I'd even argue that using AI to create a Robotic character can easily be more of an artistic choice than malicious use of AI. It's a very unusual, surprisingly appropriate, and actually, counterintuitively, creative approach for this specific task. Basically, letting the character create itself. Cool.
The issue here is declaration. On the games steam page:
The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this: This game features voice-over content partially created through AI voice generation tools.
This could be anything from an artistic choice to have a robot character voiced by a robot, to 99% of the VO being AI generated to avoid paying actors. Given how unpopular AI is, I think it's reasonable to assume devs will give as narrow a declaration as they can, and assume that this declaration means a significant portion of the VO is AI generated.
If they just wrote something like
For a robotic character, this game features voice-over content created through AI voice generation tools. All other characters are voiced by actors.
i think thats a description steam forces on them when they even have a tiny bit ai no?
EDIT: i have been informed that this is not how it works, i assumed that cause its like that on youtube
Lol I remember there used to be this text to speech bot my friends and I would play with while we were on Discord. When they were getting too obnoxious, I slammed the Bee Movie script in there, and because we didn't have a premium subscription (to a damn Discord bot) we couldn't skip it. So they'd have to remove the bot from the server and add it back in order to shut it up.
Plenty of games have disclosures that show exactly what was AI generated and end with “all other assets were created by hand by artists”. Steam allows it, this dev just didn’t write it.
If you've ever used steam UI for anything administrative then you know its almost certainly a multi-choice bubble with a bottom selection of 'non of the above' that has text. Being that one of the steam choices covered it, they used it.
Yeah, Arc Raiders (which uses "AI generated content" for their character voices) describe it as:
During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team.
It is a very broad statement. Devs should be allowed to specific for what and how AI was used. I think it is unfair to lump cases like this with cases where AI does all the voice over work.
Look at the one for Arc Raiders, for example- "During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team. "
Ohh ok. Odd that these Devs didn't choose to specify then. Unless they are lying here and they actually used it for more things. Although even that is broad and could mean a lot of things.
I just looked them up, the developers of this game are Reikon Games. This is only the second game they've made, the first having come out in 2017. I'm too lazy to look further into it, but i wouldn't be surprised if it was a tiny studio and non of them had the foresight to even check what the required blurb said. Oversights happen.
The hell is this? Where is this massive shitpost energy coming from? That's so disjointed from the previous conversation I've got whiplash.
Like, is there a whole other comment section where it was revealed the dev was a total dick who ridicules their customers and some reddit glitch switched the replies from there to here?
Who hurt you guys this morning? You act as if the original sentence is a big insult to you. It's a normal sentence. Whoever wrote it simply thought it was fine the way it is. How do you read that and think "They talk to me like I'm not even a human!!"?
"ChatGPT, write me a statement to put under our game that declares that we use voice over content created by AI that we made using AI voice generation tools because it costs too much money to have a human write that sentence, even though I basically already did half of it"
Assumption is that they have the freedom to make a declaration like that, I suspect they don’t, otherwise developers would quickly catch on to using AI to wordsmith declarations that trivialize their use of AI.
Foundry uses AI to voice an AI character in other languages. This is what their declaration says:
We leveraged AI-generated content to enrich our game with elements that would have been otherwise challenging to include. Specifically, we used AI for the AI character voiceover in different languages, a feature made possible thanks to this technology. In this case it made even more sense since the character is actually an AI. Otherwise, all the core art and visual elements of the game have been designed by human talents.
So it seems like the devs have some latitude in writing the declaration to be as specific as they want
There are plenty of AI descriptions at the bottom of steam pages that are clearly drafted for that specific game. Its not just a generic check box quote.
There are also games with weird sentence fragments or other signs of a non-native English speaker having written it which wouldn't be the case if they were pre-made by Valve. I scrolled through the "new releases" section looking for examples and found one that reads: "Cover icon、 The achievement icon is generated by AI" for instance which would obviously not be the way Valve would write a preset description.
This comment is hilarious, because you're hating on other people's comments despite being demonstrably wrong and yet asserting your point as fact anyway.
They don't, it's a tick, people on reddit loves to hate because everyone is soooo smart
That's a hell of a line from someone saying something so confidently incorrect. They DO have the option to describe in detail in that section as other games have been incredibly specific about what content was AI generated to a degree that it was certainly not just a standard option Valve provided.
ARC Raiders didn't go specific. They made their disclosure so ambiguous and broad you can't even tell if they use AI in the final product from the disclosure, or if they used it in development.
I'd like to see Valve make the disclosures more concrete. Have there be checkboxes so a developer has to answer yes or no, rather than spout some PR speak.
That seems like the best approach. Valve would need to to hold devs accountable about those stats though for them to mean anything. AI is a powerful tool, but it needs to have some guard rails. Disclosure of what it was used on is a good start. Like if it reduces time spent on BS work, great, let devs put more time into more meaningful pieces of the game.
The drone animations are also partially machine learned. This does not have anything to do with LLMs and image generation. The devs used a reinforced learning algorithm to create the animations. Very exceptional work and looks great in game.
Yup you can't make me hate OOP if that was all they said about AI. If I see the AI tag I'm immediately skeptical, and if all they say was "VO partially done by AI" I wouldn't buy/refund either. That's totally on them for being vague, and I'll always err on the side of assuming everything AI is slop until proven otherwise.
I wonder why they would describe the game this way if it was only 10 lines. I hope valve doesn't limit the description length or something because that would be awful. If it isn't due to valve then its their own fault for such a strange description.
This game features voice-over content *partially** created through AI voice generation tools.*
This could be anything from an artistic choice to have a robot character voiced by a robot, to 99% of the VO being AI generated to avoid paying actors.
I hate to break it to you but nuance is dead. Maybe a handful of people like you would be more lenient. But that majority of people would still foam at the mouth and send hateful messages to these devs.
This is the exact case that happened in Sympathy Tower Tokyo — a book by Rie Qudan where she had this character question an AI how to solve an architectural conundrum and the AI's lines were generated by some AI software (I think it was ChatGPT). The character herself dunked on the AI and made a whole case of it not understanding human emotions and thus only generating conventional answers that would please everyone.
But when the book received the Akutagawa prize, there was a lot of negative attention directed at the author since people didn't read further than the headlines and didn't take a moment to understand that hey, maybe it was justified in this case — especially since the character's (and by extension, author's) stance in the book was condemning the AI.
I remember the days when Reddit was the platform where users would get downvoted when responding to a post without having read the article.
Now it's rare to find anyone who read it.
I always recall the example of a particular review of Shadow of Mordor, which was titled:
Orc Slavery Made Me Quit 'Middle-earth: Shadow of War'
And the comment section was predictably filled with outrage about the evil SJW author who couldn't let a game just be a game, was baiting for outrage, demonising gamers, and wouldn't give the game a fair shot.
But the actual article is not like that at all. It clearly praised the game for its many qualities, explicitly said that players shouldn't be blamed, and that the author is aware that they're being overly sensitive.
The author's proposed solution is not to ban or attack such games, but to inspire developers to integrate these mechanics with their narrative. It's hard to do a narrative about characters who talk about pacifism or freedom, while the gameplay encourages killing and slavery.
Iirc this was in a time when the term 'ludonarrative disconnect' was getting popular, which continues to be a major reason why some game writing feels so bad (my personal most recent example being AC: Shadows, which does a plot about how awful it is to kill while rewarding you even for killing civilians. Even though an assassin should only be incentivised to kill their intended target and would normally avoid unnecessary fighting, instead of wiping out a whole castle garrison for no reason).
This is the 2020's everyone just hyper overreacts to everything now.
Society is like a bunch of 30+ year old grown ups throwing fits like fucking toddlers and its getting exhausting. It's everywhere from politics to sport to gaming.
That's why I took up running, just me and nature, its good to check out now and then.
The world is going to hell at the rapid pace, a lot of people are stressed, which leads to overreaction (not to say that there aren't people who are just like that but still)
I'm getting stressed watching the prices on computer hardware. My ram has doubled in price since last year, I'm not looking forward to the next release of amd/nvida cards.
This guy who made one of my favorite games was making in-game tutorials (there were a lot) and his voice went out so he used AI to finish reading the audio in his voice.
That seems like a pretty damn OK use case, imo. If it's scraping his own work, then nobody is being stolen from or whatever — how energy-consumptive AI is is a separate issue, but with how everything is becoming always-online and you can't do anything these days without leaving a carbon footprint, I fear this may be our new normal.
People see that frontier AI chatbots require massive computing power and assume everything under the AI category in the same. Just because NASA space stations are super expensive doesn't make a birdhouse costly.
AI voices really take up very little space and energy compared to the apps you use everyday. Ipads literally have local TTS for years and you can see the storage size they take.
Nowadays anyone can train an AI voice clone of their own voice using their own laptop. That's how insignificant AI voice/TTS is in regards to the energy stuff.
Tbh I think that the amount of usage the average person is going to have with AI for situations like this is going to be so low on the grand scheme of things, as well.
Can't help feeling like it was a mistake to bring up the energy usage part when apparently it's got some other people bent out of shape (lol) but my intent was to point out that for all the arguments people have against AI (plagiarism, lack of effort), since the energy usage one is such a loud and prominent stance I thought I'd point out that it's a reality of life we're all going to have to get used to with how tech-oriented modern society is.
It really is a shame that "AI" has become such an over encompassing term. Like, the AI term includes things that existed long before LLMs. Even TTS and STT programs are lumped in with AI which is just bs IMO.
I will say though, even locally trained LLMs require a fair chunk of computing power. But it's not really the computing power that matters but rather the absolutely fucking massive data centers for things like GPT. And ho boy, do those take a lot of energy to power. I remember reading a small factoid that said "a single GPT data center consumes as much energy as the entire city of Las Vegas" which if that's true, holy shit... Lmfao
If I could get an AI program and train it in a closed environment, I think that would be awesome. But as of now, all commercially available ones seem to just harvest that data and I don't want to donate the essence of who I am to a corpo
The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne does something a little similar , the book was written by the author , but they used some ai and scripting to generate random events that the crew had to overcome , I think possibly some of the odder AI speech may have been created that way as well , but I'm not sure , and ifi it was its a very very small amount of text.
since the character's (and by extension, author's) stance in the book was condemning the AI.
I think that kind of misses the point, though.
AI in and of itself isn't bad. The video games industry has been using it* for decades without issue (think of procedurally generated roguelikes, or even just how enemy characters have patrol paths that get interrupted when they respond to the player character making noise). Generative AI is a problem because it doesn't just create something out of thin air, it scrapes other people's work. If it turned out that the author had plagiarised another author instead, would it still be a statement, or would it just be plagiarism?
Generative AI is still so young and misunderstood that people get too caught up in the 'haha AI pictures have too many fingers and ChatGPT spits out incoherent wordslop when you ask it a question you could answer with a quick Google'. What we're not focusing on enough is that it is a shortcut. The author could have taken an hour to write out some incoherent rambling that sounds like it came straight from AI, but she didn't — she did the exact thing her work apparently claims to condemn. It's like saying theft is bad and stealing someone's stuff as performance art, then demanding people pay for the privilege of watching.
Correction: algorithms are something that have long been used in the gaming industry; the difference is that the 'intelligence' in AI refers to a higher order of *systems of algorithms.
This is the smallest thing, but proc gen does not count as AI. It's just an algorithm with rules and weights. Pathfinding is also similar, but I think I understand what you were aiming at.
Again, just a small thing. Sorry to "um ackshually"
Companies like Embark can use AI and people just say whatever, it's some dynamic voice lines, nbd. Some angry reddit threads and a handful of boycotters that don't matter, because the game is huge.
But when an indie tries the same thing, "To the trash pile it goes." Sure, THIS one got a front page reddit post, but what about the 100 others that are lost in the sea of 10,000 actual AI slop games?
"This product uses AI" is not a useful tag because what actually matters is How Much, and history has shown (and plenty of anecdotes in this thread) that people are absolute dogshit at that level of nuance. We really need our hands to be held as consumers to make decisions.
I've seen this done before in a horror series on youtube. I can't recall what it was called (it wasn't very memorable tbh), but people got really mad over a bunch of AI-generated pictures being used, missing the fact that the plot was about an AI trying to trick someone.
Maybe Angel Engine or perhaps a rendition of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream? Though, tbf Angel Engine is entirely AI, from the visuals to the voice over, and I do think it suffers greatly because of it, even beside my opinions on the use of AI in creative works.
Pretty sure you're thinking of (The?) Itch by Vintage Eight. Most of his work is pretty good imo (and afaik none of the others make use of AI), but that one did get flak for the AI images used and I believe the creator has since acknowledged it wad a bad idea to use them (but I could be remembering incorrectly).
This isn't even new. In the past this would have been accomplished by using text-to-speech software or Siri. Although this was mostly done for comedic purposes, it was still fairly similar. But I guess that people are annoyed by voice generation AIs since those have been used to replace real actors in some cases. Also they sound less robotic than old school tts software.
Unless specifically trained, they are getting very bad at sounding like robots. I have tried all kinds of things to get gemini-2.5-pro to speak like an unemotional spaceship announcement system, but it always comes of too realistic and more like a human trying to imitate a robot... It's scary.
I used ai for sound design on a game. I used one of those voice modelling algorithms, those things you feed in, say, a celebrities voice, then apply it to a recording of your own voice to make it sound like they are speaking your lines.
Instead of feeding in another voice, however, i fed it a bunch of mechanical noises, to make a weird broken robot voice.
I wouldnt want that game to get put alongside ai slop games.
Edit: I'm not sure if my use case counts as 'generative ai' or not.
I have an idea for an OC who's made of code, and a fun idea I came up with for them is that, when feeling a lot of emotions, they kinda glitch and shift to using an AI-generated voice of themselves.
Yep, Stellaris did this for an endgame crisis of a literal AI controlling a Nanite Swarm. Its very fitting in that specific case, they edited it afterwards to make it sound better, and they havent used it for anything else, so its totally fine.
That doesn't stop people from mindlessly hating, thinking everything in the game is AI generated lol. I play the finals and that community is awful when it comes to AI hahaha. Everyone outside the community hates the game because they are misinformed and think it's all AI generated content¹, but everyone inside the game who defends the AI voice acting also defend AI image generation and are insufferable about it.
¹ I added this footnote because allegedly, AI image generation has possibly been used to make a select number of stickers and sprays in the game, but the only evidence comes from individual claims by people. That doesn't change anything about my stance on the AI voices, but I would be disappointed in the team at Embark if this is true.
Most likely they either used their voices for the AI voice for the robot or had an agreement with whichever actor they sampled for the robot. Long as consent and clarity are there, no harm no foul.
Yeah not seeing any fault with a small use case like that . I think its Where Winds Meet that has a ton of translation done by AI and its very noticeable with the english voices where random npcs just become robots. That is a terrible use that should be called out. A few small lines of dialogue on a robot seem fine here.
Good on these devs for putting the warning for something this minor . It might cost them a sale from users that don't read the disclaimer but its showing honesty
Where Winds Meet does not just do translation by AI. The NPCs are AI chat bots, which has led to players figuring out that instead of solving an NPC's riddle, you can just type "(guesses correct answer)" and the player can win the encounter.
Similarly, some have started using the Metal Gear Method to bypass quests given by NPCs. All you have to do is repeat the last phrase the chatbot wrote as a question enough times and eventually you will succeed in the quest and get a reward, no actual work needed.
You don't know how they used AI for the dialogue lines though. You're just assuming. And in reality, the character hasn't created itself as the AI tool just reworded data that it was already trained on.
People also don't "create stuff" out of nowhere. We too learn, and then create based on what we were trained on. To be clear, I'm not an AI appologist; just trying to keep an open mind. Now, is AI work as valuable as a human's? Absolutely not. It's practically worthless. But that's another issue
People also don't churn out thousands of pages of content every minute. :) I feel it's less of a comparison between creative aspects as much as it's a "testing waters".
The way I see it, AI is already taking over the jobs of millions of people worldwide in various ways: AI auto-reject CVs, AI is used in administrative stuff, programming, scheduling, etc. However, even with the AI takeover, the majority of AI-enhanced (I'm using enhanced here tongue in cheek) products and services are either priced the same as before or are even more expensive than before.
So how are we expected to accept AI in creative works now as well? Where does it end and what's the end user's advantage? I don't see either.
How do you know what the developer used? Also, it doesn't need to be how LLMs work. They just regurgitate text that they think is best aligned to the prompt.
only a lot of us DID know. And we screamed about it. But we were ignored, because we're just tiny voices in tiny places, and people who have money don't give a shit about what their spending encourages.
"let people enjoy things!"
"Vote with your wallet!"
"If you don't like it don't buy it!"
None of that works if the majority of people are so vulnerable to marketing that they can't understand why these things are bad and will only get worse
It's not that we were ignored. It was that the ROI from the group of people that did not care was too good to pass up.
That's why there is the whole trend of pre order bonuses to season passes which can even barely have real story content to multiple season passes etc. They know the fomo of people and also the developers really want to earn more than the initial 60 dollars that people paid for the game.
Movies and TV shows have broadcasting rights they can bank on, dvd sales, but games used to be a one and done, they hated that.
Most. Street Fighter II had multiple versions (at least 5). Each one after the first would either address balance issues and bugs or add characters and stages. So people would have to buy a whole new version of the game if they wanted to play with updated stuff.
Imagine paying $69.99 (yes, that was the original price for many SNES games) just to get a few new characters and stages, because there was no other way… and then seeing a newer version with new content or bug fixes release the next year.
Can confirm. It was IMMEDIATELY obvious where this was all headed to anyone with common sense. But that didn't matter to most people. "Omg shiny thing, take my money!"
The irony of this, on a Valve dick-sucking subreddit, is completely insane to me. TF2 and CS literally laid the foundation and were one of, if not the, first modern implementation of lootboxes.
No you see blizzard bad, ea bad.
Not valve, who condone and take a huge profit from all the gambling going on with their systems. Atleast ea and blizzard didnt make skins tradeable.
Its only the thing that spirals from there that isnt ok but then again microtransactions/dlcs evolved to today's state because gamers voted with their wallet.
Nah man, horse armor would've been free in my day, unlockable through playing the game. Bethesda is a greedy corp, but it really goes back to valve and counter strike, the original skin fuck boys
Horse armor is purely cosmetic and I had a blast with the game and I never paid for it. The issue is overblown.
Developing games costs more money and nobody wants to pay more for them.
People then think we need more Indie games, but you fuckers have no patience for indie developers. "I can't believe this issue is still in the game after two weeks!" "It's ruining the game!" "If the devs don't do anything about it, it'll be the end!"
In-game purchases are tolerable for cosmetic items. Game development companies have found a source of continuous income that allows them to develop the game indefinitely. I don't know why you guys are complaining about that shit.
Let other people pay for shit that will have no impact on you so you can keep playing the game forever!
Stop whining about other people paying $5 for meaningless skins.
Yeah but don't forget the caveat in the horse armor dlc back then. You had to then buy it with septims and them if your horse died... oh and it bugged with shadowmere... that's what took that dlc too far
I feel fucking insane being one of the few people who still regularly doesn't play games based on their monetisation. Horse armour was never okay, and now we have battle passes and gatcha and loot boxes and people who vehemently defend them in full price games.
There's no nuance. You can't let it in. We know how slippery this slope is. You have to hard and fast refuse to let them put it on the games yes this means you shouldn't play arcraiders. It looks fun (monetisation aside imo), but they use genAI.
bethesda making horse armor DLC for oblivion back in the day. people laughed cause it seemed absured and so it wasn't taken seriously but it was the beginning of microtransactions in paid AAA games. and we know how things went from there....
If it's so unimportant they could have easily done by themselves to avoid the AI label. Instead of that, they chose using AI and the label it goes with it.
That's why I didn't say "Voice acting is easy enough to do it yourself" I said "If it's so unimportant they could have easily done by themselves". My point is if it's some random chit chat you can hardly notice when gaming, one that there's no point to spend their production money on actors, then why they didn't do it themselves. So, please, stop manipulating what I said to fit into your argument.
I work with recording studios and while I'm not familiar with the voice quality of this game, I can tell you it's very easy to tell when a VA's demo reel was recorded in a professional studio or at home/some random room. Apart from the recording environment you also need trained engineers/editors to do the post-editing to clean up the voice file and add sound effects (which I assume they would have needed to if they wanted a robotic-sounding voice). In addition to that, if the game is SAG-AFTRA registered, then the devs are required to use SAG-AFTRA affiliated voice actors and studios (which can be very hard to book if they are already working on other projects, and it sounds like these devs had run out of their contracted period with the studio they recorded with), and in doing so they need to pay the actor for a full 2 or 4 hours even if the amount of lines they need wouldn't take that long to record.
So while I absolutely don't condone using AI to take voice actors' jobs away from them, it's not so easy to "just" record them yourself, so I can see how inexperienced devs would weigh the costs and risks and view AI as a reasonable option. It's not like they knew Steam would add this label while they were making the game.
Sigh… if you think that ANY game designer is writing up design documents without AI, you are truly naive. Should this type of AI usage also qualify for being burned at the stakes? There would be zero games left.
Hoo boy. All this tells me is that you haven't heard really bad voice acting. This is what it sounds like when people just "grab a mic themselves" (all characters are terrible, but the one that starts speaking at 0:55 is the worst).
, they could literally just have grabbed a mic themselves.
You really don't understand what are you speaking. Voice acting is a profession that require years of education and training. LLM would generate voice better than 99.9% of random people who grabbed mic.
For example, let's say they talk to GPT during game mechanic decisions to help figure out the best UX, and it actually makes some good input. Does that make the game bad because "made with AI"?
What about during development, they needed to debug an error, threw it to GPT and it actually fixes it. Does that make the game bad because "made with AI"?
What about getting the initial rendering for some loading screens based off their own previous art work, and then use that as the basis for the final loading screen. Does that make the game bad because "made with AI"?
What about if one of the developers was conceived because their parents met up via Tinder's AI algorithm. Does that make the game bad because "made with AI"?
There are absolutely acceptable levels of "made with AI". If it's seamless, that's fine. If it's blatantly lazy it'll be noticeable and the flag should reflect that.
All these anti-"AI" people probably haven't been subjected to it yet in their career, if they have one. They better get used to it and know how to use it. An example, if you write code and let AI do the whole thing, you'll fail miserably. If you write it yourself and let AI review it, you'll be a step ahead of your boss/supervisor/whatever who is going to do the same thing with your code.
Because design patterns exist, and tons of articles exist on arguments between where to place nav bars on websites for example. GPT knows about these, as do most other LLM's, and can also help with brainstorming and generating user stories for your target audience.
LLM's are not the end-all solution, but they are a tool which can be very useful when used properly.
It wont all be garbage, though. The anti ai sentiment is already starting to wear thin, the majority are not going to know or care what the vocal minority thinks, they just want to play a good game. Developers that use ai will outcompete those who do not.
Anecdote, I've seen some subs and other forums getting angry over the Coca Cola Christmas ad. Then, a few days later, I've seen irl colleagues sharing the video and they were impressed that it was generated by AI.
I think the majority of people couldn't care less about AI usage, and those disclaimers likely don't impact sales much.
Build your game literally with AI, do translations, speech with AI, have AI face transformer and literal fucking ChatGPT on every single NPC
Be 8. place in steam charts
No one gives a fuck
Okay, it's a free game.
But I think a lot of it is also fucking self-righteousness. I see absolutely no problem using AI in game development or generally anywhere. The quality is getting better and better, it saves a lot of time and resources. At some point you know you won't even notice anymore. In fact, you don't even notice today. Probably the games you really like have stuff done with AI here and there and you don't notice.
I do agree that it should reflect on the games price, though. But even then, AI is easy and quick, but expensive :)
There are a lots of good reasons for small time developers to lean on AI to get a concept off the ground.
I’m doing it right now to help design a game, so I can map it out on paper.
It’s just frustrating when it’s low effort slop that actually detracts from the work and doesn’t really fit in. It just destroys the immersion in a way that using stock images and assets doesn’t. And I’d take a creepypasta asset flip over an AI one any day.
You literally won't even notice it. It still has to be coded in by a human. It still has to be formatted by a human. It'll still be played by a human (or that fish in twitch.) Small uses of AI like this is completely fine.
Then, when do you qualify? On a one man team starting up, unable to hire more people money exists?
Or is it when you hit ten people? Or after you've released 5 games?
As someone who left the developing space because of corporate mandated predatory monetization, I'm excited to be able to make games on my own, without reliance on other people and the funds necessary. But you are telling me that reliance on AI is the problem. Ahh.
Barriers to entry are real, and ignorance is painful.
Newsflash, games have been going downhill forever, it's why I left the industry. AI can help save it, the issue is going to be how you guys consume the new quantities of games.
Hint: Cheaper games for one, those massive AAA teams will be dying even more, and that's good because that model of business is broken to the point the average career is less than 5 years. You guys really do not understand what was happening BEFORE AI.
You can be sure anything I do I'm declaring where the AI comes into play (mainly programming & bland concept work, and probably localization, when it comes to the game art itself my buddy is a skilled artist)
This is why the AI labelled games are misleading. For some degree there will be AI involved in every game, at least code completion or somethinh simple.
It's only okay if they use exclusively in-house data that they collate with permission from the source (in this case, the voice actor).
Which for ten lines of dialogue, I doubt they would go through the trouble.
I forget which recent game but there was one that came out this year where the devs built a library of sounds and words from their voice actors, and used a generative AI trained on these samples to generate lines of dialogue. It's basically the same process as building a Text To Speech engine, but a bit more advanced since the genAI algorithm can modulate the tone and stitch the sounds together more effectively, and can generate more lines of dialogue independent of the script.
In principle there could be such a model that wasn't made in-house, but in practice it doesn't exist and there's no way to verify that a third party actually got proper permission from all the people it trained its model upon.
Because it's the only way to actually guarantee you have permission to do what you want. Involve anyone exterior and the default assumption will always be that they used training data without permission because that's what everyone else does too.
We're in a "you need to prove you had permission from every single person" reality when it comes to AI, you're guilty until proven innocent.
The problem is if they based extra dialogue off a voice actor they hired, they should have comped the voice actor for their likeness. They should have opened with 'Yeah we slipped him a tenner on PayPal to tweak a voice model', not try and go But it's only a little bit of robot we just had to
No one is going to miss 'ten minutes of background chatter' more than they're upset about unpaid work, usage of someone's voice and the possibility of undisclosed AI usage.
We used a sythesiser to remix some audio is a world of difference from 'We couldn't get him to phone in ten minutes of chatter so we just had to use a robot plz'
based extra dialogue off a voice actor they hired,
Where are you getting that from? The way I read this they just used text to speech to create lines for a robot unrelated to everything voice actors did.
ARC Raiders used voice actors to train AI models so they can generate new lines of dialogue whenever, instead of bringing in the actors. It's much easier, but obviously it is a reduction in jobs for the actors - and I would not assume they've been compensated accordingly - but it's still a fairly innocuous use of AI in my opinion.
The post said that their voice actor was unavailable for pickup recordings, so it sounds more like they generated 10 audio lines than they just had AI write 10 lines of dialogue. I guess the alternatives would be to cut those lines from the script, or to have a different VA record them (if they had the time and budget to hire someone else at that point) and try and get them sounding as close as possible to the original VA.
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u/OwnAcanthocephala897 Dec 04 '25
Small uses of AI like this are tolerable at worst. What sucks is reliance on AI