Comment on Games you really want to play, but can't or won't?
dustyData@lemmy.world 1 week agoThey didn’t sneak anything and they never will. Looked into it deeply. They used AI assets as placeholders during development. But everything in the shipped game is human-made. No further use of AI is expected, since the game awards controversy the company’s management published a statement of banning AI use entirely in their company.
The whole controversy around indie game awards was also blown beyond proportions. A company used a new technology at a time when the tech was new and the debate around it’s use was still inmature. Then dismissed it for it was not good enough. They failed at quality assurance and a couple of textures weren’t deleted. They replaced them as soon at they found out. By all intents and purposes, this controversy does not qualify sandfall as an AI using company, and to affirm so is ignorant of the context of all that went down in reality.
I understand their reasoning, but still, it soured me on the game. GenAI models being built from non-consensually mass-scraped art was known from the very start, and yet the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game… They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
But anyway, we are free to just not agree, and draw the line in different places on what we consider ethical conduct 🤷
the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game
That’s the point. They didn’t thought it was OK and didn’t.
They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
That is exactly what they did, any texture left in the first version of the game was a mistake that was promptly fixed.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
You said a whole lot of words, but the fact remains that they did use AI during development, released a game with AI textures, and told the award organization they never used AI at all.
They, and you, can make excuses all you want, but for some of us they simply have lost some of their good reputation. We will see what they do next though, and I’m hopeful.