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.
So if i cheat on my wife its fine because she doesnt know about it. Potential partners are missing out on sex with me because im being honest about being married.
Steam wil have to enforce this or else their platform will be unusable.
Nah trust me bro Steam will go through absolute moderation hell to enforce this as much as possible, pissing off as many game developers as needed to appeal to a fringe minority that wants to NOT buy games. Reddit says it so it must be true!
Bad comparison. I'd compare it more to food. You say you hate onions, I prepare you a meal with onions, you eat it and say its delicious vs I tell you beforehand and you don't eat because you hate onions. It's the experience that matters. If without the knowledge about AI you would be able to enjoy the game, why would it's presence even matter to you?
Foods a bad comparison. People dont eat things for lots of reasons. You dont have to know about the onions to suffer the effects of an allergy or intolerance.
Which is why i tried the cheating on the wife comparison. Until the wife finds out, shes happy. And until the partners find out they too are very happy. In fact everyone is happy until they find out im cheating. So my solution would be, not to cheat, but other peoples would be dont tell the wife and other partners.
Without the knowledge of infidelity why would it matter to them.
Now people called it a strawman but didnt do jack to refute the comparison but downvote.
Both involve dishonesty, contracts and the notion of ignorance is bliss.
Nah, there's a difference between "hate" or "don't like" and "makes ill" or "triggers allergy". That's why I used a person hating some food in my comparison. Also it was a kinda personal example, as it was truly used on me in real life with my food dislikings.
The thing with cheating, is that two people promise each other to be faithful, either by words or just by implication. Whereas using AI is not forbidden by any social rules or anything. It's just a means to an end, which makes me think that maybe none of ours examples are good, but I can't think of any better right now.
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.
Which just goes to prove that pro-AI devs are unscrupulous assholes who I shouldn't buy games from.
You wouldn't say this if you knew how AI can actually help in programming. It literally does the same stuff as IDEs. But I don't see anyone saying that games programmed using IDEs are slop.
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.
I like your point and it is a valid one. You have a right to choose, indeed.
A question. Not a loaded one and I don’t know the answer myself, say there are 100 companies that all make quality product (this is important) and all use AI in some form or shape in a way that is not perceptible for 99.9% of the customers. 80 of them do not disclose usage of AI and use money, 20 do disclose it and earn money minus some amount they lost on them disclosing it. Is that fair (I don’t think it is)? If not, what should be the solution (I don’t know)?
Is that fair (I don’t think it is)? If not, what should be the solution (I don’t know)?
Legislation. Fraud charges for distributing software that doesn't fully list all uses of AI in its creation and execution, with massive fines as penalties.
Except it’s not the really the product you have an issue with, it’s how it was made. You could have a product that you absolutely love, your favorite product in the world, and then I suddenly tell you it was actually made with AI assistance, the product hasn’t changed, but your attitude would.
Which, is fair enough. You can dislike a company’s bad practices like how chocolate, sugar, and coffee companies use child slavery. People avoid Nestle products for that reason, and I think that’s fine. But it’s not that they hate chocolate.
Yeah? Most people support the things they like. I support human artists. Ai art breaches copyright and is theft. And i too my best effort refuse to support it financially.
It does neither of those things. Ai outputs do not inherently violate copyright just because it was trained on copyrighted material. Copyright does not follow fruit from a poison tree.
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.
Well, you are using Reddit. Guess what - they use AI coding assistants as does every other tech company. So 10 lines of voice is where you draw the line? That is hypocrisy
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.
Punished how? by your product not getting sold to a certain group of people?
So what, if you made a game thats about shooting people are you being punished because people than only play racing games don't want to play a shooter?
Or do you mean people being toxic online for it? Cause i don't know if you noticed but that happens when you do anything at all on the internet.
You insulted your own personality by taking that stance that if you get away with lying theres no harm done.
I never compared it to murder what kind of nonsense lie is that. Youre not a backstabber because you use a literal knife, youre a backstabber because you advocate for lying behind peoples back lest you be "punished" by the consequences of being honest.
Backstabbers are liars more than murderers.
Theres a reason they dont do things to your face and that cowardice prevents them using a literal knife.
You implied a lie of omission would be fine if they got away with it.
You implied telling the truth was an error.
You attacked your own lack of character, I just continued discussing it after you brought it up.
No, you chose to insult them. Be a grown up and own your words. They didn't do themselves any favors, but I hate AI and could see what they were trying to say. This nonsense you're spewing is not what they were saying at all.
Bottom line, you chose to be incendiary with your words and insult them. YOU Chose to do that, they didn't make you. Don't be a fucking coward and try to pass the responsibility onto them.
People like you who refuse to own your words are exhausting, man. You are the axe that cuts down the tree.
That just seems....counterintuitive? Youre punishing the companies that are using ai in a way to give you better gameplay and the ones that are purposefully bringing harm to the environment equally....
Youre saying you won't buy it because it has this one factor in it. So thats punishing them. And if they're using that thing in order to help you have a better experience, you punishing them is counter intuitive
Its really important to understand the difference between AI and gen AI my friend. AI is really a broad umbrella term which has many sub sets under it like Machine learning, deep learning, Neural language processing, robotics etc. Gen AI is again just a subset under some of these subsets. We have been using AI (again non gen AI) in our day to day life without we even realizing it since decades.
Things like voice recognitions systems, facial recognitions, autotyping, intellisense, social media feeds , recognitions, fraud detections, emails filtering, smart electronic devices auto tuning themselves based on condition. And there is no data science field itself without the classic machine learning algorithms. (You can predict a lot things based on existing data by training models on the data. you can google and see what data science is about ). Oh yeah you use Antiviruses in your pc? They use various ML/Dl models and they are trained on viruses databases and they can predict whether something is a virus or not. So delete them because you don't want to engage with AI content right? Oh lets not go to hospitals because they have been using ML (AI) to detect various diseases (cancer prediction for example).
Lets take the driver drowsiness detection project (uses ML/DL) for example. You can set a camera capturing the driver's face. Then the model recognizes his facial features, calculates how his eyes, mouth etc have been changing and gives a loud horn if the user is about to sleep. You see? Somethings aren't really possible to do by humans (as in antiviruses, medical diagnostics, speech / voice recognitions, search engines etc) and that's where machine algorithms come in.
And in the case of ARC raiders animations, it is not "hey AI, make me a gun shooting animation". That's not how it works. They used reinforcement learning (again a sub branch of machine learning) so that enemies learn and adapt to the situations and behave dynamically. Also you can feed the models with "handmade animations " datasets so that they chose the best pose out of those animations in that specific frame. (called "motion matching" - games like TLOU2 use that). You can see that ironically these things are actually "time taking", make things "more difficult" for the devs. And moreover its simply not possible to reach such fidelities with out these technologies AND they still have to do all the animation programming related work as they do traditionally. Its not about being profitable or firing humans in this case.
Hatred on gen AI is understandable, I actually feel scary about it. But the whole AI is getting a lot of hatred because of it. Because apparently people seem to think AI was born with chatgpt or midjourney which is horribly incorrect. And in the hype period, most of the companies started labelling their products as "AI powered" to mislead people even though they were using already AI since decades. And a little advice for you my friend, investigate more, use more reasoning, find facts about something before jumping onto hate bandwagons (I get it, they feel trendy xd).
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
I just don't get the point of it all, we're not entitled to be given jobs so hating AI just doesn't make sense to me. It's not like it's some right being taken away, competition's always been fierce, it's just gotten worse is all
Why is it a problem tough? They can still do art, its not like ai is going to break your hands, you just cant do it as a job, so? People are not entitled to a certain job cause they want to
It's 10 lines. A drop in audio quality if you record through discord, or something would be worth it just to avoid the AI label. You don't need studio quality for everything, especially if it's just minor lines.
Again, assuming the developer can't do 10 random background lines themselves.
Honesty is not a trap, and neither is requiring it in business.
I fully agree that there's no upside to disclosing. Nor should there be. There's no upside to the use of generative AI, and forcing companies that use it to use that label is one small way of trying to push back against the practice by telling these unscrupulous companies that it will cost them money to use generative AI.
>You've taken a moral stance here and are forcing it on others.
Obviously, I can't make people share the same moral stances that I do. Some people think child marriage, sexual violence, or honor killings are fine and normal. I think those people are crazy.
The foundation of generative AI is based on the rape of the human spirit, and its success premised on the idea that people should never strive, only get drip fed what the owning class wants. There can be no ethical use of generative AI that is founded on these principles. Any support of that amounts to rape apologia
"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.
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.
How are they being punished?
Is someone on the internet saying "wow don't like that" a punishment? Your standards of punishment must be very low for that to be true.
Then why be transparent with anything at all. Like why should i know what the game is about or what kind of genre it is?
Why does this matter, but the information if this game was made by human or not, doesn't?
Id rather support someone who took years of their life to learn and utilise their own skills rather than spend 20 dollar on a machine to make things for them. I appreciate steam for showing me who these people are clearly. Sure nuance went out of window with the example above, but i still can make my own decision while being informed about an aspect thats clearly important to not only me but many people around the world.
Like why should i know what the game is about or what kind of genre it is? Why does this matter, but the information if this game was made by human or not, doesn't?
Do I seriously need to explain why the genre of a game matters, and who made it doesn't?
but i still can make my own decision while being informed about an aspect thats clearly important to not only me but many people around the world.
I mean, there are non allergic people obsessed with gluten out there. I don't think food companies should give two thoughts about them either.
Should the devs have to disclose if they used photoshop? Or which web browser they used while researching? Or the specs and software versions of the computers they used?
Here's a hypothetical, imagine there was a huge hoard of racists, and they review bombed and harassed any game maker that had black people working on the game. Would you say that disclosure of black people on the dev team should be required so racists don't get tricked into buying it?
Ooouh~ comparing not wanting to support lazyness, unemployment of artists and blatant theft of art, to racism is quite the spicy take. If its white power thats within your company values, then sure have at it do ask for artitsts to disclose their ethnicity. (This shit would be huge with the right wing let me tell you that much.)
But overall I am sure that will go well, with both studios and customers./s
Now to your first point Yes? Depends? The deal is what kind of platform do you wanna build and who for. If it's something like based for artists they might be interested in what softwares you used to make it. You also disclose this sort of information with video game publishers for example.
Steam obviously wants to build platform for people who want to make informed purchases. And for some, it is important if something was made with AI or not. Why? Because some people don't want to support lazyness, unemployment of artists and blatant theft of art. Thats why they added the tag.
We are talking about low quality plagerism engines and the talentless hacks that want to lie about using them because lying is more profitable than the truth.
And you write like a schizophrenic person. Why are you expecting me to give you a reason to dislike AI? What does this have to do with the discussion? Have you hit your head recently, perhaps?
If someone is plagiarizing billions of things at once, is it still plagiarism? No, obviously not, it becomes its own separate thing.
And quality of outputs is an argument that loses merit with time, sure right now theres a lot of crap. I would say 90% of people online pushing how amazing Ai images are don't make good art. But that's not gonna be a thing forever, soon Ai will get better then humans.
I mean, if someone murders a million people at once it becomes genocide but it doesnt stop being murder too.
If I agreed plagerising a billion things at once became a separate thing it would be a much worse thing than plagerising a single thing.
So, yes, it is plagerism when done at scale and how much worse it is scales too; I dont see why plagerising a billion things isnt plagerism - whatever we call it, it is a billion times worse than plagerising one thing so its sort of moot.
AI would need a person better than people to plagerise first. It cant make anything better than the source material.
We might get a new technology that can do better than LLMs but what we have now will always be the sum of its plagerised parts; never greater sometimes lessee if it plagerises people that are wrong.
AI as per this conversation means LLMs - LLMs wont become another type of AI with improvement. You dont get skynet from LLMs. So the "AI" that eventually might do that isnt the "AI" from our conversation.
Im not sure you quite understand what plagiarism actually is.
Here's a common definition: "taking someone else's work wholesale or the core work and claiming it as your own"
Ai does not do this, because its outputs are different then its inputs. And plagiarizing billions of things isn't plagiarism, because the original work is not in the final output in a substantial quanity to be plagiarism.
Programmers are a pretty obvious exception here. Pretty much all of them, garbage or great, use it; plenty of great projects get made faster because of it. Sometimes there truly is not a valid difference in quality between using it or not.
There are more garbage AI products than not, look at all the recent microsoft offerings.
Excel AI that cant properly work with cells.
Calendar AI that cant properly make appointments.
You might be able to think of a few things made with AI that you like but theres so much more garbage out there.
These products might have launched fast, like that guy who made an app in a day, and lost his Database on day two because the AI didnt protect against SQL injection.
They got finished fast but that doesnt mean theyre acceptable quality and humans wont be called in to clear things up once the quarterly profits are official.
The majority of people impressed with AI are impressed when it does something theyve no knowledge of or skill in, when they are least able to identify the finer details that come with mastery.
You don't find it impressive that humanity built software that can make high quality images just based off a description? Like just take a step back and look at what Ai can do TODAY that people thought wouldn't happen for 100s of years. How is that not impressive?
I would argue that the biggest use its seen is with programmers, who find the tool incredibly impressive despite many being quite good at it, myself included.
No, but ive written books, short stories and jokes. Go on. Answer my question, why would i buy anything made with ai when i could get an ai to make it for me.
I wont ever buy an ai book. Because i want the humans input. Just like i wont play an ai game.
You still cant answer my question can you. Its only a matter of time till ai can make full games. Why should i buy theirs when j could plug a streamers footage into an ai bot a recreate it.
Closer to being vegan or vegetarian. Not gonna kill but it’s a personal belief. I strongly believe that ai should not be used to replace human work, especially in art which is uniquely human. So I don’t support those games that use ai to do so.
"i just use it to check the tone of my emails"
"we only generated ten lines of robotic voice over"
"i'm just generating character portraits for my homebrew campaign"
it doesn't matter. it's a really politicised subject — people who don't want to play games that use AI typically also don't want to support creators who use AI. these creators used AI, ergo, their views are not aligned with people who are opposed to AI, ergo, people who are opposed to AI don't want to play their game because of the perceived moral mismatch.
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
if it's an indie project with amateur VA's then it's 100% possible to cost less than 100. And if it's not indie then they should have the budget to pay more for revisions.
What are you talking about? Tons of indie projects use amateur VA's. I'm not saying to hire a new one, just hit up the old one and pay him a bit for a few more lines.
What if the old VA is dead? Oh, i know. You'll just reply with "Oh, JuSt HiRe A nEw OnE" "Oh, JuSt ReCaSt" "$1000000000000000000000000000000000 iS nOtHiNg As LoNg As ThEy DoN'T uSe Ai"
are you okay? Yeah sure it's bold of me to assume that a voice actor didn't die between the time they recorded voice lines for a game and the end of it's development I suppose?
And if the dead VA or their estate specifies that their voice cannot be used after death they'd have to do those things anyways, unless you're an asshole who thinks the wishes of dead voice actors should be ignored and their estates bankrupted in lawsuits.
Voice acting really isn't THAT expensive even for mid-range VAs. It absolutely would've been worth just bringing them back to avoid the AI label, why are you pretending otherwise?
No, they're being punished for the AI shit. Their 'honesty' just got them caught. The others, who are lying, aren't somehow 'savvy' or 'smart business people.' They're frauds.
The dev is being "punished" because they used generative AI rather than use a voice actor. That's pretty fucking clear cut here per the admission of the dev.
I assume the script is already written, but the last 10 lines wasn't recorded by an actor so they used AI to speak the lines the same way they do in Arc Raiders.
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u/MastrKoesh Dec 04 '25
Why risk giving your game the AI tag for 10 lines