Hooded Horse ban AI-generated art in their games: "all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult"

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨tonytins@pawb.social⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/hooded-horse-ban-ai-generated-art-in-their-games-all-this-thing-has-done-is-made-our-lives-more-difficult

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.

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voracitude@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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 am 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.

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- Overspark@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - voracitude@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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?
    
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  - PixelatedSaturn@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Omg. The damage has been done? Cows have been killed, because someone used an ai generated texture for mud.
    
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- justdaveisfine@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - voracitude@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  If you acknowledge the problem with theft from artists, do you not acknowledge there’s a problem with theft from coders? Code intended to be fully open source with licenses requiring derivatives to be open source is now being served up for closed source uses at the press of a button with no acknowledgement.
  
  For what it’s worth, I think AI would be much better in a post scarcity moneyless society, but so long as people need to be paid for their work I find it hard to use ethically. The time it might take individuals to do the things offloaded to AI might mean a company would need to hire an additional person if they were not using AI. If AI were not trained unethically then I’d view it as a productivity tool and so be it, but because it has stolen for its training data it’s hard for me to view it as a neutral tool.
  
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  - Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    If the models are in fact reading code that’s GPL licensed, I think that’s a fair concern. Lots of code on sites like Stack Overflow is shared with the default assumption that their rights are not protected (that varies for some coding sites). That’s helpful if the whole point is for people to copy paste those solutions into large enterprise apps, especially if there’s no feasible way to write it a different way.
    
    The main reason I don’t pursue that issue is that with so much public documentation, it becomes very hard to prove what was generated from code theft. I’ve worked with AI models that were able to make very functioning apps just off a project’s documentation, without even seeing examples.
    
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- PixelatedSaturn@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - logicbomb@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.”
    
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- ratel@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Corngood@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    create entities or DTOs from schemas
    
    Surely there are deterministic tools to do this?
    
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- blaue_Fledermaus@olio.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I recently used one “agentic ‘AI’” to help writing unit tests. Was surprisingly productive with it; but also felt very dirty afterwards.
  
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  - scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - Holytimes@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Entire problem with AI is literally a legal one. The entire moral outrage that everyone has for it has only been able to be sourced back to legal arguments. Hell even every philosophical argument being made all over the place still stems down to the legalities of it.
    
    If you can find a single moral or philosophical argument to be made that does not have a rooted bias in the law then you might have a reason to feel dirty. But realistically you only feel dirty because your being told to feel dirty by idiots all around you.
    
    If you hold copyright to that high of an esteem that you feel disgraced and sullied for violating it even indirectly then yeah, feel dirty. But I really doubt you hold the draconian laws of copyright to such a high morale standing as to let your self worth be hurt from it.
    
    But even still, beyond ai, every tool you use in your work flow is almost guaranteed to be built off the back of abuse, slave labor, theft, and exploitation at some level. If we threw away tools and progress just because they were built by assholes we would have no tools at all.
    
    Fight for better regulation, and more care in the next step of advancement. But to throw away tools is just not realistic, we live in reality unfortunately.
    
    If the tool is genuinely useless to you then don’t use it. If it is genuinely useful then use it. If you can find a better tool then use that instead.
    
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Sine_Fine_Belli@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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Baggie@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
There’s a problem in movies that I keep thinking about in relation to this.

Movies often use music from other movies in early cuts to get something rough together. They time the scenes around the music, they work with it for ages, and finally it’s time to make an original track to replace the rough copy.

But they have to use something that’s the same tempo, because of how the scenes were timed around the old music. And it has to fit in the same vibe, because that’s what the old music felt like.

So you end up with a piece of music that’s usually pretty close to what they made, and a lot of Hollywood osts sound almost identical. When I see people talk about using gen ai for placeholders and concept art, I see that same problem turning up.

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- SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I had never heard about temp tracks, but this makes so much sense. That’s a powerful homogenizing force.
  
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  - prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Famously, Stanley Kubrick used classical music as a temporary track for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and intended on having Pink Floyd do the soundtrack. However, he grew to like how the classical music felt so much that he decided to keep it.
    
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- MrFinnbean@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Same thing happens with games to some degree.
  
  There are many stories from gaming about placeholder music becoming integral part of the game.
  
  In original doom games Carmack and Romero loved Black Sabbath and listened it during testing amd working on the game. That led to now legendary doom ost.
  
  During the development of Max Payne 2 Remedy used Poets of the fall song as a placeholder and in the end they decited they wanted it in to the game, but because they could not get in to agreement with the publisher, and because PoF members are just cool guys, they eventually made song just for the game to get around the licensing debucle. That song was later released as a single.
  
  I remember hearing story about Brutal Legend having some licenced music as a place holder in meeting with investors and it lead that music ending in to the game.
  
  Im writing this while im little busy, so everything is coming from my memory, without fact checking, so who ever is reading this take it with a pinch of salt.
  
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  - Infrapink@thebrainbin.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Judas Priest, not Black Sabbath.
    
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- Omgpwnies@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I wonder if that’s why so many sequences use “4 on the floor” arranged roughly around a 12 bar pattern, or a specific piece of classical music that the studio could have gotten from public domain
  
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  - Baggie@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yep, that was exactly the reason.
    
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Luminous5481@anarchist.nexus ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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.

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- northernlights@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I’ve seen games in store listings that were obviously AI slop copying their entire game, Manor Lords.
  
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  - ClamDrinker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Honestly, asset flips or pure ai slop are often not something you would consider a ‘real game’. They are closer to a scam than anything. And they certainly wouldn’t be published by a reputable publisher. I think that’s also what OP was referring to, a game that meets some minimal level of development and involvement.
    
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- utjebe@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That just sounds as they aren’t using it property or having way too high expectations of what it can do from all the hype around.
  
  GenAI can definitely help and accelerate your work, but when it is used sensibly. If you let it do most of the work, it will generate so much crap that you will not have capacity to review nor shape it to a desired state.
  
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