Fans slam The Alters after discovering evidence of undisclosed gen AI in images, text, and translation
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There's a number of reasons, not least of which being that generative AI works by processing vast amounts of prior work (without their creators' consent) to make a facsimile of it, while procedural generation only manipulates assets the developer creates. Procedural generation isn't putting artists and writers out of business. Procedural generation isn't making Idiocracy a reality, with fucking English majors unable to read Dickens without asking OpenAI to interpret the text for them. "They do similar things" doesn't mean they're equivalent. My point being, it's not inconsistent to be okay with procedural generation and not okay with generative AI.
this is a fantastic point. well put.
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How can you be sure that in any game AI wasn't used to generate some sort of an internal document or asset that would never be in the final product but was integral to the creation of the final product?
I never claimed to be omniscient. I simply don't support a company after I find out that they have unethical business practices. What are you not understanding about this?
Got it, you're fine with AI usage as long as you don't know about it.
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Correct! If you're not going to support artists and writers, the least you can do is not support the industry that's actively destroying the fields of art and writing (on top of the myraid other problems with generative AI)
No artist or writer would have been hired for producing placeholder assets.
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According to the article as cited in this comment, we do know the reason and a rush job to meet a deadline is precisely why.
I wouldn’t say „precisely“ as those are (plausible) speculations.
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Got it, you're fine with AI usage as long as you don't know about it.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]No? I just don't know that I should avoid a product if I don't know about the ethical problems with it. That's how boycotts work...
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That's kinda the problem. We're already careless with the things we do ourselves. It can't be helped, nobody's perfect. But once we start delegating tasks, we lose the direct experience. Priorities shift, attention moves to something else and the chance of carelessness rises because it's no longer a problem we have to concern ourselves with.
Meanwhile, the LLM "learns". What it "learns", nobody knows because it does so mechanically. There's zero understanding.
It keeps "learning" every time it's fed something, so you don't have a static program that does what it's told. Instead it's a "living" program that applies what it "learns". And that makes it unpredictable in the long run.This turns the user into a glorified middle manager who has to hover over their employee and make sure they did their job as they should have. And how many middle managers do you know with that kind of dedication, that isn't spiteful at its core?
The push against this is that the people depending on it to do the work become less dependable themselves.
And unless you're an independent developer without a profit driven publisher breathing down your neck, this will be used in all the wrong ways as a standard instead of it being the exception.I don’t think it’s important where the placeholder assets come from, or that mistakes will be more common when someone used gen AI instead of non-licensed stock image from a web search.
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I don’t think it’s important where the placeholder assets come from, or that mistakes will be more common when someone used gen AI instead of non-licensed stock image from a web search.
You're right. It's an opinion and only as important as the one having the opinion decides it to be.
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No? I just don't know that I should avoid a product if I don't know about the ethical problems with it. That's how boycotts work...
That's like saying you boycot Nestle but won't stop using any of their subsidiary products unless you accidentally find out that a brand not named Nestle is actually owned by Nestle.
You had a bridge to sell to anyone with the naivete to believe it's the only place AI was used. What about your naivity of believing that other games are not using AI, unless of course you stumble on the information about AI usage? Seems hypocritical to criticize others for giving the benefit of doubt while giving the benefit of doubt to all other developers simply because you don't know any better?
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When people are talking about dissatisfaction with AI usage, in this context they specifically mean LLMs and GenAI. Google translate may use LLMs as part of their translation model, but it doesn't make up the whole pipeline and will work completely differently than copy pasting some text into an LLM and telling it to translate something.
It probably uses a GPT of some sort at this point, tbh. There is no reason whatsoever using Google's ML translation or ChatGPT's ML translation should make any bit of difference to people who are actually upset over this if they have given any thought whatsoever to their concerns.
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That's like saying you boycot Nestle but won't stop using any of their subsidiary products unless you accidentally find out that a brand not named Nestle is actually owned by Nestle.
You had a bridge to sell to anyone with the naivete to believe it's the only place AI was used. What about your naivity of believing that other games are not using AI, unless of course you stumble on the information about AI usage? Seems hypocritical to criticize others for giving the benefit of doubt while giving the benefit of doubt to all other developers simply because you don't know any better?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]How the fuck would I boycott a brand for being owned by Nestle before I find out that it's owned by Nestle?
I don't know if other games are using generative AI. Maybe they are. If I find out they are, I will not buy them. If I don't find out that they are, how would I know that they're using it? The fact that I'm not able to detect it 100% of the time doesn't make me okay with it when I don't know it's there. What in any of my comments has made you think I have an "I don't care as long as I don't notice it" attitude???
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Very soon protesting the use of LLMs is like going to be like protesting the advent of the television. There is no stopping it. We should endeavour to ensure it is used ethically rather than becoming puritanical about its use.
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Very soon protesting the use of LLMs is like going to be like protesting the advent of the television. There is no stopping it. We should endeavour to ensure it is used ethically rather than becoming puritanical about its use.
Nope, fuck that, fuck genAI it is unethical by virtue of stealing to train and vastly draining resources to power slop garbage.
Television was a medium, communication. GenAI is not communicating shit, it's trash sold on a lie.
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Very soon protesting the use of LLMs is like going to be like protesting the advent of the television. There is no stopping it. We should endeavour to ensure it is used ethically rather than becoming puritanical about its use.
There's still plenty of people who don't watch TV.
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Very soon protesting the use of LLMs is like going to be like protesting the advent of the television. There is no stopping it. We should endeavour to ensure it is used ethically rather than becoming puritanical about its use.
It will take a fundamentally different algorithmic approach to make further progress in ML.
We have never figured out a different approach since it's inception in the 60s
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Super weird take, honestly. Procedurally generated content gets no hate, despite it being janky dogshit, too.
EDIT: lol your downvotes don't make your opinion more consistent
Like procedural generation, generative assets that are done well will be either indistinguishable from hand work, likely because there will be some involved, or will be incorporated in a way that they mesh well with everything else.
Everyone hated the procedural generation in no man's sky, for example, until enough work was done to make that just a piece of the game.
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Like procedural generation, generative assets that are done well will be either indistinguishable from hand work, likely because there will be some involved, or will be incorporated in a way that they mesh well with everything else.
Everyone hated the procedural generation in no man's sky, for example, until enough work was done to make that just a piece of the game.
No Man's Sky was one of the most hyped video games in history due to procedural generation. The fact that they botched it on release is not relevant.
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Nope, fuck that, fuck genAI it is unethical by virtue of stealing to train and vastly draining resources to power slop garbage.
Television was a medium, communication. GenAI is not communicating shit, it's trash sold on a lie.
Television was a medium
Yeah. We called it that because it was neither rare, nor well done. Bad writing has always existed.
it's trash sold on a lie.
You sweet summer child... The French have an expression for this: Plus ça change
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No Man's Sky was one of the most hyped video games in history due to procedural generation. The fact that they botched it on release is not relevant.
I don't agree at all, the hype was evident, sure, but the procedural generation was largely the reason people didn't like the game.
You stated that procedural generation isn't hated, but 'botching' the usage of it at release is the piece that irrelevant. The people hated it because of the, admittably bad, procedural generation.
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How the fuck would I boycott a brand for being owned by Nestle before I find out that it's owned by Nestle?
I don't know if other games are using generative AI. Maybe they are. If I find out they are, I will not buy them. If I don't find out that they are, how would I know that they're using it? The fact that I'm not able to detect it 100% of the time doesn't make me okay with it when I don't know it's there. What in any of my comments has made you think I have an "I don't care as long as I don't notice it" attitude???
How the fuck would I boycott a brand for being owned by Nestle before I find out that it's owned by Nestle?
Consumer research, look up the brands you don't know before you buy them, the corps aren't generally out here running shell companies to hide relationships.
Im not being snide and I don't care about the rest of the argument with OP, this is the literal answer to that one question, that's all.
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You're expecting it to be used responsibly when we ourselves in general are very lacking in that department.
This here is a very good example of the actual use that will happen. A rush job to meet unrealistic deadlines. And that's what will happen as is the norm.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]The translation flub is the only part that mattered here. The Alters was getting a ton of praise and good press for its story, characters, mocap, VA, mechanics, visuals, you name it. Finding out that someone used GPT for some glorified lorem ipsum to paste on a random background object doesn't change the quality one iota. The art team for this game was paid and hired and they did a phenomenal job with the game, but one of those paid artists took a shortcut for some assets. It's not a "the ayy eye is letting corpo CEOs skip out on paying real human artists!!!" situation here.
Do you know what else paid artists / game studios do other than pay a human to create an asset from scratch? They buy models and textures on the Unreal/etc asset store. The same exact boulder model is present in everything from ffviiR to Clair Obscur to Death Stranding, because it comes free with the engine and is "good enough" just like an AI generated rock texture would be.
Ever hire a professional photo editor? They're using generative AI. Every last one of them. They've been doing it for like 15 years ever since Adobe introduced "content-aware fill" algorithms that generate backgrounds to replace random bystanders or objects in a shot. Is the scary robot stealing someone's job and burning the planet there too?
However, using machine translation without even a proofreading pass is hilarious. Using a conversational model for translation is double hilarious. Surely purpose-built translation tools exist and are more efficient than "asking" chatGPT to "translate this line into Brazilian Portuguese".
