No, Tim Sweeney, Valve Isn’t ‘Irresponsible’ For Having An AI Disclosure Tag On Games
from the opacity-as-a-strategy dept
There are bad takes on AI, and then there are bad takes on AI. Some of you think my takes on the use of AI in gaming are bad. Cool, love you, kiss kiss. I think the takes from folks on both extremes, the never-AI-ers and the AI evangelists, are pretty awful most of the time. I’ll accept your love and kisses in return. And I particularly don’t like it when those in gaming journalism act like there is zero place for this technology in the industry nearly as much as I absolutely hate it when those within the industry itself fuel the concerns about it by claiming AI will do all the things most gamers feverishly don’t want it to do. I can assure you it can be very frustrating being me when it comes to this particular topic. And, no, I don’t expect any sympathy over it.
But what Tim Sweeney just said about Steam’s use of AI disclaimers on its platform might well be one of the dumbest fucking things I’ve ever heard someone in the industry say.
In the past few months, video game publishers and developers have been going all in on generative AI with the justification that it speeds up and improves development. In the attempt to help gamers make informed choices about their purchases, Valve has started enforcing AI disclosures on Steam, which Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney believes is irresponsible of the company, as it has a negative impact.
“It’s unfortunate that so many developers now are put into this position. If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you’ve got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game,” Sweeney said to PC Gamer in a new interview. “I think it’s really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn’t do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success. You have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does.”
First, to quibble with the article: claiming that “video game publishers and developers” writ large are “going all in” on generative AI is just plain wrong. In fact, there are plenty of developers and publishers out there that have flatly sworn off the use of this technology entirely. And that’s a good thing, to my way of thinking. Every experiment needs a control group, after all.
But the real issue here is just how tone deaf and idiotic it is for Sweeney to chide a rival platform for the severe crime of informing customers about the content of the games they purchase and how they were created, specifically on a hot button issue like the AI in gaming. While I, too, have made it clear that I think pre-judging every game that made any use of AI at all in development is a mistake, the cure for it is certainly not obfuscating that information from the very people that pay for these games.
Customers are supposed to be making informed buying decisions. I didn’t really think that was a matter open for debate. And Steam making that information transparent to the public is quite literally the opposite of “irresponsible”. It’s being very responsible to Steam’s customers. As for calling such disclosures a “scarlett letter”, well, I think the lady doth protest too much, as it were.
Especially when it’s obvious why Sweeney is taking this position.
To be fair, it’s not surprising to see Tim Sweeney staunchly defending the use of AI in game development, as Epic Games’ upcoming Unreal Engine 6 is going all-in with AI integration.
Now, Sweeney went on to talk about how generative AI can be used by developers to reduce the need for game makers to buy pre-made assets off of asset stores, content libraries, and reduce the economic costs for developing a game as a result… and I think those arguments are interesting and worthy of debate.
But pretty blatant attempts to try to inoculate the ecosystem against backlash for games produced by Epic’s engine by purposefully making the consumer less informed is an absolute loser of an argument.
Filed Under: ai, ai in video games, disclosures, information, tim sweeney, video games
Companies: epic, valve
Comments on “No, Tim Sweeney, Valve Isn’t ‘Irresponsible’ For Having An AI Disclosure Tag On Games”
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
the reason people hate your ai takes is you sound like a complete and total moron when you get so defensive
Re:
You used no punctuation or necessary capital letters. Kindly tend your own garden before pretending to speak for others.
Re:
“Let me explain everything to you.”
'What next, a 'This game involved heavy crunch work due to crappy managers' flag?!'
Situation: The general public and especially gamers(can’t imagine why…) aren’t too keen on AI, to the point that it’s causing people to either seriously reconsider purchases if not flat out reject them.
Steam: Decides that whatever their position on AI it’s important to their customer base, and take a basic step to make their customers/users more informed as to AI use, allowing them to make informed decisions when purchasing.
Epic: Decides that if an informed customer base is going to result in less sales then the appropriate solution is to keep people in the dark and prevent them from becoming informed.
Re:
If I remember correctly, the initial flagging of games came out of a legal concern. Players showed interest in knowing this information, so Valve put together a first pass on exposing it in the store.
Which makes Valve even MORE in the right.
Re:
Hey so just saw your title and honestly…
While I don’t think that particular flag is doable for practicality reasons, I do genuinely like the idea.
Perhaps we could find a reasonable and detectable proxy for it and offer that as a flag?
Yes, Tim, why would we prejudge a product made with a tool that’s well known for producing inferior results?
By Grabthar’s hammer….
Re:
I’m reminded of the scene from the first Clerks film, in which a customer browsing the video store complains that the boxes “say so much, but they never tell you if it’s any good”. We’ve always had to deal with bad movies and games (and books and whatever else). Sure, there have been some embarrassing examples of poorly auto-generated content, but as far as bad media products go, I’m not convinced it’s of any special concern. There are a million other ways to fuck up, almost none of which have to be disclosed to buyers.
If it’s gonna be as obviously bad as people seem to expect… well, it’ll be obvious, right? So who needs the label?
But if, for example, someone is actually concerned about the environmental effects of the technology, there are probably better ways—such as “green” certifications—to handle that. Similarly if they want it to have been made by humans who were treated and paid well (no “crunch time” as another commenter noted).
Re: Re:
Same reason I want to know if who directed and acted in a movie before I go to see it. Adam Sandler, for example, is somewhat controversial about his movies, some people really like Sandler’s specific brand of stupid, whereas Uwe Boll is uncontrovertial in how bad he is.
It lets me know quickly not to waste time or energy looking for competent reviews that weren’t paid off by various interests.
It’s not like it’s easy to find good, unbiased, reviews that match your taste in this market, and often by the time you’ve consumed a piece of media it’s too late to refund it… and you can never refund the time you’ve put into it, even if you can get the money back.
So yeah, having a nice little ‘hey, this probably isn’t to your taste’ label is useful. Be that the name of the director, or simply the fact that it was made with AI.
If you think all movies should stop having who directed and acted in them on the cover, then maybe it makes sense to you to remove the AI label from games. But it makes as much sense to point out a game was made with AI assistance as it does to point out it was made by Owlcat or EA.
Re: Re:
Or we could just…you know, have devs/publishers disclose genAI use. I mean, if people already know about the environmental effects of genAI tech and the industry surrounding it, a disclosure of genAI use is all we need. No game is developed in a perfect vacuum that doesn’t do something to the environment, considering what’s needed for everything from electric power to making the computers used to both develop and play a game. Better to keep doing what we’re doing than try to come up with a standard that bigger companies would absolutely try to get around. If companies don’t like the “scarlet letter” treatment they get for disclosing genAI use, they can stop using genAI.
Re: Re: Re:
A lot of people feel strongly that they know the effects, but I’m not sure they do or that it’s as monolithic as they think. As you say, there are so many other environmental effects associated with game development (and playing!), so why use this one aspect as an absolute proxy? It’s not like it’s any harder to bullshit one’s way around than the other “scarlet letters” might be; as with child labor, companies can always outsource and claim they “didn’t know” (then repeat as other contractors get caught).
Plus, I see no inherent reason why generative technologies are all gonna be equally wasteful, and I don’t expect your preferred plan of “nuke them all from orbit” to be the societally-agreed solution. So we might as well try to push them in less-bad directions. Which might mean “completely absent from certain areas”—but probably present to some degree in gaming.
Re: Re: Re:2
There may be some legitimate uses of non-generative AI in gaming. Fuck if I know what they are, though.
But generative AI? Yeah, nuke that shit from orbit any time.
Re: Re: Re:2
https://hub.jhu.edu/2026/06/15/americans-strongly-support-regulations-on-ai/
So, most Americans actually do want to do something serious to block generative AI enrichment into areas where it doesn’t belong.
Re: Re:
Having an AI tag is helpful for the same reason that knowing who the makers of a game are helpful.
Sure, it’s possible with enough time and energy to find enough unbiased reviews to determine if a game is good or not, but why would I spend my time and money on that when I can just look and see that Ubisoft made it? Or that Peter Molyneux was involved in it’s production? Then I know not to waste time determining if it’s good.
These labels can’t tell you if a game is good, sometimes good producers stumble, but they sure can tell you if it’s bad.
Re:
So if a game developer uses an AI to analyze the code for bugs which then results in a better experience for gamers playing the game, can you point to the inferior result?
Re: Re:
I see little evidence that AI bughunts in videogames are better nor more successful than a correctly funded and utilized QA department.
Also, some bugs are fun, and a human QA is more likely to miss a bug that’s fun, resulting in speedruns.
Re: Re: Re:
From your answer I know you don’t work in software development.
Is it also fun when the game crashes and you lose progress? You can’t have one without the other.
Re: Re: Re:2
Regardless, generative AI produces ‘samy’ results, and those results are not good, so I don’t want generative AI in my games any more than I want Uwe Boll making my movies.
Re: Re:
Importantly, that would not be generative AI. Tim Sweeney went on to talk about the uses of generative AI… which is exactly the thing that generates shoddy, soulless product.
An AI disclosure that makes it clear that AI was solely used for testing code and finding bugs, and that there was zero generative AI used in the creation of the game is likely to get much less pushback from gamers at large. In fact, you’d likely see some gamers correcting others making assumptions about what AI was used in the game.
This is the point of enforcing disclosures – AI was used, and how it was used. This allows the consumer to then make an informed decision about whether they’re going to buy that game.
With all that’s going on, a dev company that uses AI for bug finding and nothing else would be very foolish to hide that usage. If they don’t disclose it, and it’s found out later, then it will look like they had something to hide, and there will be suspicion that they used generative AI – which is the Scarlet Letter.
Re: Re: Re:
It seems to me that’s a distinction many people don’t understand, just look at this comment section where some think any use of AI is bad.
Re: Re: Re:2
This comment section is specifically responding to Tim Sweeney’s dumbfuckery, which is entirely about trying to hide the use of any AI, and especially generative AI.
In context, someone talking about “AI” with no qualifiers in this particular comment thread is talking about generative AI.
The person you responded to definitely included generative AI in the catch-all. What point are you trying to make by shifting the conversation down to a small subset of things that doesn’t include what Tim Sweeney is all jazzed up about? I assume you’re still in favor of requiring AI disclosures on games?
Re: Re:
Debugging without understanding can only go so far. It might replace black-box testing to some extent, maybe help with white-box testing, and probably help with proving code—if people can correctly describe what they want proven and understand what was actually proven. But I’m concerned about over-reliance (especially on technology controlled by others and understood by no one) and over-exurberance.
I won’t pre-judge the result, but I note that the result is not all that matters.
Re: Re: Re:
But it isn’t technically debugging which implies tests have found a problem with the application, it’s a form of code analysis that highlights problems and bugs, and which also proposes changes. Any developer that works in a professional team will treat these changes like any other changes from members of the team: follow established best practices for code standards, testing, code reviews and pull requests.
Which requires an understanding that there are nuances.
Pretty weird how Tim is all-in on AI use but hesitant to see companies declaring that use for the benefit of consumers. I would think companies that are actively using AI would be all-in on declaring their usage of AI, considering how it’s apparently going to be the wave of the future and all that. Instead, he acts like a declaration of AI use is akin to being tarred and feathered before being forced to endure a walk of shame. Now why would that be the case, Timmy?
Re: 'People love AI!' 'For the last time 'execs' and 'the public' are different groups!'
Yeah, if you have to hide AI involvement in your products that’s really giving away the game that you know damn well the public is not in favor of it no matter how much you try to claim otherwise and/or cram it down their throats.
Re:
Given there’s two Tims in play, I had to stop and think a moment before I realized you must’ve been referring to Mr. Sweeney.
Re: Re:
lmao, my bad on that misunderstanding 🙃
Re:
I can’t tell if you’re referring to me or Tim Sweeney in this comment.
If it’s me you’re saying is “all in on AI” and that I stated it would be “the wave of the future”, well, then you’re just lying. So hopefully it’s other-Tim in your comment….
Re: Re:
Yeah, that was my bad, was referring to Sweeney. Sorry for the misunderstanding!
No I think your takes on gaming and AI are like 90 year old men’s takes on what rights women should have over their own bodies.
Ignorant, uniformed, from someone that refuses to speak with the people he’s declaring to know better than.
Re:
When did Geigner declare that he knows better when it comes to the use of AI?
Re: Re:
I didn’t. The AI doomers love to lie about my position on the technology. It’s a whole thing with them.
Re:
“Ignorant, uniformed, from someone that refuses to speak with the people he’s declaring to know better than.”
Yawn.
Yes, lord knows I never interact with our comments section….
How do you know if a claim made by Tim Sweeney is false?
It came from Tim Sweeney.
Re:
I smell a new tag for false claims.
“Your article has received the TIM SWEENEY tag because you falsely claimed Donald Trump is handsome.”
Re:
But Timmy got a point here, it’s a well know fact that gamers only use Stream to wish list games and then go on Epic Store to buy them.
That’s exactly why if Valve makes an handheld console or an expensive PC, it won’t sell much of it.
Sweeny saying it’s “irresponsible” for Steam to flag games made with genAI is kind of like dairies way back when saying it’s “irresponsible” to flag the chalk they add to milk to improve the look.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Honestly, I think you should be ashamed as a writer. Kids in school put more work into researching for a paper then you have put into multiple articles at this point. Your articles are nothing more than opinion pieces, and they might as well be tweets you fire off without a thought.
It’s you, and your thoughts on how you know better than everyone else and nothing more. You aren’t any different than Sam Altman, or Jensen Huang, telling us how we just need to accept they words as a matter of fact because they are the smart and wise adults and we are all just dumb kids.
Instead of whining like a child because you don’t like how your garbage AI glazing articles get taken, grow a pair, act like a freaking adult, and put in some actual work like real journalists and writers do. Or is real work to hard for you?
I’m sure, one of the thousands of tech workers or game developers out of the job has plenty of time to talk about AI and why they don’t like it.
There is nothing AI enthusiasts hate more that informed consent and that tells you a lot about who they are as people. What other people want doesn’t matter, their love of their new toy is the only factor worthy of consideration in their eyes.
If I were hit on in a bar by someone into AI, I would make sure to keep my drink covered at all times.
Re:
The fact Sweeney is willing to destroy the ecosystem of asset packs, textures and tools that have built a thriving indy dev scene is even more sh-tty than his constant digs at Steam and people who have genuine issues with AI usage. We keep being told that AI will make becoming a game dev in everyone’s reach, and that it will help solo Devs by saving them money on hiring artists… While selling the destruction of the market for cheap assets that enable freelance artists to stay employed between gigs and has helped the indie dev ecosystem grow to the size it is to day, something he should appreciate more given Epic’s shareware origins… But no, he wants all the money.
Tim Sweeney is the Elon Musk of the video games industry, not to be taken seriously in any way.
Re:
I’d say that’s a bit unfair, Elon is a financier who was fortunate enough to be active in the era where legacy tech and media were spending silly money on garbage dotcom startups. Sweeney, for all his faults, built Epic from a Shareware producer to what it is now and helped code a lot of the products that got them there, doing 90% of Unreal engine 1 himself. He’d a douchebag, don’t get me wrong, just like his peer John Carmack, but he’s not a poser like Elon.
AI Game Dialog
I’ve been playing a game that uses some sort of AI for Non-Player Character (AKA NPCs) dialog with the player.
It’s been an amusing illustration of the state-of-art.
At times it works reasonably well. At other times, the NPCs get locked into loops unable move beyond their narrow “world view” regardless of my input and I have no choice but to simply walk away. I’m still uncertain if this “realistic” or “unrealistic”.
Re:
It’s realistic right now when talking to largeswaths of the population or your mother with denentia. Unfortunate, because that shouldn’t be realistic.
Only a scammer would get mad about consumers getting warned about counterfeit products.
Statements like Tim Sweeney’s only serve to justify the idea of “we can’t trust AI usage in games.”
Something to understand about the “never AI” folks who aren’t on the AI Doomer train (like me): It’s not that AI doesn’t have legitimate uses, it’s that there’s so much evidence of sham use going on that it’s much, much safer to simply distrust anyone’s use of it by default.
It’s the same attitude I take with internet ads: they so frequently lie, so frequently annoy, so frequently try to take up my entire attention, and so frequently serve as a vector for malicious software, that it’s much safer to just block them entirely.
(There’s also the environmental argument with AI, where the energy and water consumption of the tech is so ridiculously large that it’s utterly irresponsible and likely ethically wrong to utilize generative AI just because of the actual harm those costs can do to real world people and the environment at large, but in the context of Tim Sweeney’s statement it is unfortunately a parenthetical.)
It’s the old saw: “This is why we can’t have nice things.” It’s because of people like you, Tim Sweeney, that the smart thing for the consumer with limited means to do is to assume that anyone using AI is trying to cheat them.
Tim Geigner, as much as I agree that there should be nuanced investigation and experimentation into legitimate uses of AI, the people pushing it make it impossible for that to happen. Tim Sweeney is a reflection of the majority of CEOs salivating over the shiny new exploit button. I can only recommend any game dev company not wanting to be viewed in the same light as Tim Sweeney to punt on trying to use AI. It’s toxic. It’s been made toxic by the people pushing it, and there’s not a thing anyone can do about that in the short term.
Re:
The technology we refer to as “AI” will have some legitimate uses in the future. What I think most people are against is generative AI—the stuff that its advocates are promising will “democratize creativity” but is primarily a way for the wealthy to access skill while denying the skilled access to wealth.
Art is an inherenly human endeavour. I always catch shit for saying this, but there is a “soul” to human-made art that no genAI work can ever replicate. The LLMs behind genAI are giant pattern-predicting machines; they don’t really “know” anything, and they can’t really “learn” anything—not in the same way people do, anyway. So if a AI image generator makes you an image, it can’t tell you how it developed its style or why it chose the placement of lines and colors or anything like that. It can’t show you the works that inspired its style or discuss why it was inspired by those works. There’s no artistry to genAI works; there’s no “soul” to it that comes from years of practice and experimentation and inspiration. Anything genAI produces is assembly line slop. Anyone impressed by that slop has standards so low that their bar sits at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Re: Re:
I have seen a legitimate use of generative AI: an individual used it for storyboarding a music video. I know this because said individual also released a behind-the-scenes style video of the creation process.
In this case, it was a music video that was created by a single person, and would always have been created by a single person. The generative AI images were still images that, in the end, only gave a vague impression of where things would go – the final version of the music video was rendered in what looked like a game engine, with the creator edited in as a live action version of himself.
The video is “Trailer Park Alien” – you may be familiar with it.
The reasons I would consider this “legitimate” are:
– it was a task that would never have been assigned to a second person.
– The usage of it had no real impact on the soul of the final product
Absent the environmental concerns, this is a potential use of gen AI that I’m okay with.
Don’t quote me on this, but I think that some of the “I’m On Observation Duty” games have used Gen AI for the paintings that are scattered in the environments, where the bizarreness of the AI-generated images is part of the point. When thinking only of the ‘soul’ of the end result, the real core factor of those games is the gameplay and the unsettling atmosphere. Critically, the greatest threats (the intruders) aren’t gen-AI. So that’s another possible legitimate use of gen-AI – again, absent the environmental and cost concerns.
But these uses of it are rare, and they are not the uses that are incentivized by the people pushing it. The mass-market uses, which are the only ones that can actually be profitable for the companies that are creating generative AI, are the ones that push out artists. Like you said, the end result of generative AI in our current capitalist framework is soulless profit-seeking slop – it’s a way for the wealthy to access skill while denying the skilled access to wealth.
The consumer can’t trust the producer. There’s too many anti-consumer incentives to AI usage. There’s too many Tim Sweeneys. Any legitimate uses (from my standpoint) are not by design – they’re an accident, and they’re simply not profitable.
Thus – the consumer is best served to assume anything with the tag is slop, and the burden of proof otherwise rests with the producer that chose to take the path of using AI.
Re: Re: Re:
Nope. LOLno. Hell fuckin’ nah.
As I’ve pointed out in past treatises on this subject, Rian Johnson scribbled out the design for the infamous chair from Knives Out as a stick figure drawing on a napkin. If one of the top directors in Hollywood can turn a stick figure scribble into a fully-fledged prop without a hint of generative AI, so can anyone else. (Granted, Rian Johnson is a Hollywood director with access to some pretty sizeable resources, but my point still stands.) Nobody needs genAI to do storyboards—or any kind of art, for that matter.
…and, by proxy, all the artists whose work was fed into the LLM that powered the AI generator that person used.
If I’ve ever heard of that before, I can’t recall.
The final product, sure. But what about the process?
The whole point of storyboarding is to get out ideas in one’s own head as a rough draft and figure out what might work the best at expressing those ideas. Using genAI is offloading that cognitive task to a machine that doesn’t, and literally can’t, know what’s in someone else’s head. How different would that video have been if the creator had scribbled out some shitty storyboards on notebook paper? Because that’s the vision I want to see. I want to see what that person thought up themselves, not some computer’s best guess at what they might have wanted.
And that’s unfortunate, because I’m sure plenty of artists would’ve been happy to make both original art and fucked-up versions of that art for the game. Cutting artists out of the pipeline like that is bullshit. If you’re a single person making a game or whatever, open up GIMP or some other free photo editor and fuck up a public domain work if you really need it for your game.
There is no acceptable excuse for using genAI. There is no legitimate use case for genAI. Anything genAI can do, people can do better. And if someone is using genAI specifically because they don’t want to deal with/pay people to do those things, that someone can go fuck themselves.
Re: Re: Re:2
Eh… you’re welcome to your opinion, of course, but to me, “drew a stick figure on a napkin” and “threw a prompt at stable diffusion” are not much different in terms of “creative output.”
The “artist’s work that went into the ai slushy” holds weight when and if the AI company actually got a profit from someone’s use – and from what I know, the music video one was done with the free options. In that sense, for that specific use case – storyboarding with stick figures draws on the fact that I’ve seen stick figures as rendered by other artists. Or if I storyboard with more full pictures, I’m drawing from what I’ve seen of images on the web, and so on. I don’t fully disagree with you, but I’m not fully convinced that the argument doesn’t endanger artists in some fashion, by potentially making it illegal to learn (if there’s one group I trust less than the AI makers, it’s the copyright maximalists, who will take things like this and try to twist them into whatever lets the publishers have the most amount of control over every bit of culture you see).
I’m fully on the side of “generative AI should locked in the freezer.” The people who are in charge of it are not qualified to be in charge of it. The monster they’ve created needs to be put down, absolutely. But you won’t find me agreeing to the absolute “no possible legitimate use, ever, under any circumstance” statement.
Re: Re: Re:3
Illegal to learn what, how to type a better prompt? C’mon, man, that’s a little insulting to both of us.
Anyone can pick up a pen and draw a little scribble on some paper. That can be enough to get a general idea out. Same goes for writing down a few key words to get a mental image out of one’s head. The result matters less than the process. Someone offloading that kind of cognitive work to generative AI because it can “draw” or “write” “better” than them doesn’t make them more of an artist. It makes them a lazy asshole who can’t even be bothered to put in enough effort to draw a stick figure or write down a quick note.
There is no legitimate artistic use for generative AI. Arguing for using it to make up for a lack of artistic skills, social skills, or money/resources won’t make me think genAI is good or useful. I lack all three of those things and you don’t see me saying “genAI rules”.
Re: Re: Re:4
No, just illegal to learn. Period. I.E. “Your lineart is suspiciously similar to . Clearly plagiarism!”
In the same way I have no trust in the current owners of AI, I have no trust in copyright holders (like the RIAA and the MPAA) not to latch onto AI outrage to further expand their control over everything they can.
Re: Re: Re:5
That isn’t ever going to happen. In re: music, there are only so many chords and chord progressions and such. No one corporation could ever hope to copyright those basics and make learning them without “permission” illegal. The same goes for learning anatomy, how to mix colors, how to string together sentences, or whatever other part of whatever other artistic endeavour you can think of. A corporation can own the specific expression of an idea that is Logan; it can’t own the broad, generic idea of “old man protects young girl from evil assholes”. Any court that even thinks about letting that sort of shit happen is a court that will lose all its credibility if and when it lets that happen.
I am a pretty anti-AI person for multiple reasons. But “AI is going to make the corpos make learning illegal” makes for a lame-ass argument against…what, taking action against AI companies? I don’t even understand what the premise behind your argument is here, dude.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
In case you're ever confused...
about why so many people seem to hate your guts, refer back to this paragraph:
“First, to quibble with the article: claiming that “video game publishers and developers” writ large are “going all in” on generative AI is just plain wrong. In fact, there are plenty of developers and publishers out there that have flatly sworn off the use of this technology entirely. And that’s a good thing, to my way of thinking. Every experiment needs a control group, after all.”
Jesus H. Christ. I’d call you a cunt, but you lack the requisite depth and warmth.
How much will this AI cost devs?
I have noticed a slew of articles of previously “All In” AI corporate users being shocked, shocked I tell ya, that AI tokens cost money. The change of being a minor cost per user, to watching the programming efforts burn down millions of dollars to save paying programmers less money. The new equation needs to include how much it costs to use the AI that isn’t free, vs how much was saved by gutting the staff.
Hey, Tim Sweeney, who will be paying for AI tokens/images and how much of a cut will you take?
Also See: Epic lay offs
Being from the last century, it does recall “First one’s free” marketing
Steam’s AI disclosures made me decide to buy a game I wouldn’t have without the disclosure.
Before I read the disclosure, the only info on AI use for the game was that it used AI.
A reasonable assumption is that they used generative AI to make up their art assets.
Hard pass.
Their disclosure clarifies that AI use was for refinement of a fraction of a percent of some visual elements and some text checking, and the devs emphasize human origin human finishing of their creation.
That’s more palatable to my taste.
Allowing consumers to be better informed is always a good thing.
Re: 'The less my customers know the better' tells you a lot about a seller
Allowing consumers to be better informed is always a good thing.
To consumers? Yes.
To people who are banking on consumers not being informed under the assumption that a more informed customers is less likely to be a customer? No.