Abominable Intelligence

Like many of my peers in the writing space, I am not a fan of AI. I consider it to have occasional valid uses, but only when those uses are not trying to steal from, rehash, and homogenize human creativity for the benefit of corporations who think they have the whole “art as product” scene sown up except for the pesky issue of needing to pay the creatives who actually do the work.

I must confess that I like fancy spellcheckers like Grammarly, even though Grammarly is a large language model. I simply set mine up so that it catches spelling errors and the odd Oxford comma issue, and never makes structural or word-choice suggestions. I like my Hiberno-English ways and would rather not have the hodge-podge of Irishisms that penetrate my writing dashed into oblivion on the rocks of American cultural hegemony just because I want to be able to catch a typo before I pass this piece of writing off to my long-suffering editors.

And, of course, there is a lot I hate about AI. So, let’s talk about that.

The Alters falters

Having played The Alters extensively pre-release, it is a game that I very much enjoyed. I’m a sucker for a story about someone trapped in a hostile environment that, out of the sheer disinterest born of not being sentient, is trying to kill him. It’s just trying to be a planet, and he is trying to be a little bag of salty water and electricity that stays alive.

The Alters messes with the formula by allowing you to clone yourself and imprint the clone with your quantum potential from another possible timeline. A you, but a different you. A you who lived life just a little differently and ended up as a whole new person. It’s a fun game that explores the concept of individuality, community, sacrifice, and choice. 

Oh, and they used AI.

Now, to be fair to my AI-hating ways, it was pretty tucked away in some in-game text files and a single piece of placeholder art that they later claimed was never meant to be in the final release. Most of it appeared in text translations to other languages because of what the developer, 11 Bit Studios, has called time constraints, as they needed to get things ready for launch. 

So, all in all, a very, very small thing. Almost nothing. A mere hiccup. A faux pas. From one of my favorite developers, and yet, I gotta beat them up over it. I gotta give them some hell. Why? Because it’s the slippery slope of obfuscation, even if the obfuscation was down to a mistake rather than malice. It’s being one of the first dev teams to make the mistake of not saying that they use some AI tools in development, even if AI-generated images, words, animation, music, or anything else don’t end up in the game. Someone on the internet, somewhere, will always find out. 

Simply put, there are scales of AI use, and AI is already pretty widespread in the industry when it comes to all manner of things that many of us feel are actually pretty innocuous. Generating hills, rocks, and trees can all be done by AI, allowing for a huge variety of objects in a game’s world. I don’t feel like I have a tremendous issue with this, as it will take a skilled environmental artist to take all those parts and generate an environment that feels engaging and exciting; it will just have more shapes in it than that same AI artist could produce on their own. I am extremely open to hearing from environmental artists on how I might be wrong about that and revising my opinion, by the way. 

And that is precisely my point. Unless developers engage with consumers in an honest way about their use of AI, big and small, people will never be able to decide what level of its use they wish to support, and essentially endorse with their money. None of us will ever be able to change our opinion, should that be what we choose to do, and instead, we will just feel like we are being lied to by omission. 

Jurassic Farce

Frontier Developments used generative AI for scientist portraits in Jurassic World Evolution 3 before pulling them from the game after complaints on Steam. There wasn’t much song and dance from them in the same way that 11 Bit Studios show some contrition, likely because this almost certainly wasn’t a mistake. It felt like a small, conscious use of AI to see how people would react. It felt like a gross little experiment to see if anyone would even notice. Well, someone did.

Now, that might be mean. Maybe it was just an honest mistake from Frontier Developments in the same way 11 Bit Studios claimed, and they just were unwilling to do the song and dance—I have no idea, but it just seems to keep happening. Either way, Frontier promised those pesky AI images would be gone by the time the game comes out later this year, so it may have just been a tactic to put distance between the conversation and the release.

At the start of the year, 1939 Games used some AI art for their game, Kards, a collecting card game about military units. In that instance, they claimed it was a partner they used for art assets. They apparently noticed the partner was using AI tools, but were promised this was just for the early stages, and the art itself would be hand-drawn. This didn’t happen, and they owned the mistake of not noticing AI art ending up in their game.

Activision, an almost endless source of industry cringe, was using AI to produce ads for games that didn’t exist just to gauge interest in whether they would even bother to make them. Ubisoft used AI images of Ezio from Assassin’s Creed on some of their socials because they apparently don’t have enough stock images of one of their most famous characters. Call of Duty very famously had a six-fingered zombie Santa in some of their artwork. 

It’s all just dumb, avoidable nonsense that makes people who don’t like AI not trust whatever their vision of the future is, as it becomes all too easy to imagine a world where they try to have more and more work done by AI, and because it’s AI, the work is subpar. 

It feels as if the games industry wants to have a dishonest approach to their plans for the technology because they have, in general, a dishonest approach to most things. Everything from digital downloads to DLC began life as an “advantage” for consumers. Digital downloads meant you could buy your game at any time, but now it just means they can turn it off at any time. DLC was supposed to allow us to explore more of a game's world, but now it just means pieces get shaved off the base game and sold to us at a premium. 

To not have learned from the growing resentment among their customer base and wish to have some honest dialogue about plans for AI over the coming years is disingenuous and stupid. 

This stuff might seem small now, but it’s always small to start with. It’s always a pebble, then a rock, then a boulder, then the whole cliff is coming down on you. Customer choice means being able to make informed decisions about where we put our money. If companies wish to dabble in AI, they should be more open about it and allow us to decide if we wish to support those efforts or not. Hiding it and then acting all shocked when the truth comes out is just gonna consistently make it harder and harder to ever believe these teams have honorable intentions.

Whether the publishers wish to admit it now or later, expenditure from the cohort that should be their most profitable is going to drop further and further over the coming years. Pushing yet more customers away for a reason so easily avoidable just seems like easily avoidable self-sabotage.

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Andrej Barovic agrees AI is bad for the soul, and shares his own thoughts on this menance. - “To think that we need AI in today’s day and age when there are more skilled game developers than there ever were in history is completely absurd. Just check the credits of any given modern AAA title.”

Scott Duwe likes superhero movies, and doesn’t really mind if you don’t. - “But in the dark, with popcorn and soda in hand and overpaid actors in ridiculous outfits on the big screen in front of me, I can feel like a kid with no worries for a few hours. And that’s irreplaceable to me, regardless of the cinematic quality or critical reception they garner.”

Kacee Fay introduces the Weekly Watchlist, where recommendations on what to watch are both shared and requested. Go and have your say. - “The best thing I watched this week was the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon. The original animated version is one of my favorite movies of all time, so I wasn’t initially stoked about it getting a live-action remake. It’s a perfect film in my eyes, and I just didn’t see how they could improve upon it.”

That’s it for this week, folks. Make sure you check under your bed for any rogue AIs, and stay gold.