Owlcat is using generative AI for The Expanse Osiris Reborn, but the final game will be "100% human made"
Waiting for the "Whoops, we 'forgot' to remove it".
https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-expanse-osiris-reborn/generative-aiOpen linkView original on lemmy.world267
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If your placeholder doesn't stick out like a sore thumb, it's a bad placeholder. There is literally no workflow in which temporary assets shat by AI would be useful.
They just want to normalize AI use until people don't care anymore. And with the waste of resources this shit represents, I just hope this never happens.
You don't see the use in an artist viewing an approximation of the finished product in order to see what can be improved?
Do you suppose all conductors just write symphonies in their heads and never have to hear them out loud before deciding they're done? Would it be useful to replace the tuba with a placeholder of a duck quacking, or do you think they might want it to sound like a tuba even though it's not the final product?
Even a cheap toy synthetizer can make something close enough to a tuba sound to get an idea of what it sounds like. Need something better? people make sound fonts for that.
But maybe it's better to use generative AI to potentially have something close to the real thing, just so you can have huge datacenters consuming absurd amounts of power and water too.
What are ya, a shill for the toy synthesizer companies?!?! They just want to take jobs away from us hard working tuba players!!n
I don't because that's not what artists do.
Artists are not people who bring nearly finished projects over the finish line. And if your finished project does not look anything like your nearly-finished AI assets, what are you actually using them for?
You're saying artists never look at their work and decide to change something. Ok, buddy.
Okay, well if you're going to be like that, I'll talk to someone else:
An artist's job is to pull together research, resources, history, knowledge, opinions, their own fluency in the language of the medium they're using, and a bit of inspiration, and turn that into something interesting, or cool, or flashy, or thought provoking.
AI generation, even for the concept phase, skips 90% of that effort.
You can't fabricate something with AI and then re-make it by hand later because these are two halves of the same process. By the time the hands are involved, there is very little left for them to do.
That's a narrow definition of an art that doesn't apply to real life. Like it or not, Marcel Duchamp won the argument over whether or not he was an artist.
Marcel Duchamp is not working on video games.
Marcel Duchamp does fit my definition.
I'm certainly more interested in his work than yours.
Fine then I won't show you my awesome artwork.
Here's a good example of placeholder art being very visible from Slay the Spire 2
Collecting VC funding, particularly demonstrations or even gameplay captures.
Whelp, my interest in The Expanse Osiris Reborn has officially died...Rest in Piss, Owlcat!
Well, fuck. At least we got Rogue Trader and the Pathfinder games before enshittification began.
If we conveniently forget about how unethical all AI is, Slay the Spire shows that no game needs generative AI for “placeholder” content and Expedition 33 shows that it can and will slip through the cracks. Don’t. Fucking. Use. It.
Yep. I saw one slop picture from a new game that I was actually excited to buy, and even though it was "oh, we only used it as a placeholder and just forgot to remove after tehehe", I immediately lost all the interest, and will not buy it now. Later I learned that the quests there are nonsensical and a bit disjointed, and the story is stupid, and I can tell you, I'm not surprised at all.
LLM is like that black goo, everything it touches gets corrupted forever.
My question is if everything is going to be human made in the end why bother using at all? You won't even get any of the much vaunted time savings at that point.
Every other commenter under this seems to forget that stock assets exist and worked fine for decades without involving AI slop.
Stock assets (at least if you need more than the absolutely basics) cost quite a bit. Programmer art can work, but if you want something close to the tone of the finished product, still takes time and thus money. Slop is quick and free.
Frankly, given the fact that placeholder assets are literally meant to be utilitarian, disposable, "just good enough" work, it's actually not a terrible use case. Placeholders are meant to be slop either way, so not much is lost by automating it, so long as it is actually removed after.
Placeholder assets are generally better if they look out of place because then you don't forget to replace them 😅
AI art generation is trained to be just good enough to fly under the rader if not looked at too closely...
Depends on the use case. If its just to be a piece to fill the spot and nothing else, yes. That said, assets impact tone and gameplay, and if you're trying to judge how something will feel or play, then sometimes you need something closer to the given use case. For example, if you have a survival horror game and are trying to judge the ambiance and visibility of an in-progress level, using wildly out of place assets will mess with the tone, and may result in difficulty in judging factors like the visibility of gameplay elements. Like was said before, the same role as stock assets and programmer art.
It depends on what you are using placeholder assets for. If you want to use it to gauge how a scene would look before setting out to build it, then placeholders that stand out get in the way. You would need a way of tracking all the slop, but then you could have a build tool track how much slop is still in the game to make sure you catch it all before release.
That s not entirely true , you may want to see what it would look like and big cube purple and black are not ideal for that.
That's what concept art is for.
You have a point but a concept art is different that put a placeholder model in a 3d environnement. It s in my opinion a good use of Ai as a tool to roughly make a 3d map and then change the assets with better one.
Yeah it's a new way of working and seems like it would be a good thing if society were differently constituted
It's similar to the pre-vis stage of movie special effects. You're using basically anything available to create a facsimile of the final scene, to see if your framing and pacing work the way you intend to. In film, artists will often use action figures shot with their phone, because it doesn't matter if it looks janky since it's not a scene going in the movie to begin with; it's a test to see if your scene works at all. Game development and filmmaking share a lot of overlap in workflows these days.
For an example, see the leaked Heart of the Swarm ending animatic (StarCraft spoilers, obviously). It's a super janky rough cut to try out the scene's flow before pouring their full resources into it. They had most of the art assets already in place since it's a sequel, but for the parts they didn't they used concept art and even music ripped from the Transformers movie.
It is conceivable (though I certainly understand skepticism) that they use it for concept and placeholder art, proofs of concept and the like.
As always, the question should be whether the final product is any good.
The question should be whether the final product is worth what was sacrificed to make it. That line is different for everyone, but it's important to keep that in mind. Plenty of companies I boycott make acceptable products but are supporting a genocide.
I don't think generative AI use is worth it however it's employed and regardless of the quality of the final product. If enough people agree maybe they'll stop using it.
For instance. You can try things out without first creating them by hand. Then you pick and choose and make the final version by hand.
Because development isn't exactly asynchronous by nature. If you are waiting on placeholder assets, you are blocking everything dependent on "what comes next". Even at the cost of going back to repopulate your assets with non-placeholders, you save a tremendous amount of time.
Open up paint and doodle it for Christ's sake, these guys "forget" to go back and change it I've noticed, so just don't use it, boom, problem solved.
Guarantee they still have a chip on their shoulder about their art teacher telling them to stop using stick figures back in the day.
100% LOL
And just like that I added it to my ignored list on Steam
Same. Steam is so inundated with AI slop that I'm now following like a dozen different curators that flag AI usage, for the cases when the developers "forget" to fill out their AI disclosure field D: (which I've restyled to be red and on the top of the page)
I only know of AI Check which had to make a second account cause they already hit the limit with how many games they were marking as containing AI.
I went through my curator list just now; these are the largest/most active ones:
Thanks! Followed all of them, although not a fan of "Does this game use GenAI" adding games that they don't think have any. I get it's being informational, but at that point you might as well do like Half-Life just to say it doesn't have any.
(X) Doubt
Gonna preface this by saying I'm obviously a huge Expanse fan so my opinion is definitely biased. My username is a character from The Expanse and I consider it both my favorite TV show and book series ever. Wanted to make that clear up front.
That being said, if the game is good and they eventually replace the slop assets with proper assets, then what does it matter? As much as I like Lemmy, the hardline stances the community tends to take pisses me off at times. "Oh you're not a full blown communist and haven't read Marx? You're no better than a nazi you filthy shitlib"
Or regarding "AI" (hate that they called it that, it's basically just a smarter auto correct thats existed in smartphone keyboards for years now) anyone that doesn't automatically and passionately hate AI or any of its uses is automatically demonized as a supporter of big tech. Don't get me wrong, I fucking hate 90% of what "AI" does and is used for, especially how corpos are using it as an excuse to lay off real people and how dumbasses are relying on it as pure truth when it constantly hallucinates bullshit. I don't support "AI" and I can't wait for the bubble to burst.
There's almost zero nuance here, it's 90% "you're with us or you're against us" with no room for anything in between.
If the game is good and they replace the slop assets with real assets when it's released next year then who fucking cares that they used AI, what matters is whether the game is good or not and whether the devs are treated and paid well. Expedition 33 used AI in earlier iterations and it all got replaced with real assets eventually but that didn't stop Lemmy from shitting on one of the best games (IMO) to come out within the last decade once that became public.
You wanna make this place a more mainstream alternative to big tech controlling everything? Get off your high horse and accept that there's nuance to everything, it's not just black and white. Otherwise this place will continue to scare off new users faster than it can gain them. I consider myself to be a progressive, I'm Canadian and I've only voted NDP since I was able to vote and I'm now 32. I also really respect AOC, Mamdani, and Sanders in the states, so I'm already close enough to the target demographic of Lemmy if you exclude the tankie trifecta (ml, hexbear, and grad) and even I get sick of the circlejerk here at times.
Judge something when you can actually have a proper opportunity to do so rather than getting preemptively pissed off because they had the audacity to use something you don't like.
If the game comes out and still has slop in it and/or just sucks in general, then yeah, shit on it all you want, and I'll be first in line to join the club cause I absolutely love The Expanse and I'll be immensely disappointed if it turns out bad.
Again, in the interest of honesty and transparency, I usually prefer to just throw my opinions out there and not read or respond to replies when it's something that I know is gonna be controversial so I won't be replying to anyone that replies to this comment. I really hate arguing with random people on the internet so I just ignore replies for the most part.
It’s my favorite book too. I’m conflicted. AI isn’t going back in the box.
At the same time, it’s kinda like the way Belters are treated, barely getting their needs met in favor of corporate profits. AI is doing the same thing to a lot of people looking for work and is built off stolen labor.
So what you're saying is we should drop rocks on the data centers, right?
No. I’m saying we should be more thoughtful about how we use it and train it.
Pensa you one of them, ke? Inyalowda no care bout welwala like you, sasa.
I know you’re writing in Belter creole, but I can’t help but read it as Jar Jar Binks.
You're right. It's the same god damn mindless circle jerks you get in every online forum. This is why bots are undetectable, because they fit right in by commenting without actually thinking.
I wish I could upvote this harder.
Your hitting on one of the biggest ongoing issues that Lemmy faces. I'm really not sure how best to combat the echo chamber though. I mean I see the problem clearly, but I don't actually know of a solution.
Ok, but what if I don't want new people and like how small it is filled with like-minded individuals?
Don't go in the internet, move to a cave and don't bother interacting with the society. It solves both our and your issues.
Careful with what you wish for. Not everyone here is idiot enough to think everything is resolved with a bullet to the head.
Enjoy your 1 day ban.
Well if that were the case, then you would suck.
Huh, weird, you weren't supposed to see that in the final version. But we fired the guy responsible and we're sorry that we got caught
if you generate graphics, story and stuff with llm and make them more pretty through human labour, you still have llm generated crud. Generated story acted by humans is still same as fully generated one. using generated slop as placeholders might be fine, but it most likely still influences what they actually make so still no.
if you are just starting something and have no idea about anything and no mental image about what is what at all, THEN using generated stuff might be okay as an example so you can get the idea what is going on, as long as you stop using anything generated as soon as you can.
llm and any datacenters involved with it need to go up in flames.
Crude MS-Paint drawings are the best placeholder art. Scribbles can be made as fast, if not faster than AI. It shows the information it needs to show, but most importantly its incredibly obviously unfinished art that needs to be redone before release.
AI art looks pretty good at a distance without close inspection. You have to look closely and spend time to tell AI from art. Late in production when rushing for the deadline is not a point when you have the time to look closely at the assets, so AI placeholders will get missed.
Placeholders is a bad use case for AI.
And what you describe is probably the best case scenario, that the well meaning artist misses it in a rush.
In the real world much of the time I bet the artist is well aware and frustrated because the game already shipped (with no input from them or their boss) to make it by the end of the quarter and now the press assets all have some bland slop BS front and center instead of the real version staring back from their own monitor.
Welwalas.
If you're using AI in your process, even early in development, it means the game is no longer 100% human made, so stop the bullshit.
Literally every game that's made today is using AI as part of the development process.
Damn near every Dev has tab completion on in their IDE. Which is AI based.
==========
Edit:
I used a term, but I guess y'all were unable to infer meaning from usage?
Auto tab or w/e it's called (Some products literally call it tab completion). Visual Studio was doing it around 2018 IIRC, it's ML based, always has been. Modern versions of it are almost entirely LLM based
What do you mean "tab completion is AI based"? We have had tab completion for years before LLMs were a thing.
Apparently meaning from usage cannot be inferred here? Or you're just being intentionally obtuse?
A not insignificant number of products literally just call it tab completion these days, because tab completion in many products & IDEa is by default predictive completion, which is ML based. And these days, LLM based.
Tab completion is a table lookup and has been common for like 20 years. There's no LLM needed.
I used the wrong term, but I guess y'all were unable to infer meaning from usage?
Auto tab or w/e it's called (Some products literally call it tab completion). Visual Studio was doing it around 2018 IIRC, it was ML based, always has been. Modern versions of it are almost entirely LLM based.
No, it's not that we were "unable to infer meaning" (gaslight much?), you're just wrong.
Firstly, tab completion has been around for effectively ever, and way predates whatever VS Code may have been doing. Ctags indexing, for example, has been around since 1992.
Secondly, even if you want to move the goal post by talking about some specific implementation of ML based indexing, ML is not LLM.
Like I said plenty of products call this tab completion, and it's context aware completion, or predictive completion. I used an overloaded term but I would have thought after my explanation you would have understood what I meant by this point. You're continued explanation of classic tab completion is shows otherwise.
Also I said Visual Studio, not VS Code. 🤦
I very specifically said that it was ML based, The word was indicates past tense. 🤦
"Modern versions of it are almost entirely LLM based."
I don't know how you managed to completely skip reading that last line?
Here we are though arguing over reading comprehension issues. Which honestly is pretty classic for the internet.
Some people just dont want my money. [Steps out into the airlock]
Well... you see... 25% of the game is 100% human made!
I don't care if it is the fucking Half Life 3 in the flesh. If a game uses some short of AI I will never buy it.
Fuuuuck. I don't really care about this one, but now I'm worried they're slopping up Dark Heresy too.
On to the shit list they go.
That’s fine, I’m not gonna play it.
Sigh, TPTB are just intent on ruining The Expanse for us aren't they?
Welp. Waiting for a 75% off sale instead of day one purchase 🤷🏻
Relevant techdirt article: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/27/hey-game-devs-the-placeholder-assets-excuse-for-using-ai-is-running-really-thin/
Upside, so if these guys use AI to create assets or code, none of that can be copyrighted currently under the law. Therefore if it's not copyrightable then pirating the game and using those assets in other games is perfectly fine.
This would never hold up in court, in part due to regulatory capture, but I think this is the only thing that would stop them.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ai-art-remains-ineligible-for-copyright-as-supreme-court-declines-to-hear
Oh, I'm aware of that. Just that courts will not rule against things that involve the use of AI in general. You cannot take the output directly from, but once a human gets involved they will allow it. There's too many monied interests to allow the restrictions.
That's the fun part of all of it though, there's no definition or even subjective ruling of what constitutes "substantial transformation" or any ruling that generative AI being derivative of copyrighted material, it's a complete legal clusterfuck of law and consequences.
But yeah, I do agree that if a ruling or law change came about it would definitely be in the favor of late stage capitalism.
Doesnt that guy want his ai to own the copyright of the art it makes?
The game containing public domain images wouldn't make the entire game public domain. Someone with a copy of the game could distribute those particular assets though. Maybe. It depends on how much human effort was involved; an AI image can become copyrightable if enough effort was done to transform it after it was generated.
Sure, once crunch times starts, you'll have plenty of free time/people to audit the code and resources to determine if they were AI generated or not.
Fuck (this particular use of) AI.
I really don't care what they use to make a game. I care that it isn't shit. There's plenty of good and bad uses of generative AI.
I think using AI for storyboarding is okay. They are already pretty shitty, quick af sketches used to figure out how to arrange the action and get animators on the same page. Now that can be done just a little quicker.
However, using them as placeholders that could end up in the final thing even accidentally, is dumb. A placeholder doesn't even need to be representative visually of what it's holding a place for. Textures could be text that says "texture of wood 1" and words can be normal ass Ipsum Lorem.
Storyboarding is practically blocking for animation though. It's creative direction. I wouldn't let AI do that.
EDIT: I wouldn't let AI do anything, but defo not that lol
Not the process, just the images used on one.
Choosing the image for a storyboard is actually a crucial part and an important choice, it's what everything afterwards is based off of. It's like, the one thing you wouldn't want done by a pizza glue loving robot
Yeah that's the thing, placeholder textures need to be obviously placeholder so they don't get forgotten about. Using ai for something that's approximate to what it should be is stupid in that regards. You're just making your job harder at the end of the day.
The only time I can think of it being worthwhile is if you need to show off progress with a vertical slice, for an investment round or whatever, but you don't have all of the required textures sorted yet. But these changes should be done on a separate branch so they're not a part of the main development of the game so the above can't happen .
I disagree. Artistically it can be nice to get an approximation of what something looks like so you can see it in context and decide if you want to change it.
Like what if you think something should have a one texture but then when you actually play the game you realize it doesn't feel quite right and want to tweak it?
I don't know much about how big games are developed, but I've made things before, and sometimes seeing an approximation of the finished product is necessary to see how it can be improved.
My point is more it should be on a separate testing branch if used so it can't accidentally be left in the final product
So is every other major game company. This company just is open about it.
Only someone living under a rock can convince themselves developers arent using AI for all sorts of shit.
People are deeply unaware of the fact AI autocomplete for code has been baked into almost every major editor for almost 2 years now, and its enabled by default, opt out.
There are 3 types of game devs now:
Very few indie developers arent using it. The vast majority of casual devs have literally no idea the "code suggestions" they get from VSCode and other IDEs are AI generated, they often just assume its part of the LSP being fancy because itll only suggest a tiny bit of inline code.
Source: I do a lot of technical interviews at my company I work at, and I interview a lot of senior and junior devs all across the board.
Almost everyone has this feature enabled still (it ships pre-enabled and is opt out) and an incredibly high percent of devs are surprised when I tell them they have to disable that for the test, because it's AI assistance. They are often like "wait THATS AI?!?!?" and are genuinely shocked to learn this.
This % is very high for both juniors and seniors alike, its never really explicitly even made clear to you that its a feature you can disable, nor that its AI, its just there already working when you first install VSCode.
And basically everyone uses VSCode for most programming, theres other IDEs but VSCode heavily dominates as what pretty much everyone uses for every language except the small handful of ones that have their own bespoke IDEs for their use case.
But the VAST majority of game dev is C# and Lua now and a bit of python, and all of those are first class VS/VSCode languages as the IDE everyone and everything will recommend when you look up getting into it.
So yeah, no, Id estimate about 95% of game dev at this point, both amateur and professional, is using VSCode and has the AI "intellicode" feature enabled still, totally unaware they are injecting a shit tonne of AI generated code into their games.
The devs dont know it, the managers dont know it, the PR time doesnt know it, the CEO doesnt know it, no one is even aware this is a thing at most places lol. Everyone is just like "wow 's VSCode plugin just has such excellent quality autocomplete and quick fix suggestions, I love it!"
Not even joking, this is how most devs are atm, they have no fuckin clue haha
This isn’t about source code, it’s about using genAI for game assets like textures and character models. Steam’s disclosure policy explicitly states it’s about things a player can see or hear.
My point is, people are throwing huge hissy fits over random barely-matters stuff like "oh my god a random asset in some corner of some room looks AI generated"
When meanwhile like 40%+ of the codebase is AI generated, but because people dont know about that they dont give a shit.
They only care because they can see it and notice it.
It comes across as shallow performative upset.
I don't see anyone who consumes games remotely bringing up the fact coding IDEs have been AI autocompleting code for like 2 years now, no one even gives a shit.
Only when it started showing up in art assets, or hell, being used just in proof of concept stuff and devs say it wont be in the final game, people are like "oh mah dawg" and stamp their feet.
Its cringe, get over it. The game is either bad quality or good quality, how it GOT to be that way shouldnt matter. The devs either did a good job, or they didnt.
Let me put it this way:
If you are busy critiquing how the result was achieved by what tools, instead of WHAT the result was, you are cringe.
If you critique "this looks bad, its low quality, it looks like garbage" yeah, I have no issue with that, its a valid critique. Regardless of HOW they made the bad game, a bad game is a bad game.
But if you care about what TOOLS they use, you are incredibly naive.
People need to go look up how much resources/power/water data centres for build servers use, which the industry has been using for decades. You think AI uses a lot of power and water? Get fucked dawg, that is NOTHING compared to companies running multi-hour long gambits of automated UX testing suites. That shit is where the real power draw is.
BUT the industry has been doing that for DECADES and yet no one has raised a single eyebrow at it, no one cared, no one even knew it was a thing companies did.
Suddenly companies are using AI, which uses a fraction of that water/power, and everyone is like "oh my dawg, theyre killing the planet"
Fuck off lol, if you werent complaining about it before, you come across as cringe, uninformed, naive, and dumb for suddenly caring about a 5% uptick in energy/water usage compared to what we were doing before.
So all you end up with left is the "stolen property" argument, which STILL doesnt apply if its not in the final product anyways.
And its a VERY wobbly argument to stand up and die on a hill for, anyways.
Generated code is no different than generated imagery. They were both trained off stolen content and are both in a legally grey area. Both are equally immoral.
But just go with your Everybody else is doing it argument
Its not "everyone else is doing it" as an argument
Its reality that a massive fuck tonne of devs are using it totally unaware its AI generated
Its just a built in, enabled by default, opt out, feature in all the mainstream IDEs now and for the most popular ones, it doesnt even tell you upfront its AI
So a huge amount of devs are 100% unaware of the fact that a huge % of their code that they just tab auto-completed with was AI generated code. Everytime they hit the tab button to accept an inline suggestion, that was AI.
They just dont even know this, they use it totally unaware.
See my other comment here for further info on what I mean, so I dont have to repeat myself.
I’m indifferent about AI in games. Where necessary I don’t see a problem but only where absolutely necessary.
Take for instance the new Star Trek voyager game. It notoriously has barely any voice acting due to budget. Which is fine, paying for actors time etc is costly. But what about perhaps a contract for a few choice words that they can train on and use to make as much content as required. That could be a lot cheaper.
Also the fact Majel Barrett recorded a search of her voice specifically for this before dying and yet no one has used her for the computer since 😭
I'd rather games get a better budget and hire people than use the suicide inducing, water hoarding, electricity sucking, art stealing, job destroying, loud noise making, community destroying, glue on pizza ass scam that is AI.
What if they used local voice training though, not a service.
That's still cutting into what work they could be doing, with less optional results. I want bespoke dialog thanks