The Alters, Clair Obscur, and the curious case of AI nonchalance

Plus, my stance on GenAI in games

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

The gaming bubble collectively lost it last week over The Alters―first, at how good it was, and second, at how blasé its creators acted about their failure to disclose GenAI use in it.

These were placeholders, they said.

No one was supposed to see it, they said.

We were pressed for time, they said.

The usual bullshit.

The growing complacency about GenAI surprises me, but maybe it shouldn't. GenAI tools and the slop they produce are spreading like wildfire over social feeds that aren’t equipped to handle the surge. We are all collectively drowning in junk.

To be clear, I am specifically referring to GenAI, not AI technology in general. I’m on board with machine learning, automation, autocorrect, and other forms of unassisted decision-making. Alex Antra has a fantastic explainer of why not all AI is bad and what the issues with GenAI are.

To echo their post, here are my reasons for believing GenAI sucks and avoiding it whenever possible (yes, I wish Grammarly didn’t build that one in):

• LLMs have been trained on millions of pieces of content with no consent, compensation, or consideration for the humans who created it. GenAI is theft.

• LLMs continue to be trained on human input and prompts without users’ consent or just with their implied consent, which is not better.

• LLMs aren’t actually intelligent. They can’t think, they can’t empathize, and they can’t give advice. All they can do is look for patterns in users’ prompts and match them to strings of words and phrases they have been trained on. The answers they come up with may be correct, but they can also be a hallucination, misinformation, or a lie.

• Humans talking to ChatGPT like they’re another human is one of the most frightening and unnatural things that I’ve ever witnessed. Strong uncanny valley vibes. The complex mix of emotions I feel makes me want to give people a hug and toss their devices in the lake all at once.

• Last but not least, the amount of motherfucking energy GenAI content production, or inference, wastes is unreal. Data centres that sustain it have a significant carbon footprint, and all for what? So we can have terrible AI-generated video game movie trailers?

There’s plenty of evidence of GenAI hurting the video games industry, hindering creativity, and doing away with jobs, not to mention the climate impact. Yet the industry isn’t uniform on GenAI usage, as the case of The Alters shows. Taking a principled stance against GenAI is increasingly difficult because the perception is that everyone has just accepted this as our reality. (I’m glad to see publications like Aftermath taking a clear stance. Makes me―us―feel less alone.)

On a personal level, I don’t understand the logic behind using GenAI for assets that are, in developers’ own words, so insignificant that players aren’t supposed to even see them.

Is it much easier to throw a prompt to whatever image-producing bot than to ask a designer to doodle something? Wouldn’t they love to come up with a wacky easter egg?

Is saving $100 an hour to pay a human translator so much more important than risking ChatGPT making up shit?

Is it actually time-saving?

I understand the temptation to delegate a boring task, I really do. Have something spit out an answer immediately is pretty damn cool. As a writer with a strong empty page syndrome, I know it all too well.

But if you give in, the more you do it, the harder it gets to actually do a thing yourself. Don’t let your creative muscle atrophy, I’m begging you. Even when you’re struggling to find words and end up producing something imperfect, your brain’s work holds more inherent value than GenAI slop. Mercilessly excise the impulse to copy someone else’s homework, because this is what GenAI does.

The backlash against The Alters shows that the ubiquity of GenAI is not a case closed. Disclosing the usage of GenAI is the least the devs can do. Steam requires it. 11 Bit Studios caught more flak for failing to disclose than for using GenAI in the first place. Should they have disclosed, a portion of the player base might have avoided the game, while another portion could have made a more informed decision to support it or not. It would have likely hurt the game and the studio’s reputation less.

Let me state this loud and clear: I am against GenAI-created anything that goes into video games. I demand disclosure of such assets used, so I can decide on a case-by-case basis if I want to support or continue supporting the product in question. I will actively ignore, boycott, and decline coverage of games, studios, and publishers that use GenAI in an undisclosed manner.

Now let me get off my high horse and admit that this is going to be very difficult when it comes to games that I have already played and possibly really, really liked.

Case in point: Expedition 33. Wow, does that hurt to type! Apparently, the early version of the game included AI-generated textures that were quietly patched out a few days after release. Why did no one cover it? Luke Plunkett from Aftermath explains:

I cannot find it in me to boycott Clair Obscur. (The high horse is well in its stable now, guys!) Practically, yes, I’ve already bought the game, played the game, loved the game, and wrote about the game. I do so want to give Sandfall the benefit of the doubt. I want to believe that they’re different, they’re the good guys. Most of all, even if they’re not, I hope that they are listening and learning The Alters’ lesson to not ever mess with the muddy gloop of GenAI again, lest we all get dirty.

It’s all too easy to become desensitized to GenAI. Don’t accept it. If we fold our arms in defeat, AI slop will take over, but it’s not there yet. Resist—it’s not over.

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