from the public-response dept

‘Let It Die: Inferno’ Is A Very Interesting Trial Balloon For AI Use In Video Games

On the topic of artificial intelligence, like far too many topics these days, it seems that the vast majority of opinions out there are highly polarized. Either you’re all about making fun of AI not living up to the hype surrounding it, and there are admittedly a zillion examples of this, or you’re an AI “doomer”, believing that AI is so powerful that it’s a threat to all of our jobs, and potentially to our very existence. The latter version of that can get really, really dangerous and isn’t to be taken lightly.

Stratified opinions also exist in smaller, more focused spaces when it comes to use of AI. Take the video game industry, for example. In many cases, gamers learn about the use of AI in a game or its promotional materials and lose their minds over it. They will often tell you they’re angry because of the “slop” that AI produces and is not found and corrected by the humans overseeing it… but that doesn’t tell the full story. Some just have a knee-jerk response to the use of AI at all and rail against it. Others, including industry insiders, see AI as no big deal; just another tool in a game developer’s tool belt, helping to do things faster than could be done before. That too isn’t the entire story; certainly there will be some job loss or lack of job expansion associated with the use of AI as a tool.

Somewhere in the middle is likely the correct answer. And what developer Supertrick has done in being transparent about the use of AI in Let It Die: Inferno is something of an interesting trial balloon for gauging public sentiment. PC Gamer tells the story of how an AI disclosure notice got added to the game’s Steam page, noting that voices, graphics, and music were all generated within the game in some part by AI. The notice is completely without nuance or detail, leading to a fairly wide backlash from the public.

No one liked that, and in response to no one liking that, Supertrick has come out with a news post to clarify exactly what materials in the game have AI’s tendrils around them. Fair’s fair: it’s a pretty limited pool of stuff. So limited, in fact, that it makes me wonder why use AI for it in the first place.

Supertrick attempted to explain why. The use of AI generated assets breaks down mostly like this:

1. Graphics/art: AI generated basic images based entirely on human-generated concept art and text and human beings then used those basic images as starting points, fleshing them out with further art over the top of them. Most of the assets in question here are background images for the settings of the game.
2. Voice: AI was used for only three characters, none of which were human characters. One character was itself an fictional AI machine and the developers used an AI for its voice because they thought that just made sense and provided some realism. The other two characters were also non-human lifeforms, and so the developer used AI voices following that same logic, to make them sound not-human.
3. Music: Exactly one track was generated using AI, though another AI editor was involved in editing some of the other tracks on a minimal basis.

And that’s it. Are the explanations above all that good? Nah, not all of them, in my opinion. Actors have been portraying computers, robots, and even AI for many years. Successfully in many cases, I would say. Even iconically at times. But using AI to create some base images and then layering human expression on top of them to create a final product? That seems perfectly reasonable to me. As does the use of AI for some music creation and editing in some specific uses.

Overall, the use here isn’t extensive, though, nor particularly crazy. And I very much like that Supertrick is going for a transparency play with this. The public’s reaction to that transparency is going to be very, very interesting. Even if you don’t like Supertrick’s use of AI as outlined above, it’s not extensive and that use certainly hasn’t done away with tens or hundreds of jobs. Continued public backlash would come off as kind of silly, I think.

Though the games overall reception isn’t particularly helpful, either.

Regardless, Let It Die: Inferno released yesterday, and so far has met a rocky reception. At the time of writing, the game has a Mostly Negative user-review score on Steam, with only 39% positive reviews.

Scanning those reviews, there doesn’t seem to be a ton in there about AI usage. So perhaps the backlash has moved on to the game just not being very good.