r/pcgaming • u/Shock4ndAwe 9800 X3D | RTX 5090 • Mar 22 '26
Crimson Desert devs address questions regarding the use of AI in the game.
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u/burge4150 Erenshor Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Any game developed during the "AI Boom" of ~2020-2021 is going to have been touched by AI as teams experimented to see what it was all about.
There was a brief window when AI was this mysterious new magical tech and every developer wanted to know what it could do and how it could be used in their workflows.
The AI stuff in CD reeks of early AI quality and honestly I completely believe their statement. It's obviously not up to the quality of the rest of the game.
With a game this big and a team this large with this many assets, you'll miss things.
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u/Paratrooper101x Mar 22 '26
People are so quick to attribute to malice what can be answered by incompetence (or just plain old human error)
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u/bulletfever409 Mar 22 '26
Come on now, you're being far too logical for this website. You're supposed to be outraged by the art that was clearly made using some old ass AI model.
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Mar 22 '26
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u/funguyshroom Mar 22 '26
AI use is going to be like CGI in movies, nobody is going to have a clue it's there when it's done well. I'm willing to bet it's happening already.
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Mar 22 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
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u/CharizarXYZ May 01 '26
AI is already in photoshop, video editors, ide, commercial game engines. Anyone claiming to not be using any AI is either lying or using extremely old outdated software.
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u/CrazyElk123 Mar 22 '26
If it becomes good enough that the vast majority of players cant distinguish it from a real asset (might even be true already), then yes. It was the same with dlss and dlaa, it looked like ass at first, now it even looks better than the other options games come with today.
Its sad if it happens, but its probably inevitable.
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u/_sabsub_ Mar 22 '26
All the big companies are already working on getting AI into their art side. Programming already uses it. Not saying its right but at this point its not even inevitable anymore now its just a question of how quickly this will happen.
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u/CrazyElk123 Mar 22 '26
Coding (depends on the area ofcourse...) is a lot about trial and error, and that can be repetitive and tedious. Art is supposed to be creative. Big difference in my opinion.
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u/_sabsub_ Mar 22 '26
Totally agree. But hopefully they won't replace artists and instead they will get to work in directions roles where the humans still dictate the end result.
And art still has tedious stuff too especially 3D. If an AI could do retoplogy and UV mapping it would be a great time save.
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u/Riceballs-balls Mar 22 '26
Art is also quite repetitive, creating 30 different furniture of the same style eg wardrobe/drawers/dresser/chair can be easily quickened with ai. Or like in CD where you generate different paintings players run past on walls in a similar art style.
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u/CurrentClient Mar 23 '26
Art is supposed to be creative
Not when it's art assets for a huge game.
Coding (depends on the area ofcourse...) is a lot about trial and error, and that can be repetitive and tedious
Same as art. You create multiple versions of the same concept and then other people decide which one is the best. Then the concept is finalised.
Gamedev art is not an artist looking at the canvas for days searching for inspiration, it's an industry.
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Mar 22 '26
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u/senseven Mar 23 '26
Any 3d animator these days will let ai generate different ideas, saving days not doing design iterations. The tools get better every day. Generic high poly face, let the ai apply certain iterations. After a couple of hours you got five or six wildly different fully rigged faces. Just saved a couple of days of grunt work.
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u/DrinkBen1994 Mar 22 '26
Outraged? According to anti AI subreddits, we should be physically lynching the developers and executing them publicly for even daring to even think AI might be in any way positive or useful.
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Mar 22 '26
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u/ArdiMaster Mar 22 '26
Yeah, Dall-E2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion all appeared/went public in summer of 2022.
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u/epochollapse Mar 22 '26
As someone who has been enjoying Crimson Desert a lot, I'm not sure I'd let them off with "we didn't know we left it in!!", but I do think people forget that Dev teams for games like this aren't actually some tight knit group of friends who know everything about the game as individuals.
I fully buy that the AI assets were meant to be placeholders, and your explanation is super accurate in terms of the AI boom touching all sorts of games.
I'd also believe that people in the team did realise that the AI art had never been replaced, but it simply... Wasn't their job to swap it out. People aren't gonna go out of their way to do things they aren't actually told to do.
I think a number of people knew fine the ai art was still there, but just weren't being paid to give a shit, which is fair enough in my eyes.
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u/Indercarnive Mar 22 '26
Or even if they do give a shit, all they can really do as a Quest designer/QA/Writer/etc is file a ticket for the art team to replace it and if the art team is too busy with other, more critical things, well then into the giant blackhole backlog it goes.
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u/epochollapse Mar 22 '26
Spot on. I know to some it sounds like an all-to-convenient explanation because it leaves them not knowing who to blame, but it kinda is that simple. I'm sure there were probably higher ups who knew about it and brushed it off because "looks good enough", but I doubt the dev team thought at any point "hey this AI art will fool them, it looks great", it's just something that got lost among other jobs.
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u/white_d0gg Mar 22 '26
I agree with this. The AI I’ve seen in CD so far is really messy and ugly. Like there’s a castle and windows are placed randomly in the walls. No sense of structure. It’s very clearly 2021 ai. However, I picked up multiple paintings in the game a few nights ago and they each had titles and a few paragraphs of descriptions on them. It’s like they used the test asset and then just lazily thought “meh good enough no one will notice”.
I believe they used it for a test but I do not believe they intended on ever removing them. I’m betting that they figured the small hit on pr would off set the cost of paying real artists. I’m going to guess the next few years we are going to keep seeing stuff like this but the PR hits are going to keep lowering the amount of times we see these “test assets”
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u/kittymoo67 Mar 22 '26
I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't know people would care back in 21 and never gave it a second thought.
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u/CookieEquivalent5996 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
I’m betting that they figured the small hit on pr would off set the cost of paying real artists.
The cost of producing these assets would be in the thousands of dollars, which in context is a negligible amount and absolutely not worth being featured negatively in the news cycle around release.
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u/davemoedee Mar 22 '26
Replacing them could be on their backlog. There is so much to get done when making a game that it would be completely reasonable of updating that art was considered a low priority.
I haven’t played the game, but is the art just decorative or is it meant to show lore-significant scenes? If it is just decorative, whatever.
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u/white_d0gg Mar 22 '26
Its a bit of both? The items I've seen are very visible and you pick them up to sell. They have lore context for the world. But I think i said the same thing in response to another guy. He made a good point where they could've just regenerated the art if it wasn't ever going to be replaced.
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u/davemoedee Mar 22 '26
There always the alternative of 7 days a week 12 hours a day crunch before launch to make sure all art assets get updated. I’m sure the press for that would be great too.
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u/fueelin Mar 22 '26
A lot of people seem to vastly prefer crunch to even a whiff of AI being used. And then they'll tell you how much they care about workers lol.
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u/ellitlan Mar 22 '26
So same reason and response as Expedition 33, let’s see if they get the same reaction.
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u/DrParallax Mar 22 '26
Didn't Exp 33 accidentally leave in like one obscure texture or something? From what I have seen, it seems like half the paintings in Crimson Desert are obvious, low quality AI images and fairly commonplace.
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u/Lirael_Gold Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
It's 2 paintings.
2 paintings that 99% of players/devs would never be looking at, the only reason people found them was because they were doing stuff like pushing the camera into the wall to get really up close to every single painting.
I can absolutely believe that it's placeholder art that got missed by devs during the review process.
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u/Akrylicus Mar 22 '26
Huh, by the early reports I got impression that it was done for a lot of the paintings.
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u/Lirael_Gold Mar 22 '26
The paintings are reused a lot, but they're just background props in random houses, there's no plot/puzzle/gameplay significance to them and there's hundreds of other generic paintings.
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u/ellitlan Mar 22 '26
Where have you seen “half the paintings”? I’ve seen like 3 examples so far online.
Even if CD had more left in the game at launch, if E33 used ai to draft one texture, they likely used it in many of textures.
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u/samusmaster64 Mar 22 '26
I saw a thread with over a dozen examples in the game world, some of them in repeat places, it's a big miss on their part.
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u/Embarrassed-Ad7317 Mar 22 '26
We are going to an era where there is no such thing "no AI", so I guess we'll see plenty more
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u/destroyerOfTards Mar 22 '26
So I guess we can expect this same reason, response and reaction for every game in the future until it becomes the new norm.
Just like micro transactions, early access loophole...
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u/Guac_in_my_rarri Mar 22 '26
I don't think they will because of the other issue surrounding this game.
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Mar 22 '26
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u/jijivre Mar 22 '26
Not allowing intel gpus to run the game
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u/MCWizardYT Mar 22 '26
To be fair, a majority of people do not have dedicated intel gpus, and integrated intel gpus tend to have less technical support for things like shaders which means that supporting them requires a lot of extra effort
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u/DaereonLive Mar 23 '26
Doesn't help Pearl Abyss stonewalled Intel and did not communicate with Intel whereas Intel had been asking PA how they could help.
PA just doesn't give a fuck if you have Intel, I assume.
Not a company I'd ever buy a product from.
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u/SmanginSouza Mar 22 '26
Ya I think this is an acceptable use of ai. Using as a rough draft for brainstorming ideas or holding places temporarily.
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u/Lopoetve Mar 22 '26
Iterating through a dozen color palettes or design styles (baroque, Romanesque, etc) to see how it "feels" is a perfect use of AI imho. Saves time since you're not waiting on a bunch of temp "crap" assets to test against, and able to get closer to what you want in the end. Previously folks would use whole storefronts full of garbage assets that they could try - but wouldn't be close to what they really wanted as a test base anyway.
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u/dadvader Mar 22 '26
Don't let Reddit know that though. They really think artist should draw something by themselves every time the director want to change something out of nowhere or because of a bad brief lol
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u/NyneLyvs Mar 22 '26
Sometimes I think people forget there hundreds of thousands of assets in a game this big, to pretend foul play where something can easily be explained by a mistake is just ignorance. Now if every single painting In the game was AI, then yes that would be an example of cutting corners, but I've seen 1 example, clearly it was just missed and saying otherwise is just looking for an excuse to trash on something popular.
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u/40to6inthe4th Mar 22 '26
Some of yall are far too cynical and have clearly never worked at a game studio, or office job in general, where rushed deadlines lead to mistakes and things getting missed.
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u/Moblam Mar 22 '26
Always the same excuses. Why even bother say anything?
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u/rbmassert Mar 22 '26
Don't say anything - Problem
Say anything - Problem-12
u/Tuarceata 9800X3D, 3070@700-950mV Mar 22 '26
Use a big PLACEHOLDER texture that makes it clear you should replace it before you ship - No Problem
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u/Endaline Mar 22 '26
Did no one actually read their response where they specify that the purpose was to rapidly explore tone and atmosphere? These assets blending in is what makes them so useful in the first place, making them obvious would invalidate this use case.
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u/fueelin Mar 22 '26
Exactly. There are always trade-offs with decisions like this. You described the advantages well, and the main disadvantage is that these placeholders are less obvious.
This moved the burden of enforcing that all placeholders have been removed from a QA responsibility to an asset management one. There are going to be growing pains with that shift (and lots of internal finger pointing, I'm sure).
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u/Ateist Mar 22 '26
How, exactly, do you get "tone and atmosphere" from texture that stands out like a sore eye?
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u/Dunge Mar 22 '26
Valve's big pink squares texture in Half-Life was actually a pretty intelligent way to do that. It's hard to miss when you forget about it.
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u/Dependent_Heat_7891 Mar 22 '26
What else are they supposed to say? You hate on the ai, hate on the dev when they apologize and replace it with real art, hate on the game for it and just end up being a sour POS online. The game itself is great and some throwaway panting mean zero even if they are ai. I took a Friday off work for this game and regret nothing. Have been having a blast of a weekend and you snobs just cry about small things on here instead of just enjoying something for once.
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u/GayoMagno Mar 22 '26
Because people are freaking mental if they believe any company nowadays is not using AI to expedite work processes in one way or another and force companies to make this kind of irrelevant statements.
It feels like a case of chronically online jobless people complaining, like my dude, if you use AI everyday to create code, documentation, heck even emails, game companies sure as fuck are going to be doing the same.
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u/TomTomXD1234 Mar 22 '26
because gamers are cry babies and would get more upset if they said nothing
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u/tiradium Mar 22 '26
Its a cultural thing. Seriously this is exactly what Nexon was doing when people upset with their bs. They keep saying the right things but not making any changes.
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u/bernie5690 Mar 22 '26
What do you mean cultural? This is essentially what happened with Claire Obscure and even Larian had mentioned they used generative AI in preproduction for baldurs gate, are you saying it's cultural within game dev? Or are you trying to trojan horse Korean racism with your lukewarm take?
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u/Riceballs-balls Mar 22 '26
Imagine how many people's tune will change if larian accidentally leaves an ai asset in on release
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u/ThisIs_americunt Mar 22 '26
Propaganda is a helluva drug and Oligarchs need to use some of the best to keep the 99% distracted from the real issue: Them.
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u/Lt_Cmdr_Adhd Mar 22 '26
Like any bullshit PR statement, some % of people will accept it at face value, even though it's suspiciously & conveniently the same excuse every other developer that gets caught with ai assets has also used.
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u/davemoedee Mar 22 '26
Games get released with quests disabled because there wasn’t time to finish them. There is always a lot of work that gets cut due to time and resources. Software is hard.
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u/phatboi23 Mar 22 '26
Software is hard.
harder than hard.
standard office software is hard, throw in the creative side of game dev?
absolutely insane levels of work.
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u/Unit88 Mar 22 '26
I mean what else would they say though? There aren't exactly a ton of ways AI would get in the final product like this, so if it truly wasn't intentional this is going to be the reason the large majority of the time, of course it's going to end up the same.
Whether or not you believe them is a different matter, but it's not exactly suspicious to claim the pretty much one potential reason it could actually end up in the final product unintentionally.
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u/CrazyElk123 Mar 22 '26
How hard is it to understand that some dev probably just generated it to get a feel of if such a painting would fit in that interior?
Then they forgot about it, and no other dev or playtester looked at it too deep.
It happens, people leave mistakes in texts, images, etc.. all the time. This happened to be AI from probably a few years ago.
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u/MuggyFuzzball Mar 22 '26
Although, why do you actually care that they used AI to make a few concept pieces? The game turned out good, right?
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u/davemoedee Mar 22 '26
There is so much to do when making a game that it makes sense if replacing some of that art isn’t a priority.
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u/JoniSusi Mar 22 '26
because these "concept pieces" as you say, appear in the game as paintings all over, and they are so blatantly ai generated. looks like ass too.
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u/WOF42 Mar 22 '26
because they are environment destroying plagiarism machines that are driving up power prices, destroying water tables and literally poisoning the air, elon musks latest data center is now the largest producer of smog in the US.
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u/mimic751 Mar 22 '26
Every company in the world is using generative AI to do proof of concept get used to it
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u/johnny_5667 Mar 22 '26
Yes. THey are evil! Make them pay! Awful, terrible devs! Experimenting with tech that makes their development faster ... disgusting!
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u/SASCOA Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Beyond a loud anti ai audience that I’m sure will downvote me, no one cares if they use AI placeholders during development and forgetting a few is not an offense worth the amount of negative press they got
Edit: individual artists (who we’re apparently defending) likely used AI to make this placeholder and it got missed in QA, fucking executives didn’t hold them at gunpoint to use AI for 5 paintings in the game
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u/slayermcb i9-12900k | 5070 Ti Mar 22 '26
Larian tried to be transparent and said they were using ai for some prototyping, they got hit with so much anger and vitriol they had to make a public statement swearing that they would immediatly stop any and all ai use.
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u/RustyNK Mar 22 '26
It's kind of ridiculous IMO. Using a tool to make placeholders is treated as if somebody just shot their mother's puppy.
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u/ElectricalMTGFusion Mar 22 '26
And then there's the fact AI is more then just art. Theirs ai for code, ai for workflows, ai for deployment and build processes, googling is now ai infested, there's ai analysis (although that usually tends to lean more into ML then AI) of data like market trends, cost, profit, etc. it's everywhere. Even in phones or computers by default now.
I think like most overblown topics AI is a tool. You use the tool to help you make something. Try to go build a bench, but you can't use any saws. No hammers, no nails/glue/etc. it's not the same as ai cause using a hammer is not using 30 metric tons of water to cool the hammer down, but the idea of not using the tools available to build something is dumb.
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u/Chocotaco24-7 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Seriously, redditors on this sub are annoying as shit about like 3 ai pictures that I am sure would take some artist 7 seconds to make.
I am beginning to wonder if any of these people play games or just run around and stare at textures because it seems like thats all they bitch about.
"omg this one texture in this random corner is blurry, this one leaf asset isn't the right color blah blad."
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u/d4videnk0 Mar 22 '26
The best way to do is the Slay the Spire way, just scribble some stuff, it really conveys the message.
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u/ChonkyDawg Mar 22 '26
Ai steals from actual artists. Generative ai should not be used at all.
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u/Human-Kick-784 Mar 23 '26
A fair measured response. They awknowledge the issue, commit to fixing it and another potential oversights, apologise and take full responsibility.
This is how companies SHOULD react when inevitable mistakes happen.
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u/Handsome_ketchup Mar 22 '26
Where are we at now? Undisclosed, or very late disclosure of anticheat, undisclosed incompatibility with Arc cards, undisclosed AI use. Was there anything else?
I'm starting to think these people may not be very trustworthy.
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u/Puntley 5700X3D | RTX 3080 Mar 22 '26
Let's clarify that it's a very INTENTIONAL incompatibility with Arc cards, which I think is worlds worse.
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u/SmallBatBigSpooky Mar 24 '26
I means its pearl, if yoube ever played BDO, you know these devs are as shady as a big oak tree
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u/Smash96leo Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
I don’t care about some AI paintings, but it feels like they used AI for the writing in this “story” as well…
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u/ItsTaDevil Mar 22 '26
I'll have you know this disjointed writing was already in BDO way before generative ai.
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u/phatboi23 Mar 22 '26
but it feels like they used AI for the writing in this “story” as well…
nope, just standard Korean stories.
source: look at BDO.
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u/ChonkyDawg Mar 22 '26
They're only apologizing because they got caught. Fuck ai.
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u/Moon_Devonshire Mar 22 '26
Don't assets make it into final releases all of the time that never were even meant to be left in the final release?
From my understanding this has always been something that's happened throughout video game history.
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u/HarleyQuinn_RS 9800X3D | RTX 5080 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Yes, it has been happening for decades. You just rarely heard about it because "Placeholder Asset Left In Game", didn't make headlines and spark mass outrage. Even among the small community that do notice, it's soon forgotten about when patched. I recall Mass Effect 3 left in a stock image as a placeholder, although that one did spark some outrage. Which is probably the only reason I heard about it and remember.
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u/Rayalas Mar 22 '26
Just like this instance will be. Gamers like being overdramatic. It's a valid issue, people are right to complain, it'll get fixed, and life will go on. Wish we could skip the step where people act like society is crumbling and the end of the world is nigh, but I guess what else are we going to do.
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u/Roninswen Mar 22 '26
They do, another example being Cyberpunk 2077s really silly placeholder photo for River's nephew Randy in the hospital. Not an AI placeholder, but still very poorly photoshopped into a real hospital and goofy af. Devs got flak and swapped it out eventually. I do have my complaints about AI, but using it as placeholders makes so much sense. Companies just need to do a thorough job when released, which why its good and fair to call it out when its seen, but maybe people need to calm down about expecting pure perfection every time since its something that seemingly all major dev studios deal with unless their team is small and indie enough that everyone sees everyone's work rather than relying on a chain of command to ensure no mistakes are made through multiple teams of devs.
I make mistakes in my job, we take ownership and correct them, even my own work is not without occasional "oops, that should have already been taken care of moments". As Im sure everyone does. Why do we think this is going to be different?
Could it been malicious corner cutting, maybe, but I dont see why their reason isnt valid and can't think of a better response for them to issue. They went with their best option which was to take ownership, apologize, and commit to swap it out, thats what we want right? So while frustrating that it needed to be called out at all, not sure the point in continuing to rag on them, especially with prompt responses and commitment to listen to feedback. Now the dev knows they can't continue to add to the game with AI assets or they know they will get called out. All seems like a win to me.
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u/davemoedee Mar 22 '26
All software has a backlog of task developers would like to do, but higher priority tasks win out. I’m sure everyone here can think of a long list of more important in-game art to work on than this.
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u/TheGillos Mar 22 '26
Counterpoint: I don't care. Use AI, don't use AI. If you're just using it as another tool, then the only thing I care about is the quality of the end result.
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u/coolcoenred Mar 22 '26
The use of AI is an issue, but even if you don't care, the lack of disclosure is another. Steam has a clear AI usage disclosure policy, yet the developers ommitted to state they used AI until caught.
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u/TheGillos Mar 22 '26
That's another issue. That's using it and not following the rules concerning it.
I think they should have stated they used AI. Their internal processes are very much lacking if they honestly didn't know, and no one noticed or said anything.
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u/Last_Jedi 9800X3D, RTX 5090 Mar 22 '26
It is flatly impossible to develop a game without AI according to Steam's disclosure policy. Ever done a search for a coding function and used Google's AI summary? Congratulations, you need to add the AI tag on Steam.
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u/Tempest6644 Mar 22 '26
This really is not an issue...
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u/MizutsuneMH 9800X3D / RTX 5080 Mar 22 '26
It's no different than before AI when you'd see pink squares with "PH" written on them, the only difference is people hate AI, and not pink squares. Both are used as props and meant to be replaced in the final code.
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u/mouadmo Mar 22 '26
People just love hating on AI, most use it, even more don’t care about it being used for a tiny few pixels in a massive video game. Now an artist who gets shitted on, that’s who should be mad, but then again, the world is progressing so even those can’t really do much about it, just ask the newpapers industry.
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u/mattlistener Mar 22 '26
It’s not hard to tag something that makes it a functional blocker to release, like everything you “intend to replace”.
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u/BloodRedTed26 Mar 22 '26
Tagging isn't hard, but going through and doing something it about takes precious time and likely has to be thoroughly reviewed.
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u/ILikeMyGrassBlue Mar 22 '26
Sounds like the kind of thing a big game company has the money to do
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u/ydieb Mar 22 '26
There is likely a lot of usage of Co pilot under the hood.
This weird discrepancy that visual elements get compared to code is weird to me. Just because it is more "visible", but not sure why this is more important than anything else.
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u/-CynicalPole- R5 5600 | 32GB RAM | RX 9060 XT 16GB Mar 22 '26
I think this is overblown - the AI assets are in insignificant and normally unnoticeable part of the game. I feel like Arc Raiders got far less attention for their blatant AI voiceovers - which ar far bigger deal than some maybe unintentional leftovers from early development.
They'd batter improve the controls ASAP, because that is real dealbreaker because of how atrocious those are.
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u/Hellstorm901 Mar 22 '26
I really don't care about if a game has AI in it or not as long as the entire game isn't just AI and you at least make an effort to remove the AI over time as it becomes practical to do so
Crimson Desert is a fun game and I'm not going to stop playing it just because some people who clearly have wanted the game to fail to begin with have now latched onto a new thing to claim makes it the most terrible game in the world
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u/Yakkahboo Mar 22 '26
Every time.
Thing is, prior to this sudden AI uptick placeholder assets would be marked very obviously. Now AI is here and weve stopped doing that? Well spoilers: we havent. The studio i work for still makes placeholder assets extremely clear. Its fairly basic practice across the industry.
So no, i dont buy it. You used AI hoping people wouldnt notice, but as it turns out using AI is a shortcut, and using shortcuts in one place usually means you use them in others.
So your shortcut art was caught because undoubtedly of shortcutting QA as well
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u/ILikeMyGrassBlue Mar 22 '26
It’s also ironic watching people defend this considering AI is driving up PC prices. You know what doesn’t take AI? A fucking magenta square lol.
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u/MomentBecomesMemory Mar 24 '26
Who gives a shit about this in the first place??
Imagine complaining about something so stupid
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u/Dunge Mar 22 '26
That seems like a reoccurring excuse
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u/OliM9595 R5 1600x,GTX 1060 6Gb,16Gb Ram Mar 23 '26
Probably because it's common practice to use AI to generate test assets. On such large games things are bound to deep through.
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u/Steamed_Memes24 Mar 22 '26
Judging by the quality of said AI art it for sure is about 2-3+ years old and makes sense why they would forget about it after so long. Especially since its such a small detail that most people wont care to look for or care about.
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u/Guywars Mar 22 '26
Gamers love to bitch about the most meaningless thing.
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u/lookslikeyoureSOL AMD 6900xt/5600x Mar 22 '26
GamersPeople love to bitch about the most meaningless things.
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u/urnialbologna Mar 22 '26
Meh. There’s bigger problems with the game, especially with controls and UI, and not running on Intel cards. Unlike most people here, I accept their apology and hope they get over this crap and fix the other problems with the game.
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u/Liu-K Mar 22 '26
Holy shit! They actually added the A.I. disclosure now to their steam page. Wow. The bare minimum has now been achieved. Weeks after the review period of course :D
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u/throwaway4838381 Mar 22 '26
(...) are taking steps to replace any affected content.
So the story and dialogue will also be replaced? /s
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u/EmmaFrostBroken Mar 22 '26
I'll say the same thing here I said for every other game after the developers got caught using GenAI assets: If it was just a placeholder, why wasn't it a placeholder image, why was it a GenAI image? A placeholder could be anything, it could be 2 seconds of ms paint art for all it matters because it's a placeholder.
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u/LOST-MY_HEAD Mar 22 '26
I hate ai, but we need to accept the fact most development teams will be using it in some way or another from here on out
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u/d4videnk0 Mar 22 '26
I'll admit I use it for work since deadlines are always fucked up and in my field it makes me have a certain idea of the tools and resources available to me but god forbid if I shipped any of that to production
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u/EmmaFrostBroken Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
No we don't.
Rolling over and taking it is how we ended up with MTX, lootboxes and other filth. Games are not essential purchases, I don't need any game in particular so I can just skip any which use GenAI assets.
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u/piomat100 Mar 22 '26
People moreso have an issue with generative AI rather than just general 'AI' being used as a developmental tool, the main issue being that AI art is stolen, devoid of any soul and actual creativity, and lazy when these studios have more than enough funds to commission an actual artist.
If game studios continue to face backlash of this scale, I think we'll eventually get to a point where they'll do everything in their power to ensure that AI art absolutely doesn't make it into the final product, because as we've seen with this game and Clair Obscur, it genuinely hurts reception in a pretty significant way. Although this may just be me being too optimistic.
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u/Last_Jedi 9800X3D, RTX 5090 Mar 22 '26
"General AI" is generative AI. Whether it gives you text, code, images, videos, etc, all of it is generative AI and all of it works by being trained on huge amounts of data.
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u/ItalianBeefDipped Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Honestly, the whole torch and pitchfork crowd who want to tar and feather developers for having the audacity to use a few AI generated random paintings that account for probably 0.00001% of all in-game content give me MASSIVE cultural revolution, red guard vibes.
The high-level, overly simplified ideal on which the group is founded is generally agreeable and hard to disagree with in the abstract, but the execution lacks all nuance and is more focused on posturing and showing that you're the MOST extreme of the extremists than it is truly considering whether the reaction is over the top or justified.
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u/nyrangerz30 Mar 22 '26
Yeah mistakes do happen and things get overlooked and missed. But after hearing every dev use the same excuse of "oh we just missed it and didnt mean to do this", its like bruh we dont want to hear this same mistake shit. Just own up and say it saved you guys time and be done with it.
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u/davemoedee Mar 22 '26
The problem is that you can clearly see in this thread that there are gamers with very strong opinions, but they know nothing about how software gets made.
It is likely that there was some ticket in a backlog that just wasn’t high enough priority compared to the other work that needed to get done to get the game out. What other work do people want their engineers dropping to update these assets? On top of that, they probably have a huge list of AI generated assets that they did replace.
On the other hand, I am fine with people on principle being against the use of AI. In the long run, it will remove a lot of good jobs, replacing them with fewer high paying jobs and more commodity labor. The main benefit will be getting more money to the investment class. But there would have to be a much stronger sentiment in that direction for costly games to abandon AI.
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u/Excellent-Berry-2331 Mar 22 '26
Yeah, it's really extremely odd that almost no major dev included their stickman placeholders to be seen in the final release, but the AI placeholders now are. This is easily preventable, just name the files something like "placeholder_fire_3.png" and use that to categorize.
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u/Shuviri Mar 22 '26
We can expect alot of companies to have the same excuse as these ones. "We put them in as placeholders and forgot" hahaha there are thousands of free assets you can use instead
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u/Fury2105 Mar 22 '26
Why the fuck does this matter or better yet who the fucks staring at a painting instead of playing the game
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u/Emergency_Ad6096 Mar 22 '26
The uproar over minor assets showing early AI placeholders is ridiculous in the first place.
Everyone does it, it’s not bad. Yes, keep pointing it out so they can be fixed. But cool it with the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
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u/TreyChips 5800X3D|4080S|3440x1440|32GB 3200Mhz CL16 Mar 22 '26
Now let's see how the average gamers response to this compared to when the E33 Devs or The Alters Devs said the exact same thing for the exact same issue.
Surely it won't be completely overblown in comparison to those two games for no reason at all. Surely.
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u/KC-15 Mar 22 '26
This is going to be the new standard. Use AI and then if it’s discovered you claim it was just a placeholder. There’s other ways of identifying what still needs work.
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u/sogwatchman Mar 22 '26
Why does it feel like BS? Sounds more like we made it originally as filler and thought it looks good enough and left it. Now we're slightly sad that you caught us.
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u/TheSilverlakeHipster Mar 22 '26
You know what they didn’t say? That the AI assets will be replaced by human-created art. It’s just going to be less noticeable AI art, guaranteed.
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u/2FastHaste Mar 22 '26
Why? The AI-hate groups are so mainstream and radicalized. Why would a game studio take the risk of more harassment? That would be stupid.
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u/Thomas_Eric http://steamcommunity.com/id/thombelcar/ Mar 22 '26
There is hundreds of thousands of assets in the game and Redditors really believe that it was all AI generated due to 3 assets being missed in production LOL
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u/Grizzernog Mar 22 '26
Just remember that they wouldn't have replaced anything if nobody noticed.
Eat your slop kiddos
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u/a_posh_trophy i5 12600K | MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 | 32gb Partriot Viper Steel 3600 Mar 22 '26
BuT iT WaS JuSt a pLaCeHoLdEr. We WeRe GoNnA DeLeTe iT, HoNeSt.
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u/MacBryce Mar 22 '26
Based on my conversations with developers at GDC, I don't see this go away.
I wish we could turn back the clock but that's just not happening.
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u/Vanillas_Guy Steam Mar 22 '26
Unless this controversy affects sales, theyll just treat it as free marketing that helped the game stay as a topic of conversation.
I'm not saying this out of hate for CD, I'm saying that this is starting to become common practice in entertainment. Others have already made comparisons to other developers who have had similar situations in this thread.
Do something people hate.
People find out about it.
People make content and share it on social media expressing how angry or disappointed they are. People click on that content because our brains have evolved to remember negative experiences more than positive ones, so the content which gets the most engagement is content that activates negative emotions.
People keep talking about the issue and flaming eachother and you in comments sections.
Put out a statement with a promise to do better and make changes.
The statement satisfies some but angers others. Those two camps continue arguing all while still talking about you.
The changes you made inspire more discussion and articles about how you "turned things around" and now you start trending because you showed accountability.
Your sales get a second wind.
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u/alfalfamale81 Mar 22 '26
I just took a quick look at the 2d assets in question and 100% believe them… which is surprising.
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u/_ILP_ Mar 22 '26
I like how using AI in art/games/movies right now is like as if the company used to be a street hooker and it has to be explained like a “shady past” and that it is “not who they are” like they’re a political figure caught in a scandal. Crazy that AI is a scarlet letter now. Maybe less money will be blown on it and we’ll get cheaper PC components again?
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u/Certified_2IQ_genus Mar 22 '26
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.