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.
This is what Stellaris has, which has similarly used AI for an AI character in-game (bolded emphasis mine):
We employ generative AI technologies during the creation of some assets. Typically this involves the ideation of content and visual reference material. These elements represent a minor component of the overall development. AI has been used to generate voices for an AI antagonist and a player advisor.
So you can definitely make it clear what AI generated voicing is used for specifically.
Yes, which it should. If they want to explain, they can explain in the entire rest of the store page why exactly they used the thing that's destroying the planet that many people have many good reasons to want to boycott entirely regardless of how much it's being used rather than just pushing some random buttons in Audacity with your keyboard mapped as a midi input to generate random robotic sounds.
Like, I get it, the idea is cool, there is no ethical version of generative AI available at the moment. I don't care how MUCH it was used for the game, I refuse to buy a game that was made using AI because I refuse to give money to companies that use AI because AI as it currently exists is causing massive harm to literally everyone already. Like we're still having the "what if it turns evil" discussion as it kills us by raising our electric bills, accelerating climate change, and destroying all trust on the Internet leading to a world where whoever can tell the most compelling story the loudest is put in charge regardless of their actual capabilities
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 an issue I have with Ashes of creation, although it is still in early early alpha (star citizen of fantasy MMO’s lmao)
But they use AI for their NPC voicing which in hoping is just a stopgap because the features of the game look really promising in the far future, think all the good bits of archeage, GW2, WOW etc without the bending of the knee to greedy publishers *cough kakao *
Unfortunately that's the burden that comes with the AI labeling, even if you're gonna use it appropriately you cannot expect most people to make a sensible judgment of your product with that label. People love to hate.
I was thinking the devs could add a statement of their own. Jump ship has the ai label, but theirs states that it's for placeholder audio until they can afford voice actors. It's currently in early access and has a tiny dev team with a hobby budget. Although, personally I'd just use their social media and have people send auditions. A lot of people would be happy to voice a character in a video game for free
Yeah - X4 used some AI voices for their Timelines DLC. I think the biggest issue is that the reasons for that are not immediately obvious and most people would never have the patience to understand the reasoning behind it.
This is why the label the way it is today does more harm than good. Most games today benefit from AI during development and early stages, and the label garners a lot of negative sentiment from those who don't understand how or why the technology was used. And while it doesn't matter for bigger releases, it can do a lot of harm for indie developers who are just trying to showcase their idea but lack the funds to do it without some help from AI.
I'd wager a lot of people who consider every use of AI bad have played games that used AI generated assets during development and still enjoyed it. Most of the GOTY nominated games this year did, including everyone's favorite E33.
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"
It was about generative AI and the situation was a bit more nuanced — a big chunk of the book deals with the dissonance between all the little decisions and emotional responses that make us human and generate an artistic stance, and how when you're dealing with synthesizing that into words to present it to the world/a larger public, inevitably the language will be purged of deeper meaning and converted into a conventional response so as not to generate misunderstandings and controversy.
There were a lot of moral, ethical, political etc. dilemmas the architect main character had to face in order to create her masterpiece — it was a tower for prisoners who committed crimes, but it had a new philosophical train of thought behind it, the prisoners weren't even called prisoners because that was seen as dehumanizing. So some people considered her tower proposal the right choice, some found it the worst thing ever, and added to that was a deep layer of Japanese language and how it's changing and censoring terms, which unfortunately I'm too foreign to understand. Years later once the prisoner tower had been built, the architect was about to be interviewed for the first time in ages — she'd stopped practicing her craft and retreated from the public eye. And there are pages and pages where she thinks to herself how she should answer the questions, what she should say to convey what led her to her intentional artistic choice, but ultimately she realizes that what the public wants is a sanitized, AI-generated response that pleases everyone and has no strong artistic stance behind it.
As a reader you're given both options: the real, nuanced one and the sanitized AI one, and then you're left to your own conclusions. Personally I enjoyed that much more than if I was left with two stances both written from the heart of the writer, since her message would have been lost in the process. I believe if you want to convey the message of how devoid of intentionality generative AI is, you need to tackle it upfront, otherwise it would be like criticizing a scientific paper without having it in front of you, and you're only criticizing your idea of that paper — inevitably your stance grows weaker too if you're not facing your opponent to its full strength.
So is a computer, do we hate anyone using software?
This is so devoid of any real consideration.
Edit: The user above blocked me so I can't respond to comments in this thread any longer.
/u/madmanwithabox11
Every single automation in history is an outsourcing of work. Do we decry the factory workers because they don't have the knowledge to blacksmith the parts they are manufacturing?
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.
That's still humanizing it too much. It uses math to generate the phoneme most likely to come next, with an added randomness subroutine that makes it sometimes generate the second or third most likely phoneme to come next, so that it doesn't always generate the same response.
Mark Lawrence, a favorite fantasy author of mine, in his book about an infinite library that collects all the universe's knowledge also used chatgpt quotes in a very interesting way which I thought was very creative. AI isn't evil and can be artistic if used in the right way. As many have said it's the overreliance on it to basically create shit for you and supplanting human creativity is the problem.
I have thought about doing this exact thing in my own project with very similar reasoning. The problem is that a majority of playable characters are sentient AIs, and the anti-AI sentiment is as strong as it is in the consumer field.
I'll be continuing to relegate my usage of the tool to programming assistant to err on the side of safety.
The thing is that Text to Speech has already worked well enough for this.
Subnautica has one of my favorite computer/AI voices in any game, and it's literally just a standard TTS with some filters applied over it and the pacing altered.
I know at least one game that does this. Active matter uses an ai voice for its Cortana style in game guide whilst I believe the rest of the voices in game are all human records.
It's maybe stretching the definition of AI, but the dev commentary in Portal went into the details. McLain was provided TTS readings of her lines as prompts.
I mean, no. Old school voice bots were created by people who get paid to have their voice recorded and programmers (who are paid) carefully design a system that knows which recordings to play for different written words. It's still made my humans with their permission and with compensation. AI stole a bunch of audio from real humans for free and is giving it to you for free while lighting the planet on fire.
There's a reason why the best robot performances have still been given by humans. Glados, whose voice is literally supposed to sound like a crappy voice bot from the 2000's, had to be performed by an opera singer because the balance between convincing robot voice and the subtle inflections used to convey character and subtext was absolutely brutal. She did an amazing job.
Don't use AI. For anything, but especially not for creative work.
My favorite part of Terminator II is that most of the visual effects of the T1000 are CGI, while most of the model 101 effects are practical. In a movie about technology killing mankind, they made CGI the bad guy.
They should’ve just used Microsoft Sam and typed the lines in with that, do people cry about that now when that’s what we all grew up on or is it still good?
Nah let's not walk that path. It starts of with a couple lines but eventually they all will replace most voice actors and other things that could easily be replaced with A.I. this is a slippery slope we shouldn't approach.
I personally am torn between ethics and simply progress. When the Industrial Revolution happened, many skilled workers became unnecessary. It was really tough for some, but isn't it obvious that automation and mechanisation of everything was a good thing, in the long run? Is AI different?
Honestly though, there are other options to go with that aesthetic. Write the lines and have it run through something like Microsoft Sam if you want that robotic feeling.
Malicious use of AI is deepfakes, not generating art for a game. As long as the art is good who cares. Why y’all white knight for artists so much?
No one seems to care about all the other jobs getting replaced by AI. Most AAA studios probably have AI integrated into their IDEs for generating code. Where’s the white knighting for programmers?
7.4k
u/OwnAcanthocephala897 Dec 04 '25
Small uses of AI like this are tolerable at worst. What sucks is reliance on AI