Comment on After GOTY pull, Clair Obscur devs draw line in sand: 'Everything will be made by humans by us'
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks agoThey used it to create placeholders during development. It wasn’t something they decided not to use before. It’s just something that was meant to be replaced. Usually these placeholders are a missing texture image or just a magenta texture, but they used generative AI to create something that fit into the world. Because it fit they forgot to replace it.
Honestly, I’m not opposed to this usage. It’s not like it’s replacing an artist. No one was going to create a placeholder to be replaced. However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you’ll forget to replace items with this technique, like we saw here. The old style of incredibly obvious placeholders were used for a reason; so that you can’t forget to replace them. It’s probably smart to keep doing this.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I agree with almost everything here, I think using LLMs to generate placeholders is fair game and allows studios to nail down the feeling of the game sooner. That being said there’s one thing I disagree:
There are ways to ensure you don’t forget, things like naming your placeholders placeholder_<name> or whatever so you ensure there are no more placeholders when you make the final build. That is the best way to approach this because even extremely obvious placeholders might be missed otherwise, since even if you have a full QA team they won’t be playing every little scene from the game daily looking for that, and a few blank/pink/checkered textures on small or weird areas might be missed.
I think it’s okay for studios to use generative AI for placeholders, but if one of them makes it to the release you screwed up big time. And like I said there are ways to ensure you don’t, it’s trivial to make a plugin for any of the major engines (and should be even easier if you’re building the engine yourself) where it would alert you of placeholders in use at compile time.
Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 2 weeks ago
That’s just ridiculous standards when you apply them to a small team doing their best to pump out a unique piece of art. Yeah sure you can add a million processes to avoid inconsequential things like that but that’s time you can’t spend on making a good game. Zero value except for appeasing superstitious busybodies…
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Dude, naming the textures placeholder_<name> doesn’t take any more time and ensures you won’t ship a game with a placeholder. This is, or at least should be, common practice even without using LLMs, and only takes a couple of seconds, not enough to cause any inconvenience.
Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 2 weeks ago
Every process can be theoretically simple but they never have zero impact. Imagine the uber-crunch a small team needs to go through to produce an AA title. It’s just cruel to just come up after the fact and be like “oh yeah you could have done this and that on top of your actual work, it would have added zero quality to the finished product but it’s oh so important to a few people”.
Like… When will gamers ever respect workers giving it their all? They’re just human ffs.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I don’t disagree that there are ways to add protections. It’d require strict compliance still though or things could fall through the cracks. Even when using the classic placeholders things have been missed on occasion. The only 100% reliable way to avoid shipping any generative AI content is to never include it in the project.
Again, I don’t think the usage here was bad. I think the reaction to one piece of generative AI art, which was replaced within a week, has been too severe. I’m just saying that if you really want to make sure you don’t ship any of it, just don’t ever include any. The old methods were perfectly fine, even if they made development look less pretty.