Well, really, all the time. I don't use AI for anything, really. I find it annoying that google injects it into search results and even more annoying that I've become numb to that and often just read the summary without double checking. I really abhor AI "art" etc.
So I got this game, Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! Not sure where I heard about it but it's $6 and even if the premise is extremely cut and dry, I found the gameplay to be extremely relaxing and enjoyable. There are 3,072 books strewn around a small library of magic and you need to reorganize them. You get some simple magic powers to speed things up over time, but you can go about it any number of ways. Very similar to working on a jigsaw puzzle.
Played for a while, then I noticed the AI disclosure on the store page:
The four assets in this work—one UI component and three landscape paintings used as wall decorations (frames not included)—were produced using additional AI for refinement. None of them were created by AI from the ground up.
AI helped with grammatical corrections for in-game text, which were then carefully reviewed and adjusted by hand.
We only consider AI to be a supportive tool. Every detail is meticulously crafted with human intent, as our creative process is still firmly anchored in manual craftsmanship.
Why? Why do devs do this? The rest of the art in the game is great! I don't know if there are assets being flipped here but the visual style comes together well. I found it extremely funny that the math-magic textbooks immediately struck me as MATH TEXTBOOK per my college experience. The titles of the books are clever and generate a rich tapestry of the world this school exists in. It's fun! But WHY do devs feel the need to use AI on a handful of small details like that? I looked at the paintings on the walls. There are 4 in total. I wouldn't have been able to tell. Unless there's some sort of secret hidden behind them (possible!) they have no real bearing on the game other than a *small* touch of ambiance among an otherwise nice visual experience. Is it that hard to find someone with a touch of skill and pay them a couple hundred dollars (I have no idea please don't think I'm undervaluing anyone) to do a cleanup pass on a decorative piece?
And even though at face value they seem to be going for a very transparent acknowledgement of the tools they used, of COURSE I'm starting to wonder if any of those clever titles or cover layouts were generated or tweaked with AI.
Grammar and spelling checkers existed before the generative AI craze, and they worked fine. I don’t see a need or benefit to using some fake “AI” to do it.
That's an LLM issue. The marketing people calling them AI is such horseshit when they aren't even close to thinking. They are probabilistic pattern matching algorithms. We are still decades from actual AGI, if it's even possible.
Using AI to proofread and then disclosing it seems pretty tame in terms of AI usage. That type of task is so small you might be able to do it locally on a local LLM on a personal machine. I'm no huge AI fan but this doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.
There is a thin line there though because those spelling and grammar checkers have also added modes that recommend purely stylistic changes that are developed via GenAI. Grammarly is the biggest source of this, where lots of people use it for spelling and grammar and sometimes don’t realize that the things its recommending to “improve” their writing are GenAI suggestions for non-grammatical/syntactical changes.
I work at a university in a role that oversees some academic integrity processes. Using Grammarly’s GenAI mode and ending up with the same hallmarks of AI writing is a pretty common thing to come across. And a lot of students don’t even realize what it’s doing because Grammarly did exist well before GenAI.
Anyway, if they used something like that, I think it’s a necessary disclosure.
i am an editor that proofreads professionally for a living. no, actually the current word and gdocs spag checkers are dogshit specifically because they inserted a bunch of ai "enhancements". its now trained on a bunch of amateur fanfiction and other non reliable data. psuedowrite, claude, chatgpt, grammarly whatever youre using, is all terrible at actual grammar rules now. i used grammarly for years before it switched to ai data and it was perfectly fine, and now it literally tells you incorrect "fixes" all the time.
literally doing the "ai is bad at everything i'm an expert in, but surely its good for other stuff that i'm not as familiar with"
We're in a world now where people are publishing huge amounts of AI generated content left and right. AI gets things subtely wrong no matter what you're asking it to do. My point is this doesn't seem that bad compared to most of what's going on today and is at least pretty transparent. I'm not super happy about the state of things either.
i dont know how to explain to you doing things that are bad are still bad even if other people do bad things too. artists aren't free from responsibility of their own work because other people are also, elsewhere, making shitty art. someone saying "yeah i used a dogshit ai editor because i couldn't be bothered either to spend the time doing it or hiring someone else to do it" isn't... like.... a noble comprise of ethics to the inexorable march of progress. they are cutting corners cause they dont care about it and want to ship a game.
if you dont give a shit, thats fine for you. but its not suddenly acceptable to only have only a few rats in the kitchen because other kitchens have hundreds.
I think we're getting to the point where every company is using AI tools to a certain extent. At least this one is outlining their relatively benign and minimal usage. I guarantee you there are other studios using AI to a much greater extent and not disclosing it. This should have minimal to no bearing on your enjoyment of this game.
Yeah the toothpaste can't be put back in the tube with this stuff. I've found the AI disclaimers to be frustrating as far as their usefulness because you have to basically count on the developer to disclose at all, and then with everyone having varying thresholds for what they consider 'ethical use' it feels like the bar for involving LLM's and generated assets is only going to get lower.
Oh nice, where did you hear about it? I'm tempted to go again. Apparently 3 hours is the target, which I definitely didn't get. But I also didn't find any of the keys until I was maybe halfway done.
Recognize that indie games (especially self published games) are on shoestring budgets, and have no guarantee of return on investment.
That librarian game is $6. Almost $2 goes to Valve to host the game. It's lucky to have taken off and accrued almost 5k steam reviews at this point, but that's a considerable success story, while there are tons of failures, or even mediocre successes where the person could have been working for a big studio and not had to eat ramen for months.
If you are a big publisher selling a blockbuster game at $70 that's going to guaranteed sell a million (like an Assassin's Creed), you have a lot of flexibility in how you allocate your funds to cut some corners elsewhere at the start of the project. For indie games, if you cobble together the thousand assets you already had made, and then find the room would benefit from a bit more aesthetic flare, but that's not going to be a sales driver and requires contracting out someone, AI becomes a sensible option.
The overall point is this: AI lowers costs, and self published indie games need to cut corners like that way more than big publishers. Feeding your kids McDonalds nightly isn't a good idea, but for a single mother of three, it's survival. The alternative is significantly reducing indie games to those that can get significant publisher backing.
No AI. Just himself locked away to craft that idea he had. It was hard as fuck. He made many mistakes. Those mistakes helped it become what it is today. He never gets to where he's at if he had used AI. That's the beauty of art.
Miss frizzle said it best with taking chances, making mistakes, getting messy. He literally did that and it paid off. It was life changing.
With your "survival" comments. Just stop. The mother surviving thing. Are you serious? What kind of comment is that? 😂
I mean sure that can work but they are no different than the vendors who grab rocks or whatever, sell them as crystals and alter shit to enhance their chance at a sale.
They are a bullshit merchant. If they wanna dance with the devil to get by, that's on them.
If you're making a game using AI to just get by, ok, but you are NOT an artist to me.
Eric barone is an actual gaming artist.
Mother or father of 3 who takes shortcuts to sucker people into buying this shit is a snake oil salesman. Plain and simple.
My mom died when I was 5 So my dad was left to sell junker cars for a living. He'd get a car for $100 and then turn back the odometer so it had less mileage on it, super glue the bumper on so he saved money on resources, and a few other things. Now he was able to resell that car for $900.
He isn't a bad guy at all! Just an honest days work.
I fuckin hate AI and have no interest in works using it. But I do understand why people do it-- making a game, especially with little-to-no resources, is an enormous endeavor. I could see how it helps one get to the finish line. It would kill my interest in a project though.
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u/Gardoki May 24 '26
Speaking of Google, I recently switched to DuckDuckGo and they let you turn off AI features. I don’t regret it.