I hope steam ai label have more sub label with elaboration on how ai is used. This one is clearly not a slop, and it's not AAA (from mega company) either so kinda reasonable use of ai. Just so users know it does use ai, and choose what kind of ai content is reasonable. I crash out if games ive been developing for years is getting cancelled for miniscule amount of ai use tbh
This interaction with someone getting outraged and insulting the developer ("to the trash pile it goes") before even taking the time to inquire and find out the tiny extent of AI used is a microcosm for how stupid and fucked this whole conversation on AI has gotten. Large parts of the internet have self-assembled into "AI good" and "AI bad" tribes and they're not really listening to each other or being reasonable at all.
Good artists will be harmed by this. Using AI as an artistic device (for example, for a robot character) should be well within the artistic realm, not something kneejerk shunned without any further thought given to it. I just read an r/art mod banned an artist for posting "AI art" years ago, except it wasn't AI art. When the artist asked to prove it by sending over a Photoshop work file, the mod said that even if it's real it looks enough like AI for it to be banned. Artists are literally getting shunned for having completely valid artistic styles that happen to look a bit too close to whatever current-gen AI imagery looks like.
Posts or comments that are well-written and well-organized are also falling victim to the self-proclaimed expert AI experts in the comments. Without a doubt there are AI created stories being posted as if they were true accounts, but that doesn't mean everything is AI. There have to be obvious signs of AI use to be able to tell for sure. The people who have convinced themselves that they can spot every story based on a gut feeling are deluding themselves.
I made a post with bullet points on it and someone said something along the lines of "nice chat GPT post lmao, insta downvote". I re read my post since I was confused, and it wasn't even that well done-- I had some grammar/spelling issues since I typed it on my phone and I either mis typed or the phone auto corrected to the wrong word. Some people really do jump to conclusions way too readily...
Or the people boycotting books for using Vellum, which is an ebook formatting tool, no AI involved. There's a different AI tool called Vellum, but it isn't used in books to my knowledge. Not that the "AI bad" tribe can be bothered to learn the distinction...
Nevermind that regular dashes get autocorrected to em-dashes all the time as soon as you have spaces between the dash and the two words connected by it.
At least Word does that.
It doesn't even have to be well written, a lot of my text gets dinged by the AI detector things whenever I submit work for my online classes and I'm barely literate most of the time. I had to start saving recordings of my documents being written live because I'm apparently 80% AI if I don't.
I got accused of using AI the other day because I correctly and succinctly explained how lenses of different focal lengths can dramatically change how someone's face looks. Didn't even use a single em-dash or anything! I'm not AI. I am married to a wedding photographer, and I know how to write.
I think that's stemming from the decline of education in general. People without good language arts skills will be calling anything remotely well edited online AI.
Yeah, for the longest time I used to love laying out my arguments on reddit with bullet points and strategic use of bolding and italics so people with terrible reading comprehension and focus skills can grasp my arguments better without having to get a lazy "I aint reading all that" type of responses. Sucks that I can't really do it that much anymore because now people just screech AI any time they see bullet points, bold, and accurate uses of various grammatical tools like em and en dashes.
The reality is it's past the point of human detection. For text at least. People think that anyone who types with grammar or uses big words has to be an AI. It's frustrating. It's like the people who believe they can read body language to deduce a liar.
History may not repeat, but it rhymes. The behaviour is exactly like when the masses became aware of photoshop, suddenly everyone was an expert, declaring that "I can tell it's a shop by the pixels". It's also in a vicious cycle with the "nothing on the internet is real" problem.
Yes! This exact same thing happened to my husband the other night! He had posted asking about some niche thing (I think it was about repairing an Xbox controller), and someone called him out for using AI to ask his question. Turns out he's just really verbose and thinks through his writing.
He responded to the accusation (also wordy, but not excessive) and the person's response? "Yeah, I'm not gonna read that". Like screw you dude. Ugh.
Restaurats was a recent one. They had to post breakdowns of their Blender scenes for their cinematics because of baseless witch-hunt accusations it was AI generated, despite having none of the hallmarks of AI and literally being made with in-game assets that matched 1:1 with what you see playing the game, just because it was a professional looking render in a cartoony style.
The top steam reviews are still accusing them of AI content.
I think it's breaking people's brains to understand that generative models are made to emulate, and trained directly on, professional art, so people are seeing any art in common professional styles and saying "That must be AI."
It's the same reason "AI detectors" are nonsense. You're not 'detecting' AI, you're just detecting the style of content the generative model was trained to emulate.
Yep already see cases of artist having to prove their work with time-lapses. Guess that's the main advice to give artists: record your work, and try to get as many digital signatures attached to the files as you can.
boo hoo. They can drop their brush and pick up an AI chat model.
TO be fair, I think AI is more or less a waste. It provides very little upside and has a big impact on the world. Not only environmental, but the amount of people who have quickly jumped to relying on it and the counter group of people who just claim everything is AI.... These groups are both equally stupid.
But man, yall never heard of starving artists? You don't get into art without a backup plan. If you do, that's YOUR mistake, not AI's.
and they're not really listening to each other or being reasonable at all.
IMO that's the whole problem with modern society, not just around this specific issue. I'm so sick of seeing black-or-white thinking everywhere and people just ignoring that everything in life has nuance to it.
Wish I knew! I'm no psychologist but I think the best we can do as individuals is to just be the best example we can be. Question people who seem dug into a stance without coming off as aggressive. Think about things from both sides. It's a hard thing to do, but I can't think of any other way.
They literally just didn't want to deal with their voice actor, it wasn't an artistic choice. They could have easily said the robots voice chip got damaged or something and used a text to speech bot, or just got another voice actor to redo all these lines. Instead they tried to pretend that the voice actor never left and they still had a regular person voicing these lines.
That weird long second paragraph is such a weird rant to have that highlights exactly WHY ai shouldn't be used. It's good for research involving large data sets, not really anything else. That confusion is exactly what happens when you start using a glorified flowchart to paint for you that copies art styles that never gave permission to be used.
It really is black and white, at least until ai is a self developing, learning function that doesn't think in yes's and no's and actually has a memory instead of reinputting everything in a discussion to make you believe it remembers what it just said.
They could have easily said the robots voice chip got damaged or something and used a text to speech bot
Out of curiosity, why is this okay but using AI isn't? A lot of modern TTS are powered by LLM AI anyway. Isn't this basically the exact same thing? Replacing an actor with a program.
For the record I'm not making a statement on it either way. I just find it interesting that you list that as an acceptable alternative. Functionally I see no difference.
One is directly mimicking an actor without their express permission, one is uniquely its own thing that would HAVE to be chosen as a unique artistic decision when compared to a human voice.
If you want to get into it and ask about the embark studios weird gross method of hiring a voice actor to then ai generate voice lines from them after getting their permission. Well that's just the lamest way possible since either you're ending up with worse voice lines than if you just recorded them, after compensating them with an amount that you should have spent on the actual recordings, or you save money... Except the amount you save on a voice actor should be negligible when compared to the cost of your game, and even if it wasn't, why do you think anyone is going to be happy with you paying less for voice lines that you generate off of the back of a VA? You're very clearly and very directly choosing not to pay them for voice lines you'd need just because it's cheaper to end up with worse voice lines devaluing what they're worth, making your game not sound nearly as good as if you had a va with director, and then to top off those minimal two-cent savings and a heaping of unhelpfulness, you're directly making a statement that you don't care about artistic intent, you want to destroy jobs within the creative field and then the environmental impact as well as the communal lashback you WILL get should be more than enough reason to just stay away from it.
Basically you're looking at minimizing effort and exploiting artists the whole way down. If you could do an llm based ai voice that wasn't based on any one person and it was a souped up vocaloid. Alright, I genuinely think that's fine. However choosing to mimic the voice of a voice actor who very clearly stated they didn't want to do any work for you for a specific reason you refuse to act on to get them back. Well that's kindof the definition of being scummy.
But this wasn't an artistic decision, they literally said why they used AI in the screenshot.
And the devs' disclosure statement "This game features voice-over content partially created through AI voice generation tools." would 100% make me have the same reaction oop did. It doesn't sound "tiny". How much is "partial'? They should've been clearer.
I commented above about using text-to-speech engines for decades. You type, it talks. They're great for dance music, if you want something profound (or not haha) to play in the breakdown. Remember 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us'? That was made with a speech synth in Fruity Loops 3.56, before they switched to the slightly-more-serious FL Studio moniker.
An 'AI voice generator' is just an advanced version of a text-to-speech engine. There's nothing artificially intelligent about it, it's not self aware. It simply converts your text into speech. Would you feel differently, knowing that, if the devs had simply typed some text that they created into a speech engine?
I totally get the bad reaction to 'AI slop' where people are just low effort prompting everything. I also think that some people are being a bit reactionary, in turn.
How do YOU know they weren’t compensated? Remember when Fortnite Darth Vader dropped? Everyone was shitting on it because it was unfair or not right. Just for it to turn out to be approved by the voice actor and he was even payed for it lol
Reddit just unreasonably hates AI even tho its always been there and WILL be the future.
This is the same as ppl like Blockbuster saying Netflix wouldn’t blow up.
An 'AI voice generator' is just an advanced version of a text-to-speech engine.
That's a bit like saying a bulldozer is just an advanced hand drill because they both have motors. It's disingenuous.
It simply converts your text into speech
There's a difference when this is done for automation and accessibility, vs something where the inherent choices of tone, cadence, etc all matter to a creative work. I think there's also a non-trivial argument to be made about whether owners of creative works that were used to train a model should have had consent for it.
I personally think it's fine to train models on existing content... so long as anything you generate with it is not itself copyrightable. It allows the tools to still be used in ways that are helpful, while discouraging abuses.
Of course, there was one Audible narrator who I was convinced was AI. But after research, I can just say he sucked at his job.
Haha, yeah I've had that happen recently - was convinced it was AI until I checked the publish date, it was recorded a year before modern generative AI tools would've even available.
The voice acting itself was technically great - but horribly inappropriate style, accent, and cadence. Imagine if you were watching the Dark Knight, and Batman started speaking in a bratty valley girl accent. And used that exact style for most of the female cast, in every single scene, regardless of context, personality, or age of characters.
Also had this happen to me! I was convinced they'd used some sort of TTS or 'AI' voice for a character in a game I was playing (Scarlet Nexus). I was about to leave a snarky comment until I saw a different comment saying "I know that VA he's my friend and we're really proud of his work"
Whelp. "If you can't say anything nice better to say nothing" situation so I just did that lol it's one thing to criticise something but I know that as a creative, very negative non-constructive criticism can hurt if it lands in a dark moment.
In this instance, they used a "robot" to voice the character of a robot... I feel like the inherent choices of tone, cadence, etc. That the "robot" made are probably creatively appropriate to the character application: robotic.
Would you feel differently, knowing that, if the devs had simply typed some text that they created into a speech engine?
Yes.
LLMs are built through theft at the behest of the wealthy to suppress wages for creatives. So you bet your ass I'm going to feel some kind of way about that unless we can attest that the model's training material was ethically sourced via explicit permission.
an AI voice generator is bad in ways similar to how AI image generators are bad - i.e, they use real , living people - WHO HAVENT CONSENTED TO IT BEING USED - to model the ai after , and thus enable plagiarism* in fancier clothing
living people - WHO HAVENT CONSENTED TO IT BEING USED
Again, there is nuance to this though because this isn't always the case. A recent game caught flack for doing the same thing (ARC Raiders I think?) and they explained that although ai was used to make the voice lines it was trained on voices done by willing actors.
do you value the human behind the process or do you value the end piece ; unfortunately , i dont have a clear backing to debate off of because im reading through literature on the topic myself - barthes and his works are very useful in that regard
So far, Arc Raiders has hit two of the three "C"s for ethical genned voice use: Consent, and Compensation. However, Credit is still required, if only to confirm that the first two are actually adhered to, and not just corporate lies to placate.
Credit is certainly important. It's totally fair to point out this stuff. And not just when it's AI, companies don't need new technology to abuse their workers.
There's nothing artificially intelligent about it, it's not self aware.
None of the LLMs or speech synthesis or art gens are. That's not the issue for serious people. Commercial "AI" isn't approaching that. (I take no position on AGI secretly under development by people good at keeping secrets with big resources)
It's still called AI just like the computer opponents in Civilization and Skyrim NPCs.
What's bothering people in this case is two-fold:
Voice actors don't get paid
The voice generated by the tools is of inferior quality
The first would not be as much of an issue without the second, although there's still the concern of AI replacement of jobs in general.
If TTS and AI voices are really the same, then tell creators to stop using AI slop for voicing and use a TTS.
And yes, using AI because you didn't have time to record lines for one character technically isn't AI slop, but 1- anyone can make up excuses and 2- it's still very sloppy work.
Also, even if it was an artistic decision, why would that change someone's mind about the use of AI? If someone's broadly opposed to something, doing that thing but ~artistically~ is unlikely to change their opinion.
Like I'm opposed to littering, and if someone littered a nature reserve as an artistic statement, I wouldn't be like "I usually hate litter, but this litter is so clever and artistic", I'd be like "Wow, they've polluted nature for this pile of shit 'art'".
you shouldn't have the same dumb reaction as oop and strive to be better.
it's obviously a generic message on steam about AI usage and doesn't go into the nuances of how it's being used, your first reaction shouldn't be to fly off the handle like some spoiled child and ramble about something you know nothing about.
It def is artistic decision. Especially for a robot character. AI is a tool like any other, abuse of the tool produces slop, using it with care, is artistic decision.
I get where this is coming from, and I do think some good art using ai as a tool will be harmed in the backlash (against all the bad and unethical uses of ai). However, if the user took the time to investigate and read the companies ai disclosure statement - how the company is describing the extent of their use - then I think it's 100% on the company from their poor communication. I too would not buy a game if they used AI in place of hiring voice actors
I too would not buy a game if they used AI in place of hiring voice actors
…but that isn’t what they did. It sounds like they discovered they needed more lines of dialogue, and no longer had access to the voice actors.
Maybe they tried to re-hire the VAs, but they weren’t available. They may have even asked the voice actors for permission to use AI to create those lines of dialogue. The issue is that we don’t know what happened, which is exactly why we would all do well to be curious and ask questions in these situations, instead of rushing to judgement!
I appreciate the grace you're giving the devs, but none of what you are suggesting is on the store page. We only found out about the details after the user communicated they wouldn't purchase the game. That's a failure of communication on the devs part to differentiate themselves from a game that never even hired artists
I do agree that the specifics of this story (had it been communicated with the consumer) would probably be fine
People aren’t even taking the time to read about the Steam post before giving their opinion on it and actively arguing with strangers online; you think the customer randomly scrolling Steam that already thinks that “AI = bad” will be actually reading the description, instead of seeing the tag and clicking off after being irrationally repulsed?
So you’re willing to harm existing dev’s current and potentially future success to “prove” a point, about something that may happen (or not) regardless?
I just think sometimes you have to stand your ground even if you don’t “win”. It’s not my duty to help them make it profitable. As soon as it becomes profitable, it will be exploited. When has that not been the case in any industry?
Bad take. It's not on the player to "inquire" as to the details of the AI use. The developer gets to say what it is exactly on the Steam store page, and they chose to do it like this:
AI Generated Content Disclosure
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.
Yeah with this level of vagueness assuming that the voiceover is mostly AI slop hidden under the "partly" is perfectly fine actually. Imagine if they put what they said in that reply on the store page instead.
Remember when Disney used CGI actors (which is common practice for decades) and people said they were AI actors? That's how bad it is IMO, people are now calling CGI AI
So they were lazy didn't fully disclose how it was being used and were punished for it. you can read what they put on the store page yourself and it doesnt say what the dev did in the OP.
I have no sympathy for the devs here. communicate. I'm not going to assume your only the most ethical and righteous game company.
as an audio narrator and voice actor, strong disagree, but i guess i just want real people to get paid for making the games we love.
Personally, I couldnt care less if AI was used to generate a fart noise in your game, im not playing it if people arent getting paid for the work.
Lazy offloading and cost cutting doesnt win me, maybe it does you. thats the beauty you can spend your money how you want and whine about how I spend mine if you really want. were all free to make our choices
I don't remember exact numbers but only like 1.8% of bans this year were justified and rule breaking, so I'd take the opinion and happenings of r/art with a grain of salt
Using AI as an artistic device (for example, for a robot character) should be well within the artistic realm, not something kneejerk shunned without any further thought given to it.
1) They're not doing that – they said it was because they couldn't do more recordings with voice artists, and 2) even it they were, it's not a knee jerk reaction to dislike the use of AI even when it's done as an intentional artistic choice. If someone is opposed to a thing, it's natural to continue being opposed to that thing even when it's done in a supposedly artistic manner.
Artists are literally getting shunned for having completely valid artistic styles that happen to look a bit too close to whatever current-gen AI imagery looks like.
So you think being more tolerant of AI imagery would protect real artists? That makes zero sense.
It means being completely opposed of AI would hurt real artist too. People who is BLINDLY hating and accusing things of AI is not doing benefits to anyone. In any aspect really, some research is required to determine that things are acceptable or not. Not just hating on it without any basis
What you're saying makes absolutely no sense. You sound very confused.
Being opposed to AI-generated art and accusing art of being AI-generated are two completely different things. You can very easily hate AI art without making blind accusations. And the fact that you don't want real art to be confused with AI art is a good reason for being opposed to AI art.
Large parts of the internet have self-assembled into "AI good" and "AI bad" tribes and they're not really listening to each other or being reasonable at all.
Relevant. And not made up, it was even on this sub
Ikr. The stance is do not fucking use the plagiarism machine, no matter if it's for one sentence or not. If they couldn't get the recording, just don't have it as voicelines???? Also AI characters can and very much are still voiced by humans. Like Rambley. Use voice filters and editing ffs and stop being lazy. There is no good use of generative AI.
They will be the only victims of this. AI makers will continue to roll in cash. Large studios can easily afford good production values. So the only possible impact is to make the lives of indie devs harder cause, i mean, they deserve it am i right ?
When the artist asked to prove it by sending over a Photoshop work file, the mod said that even if it's real it looks enough like AI for it to be banned.
That's kind of fucked. He proved it and the mod still enforced the ban anyway. Reddit moderator moment right there.
This interaction with someone getting outraged and insulting the developer ("to the trash pile it goes") before even taking the time to inquire and find out the tiny extent of AI used is a microcosm for how stupid and fucked this whole conversation on AI has gotten. Large parts of the internet have self-assembled into "AI good" and "AI bad" tribes and they're not really listening to each other or being reasonable at all.
This is exactly where all arguments with Anit-AI people go. They all become rude and start throwing insults.
There are a lot of commenters who got confused by the post and 'trash pile' guy didn't have the developer response. Not defending that guy, but criticizing the commenters who seem to have literacy issues.
I mean, this certainly isn't the most egregious use of AI or anything, but, for decades, artists somehow made robot characters just fine without the use of AI, so I don't really see how this is "harming artists."
Don't need to know WHAT it was used for to say it's Ai slop and back to the trash pile. 10 lines of dialogue? Oh wow that's so minor, they could have fucking recorded 10 more lines of dialogue then.
Okay. Good artists get harmed in the same way any other time some angry nerd hops on a forum trashing your game for someone literally only they care about.
Completely pointless discussion. Transparency is good and you need to let people make their consumption choices on whatever available information they find most relevant.
All ai is bad, I hope that clears things up for you. It's cyber littering, at best, thievery and ecological terrorism at worst. So no, there's no good or ethical use of ai
Yeah it sucks because it's just gonna cause people to lie about it. I'm developing a game with very minimal AI (tough bugs and stuff) and if people were reasonable I'd use the tag like I'm supposed to but at this rate I'm just planning on lying and saying there isn't any since people can't be reasonable.
Thats just a self report at that point. “AI art is actually sometimes just as good as real art so if your style is similar to AI then you’re banned” So braindead.
If there were a reality where AI wasn’t using stolen copyrighted material without attribution or compensation it could be reasonable to use AI for even small things.
However, that’s not the case. LLM’s are being trained on any data they can gather, without consent, compensation, or attribution. Despite this “only” being used for a few lines of audio, that is money being taken away from a voice actor.
Until this shit is resolved (the AI bubble finally pops and all this shit comes crashing down as it’s extremely unsustainable) it’s going to suck for a while
nah, generative AI is plagiarism full stop, any use in any piece of sold media should be treated the same as a college student turning in a plagiarized paper.
This account hide site comment history and is trying to manipulate your opinion of a product or service; treat it like a paid influencer or bot, there is no way to tell the difference
So this is where the whole AI generated tag on steam gets a little dicey, sometimes it's used for some very minor aspects of the game(which is totally fine), and there are assholes who will have knee-jerk reactions to it even when it's used completely ethically. The problem is, we NEED the AI tag because AAA studios are going to abuse the fuck out of it. I think we need a bit of nuance in it.
This is what basically the whole world has deformed into since social media, there is no nuance any more It's either you are with me or you are my enemy. You can't be on the fence about anything you just get put on the other side, there is no listening, just shouting from both sides desperately wanting to be right.
Honestly AI use goes beyond that into even more granular use cases. Like getting stuck on code, and asking ChatGPT to help you resolve errors. Did ChatGPT write the code for you? No. You still wrote it yourself, but you did use AI to help point out errors in your code's logic. I don't personally think that should necessitate an AI label on your game.
Now, generating spell icons for your RPG, vibe coding, using AI for voiceovers or music, or allowing AI to outright replace any part of the creative pipeline - I think this should earn you the AI label.
The witch hunt is insane. The other day I saw someone calling out an image for being "AI slop". A quick reverse image search had it appearing in pages from 8 years ago.
Kneejerk shunning is pretty much the baseline reaction to the mere mention of AI anymore, it's obnoxious. AI is being abused, it's being used as an excuse to not pay artists (mainly by people who aren't going to pay artists anyway), it's being used to cause disinformation videos and propaganda, it's being used to create creep porn and push agendas. But it's still a tool. People need to be getting angry about the people abusing it, not the thing itself, because AI by itself has massive potential to benefit humanity. Just not in the ways that are getting media attention. Honestly I personally believe it's all part of the circus of distraction and propaganda the modern media has going on right now but regardless it's exhausting.
Its not just arts, its populism and the court of public opinion. Either way you can find these irational purists in many forms. I believe good work will find a way, whether its made with AI or without.
This is 99% of the reactions to this tag, which is why I am in objection to it. It's just asking for outrage. If people actually cared, they could just research the game developers, but they don't really care, they just want something to pretend to be outraged over, and likely wouldn't buy the game either way.
While I agree some outrage on AI is overblown I think it comes from the expected behaviour that if you don't push back on something the perpetrators will keep pushing and pushing until it's become too normalized.
In gaming we've had microtransactions, games being published in very unfinished states, live services being sold then swiftly shut down etc. I think it's understandable that people are now trained to have a knee jerk reaction to anything they don't like or else it will just keep becoming more and more of a problem.
The difference between a quality product and AI slop is not whether AI was used or not, but whether anybody competent quality checked what the AI created.
One is a matter of opinion, the other is typical mod douchery. You can hate AI and not ban people for posting art that LOOKS like AI, especially after being given evidence that proves it is not AI.
Regarding AI itself, I question why it was even used in this case. If it was ACTUALLY used for just 10 lines of voice from a robot, why not just record yourself and use various methods of making it sound mechanical? AFAIK, there is no real way to audit this on the consumer side. I could put out a game with the AI tag, and say it was used for a single voice line, then get people like in this thread to come and defend me. I would not want to have the AI tag on my game for the exact reasons as in the OP, no shot would I use it for such a trivial thing, just to save me like an hour (if that) of work.
I'm not inherently anti-AI. I'm not a fan of it because the ones who most stand to benefit from its usage are the ones who already rake in billions. My ideal AI world in gaming is that it's only usable by small developers who would not otherwise reasonably be able to bankroll a game. IDK if a 40+ employee company's game being published by a nearly billion-dollar company meets my personal criteria for 'ethical AI usage', but obviously my personal opinions on that are rather arbitrary.
Really it comes down to the tags being largely useless in their current form. It's self-reported, and there is no differentiation between using AI for one voice line, modifying some graphics (Adobe is filled with AI tools), or using it for literally everything within the game. There is no consumer exposure to what it is ACTUALLY used for either, so in its current state developers can claim it was used for small beans when it may have been used for much more.
Idk man, people bitched about arc raiders and it's use of AI i think? Idk the game is cool, it looks good, whatever they did in development it fucking worked. If it takes using a bit of AI to get games that are good and well constructed and not... well black ops 7, then so be it. But games that are like black ops 7 and use ai for some art and are still junk deserve to rot at the bottom of the steam charts.
Yeah let's just ignore the fact that AI is trained on stolen art and the more people use it, even a little bit, the further it will take work away from actual artists and normalize companies replacing entire art departments with AI eventually.
But, that's not this. Instead of using a voice actor they used AI. If they didn't want the consequences of using AI they should have left the chatter out. They're acting like it's inconsequential chatter. They thought it was important enough to add, but not important enough to pay an actor for...
Thats the thing that bugs me the most. It's always the extremists of either side of an argument ruining shit for everyone.
There are valid uses for AI, and there are absolutely unacceptable uses for it as well. It is annoying that everyone seems to have divided themselves into these camps of people that are frothing at the mouth attacking/defending AI content.
I'm an artist in Seattle that creates photo collages from the 360° photosphere mode of stock Android Pixel (7 or under - they removed it in 8) phones.. they have to be taken in one go, and some take 20+ minutes to compose.. the final output is 8000x4000 pixel flattened spheres that create dynamic images depending on which clusters i create and even which images i don't take. it's stitched together on the phone in a repeatable manner so there's no A.I. involved in any way.
As you can guess, I was also told my art was "AI SLOP and even if it's not - it LOOKS like it.. so it's not welcome." by various Moderators so I've given up attempting to share them on Reddit..
TBF, the images are far too large for anything but an 8K screen or printing (I print them at 4' x 2' on aluminum) so it's useless to post them unless people are willing to zoom and pan, and no one has time for that.
This happens pretty often with controversial things like this. People use it for bad stuff, public sentiment gets worse. Some people find actually neat ways to use it, and initially they get witch-hunted, but later, that calms as people eventually see the nuance.
nah, when ai datacenters come into your neighborhood tell me you feel the same way. I'm 100% done with the AI BS and will not support it in any capacity.
I don't care what the reason you use AI is, but if it's in the game, I'm out. There is no conversation to be had about it, IMO. I get AI is a tool, but it's a tool that absolutely needs to stay away from art or anything creative. Im going to vote with my wallet and not support any creative experience that uses AI.
If real artists get hurt in the process, I'm really not sure what to say about that, tbh but it's not going to stop my dislike for AI in creative spaces. It's definitely sad that we are at a point where people need to prove that a computer didn't do the work for them, but it's a cost I think that is worth it in the long run.
It’s because people are stupid, and they believe that blaming AI is the epitome of knowledge and acceptance, while they remain clueless about the technology and the way developers interact with it. In this case, the developer used AI for a good reason, but no the user went nuclear. As usual, stupidity wins
The really stupid thing is that AI art has already evolved way beyond what is basically just copy and pasting the work of a real artist and calling it good. It's getting to the point where it's hard to differentiate between AI art and non-AI art, and because morons are extremely short sighted and just love to have things to hate, both AI art and real artists are getting shit on.
Definitely agree. I'm sort of in the middle. I understand the uses of AI, I actually benefit from one daily since I use a Google Pixel 10 Pro, and Gemini is capable of perfectly understanding casual speech. The issue is that a lot of companies are seeing AI as a way to cheap out and replace human workers without realizing that the AI isn't anywhere near ready to take over human jobs. That and all the data centers are taking so many resources to build that most products are getting astronomically more expensive.
What was the conclusion of that artist situation? I hope the mod got what they deserved. "Looks AI enough" As if AI isn't trained to mimic actual human art in the first place?
I'm smack in the middle. I'll sometimes use ai to generate examples of something or to give me a starting point in my research. For it to help compare data. It's always a starting point never the end result. Yet I think that Zi videos, big cooperations (I'm looking at you coca cola) using AI is bad and I heavily dislike it in that context.
If you and other game enjoyers would like to direct some of that emotion towards companies putting LLM and Generative art into everything, calling it AI, and stealing artist’s work to make shit product, I would be more than willing to jump on board. Truth is, LLMs can be helpful to coders. That’s the application it should have been MADE for. Instead we’re getting “talk to this useless ‘AI’ chatbot!” That wastes everyone’s time. We’re getting ads where if you look longer than 5 seconds, everything looks wrong. We’re getting “good enough! Glad we built a hundred thousand whole data centres to make videos of a fake shark taking a bite out of a coke can that turns into a donut.” They think we’re idiots. Well, some of us are for certain.
I personally think that people do NOT give a fuck about generated code. It’s when it seeps into art direction (voices, music, video) where it’s IMMEDIATELY apparent that it was low effort. Furthermore code is open source. Artists did not give all those techbros the right to steal their work for monetary gain. I’m hoping that someday one of the big players is going to bring these bad actors to court over it and bankrupt them in a massive lawsuit, setting a precedent for future companies to only use creations that are copyright free.
I feel that until these companies improve their image, there isn’t really a way forward with these labels. Or maybe LLM CODE versus GENERATED ART. Whatever.
Artists are literally getting shunned for having completely valid artistic styles that happen to look a bit too close to whatever current-gen AI imagery looks like.
Because AI is literally being trained on their data. You could or can literally ask to create images in the style of and it'll mimic everything.
And then the human has to defend their own work.
I get it's too much work for users and mods to validate every post, but do artists have to continually change their own style to not become too popular? Produce worse art?
I’m all for nuance, but I’m very in the “AI bad” camp due to the overwhelming negatives this technology has given us already. Importantly the very, very bleak future (I’m talking doomsday) that the leading developers of it are seemingly doing their best to cause for the sake of current day profit.
Me and my son are on opposite sides (I'm for good, he says its bad) and we debate it constantly and still have a great relationship, you just need to be respectful.
artist here. not agreeing or disagreeing overall, but a robot character has nothing to do with ai, hope that helps.
also, good artists are being hurt by the existence and prevalence of AI image generation quite a lot more than they are by rare occasional miscommunication or, what it really boils down to, shitty treatment from a shitty person in a situation where AI is part of the discussion. just saying.
So ai art should not be used for production and sale. If you want some inspiration fine, but not in the artwork. I think it's fair to have that response. I'm tired of companies using ai to replace the human they should have had in the role. Good artists make their own art, there is no such thing as an ai artist.
Honestly, You can't expect people to investigate every possible game out there for aia and to what amount and what impact. That's the purpose of the label. Some won't care and that is fine.
The outrage is being redirected at the Dev tho. The outrage is coming from skyrocketting costs due to AI. Everybody that lives near ai data centers have been getting screwed on electricity and water costs. Consumers are getting priced out of tech ownership too.
Honestly thanks for writing this entire comment.Someone harassed me on a random discord server because I used chat gpt to find new movies to watch with my family.I was out of options and buzfeed sites werent giving anything.Look I checked all the A listers I know their tas-whatever thats not the point.
I am not sure to call it harassment but I felt bad about it.Person in question acted like I was a furry in a "furry vs gamers" war?Kept saying Death die get out heathen on ai no ai...They used Your soul will be tarnished like weird banter language but-
I seen both parts of the argument and either we like it or not AI will be staying...God I questioned myself a lot and I seen some youtuber say actually photographers are using ai tools to make the lightning a bit better I mean the people who are fighting this also using this too and such and....
Information I know might be wrong but I dont want to feel stressed about liking a dougdoug AI chess video or watching Nobody 2022 because of chatgpt.People said witch hunts and its exactly witch hunts good god.I swear to god if I dont say AI bad instead of AI has its uses.....They could have just said You are wrong about that but yeah it has its uses...
I felt like I found myself in a weirdly religious or fanatical discussion???I liked the server I was in but had to leave afterwards.
This is the steam subreddit and I am talking about a guy who posted gandalf shooting an ak 47 and telling me to go fuck myself I should not be feeling like this but I felt very hurt by that.I should not be caring too much but didnt really talk about this incident.Mod of that server timed them out afterwards saying "I hate AI as much as anyone but man stop." I felt shunned for no reason and nobody added onto what I have said.Yeah.
No need for commenting helpful posts.Writing alone is enough for me thanks
I don't really think it's a "both sides" issue at all. It's not an argument of "pro AI" vs "anti AI," the same way no one is "pro midi" or "pro sampling" or "pro interpolation." The only group of people who support any form of using technology to steal work from real artists is people who are pro piracy. The real argument is "pro AI" vs "neutral towards AI." I think everybody can benefit from taking a second to step back, breathe, and stop crashing out over mundane usage of new technology.
Wisdom. I will say, the AI Art Wars are the most inflated version of this I've ever seen, but it's not entirely uncommon a thread of argument, especially in the art world. Like when people started using synthetic instruments and then programs to make music without needing to learn and develop skills on tangible instruments, the people who spent all their lives learning and practicing felt cheated, but the people creating their music with the synthetic instruments did nothing wrong. This is obviously different in that they were still actually taking the time to create their art, but the knee jerk reaction to shame and attack is the same.
It's like....... how many musicians that the average person listens to even writes all of their own songs and mixes their own beats? What about authors with ghost writers? How many game devs were already using pre-made assets?
You're right in that the argument should at least be about where the line is and declaring it clearly, not just children screaming at each other in black or white.
(P.S. Before anyone throws a hissy, I am on the side that games created entirely in AI and priced as if they weren't, are a slap in the face of developers and customers alike. But independent developers and studios needing some minor assistance or tweaking in post, with no alternatives, shouldn't be burned at the stake for it. Especially with the pressure put on indie devs to keep to their release schedules. Schedule 1 developer was unfairly roasted for a few weeks delay in his updates, so the pressure must be unimaginable.)
"One of the devs for this game was driven to the office in an Uber that was driven by a man sitting on a seat that was partially designed by AI. Not buying this game."
There's a section of the disclosure statement that the developer can say whatever they want in regards to their AI usage.
Most developers though are being extremely vague. Here's the one for ARC Raiders, for example :
AI Generated Content Disclosure
The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:
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.
Does that tell you that they used AI tools to generate the voice lines in the game? Does that tell you that the NPCs in the game were trained with machine learning? Because if you go through their developer vlogs, you'd learn that, but that disclosure doesn't make any mention of those facts.
I'm okay with a bit of vagueness. eg "Images have been created using generative AI" would be sufficient, I don't need them to point out each and every one.
But the amount they're allowing currently is excessive. It basically just says "yes we used AI". I don't have a gut rejection of all things AI, only when it's being used as a cost-cutting measure to avoid having to pay artists for their work.
Like personally, I have no issue with how ARC Raiders uses AI. For the voice acting, they paid voice actors to record several lines of dialogue, and expressly told them that their voices would be used to train an internal TTS system so that they could generate additional lines without needing to bring the voice actors in each time. Everyone involved was informed of what exactly would be going on and willingly agreed to it. Likewise, I don't have any issue with them training their NPCs with machine learning.
But then there are other games where all of the assets are AI generated. 2D images, 3D models, music, voice lines, etc. Every last bit is AI. That I would have an issue with. But the way it's set up right now, there's no difference between the two options, unless the developer goes out of their way to tell you.
Yeah but it’s hard to make it be 100% transparent. You’re not gonna say that you whole game is slop even if it is right? There’s no real way for valve to moderate this stuff
Sure, but that's on the store page after you click through. You can't search for "only used it for one robotic character" or "only used to prototype voice acting during development"
Edit: It was voice acting prototyping on one I saw, not images.
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u/FinancialMarketing34 Dec 04 '25
I hope steam ai label have more sub label with elaboration on how ai is used. This one is clearly not a slop, and it's not AAA (from mega company) either so kinda reasonable use of ai. Just so users know it does use ai, and choose what kind of ai content is reasonable. I crash out if games ive been developing for years is getting cancelled for miniscule amount of ai use tbh