
It’d be pretty hard to test in a meaningful way, but I’d be curious how big the impact of AI art is on a game’s initial perception compared to human-made slop such as asset flips or a lot of the mobile market and compared to human-made ugly games like Cruelty Squad or Don’t Stop Girlypop.
Basically, define how much the humanity is important, versus “prettyness”, versus dislike of AI for indirect reasons.
Don’t Stop Girlypop is such a vibe wym ugly
I’d imagine people care more about a cohesive visual direction than they care about “pretty”. A lot of AI art already captures what an average jane would probably consider pretty, in a shallow sense. It just isn’t cohesive and its morally bankrupt beyond that so it gives people the big ick
It just isn’t cohesive and its morally bankrupt beyond that so it gives people the big ick
But that lack of cohesion is exactly what makes it ugly, esspecially when split between a number of seperate assets. That said, I’m not convinced that that doesn’t have a huge impact on sales/perception, esspecially compared to an indirect factor like the resource waste and political influences of AI companies. Think of how little impact things like EA and Tencent’s immorality and anti-consumer behavior have on sales. Is AI really that much worse in perception than a company like that, or is it just down to the fact that the games look worse? Thats what I want measured.
Reasonable
Don’t Stop Girlypop is such a vibe wym ugly
I’d imagine people care more about a cohesive visual direction than they care about “pretty”. A lot of AI art already captures what an average jane would probably consider pretty, in a shallow sense. It just isn’t cohesive and its morally bankrupt beyond that so it gives people the big ick
Um, what?
Just accidentlly hit post, and the immediate delete took too long to federate.
Aha makes sense
I’m fine with AI use in the back end, nobody really codes without something along the lines of copilot or claude anymore anyway. But any art related asset (in terms of the writing, visuals or audio) needs to be human made.
If you’re comfortable leaving what should be deliberate artistic choices to some logic machine, i’m not interested in putting time the world you’re building.
I’m fine with AI use in the back end, nobody really codes without something along the lines of copilot or claude anymore anyway.
Well that’s just straight up untrue. My org did an AI pilot to see if it was something we wanted to invest in and it ended up coming back with reduced productivity among devs (largely due to a massive increase in debugging time because of the slop output from the AI). Our devs write good code, faster, without the AI involved.
It’s mostly in management where we’ve seen productivity increases, because of how many emails they are writing on the average day and for transcription of meetings.
Heck, it is objectively measured by a LLM adjacent seller like Faros AI.
The more LLM code in your company, the slower delivery and more bugs that you likely find on production.
Literally data is at 60% of daily tasks being LLM assisted, the throughput is (every value is an average) 500% slower, company delivers 10% less and the bug rate is +50% per PR and +250% production incidents.
At 40% of daily task being LLM assisted the bug rate was +9% vs pre-LLM.
That’s what’s crazy.
Some indie dev was like, “Yeah I used AI to help me learn Godot” and suddenly there’s a dozen negative reviews about how his game uses AI.
Nuance is a word that doesn’t exist in some people’s dictionary, unfortunately.
