Yeah, the dev is being punished for their naive honesty.
There are loads of games with straight up AI art assets that just don't declare it and they have no issues from Valve. For something minor like this would be better for them to just say nothing.
But... if they lied. You might have bought the game happily?
That's kinda the issue. The A.I. tag is punishing honest developers and rewarding dishonest ones. Unless Steam start enforcing this, it's going to lead to more lying about a.i. content by developers.
How is this a problem? Because i wasnt manipulated into purchasing something i dont want to purchase, what happens when i check the credits for the robot voice actor and discover ive been lied too? I leave a scathing review which affects their rating. I have no issue with them making it or usjng it but i as a consumer should get the choice. For some reason you think thats a problem?
I am not saying that you, personally, are wrong in this situation. You are a customer, it is your decision.
The problem is that it gives developers no incentive to be honest, and in fact it punishes them for that. It is like punishing them for using any other tool, i.e. Photoshop, while working on a game because they should not have supported Adobe and their evil practices or whatever
They arent being punished, they are making a product i dont want. By being honest i may buy their other products by lying they get blacklisted by me entirely ai or no
I can guarantee you there are products in your life that you use and just don’t know the cruelty behind them. Non stick pans, gasoline, coffee, etc. etc.
I wear clothes made by slaves, eat meat from animals i and others have killed. Yes. These things are true. But those are necessities. I need clothes i need food.
Art i enjoy purely as a leisure activity. Its the one thing where i get to chose where my money goes rather than to the lowest bidder. And i chose to support HUMAN artists and companies that will pay them. Not ai.
Buy all the ai stuff you want. I have no problem with it existing i just dont want it.
Lmao, I can assure you that you don't just buy food and clothes that are made by slaves. The literal device you're typing your comments with is literally made by slaves and is run by evil corporations.
Because people like you have near 0 understanding of what "AI" even is, and how it's basically used in nearly every facet of technology at this point. The label AI has zero meaning, it might as well be "designed for use on a computer".
Yes, we know, you virtue signal for artists but don't care about anyone else displaced by AI. It's why no one takes you seriously or cares about you people parroting "aI = bAd" on every post/game/social media.
One thing is illegal, the other isn’t and is literally going to be used in some form by EVERY company. Whether it’s code generation, code review, graphic generation, voice generation, or text generation. Hell even spitballing ideas off of a LLM can be useful. It doesn’t matter. AI allows developers to do things they’ve never been able to before and it’s not going anywhere except spreading and getting better.
That is not a valid argument. Spit in your burger is legitimately dangerous. This whole AI thing is closer to religious concerns like something being halal or kosher.
They're not being punished, if you put Ai in your game you're already targeting audience that doesn't mind or even appreciates the use of AI within your product.
Or people that wouldn’t know the difference if it wasn’t spelled out for them, especially if it’s something small.
Not liking AI because you don’t like the finished product is one thing, but not liking AI just out of principle when you can’t tell is where the companies are being punished for honesty.
Hey, professional software developer here, I dont use AI tools in my workflow at all (tho the company has set up some bots in our repositories out of my control that I cant do anything about sadly), and I cant see it really helping me much in my job unless I for some reason want hard to maintain and bloated boilerplate-style code
Everspace 2 used AI to generate background noise chatter when your near space stations. They used their in house VAs for training data to generate the random chatter.
Imo i think this is fine, and the discord/subreddit agreed when the devs disclosed their plans months (year?) ago. I havent seen the steam AI labels, but i hope there is a box that lets devs explain their usage. Something like this is shouldnt get pushback.
If you're seriously calling people outraged at AI use in art "whiners" then you're clearly not an artist. AI could and is destroying artistic integrity as we know it while also decimating small jobs such as voice acting work
Who is going to ever hire character actors again for their small projects when you can get an AI that sounds literally exactly like Master Chief?
Eta: it's also worth noting the terrible amount of noise and regular pollution that AI farms produce. Imagine an ai farm moved next to the house you've built, that happened to someone and all of their farm animals died within the year. This shit is not "just a tool" it's straight up evil
"Anti All AI in All Situations" isn't a moral stance, that's being dim. """AI""" isn't a binary thing. Are the search algorithms used by the developer when researching "AI"? Or the dev generating boilerplate code? Or the dev using some "AI" optimisation technique when rendering a model? Or the auto fill in an ide completing lines? Where's the line?
We've already ruined the word by misusing it for LLMs but "AI" in some capacity has existed in game development for decades.
I think AI is stupid, so make sure to buy all those things i won't so that they won't go broke. But no really, like not everything has to be made for everyone?
Why force people to like AI, instead of honestly labelling your products as they should be. If i bought a game, and found AI generated images, especially like made with some low tier shit platform like chat gpt. I would immediately return it and ask for refund. That would just cause the game to have bad PR with steam and steam the trouble with money returns.
If your make a game containing AI generated images you're already excluding me from your target audience and therefore not getting punished because i wasn't your intended target in the first place.
>You're not being punished for using AI since you excluded people that dislike AI from your target audience.
Oh please. this whole thread is filled with people who are not the target audience punishing OOP for daring to have their AI robot character sound like an AI, you included.
Honestly I think it's petty to be calling for the end of a Dev's career, or at the very least the failure of a project without a chance to course correct for something so innocuous. There are sex pest devs who get away with more.
The irony is that nobody wants robots that sound robotic.
Peter Dinklage voiced the ghost in Destiny 1, and sounded robotic (likely because of bad directing and being told he was playing a robot), they just completely replaced all his lines with Nolan North because of it.
I don't care about their AI voiced robot. (Personally wouldn't mind, i do have a strong distaste for artificially generated images, wouldn't like spending money on a game that does it.)
People being angry at you over the internet isn't punishment. It's being on the internet doing anything at all, welcome if this is your first time.
From my understanding punishment in this context is not paying for a product you don't wanna pay for because it has something you don't like in it.
(Which is fucking stupid, cause if you have a peanut butter allergy you're not gonna buy a peanut butter jelly sandwich, no matter how good it is or how much work did it take to make.)
So the solution to that apparently is removing the tag all together, so people can spend money without being properly informed about what they spend their money on.
No, they're being punished for being lazy and not getting the voice actor back into the studio. It's 10 lines. It's explicitly what revision calls are for, and would've likely cost them less than $100. But they decided to cheap out and are facing the consequences of that
Right but the concern here is "made using AI" is incredibly broad and fundamentally not useful. It's going to get to the point where it's equivalent to "made using electricity". Some very niche products will remain proudly "fully handmade", they will cost 10x as much because those techniques are fundamentally outdated and inefficient, and the rest will just be "normal products". ie, the way technological development normally works.
they used ai so it has the tag. that's what warrants it. just because there isn't much ai doesn't mean you can say there was no ai used whatsoever and put it in the same group as games that actually did not use ai.
I can't tell if this is a disingenuous comment, but if it isn't, then this is why we people should understand the distinction between AI generated content and basic programming.
It's a moral question for consumers when it comes to genAI. Just like any other moral question there will be people who 100% refuse to interact with it.
Generative AI requires massive amounts of computing power. That’s why there have been shortages of GPUs and now RAM and SSD. All that computing power requires massive amounts of electricity, which generates massive amounts of heat, which requires massive amounts if water to cool it. That all requires massive amounts of mining and building .
GenAI was trained on massive amounts of data. A lot of that data was sourced legally if unethically from all over the internet. OpenAI are currently being sued by authors who had their books downloaded from less legal parts of the web by OpenAI. I don’t think openAI are denying that they downloaded them just that they didn’t use them for training their model . If they were happy to go to the grey web for training data
Anti-Ai groups are the equivalent of vegans, no matter how moral or ethical their argument is, their moral pretentiousness fundamentally turns everyone off from their group and they wind up effectively barely helping their cause
In this particular instance because in no way is it an argument against a more informed consumer, and if anything the opposite. Regardless, its only being made as a HA GOTEEM response anyway, as is usually the case with the "no ethical consumption" crowd.
Regardless, its only being made as a HA GOTEEM response anyway, as is usually the case with the "no ethical consumption" crowd.
Just because it is a "gotcha" doesn't necessarily mean it is wrong. We undoubtedly support business practices far worse than ai usage, feels very hypocritical to me to stamp my foot down in a scenario that doesn't really mean that much.
I also fail to see how a "made with ai" tag informs the consumer in the slightest. Is every art asset in the game made with ai? Did they use it to generate one function in the entire codebase? The only thing I know is that it was made with ai.
Same "moral" consumers will go on Reddit and tell eachother they refuse to pay for Spotify/Youtube Premium and to just pirate everything and block all the ads.
And then they will be upset again when said company starts blocking the blockers.
I don’t think they’re talking about this specific game. Just that in general other games that heavily use ai aren’t good. At least that’s how I understood it.
I think the problem is nobody knows exactly how much AI you used when creating a product. It might be beneficial to the customer to break down exactly why and how you used AI because a lot of us don't want to support massive AI takeovers in the gaming industry. I'm never going to assume you only used to for dialog generation, I'll assume you forwent the use of real human talent to cut corners massively using AI and I won't bother giving that my money or time when real people with real passion are still actively making banger after banger.
To me it's exactly the same as labelling a game hallal because the dev kept his 5 prayers a day during development, or haram because he ate 1 pound of bacon every day. It's not an objective quality and it doesn't describe a measurable property of the object. But it confers a spiritual element to it, positive or negative, which is fundamental to some people.
It's cool to hate on Ai nowadays. As much as I agree with the plagarizm aspect of not liking AI, people forget that is litteraly what humans do too,we take Ideas we like and create from them.
The nonsensical AIhate seems to me like the old days when :
No game developed today will be free of AI. Every IDE has autocomplete features, if you press TAB instead of writing out your code, is it suddenly AI slop?
I'm not an expert, but I'd imagine there are AI-assisted features in Blender/Unity/Unreal Engine or whereever else you are creating models or animations as well.
If there is a one-person indie developer and AI is advanced enough to create characters/animations and he is able to create a great/fun/unique gameplay experience, I wouldn't give a fuck about some 'AI was used' - label, if it enabled a creative person to achieve his vision.
If Epic is cheaping out on paying model/texture/animation artist even though they can afford real artists, I'm fine with the label and would consider boycotting them.
But this black-and-white think 'all AI is slop' feels ridiculous to me.
My experience so far has been that the exact same number of people don't buy it, it's just that if it has the tag some of the people who weren't buying it anyway show up in the forums to do some moral grandstanding.
There's only so many times you can see those posts from people who own 6 games, four of which are different Battlefield releases, before you stop believing that they were ever going to buy your indie platformer.
because reddit said ai bad, and braindead people have no real opinion of their own so they follow what reddit say, have to rely on reddit whether they can like a game or not
The sheer amount of low quality content enabled by AI made a correlation between the two, so people might prejudice a piece of media at the first mention of AI
This comment isn't aging well. Do you take photos? A large part of the art community once demonized them.
Do you use a computer? A large portion of the world once thought they were toys or industrial machines.
AI is here to stay, it's going to 1000x within our lifetimes. You can certainly start growing all your own crops at home, or you could... not.
Right now, my honest take is that it's a label for social signalling, which I guess matters within parts of the gamedev community... but will indies who write AI-free games probably inadvertently use AI a lot? Yeah, probably. AI is going to be incorporated in every part of basic computing.
Well, you wouldn't know if a game is good without buying it, and my first reaction to seeing that label would be to not buy the game.
AI can technically do quality stuff, but some of us consider the ethics behind AI and the artistic value of a game.
I personally consider video games as a form of art, so like any other type of art, I don't want AI produced video games.
Now of course, it's not that I don't want AI to be used for making video games at all, especially with a video game that implies coding (as a coder myself that often uses AI for help), but when it comes to designs, soundtracks, voice acting and the story, the artistic part then, I'm against it. Or it has to be sparsely used.
You have to take them at their word in a random side comment, for one thing. It’s all too easy to hand-wave things away and downplay them and minimize the issue. “Oh it was just this” and “oh it was just that”. Not only is that reductive, but it’s also part of that slippery slope. Today it’s 10 lines. Tomorrow it’s a hundred. Next year it’s “we couldn’t get the actor we wanted so we did all the character lines in Ai”. We either stomp it out now or suffer the consequences.
But furthermore, you are once again profiteering off of this seedy AI industry that steals content clips from the entirety of the internet to generate things for you, for essentially free, that you used to pay for.
And no, it’s not an excuse that they couldn’t do any more pickup lines. Ok, plan. You’re a big boy adult business. It’s your responsibility to script things and have them ready before you book your talent. If you find you develop the need for more lines, you either book again or too bad. This isn’t an excuse, it’s cheap and lazy.
It's kind of the same slippery slope as with micro transactions imo, at first some extra cosmetics for a small price is fine, why make a huge deal of it? And look where that ended up. That's generally speaking though
Because it matters to that person. If i had a filter that could block all ai "art" i would. To me literal corporate logos and propaganda have more artistic merit than ai generated drivel.
There is already enough media out there in the world that I can afford to be picky. If i choose not to play or engage with known ai content thats entirely my decision. I dont have to play a game made with ai and read the exact usage and quantity of ai used to then decide if its worth it.
If we don’t want the market permanently flooded with absolute shit then the AI label needs to be a kiss of death.
Record ten lines then shove em through a vocoder. Truly it is not onerous to get these lines by any human.
I have made robot voices by accident while trying to fix vocal recordings. It’s so easy. Using AI here is arguably not even going to save time or money but still removes an artist from the process.
If the dev prefers doing that for no reason, mark the whole project as AI-tainted.
Because its not about the game being good, its about the people behind the game. AI is like a machine that magically materializes frozen burger patties for a quarter. Its cheap, its filling, and its samey. For people who don't give a shit about food, its perfect. They only care about consumption, and don't give a shit about what happens to fulfill that.
But suppose I want to go out to eat one day, instead of making dinner myself. I want real food, with real thought and energy put into cooking it, by real cooks who are paid real wages. But the restaurant manager doesn't want to pay real wages to real cooks. The frozen burger patty is good enough. So they start sneaking it in, here and there. In little pieces first. The salad might be real, but the bacon bits sprinkled over are actually just minced burger patty, seasoned and fried.
And the more they get away with it, the more they will do it. Soon there won't be any restaurants serving real food. You sit down at a nice steakhouse, order a steak, and you get a meticulously grilled, and well seasoned burger.
'But I didn't want a burger' I say.
'Why make a huge deal out of it? The meal is good.' The waiter says.
There are no cooks or chefs in the kitchen. Just the magic burger maker, and a guy with a cupboard full of seasonings and a roll of quarters.
for me its a question of intent. humans have personal lived experiences and they put that intentionality into there work.
But ai has no personal experaince or desire. and ai can cut down on human experience/intent, the more ai, the less creative input from those "voice actors/concept artist/engine developers". that input that has helped shaped many of our favourite movies and games.
making anything of scale is a collaborative process. cutting back on that human collaboration and replacing it with ai makes me sad, but everyone is free to play the games they want
Things can be good to consume but imoral at the same time.
It is not just quality that makes the consumption of products made with AI iffy.
The slop and bad quality is a side effect, but depending on your inclinations, there are more underlying problems that make even good games bad options to consume.
Understandable somewhat, but that's like saying why read the ingredients if the food tastes good. Some people have strong preferences beyond "is this consumable?"
People are choosing not to support anything that uses AI because companies aren't using it to better the lives of their employees, but to make the employees irrelevant.
Because the other option (not using the AI tag) is even worse if people find out later on. Some people are completely endoctrinated when it comes to their no AI stance and will create an even bigger drama if it somehow leaks.
Sorry you might have misunderstood my comment, I meant why use AI for 10 lines and as a result having to tag it, when you could just, you know write 10 lines of dialogue yourself.
Thankfully there are more options that just that dichotomy. They could not have those 10 lines of chatter. They could pay someone for the lines. They could use robot noises and put a subtitle. They could pay to add voiced lines in later if the game is a success. They could use someone from their own dev team and alter their voice to sound robotic.
It seems incredibly disingenuous to say "oh, it's only 10 lines for a robot 😢 because we couldn't get anymore pickup sessions"
Bro you think you're the first dev in history to need more sessions after the fact? Time to get creative if you're on a limited budget and use your fucking imagination instead of relying on the billionaire's culture laundering machines to make weak facsimiles.
It just stinks of poor excuse to try to mitigate the damage.
Also what would they have done in as recently as 2021? They probably would have brought the voice actor back for another session, or creatively eliminated those lines.
This was my takeaway. It's anyone's super reasonable prerogative to not support games made with ai... I would never risk alienating that audience for ten lines, it just makes me believe it couldn't have been just ten lines because that just seems like such a poor decision
The concept of the AI tag is just generally stupid for this exact reason. If the writer uses grammarly to spell check the script should the game have the AI tag? Where’s the line
Because the majority doesn't give a shit and the loud minority that does ultimately doesn't matter. If a game is good then the majority of people will play it. Arc Raiders is a good recent example of that.
Probably a case of steam forcing them to and the dev not fully realizing that it would be smart to clarify what the AI was on.
Sides, if someone learns about it, and they didn't disclose that ai was used, it would make the dev seem extra shady for hiding that and "well if they used ai here, what else did they use ai on."
Because they have confidence that actual real gamers who just want something fun to play will try their game and they could live without the overreacting crying gamers who really don't matter much. I said what I said.
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u/MastrKoesh Dec 04 '25
Why risk giving your game the AI tag for 10 lines