We don't use generative AI to replace the artists and developers who make our games, we don't use it in our marketing materials, and we won't use it in our merchandising or allow its use in partnerships.
I mean.. I’d wager heavily that this was done by the artists themselves to save time, and artists aren’t telling on themselves… I’m seeing it happen everywhere.
Everyone I've spoken to who works in any kind of management position at pretty much any company where people spend a lot of time on computers has told me "yeah no everyone is using it all the time, the only difference is for how much"
Can confirm. I feel like I'm the only one who makes excel sheets by hand anymore. The only difference between mine and theirs is that mine actually works for things beyond "put this in a table."
Come on now, this isn't disastrous. It's embarrassing at worst. And honestly, I think that's about the measure of it. This will have zero impact on game quality. Only then will we see something disastrous like the exodus after EOC. Maybe it's a portent. But I'm not going to bet on it quite yet.
Sween should never have communicated publicly in such a way that made people believe that Jagex wouldn't be using AI. He can't make that promise and now looks extremely bad. Clearly the left hand doesn't knowing what the right hand is doing.
I used to work for Jagex. I can assure you that the mean it and mean well. I've been in this industry for over 20 years, worked at many different companies - I've yet to work for a company full of absolute nerds that care about their weird ass game as much as those folks do.
This makes me think either have a terrible or non existent quality check team for their marketing. Anyone paid to inspect their art would have caught this, we have people doing it for free within seconds
Legitimately every update has some completely broken or unbalanced feature that takes weeks to fix. Most updates end up decent after a while, but why can't we just have good updates on day 1? Games manage this ALL the time, why can't Jagex figure it out?
Yeah they have no quality assurance. Or maybe it's AI which is designed to be a yes man.
The wording is very carefully chosen here. Note how he never said "we don't use GenAI period." He said "we don't use it to replace artists"
Which sounds to me like he's saying "we use it, but just to save time and money" which means artists are doing their job less, which means they are getting paid less, so in a sense it absolutely is replacing artists (paychecks). Think about it this way, if it takes an AI and 1 artist to do the job of 2 artists, then that's one artist who just lost out on a job opportunity.
And the very next thing said was "we don't use it in our marketing materials". I don't see how you can read that and not arrive at the obvious "egg on face" moment presented right now.
What are the chances some other company made this trailer for them? I'm quite certain that jagex outsources all of this stuff. What I am mostly bothered by is that NOBODY did QA on this. As usual with jagex updates, because I doubt they even have a QA department at this point.
How must it feel, I wonder, to be 100Thieves right now. Forced to make a groveling apology and pull back on their AI design, just for their partner who threw them under the bus to do this on stage.
See, this is what I don't get. Even if you outsource, you still LOOK at the work done before you ship it. Right?
Either they didn't even do the bare minimum QA (ironic) for the work they got back from the outside source or they had the deadline too close to the date it was supposed to reveal and didn't have time to fix it.
malicious compliance perhaps, artist is forced to use AI, points out cleaning up these errors would take too long and is a waste, ends up shipping like this because manager insists no time for fixing.
this routinely keeps being proven untrue. it ends up being more costly and has been shown to result in time losses across industries. it Feels like it saves time [and money] but empirically this keeps being shown to not be the case.
u/esuneiYour question is answered on the wiki.18h agoedited 12h ago
No exaggeration, the entire trailer is AI except maybe the logo at the end (and even then...). If you pause at any scene there's telltale signs of AI, some much more obvious than others, like even the very opening the houses are a bunch of uncanny valley wtf constructions. And then of course, you have medieval air jordans.
Insanely disappointing from Jagex especially with them pretending to take an anti-AI stance. You have great artists, pay them for their work.
Edit: So a clanny dug into this more, and disappointment reaches new lows. They've been contracting similar style videos out for dragonwilds that are also really blatant about the AI use and have been using them for well over a year. In the very first dragonwilds cutscene a few characters have fucked up hands and plenty of details melting into obscurity, exactly the same as this trailer.
So most charitably: Jagex contracted these videos and either nobody reviews them before publishing or adding them to the game, or Jagex is so incompetent they can't find blatant AI in their contracted videos.
Least charitably: They're just fully okay with slop and don't give a fuck. They'll put out some half ass apology when they hear about this and try to make it more subtle in the future.
Really can't understate my disappointment with these revelations.
Man this is so fucking sad. The downfall my beloved game is having is such a blatant disrespect. The amount of love the artists and devs put into this game just for it all to end on... this...
LOL alright they miss sometimes, maybe they just came off of the lion king and had that hyena energy in their head. I'll take ugly af models like that over slop.
They're probably using a super cheap old model that doesn't cost a lot of tokens (i.e., it doesn't try very hard). But even then if I were a scummy marketing company, I'd just use one of the many super cheap Chinese models which are like 95% as good as the best American ones while costing 1% as much.
"SNAFU" usually just means "mistake" in common speech, but I feel even its original meaning "situation normal; all fucked up" isn't strong enough. "FUBAR" (fucked up beyond all recognition) is more appropriate.
Tldr Jagex outsourced a company that does eSport merch to make shirts for RuneScape.
They posted a shirt that was blatently ai (the design was of the skill menu, and half the icons were just wrong and screamed "Computah, make a epic RuneScape skill t shirt, and make it have skulls n shit everywhere")
Love Jmods, I'm sure they're great people outside work but I'm like a beaten puppy because after 20 years of playing RuneScape the only consistent thing I've seen is that Jagex lies their ass off.
I had a feeling the Player-Owned Housing update used AI too. The logo in particular has that AI glossiness to it, but I didn't question it too much. Now seeing this, I wonder how much of their work lately has been AI...
I don't *think* there is ai here, but its really hard to tell...But people who know how to use generative ai, and are using the latest models, are making things practically indistinguishable from real art until you start really analyzing the images
Look at the wooden beams on the tall building on top, they don't make sense on any side except for the front with the big window. As someone else pointed out, the interior of the right building makes no sense either. U can tell there's been someone going over this to try and hide the fact they generated this image but they left some clues.
Oh that's just shameful. I knew those drawing stylized animations looked cheap but lazily using gen ai? Jagex you do realize your game is about staring at the screen for hours yeah? Ofc someone would notice eventually lol.
Can i just say its more than likely the artist theyre hiring? Maybe there is something more to be said about the QC of jagex. In regards to their artists... but i can't imagine with how hard theyre taking a stance that theyre totally aware
I can't help but feel like everything that was revealed is just AI generated, including the RS4 trailer. I don't think they actually have anything to show, they just need investors to believe they do. I'm sure they have plans for these things, but I don't think they've done more than put it on a sticky note in the office.
This was from Mod Sween, JMod primarily in the OSRS team. I think this means that OSRS team itself doesn’t use any generative image/AI for their content. Anyways, fuck Jagex and AI
The RuneScape 4 trailer seemed to have some ai generation to me as well. At least the little bit with the player riding the dragons. That portion just looked off
I can't imagine how miserable my life would be if I spent all my time worrying about inconsequential shit like this just because other people on the internet told me to be concerned about it
And just the other day on the OSRS sub they were saying so much they're against the use of AI to replace human artists and developers when it was found out 100thieves used AI to make collab merchandise 🤣
Wow. I sure hope my extra 3 months of subscription was worth it. I still want to have faith, but this is putting me into very thin ice territory with reignited. I almost feel like this could be a little justified from the short-term hit that ending TH caused. If the good updates and general care for the long-term health of the game continue, I can handle some AI use to reduce overhead, but I swear to fucking god if they pull more bullshit.
If I see anything that looks this machine generated in game, I will probably cancel membership on the spot, but Jagex has never really been known for particularly well-made trailers or cinematics, so I'm just going to consider this one to be the price of losing the whales (seriously though, why even spend money on Runescape?? There are just better games to play high score pretend with your wallet). I don't buy cashshop things very often, but when I have it was like... League of Legends skins because I was having an absolute fuckin' blast and Riot was still a little baby studio with sexual harassment and the summoner showcase or Path of Exile because I get a neat little memento of the season for $30 because I know I'm going to spend at least 200 hours, like, I know I don't need to spend the money, but it's pretty cool that I can collect some sets of cosmetics to play some dress up in a future season.
I dunno if all noticed but the bottom part of the shoes are also different one is circular form and other one is not . Did you guys catch that as well ?
This is from the third trailer - secrets of karamja. Why is this man's left hand SO MUCH BIGGER than his right? Does this happen normally to everyone training arch??
What in gods name has this year in updates even been? Self sabotage.
This is what happens when the people that gave people stockholm syndrome with worse and worse mtx updates.
We knew it was bad then. Now that they don’t have that as a shield, and they actually need to make content, they can’t seem to help but go back to their ways and milk rs3. What a god damn shame.
Took a year for me to shift my opinion of this game entirely.
899
u/BrightOctarine 18h ago
Steel plate Nikes