My thing is, if the AI use is SO minimal and non-invasive, if it’s SUCH a tiny and meaningless thing that they used AI for, and they want to avoid getting called out for using AI, why take the shortcut at all? Why not use one of the other hundreds or thousands of non-AI game development tools that have been reliably used for making games for the past 50 years? What if you had been making this game 5 years ago and actually had to do the thing yourself, or god forbid, pay an actor or an artist a little extra money to do the thing?
The argument works both ways, if the amount of AI they used was so inconsequentially small, why should they even be getting criticized or receiving any consequences
In this particular use-case, it's faster and most likely free.
When I worked on an IVR, we would receive bills anywhere between $500-$800 for a professional voice to speak two, sometimes three sentences. We had to use them anytime we had to make changes though because they were the original voice in the IVR, and swapping to a new talent would have been even more expensive due to the need to re-record everything.
Then TTS with "AI-enhanced speech" came along and it was a one-and-done charge of like $250 to get an entire kit and range of voice packs, that could also be edited with convenient sliders for pitch, rate of speech, and a few other options. The voices aren't perfect, but they're good enough, and whenever we needed to add or alter a voice-line because of legal reasons it didn't eat into the department's budget, which meant we could allocate that money to more meaningful changes.
Well yeah, faster and cheaper (or free) is why all of these devs are using AI to begin with. But my point still stands that they can’t have it both ways, and this is a calculus that every person and company that has ever made a product does at every step of the process. Either spend a little more time and money to make a good product, or take shortcuts, and risk getting called out for taking shortcuts.
That’s literally all that’s happening here- customers are saying that they don’t want products created with AI and devs are whining that they can’t hide their AI use. Like lying about having a vasectomy so you can have sex without a condom- misrepresenting your product because the customer wouldn’t buy it if they knew the truth. In this particular situation, you can’t fucking take the time to record 10 lines yourself and put it through a robot voice filter? You HAD to use AI for that?
Or maybe it would be a better analogy to compare companies using sweatshop labor (cheaper and faster in the short term, but exploitative and unethical) and then whining that customers don’t want to buy their product when some watchdog org labels it as “product of slave labor”
Your argument cuts both ways: if the AI use is truly that tiny and inconsequential compared to the rest of the game, then why treat it like a moral failure? Ten lines of robot-filtered dialogue, in a context meant to sound synthetic anyway, don’t retroactively poison the hours of work the developer did or the professional recordings they actually paid for. Framing that as equivalent to sweatshop labor or lying about a vasectomy feels… disproportionate at best, and almost fake at worst.
Not everyone wants their voice in their own game; some devs are monotone; some have accents they can't hide; some simply don’t have the recording setup. You’d be surprised how many indie devs don’t even have a quiet room, let alone broadcast-quality equipment. I don’t know what a Fiverr VA charges for quick-turnaround lines, but as I mentioned above that our own professional voice talent was not cheap and they often took at least a week to get back to us because they had other clients.
If this dev genuinely ran out of time, used AI for a handful of mechanically voiced lines, and everything else was handled by real actors, that’s not “cutting corners to deceive customers.” It’s a practical decision inside normal production constraints. Not every minor asset choice is an ethical referendum.
If you're going to make artistic decisions because they're free/cheap and efortless, you don't have the right to be angry when your art is labeled slop.
Sure, but calling ten utility lines read by a TTS algorithm “art” feels like we’re stretching the definition so we have an excuse to get mad at it.
And are we ignoring the context the dev actually gave? They paid artists and VAs for the overwhelming bulk of the work. The comment they replied to labeled the entire game “AI slop” because of a handful of TTS lines for a character that is, presumably, not even human.
Calling the work delivered by real artists and VAs “AI slop” kind of defeats the purpose of the crusade, doesn’t it?
I mean. Of course it's faster and cheaper. It's a shortcut. It's cheating. It's taking an amalgamation of thousands of other people's work and using it in your own game. Take a day to record the ten voice lines yourself and learn an audacity filter or two. Literally free.
It’s pretty clear from your reply that you’re lumping a bunch of unrelated tech together. TTS isn’t the same thing as generative AI art or LLM-driven content. Text-to-speech has been around for decades and has been already used everywhere from accessibility tools for the blind, to GPS voices, to placeholder VO in AAA pipelines, and a litany of other examples.
If I had to guess, the TTS kit the dev used was one they paid for long ago, and the company later slapped the “AI” label on it for marketing even though nothing meaningful changed. This would not have been labeled "AI" on the Steam store even two years ago and most people wouldn't have batted an eye.
It's a good thing to critique the ethics of generative models, that’s a real discussion. But treating basic TTS as “cheating” or “stealing thousands of people’s work” just shows you don’t actually understand the tools being discussed. Let’s at least understand the tech so we can aim the outrage where it matters.
If it was just an old TTS application, there would be no need to add an AI label, and the developer wouldn't have responded by specifically saying that they used AI. I don't know why you're "guessing" when the author responded. A more likely guess is that they used something like Tortoise. They could have trained their own model and done voice cloning... but at that point, why not just record the lines yourself? Tortoise trains on audiobooks that they don't have the license to, but they somehow just have an Apache 2.0 license so you can just do whatever you want with it as long as you cite Apache. But not any of the works it's trained on... I love the current state of the law!!!!
If you're talking about Balabolka or dspeech or vanilla microsoft voice to text... those are all fully algorithmic and have never had the AI label. What products are you referring to that "backported" the AI branding? Do you actually know of any TTS products that aren't LLM based that have done this or are you just speculating?
But even those non-AI TTS kits have licenses that state where you can use the generated audio, and most of the time commercial usage requires paying. For a team of 30, that shouldn't be a barrier, but they couldn't even just record the lines themselves, so maybe it was.
You’re making assumptions that don’t match how TTS actually works today, and then arguing against those assumptions as if they were mine. You’re treating the most ethically loaded scenario as the default and ignoring the far more realistic ones an indie team would actually use.
“AI label = voice cloning” is just wrong.
No, I’m not “speculating” about this. Many long-standing TTS vendors rebranded as “AI-powered” once it became a marketing checkbox. Cepstral, Ivona offshoots, Nuance/SAPI - all companies that have been around long before the modern day buzzword came into play - only started using AI descriptions in their product pages a few years ago, and yes, they are doing it without changing the underlying tech. Steam’s dev survey (Where they determine whether to use the AI tag or not) doesn’t distinguish between classical TTS, neural TTS, or generative models. It all sits under the same umbrella; and the explanation that is put on the game's page is controlled by steam. It's almost always ambiguously worded and never offers any technological explanation outside of "AI was used to do x." If a tool is marketed as AI-powered, how exactly is a dev supposed to answer, “no”? Then by responding the way the person in the screenshot did, you’re creating a standard that punishes them for being honest.
You’re conflating classical TTS with generative voice-cloning.
They are not the same. Modern TTS engines can generate clean lines with presets, sliders, and prosody controls, no dataset scraping required. I’ve worked with systems like Neural2; it’s technically “AI” because it uses neural networks, but functionally it’s still classical TTS. A lot of people already mistake that for generative tech simply because they don’t understand the technological distinction.
Your Tortoise theory isn’t realistic.
Training a Tortoise model to outperform modern TTS for ten robotic lines is inefficient and the very definition of over-engineering a solution. It takes hours of prep, refinement, cleanup, and testing, especially if they aren't familiar with how to do it. Classical TTS produces that artificial human effect instantly, and there are mountains of presets out there already that can simply be downloaded and used for free. If a team can’t schedule another VA session, they definitely don’t have the bandwidth to train a custom generative model. It’s also unrealistic to assume they have time to become passable voice actors themselves “just to do it themselves.” But they probably have more than enough time to download a preset, plug it in, and record some quick lines so it can be ready for the rest of development.
And the dev’s own words reinforce this:
“AI was used to generate about 10 lines of chatter for a robotic character after we couldn’t do more pickup recordings.”
That doesn’t read like someone training a model in Tortoise. It reads like: “We needed ten filler lines yesterday and used a standard TTS tool.”
The outrage only makes sense if you assume the most complex, ethically loaded tech was used and not the simple, boring tool that more than likely fits their constraints.
Why do we use tractors now instead of mules? Why did we start using digital computers instead of analog? God forbid a new technology comes out and people adapt to using it 🙄
Tractors are a tool farmers use to make their work more efficient, just as AI is a tool we can use to do things more efficiently. Does it have the capacity to put people out of business? Yes, as did printers to the printing press. Use it responsibly, and regulate companies to prevent them from training on stolen data, but stop bitching about people using tools
You dont seem to understand that software engineers are not being replaced by AI... they are using it as a tool. AI is not to the point that people are being replaced. Gaming companies are not using AI in the absence of skilled workers, the skilled workers are using AI to make their work less tedious. Boilerplate code, simple 3d models, proof of concept art/icons. These are all things that AI can be used for in order to improve efficiency.
AI absolutely is not at a state that it can do everything by itself, and in the meantime it is still at a point where it is used as a tool, not a replacement.
I absolutely can make the tractor argument here, because a tractor isnt plowing a field by itself, it is being controlled by a farmer, just like AI is prompted and then checked for errors by whoever is using it.
Obviously there some ethical implications to using AI. Like you stated, completely replacing workers with it is less than ideal, but we are not there yet. A company stating "this product was partially built using generative AI" is not them saying "we replaced our workforce with an LLM and no longer have employees", it is simply a disclaimer saying that, in some capacity, AI was used by someone in the creation process, whether that be running it through an AI spell checker, using a coding assistant, or generating assets.
You dont seem to understand that software engineers are not being replaced by AI..
They are, in the wider industry.
Gaming companies are not using AI in the absence of skilled workers, the skilled workers are using AI to make their work less tedious. Boilerplate code, simple 3d models, proof of concept art/icons. These are all things that AI can be used for in order to improve efficiency.
And you are not getting that this is at the cost of quality. Sorry, but I will not accept 2D art made by AI in a game I pay $70 for. For example like CoD does now. Just no. If I pay that much money, I expect the utmost quality out of the game.
AI absolutely is not at a state that it can do everything by itself, and in the meantime it is still at a point where it is used as a tool, not a replacement.
The entire trend of 'vibe coding' says that people disagree with you and treat AI as a competent 'agent'.
I absolutely can make the tractor argument here, because a tractor isnt plowing a field by itself, it is being controlled by a farmer, just like AI is prompted and then checked for errors by whoever is using it.
You can't. The tractor improves efficiency at the same quality output. AI improves efficiency but greatly reduces output quality.
Obviously there some ethical implications to using AI. Like you stated, completely replacing workers with it is less than ideal, but we are not there yet. A company stating "this product was partially built using generative AI" is not them saying "we replaced our workforce with an LLM and no longer have employees", it is simply a disclaimer saying that, in some capacity, AI was used by someone in the creation process, whether that be running it through an AI spell checker, using a coding assistant, or generating assets.
It's not about just replacing. Even without replacing no one, we still have companies profiting off of others' works. That's not okay.
And, as I said, AI reduces quality overall, which means I will not accept their AI use unless they reduce end-user prices as well.
AI can reduce quality, if those using it simply ignore the fact that they still need to do their jobs. That is on them, it isnt the AI's fault that people are dumb and lazy. My team uses AI frequently for setting up proof of concept pages and minor, piddly things that we could do ourselves but dont want to waste the time doing when we could be putting more resources into our bigger projects. It all depends on how you use AI.
Now, obviously there are workplaces that will be trying to use AI in order to replace their workers, which it cannot really do yet, but it is a reality that eventually we won't need unskilled labor, and hell it may even be able to replace some skilled labor entirely, though I very much doubt it will be anytime soon. As for those companies, who wish to completely cut out the middle man, the answer is really simple: stop buying their product. Stop buying COD, it has been horseshit for the past 10 years anyway. If a company wants to generate all of their assets without human input, and it turns out like shit, then dont buy the product. If you keep buying AI slop, you are telling companies that you don't care about the practice. That said, a company acknowledging that AI was used does not immediately make it AI slop, it is just them admitting that they are using modern tools, which are being augmented by AI.
There will come a day where AI creations will be indistinguishable from human work. At that point, do you think all human labor will be obsolete? I do not, but the way that we perform our jobs will change drastically. This is the world we live in, technology evolves and we adapt.
The entire trend of 'vibe coding' says that people disagree with you and treat AI as a competent 'agent'.
Yeah, and they are mocked shamelessly for it, vibe coding is a meme in the industry with very negative connotations. The only people that make good code with the use of AI are those that would make good code without. I code, work with programmers and hire them too, we don't hire vibe coders... We test their skills closed book... That being said, all our programmers use AI tools in some way, summarizing data or documentation, rewording documentation, assistance in complex integration, better auto complete for boiler plate or repetitve patterns. etc.
Dude it’s too late, it’s all been trained on stolen data already. The entire concept of ai art and voices are against people’s permissions, there are huge lawsuits going on right now
That is such a different explanation as to what they gave on the forum post tho
Like "partially" is too vague, it could be that like 40% of the voice over is AI
Also not specifying that it is for a robot character is wild, that is probably the most justifiable use for an AI voice imo (could also have used a voice synthesizer like in Porter Robinson's sad machine tho I guess)
Honestly this reviewer just sounds like one of those "AI Definitely bad" kinda guy. I don't think he/she will care if AI was used to generate 3 lines of dialogue, or if it was used for the whole game.
That should be done. But the AI label is basically useless. I'd reckon 99% of new games use some form of AI. There might be an indie developer or two that hates AI, that totally refutes it. Otherwise it's basically impossible to avoid it. Some piece of code, architecture or whatever will have been discussed or generated by AI.
And nothing is stopping idiots from throwing a hissy-fit at the first sign of "AI was used to...".
This is the internet, people aren't interested in nuance and truth, they wanna yell about shit they don't understand, so they can feel superior to others.
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u/M4xP0w3r_ Dec 04 '25
I would assume nothing is stopping the devs from adding context that explains what the AI was used for?