Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”.
“I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender told Kotaku in a recent interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.'” I assume that’s not a verbatim quote, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
The publishers also take a dim view of using generative AI for “placeholder” work, or indeed any ‘non-final’ aspect of game development. “We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?” Bender went on.
As with much discussion of generative AI, the difficulty of Hooded Horse’s position is pinning down what they’re trying to ban. Does an artwork count as generated if somebody used the tech to make a base image of some kind, then fleshed it out and finished it off at length by hand?
A very salient question. Is someone generates a rough outline and then redraws it, fixing errors and making modifications with their human artist eye, is the thing they draw a problem? It will involve a human artist, and human artistic skill.
Tracing is one way to teach children how to draw. If someone generates an image to trace for practice, is all their art problematic because they were trained with AI?
This seems kind of like asking a vegan if they’d eat lab-grown meat… I think the answer depends heavily on why the person believes what they do in the first place.
One way of looking at it is serving a vegan a vegan meal, after you slaughtered a cow for the first couple of tries. Some of the damage has already been done.
Also, we’ve had several kerfuffles already where GenAI “placeholders” were present in a released game, and caused plenty of outrage. It’s far safer to never have those placeholders to begin with. Just draw up something ugly in Paint, at least it’ll be plenty obvious you need to fix it before launching the game.
Maybe a better analogy would be the Ship of Theseus - how much of an AI-generated picture has to be replaced by human work for it to not be considered slop anymore?
Slop of Theseus
Omg. The damage has been done? Cows have been killed, because someone used an ai generated texture for mud.
In order to generate that texture, AI bots have already been attacking every website hosting content on the internet for the past year, to the point that they were basically DDoSed and forced to take extreme measures to stay online. Plenty of copyrighted works have been slurped up without consent from their authors, a massive amount of energy has been used to inference the models and even more energy (far more than all cryptocurrencies combined for example) is used generating things from those models. So yes, a lot of damage has already been done. Far more than killing a couple of cows.
That’s bullshit exaggeration and you know it.
Plus there are legally made models.
Massive energy is used to give you porn, its the way it is. Humanity needs more and more energy all the time. Making that one thing you don’t like the problem is not sensible.
That’s bullshit exaggeration and you know it.
It is not a bullshit exaggeration.
Yes it is. It is and also a generalization.
And in the end, it doesn’t matter. The are tens of thousands of people dying each year to support the living standard you enjoy, but you have focused on ai. Your outrage is a fallacy.
I’ve seen the argument that if you’re generating an image and making some edits, you’re robbing yourself of original concepts. Even if human hands do the editing you’ve already outsourced one of the most important parts.
I’ve seen the argument that if you’re generating an image and making some edits, you’re robbing yourself of original concepts
This argument can also be deployed against Fair Use artworks, though, or tracing.
I need to admit that in the past day, I asked an AI to write unit tests for a feature I’d just added. I didn’t trust it to write the feature, and I had to fix the tests afterwards, but it did save time.
I really don’t see any usefulness or good intent in the art world though. Sooo much of those models has been put together through copyright theft of people’s work. Disney made a pretty good case against them, before deciding to team up for a shitty service feature.
It’s sad Clair Obscur lost that indie award, but hopefully the game dev world can take that as a bit of a lesson.
I recently used one “agentic ‘AI’” to help writing unit tests. Was surprisingly productive with it; but also felt very dirty afterwards.
Don’t. I think it honestly has a place. Now that place is vastly different from what business bros think it is, but it does have a place. I think writing tests is a great reason, and it’s a good double check. Writing documentation is good, and even writing some boilerplate code and models. The kicker is that you need to already be an engineer to use it, and to understand what it’s doing. I would not trust it blindly, and I feel confident enough to catch it.
It’s another tool in our belt, it’s fine to use it that way. Management is insane though if they think you’ll 10x. Maybe 2x.
I don’t know what you mean, but as a designer I can imagine my work without ai anymore. I get the same response from everybody I know In my line of work.
I don’t get banning it. At most for the ethical prudes is limiting one self to the models that were legally trained. But I have no problem admitting I am not one of those.
I still haven’t seen anything neat from any models that were certified following only legally permitted content. That said, to my knowledge there’s very few of that variety.
Training off of the work of current artists serves to starve them by negating the chance companies hire them on, and results in circumstances where AI trains off of other AIs, creating terrible work and a complete lack of innovation.
People suggest a brilliant future where no one has to work and AI does everything, but current generations of executives are so cut-throat and greedy to maximize revenue at the top, that will never happen without extreme, rapid political and commercial reform.
Artists have been always starving. The future is such that if you can’t compete with ai , chose another profession where you can. That’s not something I want, but the world is changing and people have to change with it. That’s either with another profession or by voting in politicians that can redistribute the wealth back to them. There is no option where the progress stops , where the clock stops ticking.
Many artists do starve, and many others succeed. Not sure what your point is, or why you want to shift the needle more in the former direction.
AI can’t compete with artists if they are not generating content to serve for the model. Even if the models could achieve consistent art, it would mean we get no new themes or ideas. People who would normally invent those new styles will start by repeating what’s existing, and will be paid for that.
Many nations provide grants for art, because they recognize it’s a world that doesn’t always generate immediate, quantifiable monetary return, but in the long run proves valuable. The base expectation is that companies recognize that value and uniqueness in fostered talent as well, rather than the immediacy of AI prompts giving them “good enough” visuals.
Artists are always starving is because that’s how it’s always been. I don’t think it can be an argument for or against anything.
I’ve worked with ai image generation professionally and I can say that they are not missing new ideas if people using them aren’t. They are great for brainstorming new ideas. They can’t make a design, but are a great tool speeding up the process.
I love art. I go to galleries often. I don’t think ai can do that and will never be able to. Not true art like capturing a moment in time with the original style of the artist and their life experience. I don’t think ai is a threat to that.
I saw an article about an artist who used AI just for overall composition, and who said that he couldn’t compete if he didn’t do this, because everyone in his field was doing it and it was significantly faster than what he used to do.
I suspect that when people say things like “AI cannot possibly help field X be more efficient like it does in field Y,” what they often really mean is, “I work in field Y and not field X.”
He’s right. You have to use the tools at your disposal. It’s not only a matter of survival but also about streamlining your work process. Focusing on the main design decisions and letting the machine do at least some of the leg work when possible. It’s more pleasant like that.
I don’t mind people hating on ai. Everybody can not use it as much as they want.
I often use it in programming to either layout the unit testsor do something that’s repetitive like create entities or DTOs from schemas. These tasks I can do myself easily but they’re boring and I will also make mistakes. I always have to check every single line and need to correct things, plus have to write one or two detailed prompts to make sure that the correct pattern and style is followed. It saves me a lot of time, but always tries to do more than it should: if it writes tests it will try and run them, and then try and fix them, and then try to change my code which is annoying and I always cancel all of that.
I find AI art and creative writing boring and I only really see these things as a tool to support being more efficient where applicable, and you also have to know what you’re doing, just like using any other tool.
create entities or DTOs from schemas
Surely there are deterministic tools to do this?
There are and I used to use them but they aren’t error-free either or following the style guides I need to adhere to so it’s essentially the same outcome.
I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t
seeing as how using genAI even during development is still rare enough that it makes the news, I can’t imagine it’s been as big of a problem for them as they make it seem. this sounds more like a smaller publisher taking a popular public stance for the PR.
I’ve seen games in store listings that were obviously AI slop copying their entire game, Manor Lords (which is awesome btw)
