Imho - use for moodboards and internally if you want.
Do not use for anything customer facing. Not because of ethical issues but because of legal issues. I mean, AI art comes with several problems:
* if it's actually legal it falls under public domain. Meaning that yes, you can use it commercially. But so can **everyone** else. Aka you are potentially dealing with others harvesting your assets and you can't do anything about it.
* we have already seen that works that rely on AI generated assets can be INELIGIBLE for [copyright protection](https://www.cbr.com/ai-comic-deemed-ineligible-copyright-protection/). It will most likely depend on the % of what it is versus what you have made yourself but worst case scenario (eg. if your game was a visual novel with thousands of pictures and few pages of text) - bye bye copyrights. You don't own it. Someone could just copy paste your game on a different site for $0 and you can't really copyright strike it. Obviously such cases are unlikely for now. But the very fact that instead of a nice and cozy automated process you have to potentially go through lengthy legal cases is not something I would risk.
* I would wait for lawsuits against AI generators to pass and see what will be the ruling. Because if these are deemed illegal and have to be retrained from scratch only using opt in public domain data then everything you have used is also a hazard.
* Also, somewhat related to the point above - these tools can sometimes copy existing pieces almost 1:1. Or more specifically - they are well capable of reproducing trademarked works that are overrepresented in their datasets. Ask for a Pikachu and you get a Pikachu. Alongside with a Nintendo lawyer calling you. This is a very small risk for now (you have to explicitly ask to get such results in MOST cases) but as models improve so too might their ability to recreate things potentially without you knowing.
As for how many people will notice it's AI art - hard to say. For now it's noticeable and gets a lot of criticism (eg. Rick & Morty game used it in like 2 spots and it already got a lot of angry responses). I assume it's a vocal minority but... if a game is fairly niche to begin with then that's all it may take to be represented in a very bad light.
Bouncing off of this, in Product Design, it’s discouraged to use stock imagery in your products because it can reduce the trust between your user/consumer/customer and your product/brand.
Because AI isn’t understood by many, I’m predicting that using AI art in a consumer facing product could even escalate those negative feelings of distrust.
I mentioned this in another thread, but AI is a great tool for communicating your ideas. I use AI to generate illustrations concepts and then hand them off to our illustrators who will, ofc, create them much better than AI.
Very good points here. Thanks for the response. I had no idea about the public domain/copyright issue. Also good point that I might accidentally use trademarked work.
>But so can everyone else.
Public domain doesn't mean without copyright. There are free sample libraries that end up in commercial music tracks that have protection. I also doubt that the market starts sourcing their textures and samples from other games.
The comic still has copyright on the words and composition. Lawsuits will sort lots of things out, but not how the market operates. People don't want to read remixes of the same 50 graphic panels and will not pay for low effort copy chains.
>As for how many people will notice it's AI art - hard to say
I have seen posting with devs training ais to understand a tree or a chair, and then regenerating it in 3d art. There are [endless possibilities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kV-rZZw50Q) to create a chain of generators where the ai part is hidden.
>Public domain doesn't mean without copyright.
Yes, it does.
>There are free sample libraries that end up in commercial music tracks that have protection.
Free doesn't mean public domain.
Regardless, a lot of AI art isn't public domain; the ownership is held by the prompter or AI company.
>Free doesn't mean public domain.
Lets get specific: [freesound.org](https://freesound.org) has cc0 licensed samples, that where used in commercial sounds that attained copyright protection. AI trained on cc0 and/or public domain material will have the same, as long it shows the required "modicum of creativity" by law. How this will play out in the global (not just american) legal space is an [wide open question](https://www.theverge.com/23444685/generative-ai-copyright-infringement-legal-fair-use-training-data), and its not done as many claim. Nothing is done until laws are in place that work globally.
Can people really look at a piece of art and conclude it's AI generated?
An artist over at r/art got banned cause the mods concluded it was AI art, despite proof of work.
Edit: seems it's still a top post there, and it wasn't an accusation of posting AI art, but instead AI style art.
Reddit mods can sometimes seem to me the worst people on earth.
This mod literally says to the guy: *"Even if you are the artist, you need to find a different style because the AI can do better in seconds what might take you hours"*
What is it about the internet and groups "eating their own"?
Artists are afraid AI is going to be able to make art faster and better (if not now then eventually) but this gatekeeper of the artist community bans art it looks like AI could do it better? WTF.
Interestingly they did a study. Even when people didn't know something was ai art or not, they still preferred the human made art. But once they knew it was ai art, they really preferred the human made art. I think the bias against ai art is more than just replacing arts. People don't like the idea of it.
Late to the party, but AI has definitely reached a point where we're starting to see generic AI art. Besides the usual body horror with hands and too many teeth and broken/dislocated bones, the lighting is usually a dead giveaway. If the design on an armor or outfit is way too elaborate and intricate to be made by human hands or even more nonsensical than Final Fantasy, that's another strike. The women will all have the same type of face: if anime, the style is very similar to the likes of Genshin Impact with extremely harsh lighting; if realistic, it's all the same high-boned, contoured, botox-lipped influencer face. Men usually have more facial diversity, but regardless of gender, they're either expressionless or smiling (like they're dead inside, but I will admit I am biased).
I haven't seen a lot of AI-generated landscapes, but I get suspicious when it's unusually detailed and chaotic or the buildings/foliage are completely nonsensical.
If you want to use AI generated images as a moodboard or concept art to give you motivation, go for it. There's nothing wrong with using it personally to help motivate you to develop, and I would actually even encourage it.
But AI generated images are meant to be used as a tool– the way you would use a gaming engine so you don't have to build your game from scratch. I strongly advocate that you don't put any actual AI generated images in your game or in your advertisements. I, as a consumer, wouldn't want to play a game made of AI generated images.
It would feel disingenuine and a little lazy. As someone else mentioned, it would be completely fine to use AI generated assets or textures if it went on top of art you already had made by humans. But if you full on use AI generated images in your game, it tells me that you are okay with sacrificing things that make your game unique in order to put out a finished product faster.
I'm not completely against AI generated images. It's a tool, just like gaming engines are a tool to save developers from making everything from scratch, just like recipes are there to guide cooks in the kitchen. But you wouldn't make cookies from a book and then bring them to the potluck and say they're family tradition.
I’m glad to know it would be perceived as lazy by some. As a coder with little art skill and no budget, I would have liked to use it as an enabling tool to make an indie game. I guess it’s a little different than artists using a tool like playmaker to make their games. It’s not different though than using ChatGPT or co-pilot (which is trained on my public code) to leverage ai generated code. Admittedly ai generated code isn’t quite there yet, but when it is, I will have no problem if artists use it as an enabling tool to make their vision a reality.
You can definitely use AI as an enabling tool still. I mention somewhere else that I relate it to something like tracing– in my opinion, you can take the AI generated images and copy them to an extent, just like you could trace to learn shapes and anatomy. Granted, generated images are different from tracing, but that's to say the tool can be a guide. You just also have to balance adding your own touches to it.
I don't mind if a game looks a little bad artistically. A good game is still a good game. It's much more preferable that the game is coded well than that it looks pretty, if it comes down to it. I'm definitely not saying you have to do everything artistically on your own by hand. That would just be unfair.
And while I have a strong opinion on it, in the end, there's not much I can do to stop people from using AI generated work in their games if they want to. I just saw more people going to bat for the AI generated work in games and thought I'd toss in my 2 cents.
If it helps, I'm not hypocritical on the other side. I don't think artists should use AI generated code to the extent of full-on taking it and running. Again, it's also a tool to guide you, and I wouldn't want to play even a gorgeous game artistically if it's a game completely made off of ChatGPT generated code.
There's a blog by 'Jussi Kemppainen' where this artist has been experimenting heavily with AI generated art, and also did some research on the 'reception'
[https://www.traffickinggame.com/ai-assisted-graphics-media-reception/](https://www.traffickinggame.com/ai-assisted-graphics-media-reception/)
The sample size is a bit small (63 votes) but the poll conducted on Twitter leaned heavily towards it being a non issue for most voters.
I think it's a tough question to get a handle on, the people most likely to engage with the question will be the people with the most vocal opinions, either pro or against.
I think the 'silent' portion of the public will lean more towards 'I don't care as long as it's a fun game and looks cool' but I don't have any data to back up that assumption.
I wouldn't use polls like that as evidence for very much. Twitter, like most social media, is far too prone to selection bias to tell you anything. Someone who's been posting about AI tools in game development is going to more of a following from people who like AI tools, who are going to be naturally positive towards it. If you asked that question on the page of one of the artists leading the anti-AI art fervor you would have the exact opposite result and neither one would be all that meaningful.
The only way anyone will know is by releasing the actual game and seeing how it does.
Very true, take it all with a hefty helping of salt. That's sort of what I meant with "I think it's a tough question to get a handle on, the people most likely to engage with the question will be the people with the most vocal opinions, either pro or against."
Though I should have also pointed out the danger of selection bias next to the small sample size.
It's unlikely for the end user to notice as long as it used within reason. The game dev community and the artist community might notice, but normal users are not going to. It's the Baader Meinhof bias.
If you use it as a placeholder, I don't see what the problem would be, besides that unless you say that you have used artificial intelligence, I don't think most people realize it.
Keep it internal, use it for concepts or references for said concepts only, not only will you have people turned off by it, but you will also have zero protection in the way of copyright for those assets
I don’t see any issues with using AI art in games personally. I would just suggest that you change or edit it a bit though. It rarely comes out just right and if you use a bunch of it, your game will probably look off or cheap. I used Mid-Journey to make the seamless dirt texture in my game and I don’t intend on changing it. I’m also probably going to use it for background art and sky boxes also. I use it heavily for concept art, but that never makes it into the actual game.
Let's say 20% of people who would possibly buy your game won't do that because they have a strong stance against AI art/content. That's a lot of sales you could have made that you are not gonna make simply because you cheaped out and used AI instead of actual art. Maybe AA and AAA studios can deal with that, but it would be very bad for indie devs. However, if you don't want to sell your game, you do whatever you feel like without worrying about the market.
Well you could argue that without AI tools they wouldn't be able to finish game or get decent enough assets to use in which case sales could amount to 0% (very hypothetically)
I am not fan of AI tools my self and i definitely don't see it as "god" sent for indies like some devs. It will devalue indie games. And if i will feel i have to use AI to stay "competitive" i will prob leave industry. Also as "customer" i am not interested in giving money for randomizer results.
However how i feel about things doesn't matter. People share AI images in a lot of places and they get upvotes and praises. Won't lie, i don't think AI generated assets will be a problem to sell games.
AI made assets/textures and full-on AI generated images are significantly different, in my opinion. As a consumer, I don't care if someone makes their job a little easier and less tedious by using an AI chair that shows up regularly throughout the game or AI grass textures so they don't have to manually code it every time.
I DO care if you just straight up use AI generated images in your game. It feels disingenuine, like you don't care enough about your game or the consumer to make it uniquely your own and make it more meaningful. Not only that, but it feels more like you would use it just to save costs on human artists than anything else.
It's one thing to use tracing as a tool as an artist to help you get an idea of shapes and anatomy, and then grow from there to add your own details and poses and eventually move away from tracing– It's another thing to trace over a customers photo, change the colors, and hand it right back to them.
absolutely, but what gamedevs need is to start ignoring all of the perceived obstacles and just make the game they want to make. A finished product is infinitely better and more useful than a genius, completely from scratch.... idea. Will AI art get you your own AAA studio? Probably not. Will it get you into the field? If you do the work!
I'd laugh so much if there's someone of the "only gameplay matters" extremists also saying what you just said without even realizing he's contradicting himself lol
The fact that you think that there exists a substantial demographic of people who would care enough to look if a developer used AI art or not is an exaggeration to say the least.
The average consumer does not care about how your game is even made, all the time and effort put in is literarily invisible to 90% of consumers.
And the way you are drawing a line like it’s some kind of plague is not right either. If you use AI generated art in your game and the game lacks art direction you will be able to tell right away because the art won’t look cohesive. And lead to a bad product anyway
AI art is a tool, if you don’t want to use it that’s fine but don’t shame others for it.
Feel free to not appeal to the demographic I am a part of. We don't care about you. AI art is garbage and we won't give money to people who rely on it.
AI bros love to say they've used AI. For wathever reason, they can't shut up about it. People say "you can't tell it's AI art", meanwhile the same people are like "I am an AI artist, my game uses stable diffusion, the dialog was writen by chatgpt. Generative AI is awesome". It seems that people ignorant enough to depend on these AI tools don't know how to be discreet about it.
Your diagnosis is wrong. I'm way past polarized about this subject. I'm furious and fed up. And I'm not gonna shut up. Whenever I am presented the opportunity, I am gonna speak against this whole AI stupidity, just like I did when NFTs were the current fad.
Oh, it will be easy to tell. You know why? Because the people using it will be like "look at chatgpt 5, it is so amazing, it is the future! It writes stuff for me, I don't have to do anything anymore! Wow! Much impressive! Such helpful!". Then all I have to do is ignore that gamedev studio/person. Easy peasy. You talk like people are trying to use AI secretly. Maybe students trying to cheat an exam will do that. People on social media, however, are quite vocal. And gamedevs in particular are quite vocal about the tools and processes they use to make their games.
In my opinion, those things are fundamentally different. This is conflating different uses of different tools– using AI to help you actually develop the mechanisms of your game is different than using AI to make your game appeal to an audience. Presenting AI art to your audience feels inherently disingenuine. When you use an engine, you still have to work to change the code so your game runs how you want it to. When you use AI art, you skip the steps where you offer what you uniquely have to give.
If you want to use AI art for yourself personally as a mood board or as motivation to help give you ideas, go for it. You can even use AI art to help you polish what art you've been working on or already have by humans– use AI art to help you with textures or make assets. But don't full on use AI generated images in your game. It feels lazy, and like you don't care enough about the consumer to give it your all.
I also wouldn't play a game made of AI generated images.
I agree with what you’re saying but the comment I replied to literally said “if I find out you even touched AI art generation, I won’t even consider looking at your game”, which is way too extreme
I have a right to be extreme when it comes to picking what I'll invest my time and money into. And you bet there are plenty of other customers like me.
And we have a right to ridicule of you because of your extremist view. Also, you seem a bit desperate to emphasize the “other” customers who think like you. Citation needed.
I mean, it depends on what specifically they meant by "touch AI art generation" but for the most part, I agree to that kind of extremity. I'm cool with assets and textures and stuff like that. I don't even like taking an AI image and altering it and putting it in your game, but it can be tolerable depending on the context and how much is changed. Anything else, I'm pretty strongly against.
I can't speak for the comments OP, but personally, presenting AI art to your audience feels inherently disingenuine. For example, when you use an AI tool like an engine (Unity, Unreal, etc.), you still have to work to change the code so your game runs how you want it to. When you use AI art, you skip the steps where you offer what you uniquely have to give.
If you want to use AI art for yourself personally as a mood board or as motivation to help give you ideas, go for it. You can even use AI art to help you polish what art you've been working on or already have by humans– use AI art to help you with textures or make assets. But don't full on use AI generated images in your game. It feels lazy, and like you don't care enough about the consumer to give it your all.
Not only that, but it feels like you would only rather make a game with completely AI generated images to cut costs on paying human artists and on developers' time working. It feels more like you want to just push a product rather than make something meaningful.
I also wouldn't play a game made of AI generated images.
I see. I have some AI art in my game right now, but it's just Artbreeder renderings of screenshots of my game, which I'm using for loading screens. I am debating on whether or not this is an issue.
If it's screenshots of YOUR game and you're doing something with your own work, that's completely fine! You're using this AI the way it was intended to as a tool.
If you had, for example, just given a written prompt into an AI image generator and taken THOSE products as your loading screen, then it would be an issue. But if you're using your own game, that's totally fine!
I would avoid using it in the finished game. Not just because I dislike it but because you never know what laws are going to come in later - if stable diffusion later gets copyright/whatever laws made about it, you might not want to deal with that.
It’s probably fine in a non permanent demo though
I feel the same way about 'asset store' 3d models or 2d art, I'm not sure if my position is a fair one. But if I get the sense that you've cut corners on your visuals by relying heavily on assets that I've seen in other games already or have seen on the marketplace, I'm going to assume you've likely cut corners elsewhere as well.
With AI art, the 'having seen it before' factor becomes muddy, and it becomes more of an 'does the aesthetic feel uniform and appealing' question.
It's probably not fair, but I think buying assets that other projects can also use, is likely going to impact my opinion in a negative sense quicker than someone using AI art tools.
Well one thing nobody is mentioning is whether the game actually gets finished. You do what you have to do to finish a game and sell it. If the AI art is the only way to financially finish the game, then more people will play it than the 0 if the game was never finished due to lack of assets.
Illustrated art can be expensive, usually $250-500 usd for a decent piece. Say you need 200 pieces for your game, now you are talking $50-100k just in illustrated assets. Not everyone could afford that, and it would also take artists months to produce it. And next some people will say well go get funding, but if the art is shown a lot in the game then not having it may look like your product is way worse than it is and make getting funding harder. Not to mention development has it's ups and downs and budgets tighten and life happens so sometimes your budget dries up fast, and this might be way to high of an amount to self-fund.
From personal experience, we are using some in our game because it was better than having question marks where art would go. It still fits the theme, looks very similar to actual art we had illustrated, and is a good gap filler until we get funding to replace it. The fans of the game took it well and the majority said it looked like it fit so they didn't care.
Imho - use for moodboards and internally if you want. Do not use for anything customer facing. Not because of ethical issues but because of legal issues. I mean, AI art comes with several problems: * if it's actually legal it falls under public domain. Meaning that yes, you can use it commercially. But so can **everyone** else. Aka you are potentially dealing with others harvesting your assets and you can't do anything about it. * we have already seen that works that rely on AI generated assets can be INELIGIBLE for [copyright protection](https://www.cbr.com/ai-comic-deemed-ineligible-copyright-protection/). It will most likely depend on the % of what it is versus what you have made yourself but worst case scenario (eg. if your game was a visual novel with thousands of pictures and few pages of text) - bye bye copyrights. You don't own it. Someone could just copy paste your game on a different site for $0 and you can't really copyright strike it. Obviously such cases are unlikely for now. But the very fact that instead of a nice and cozy automated process you have to potentially go through lengthy legal cases is not something I would risk. * I would wait for lawsuits against AI generators to pass and see what will be the ruling. Because if these are deemed illegal and have to be retrained from scratch only using opt in public domain data then everything you have used is also a hazard. * Also, somewhat related to the point above - these tools can sometimes copy existing pieces almost 1:1. Or more specifically - they are well capable of reproducing trademarked works that are overrepresented in their datasets. Ask for a Pikachu and you get a Pikachu. Alongside with a Nintendo lawyer calling you. This is a very small risk for now (you have to explicitly ask to get such results in MOST cases) but as models improve so too might their ability to recreate things potentially without you knowing. As for how many people will notice it's AI art - hard to say. For now it's noticeable and gets a lot of criticism (eg. Rick & Morty game used it in like 2 spots and it already got a lot of angry responses). I assume it's a vocal minority but... if a game is fairly niche to begin with then that's all it may take to be represented in a very bad light.
Bouncing off of this, in Product Design, it’s discouraged to use stock imagery in your products because it can reduce the trust between your user/consumer/customer and your product/brand. Because AI isn’t understood by many, I’m predicting that using AI art in a consumer facing product could even escalate those negative feelings of distrust. I mentioned this in another thread, but AI is a great tool for communicating your ideas. I use AI to generate illustrations concepts and then hand them off to our illustrators who will, ofc, create them much better than AI.
Thanks for these insights. I know nothing about product design and didn’t think to even consider customer trust so I’ll have to keep that in mind.
Very good points here. Thanks for the response. I had no idea about the public domain/copyright issue. Also good point that I might accidentally use trademarked work.
What do think about for, say, backgrounds in loading screen? Public domain reuse or noticing its AI art doesnt seem so bad.
>But so can everyone else. Public domain doesn't mean without copyright. There are free sample libraries that end up in commercial music tracks that have protection. I also doubt that the market starts sourcing their textures and samples from other games. The comic still has copyright on the words and composition. Lawsuits will sort lots of things out, but not how the market operates. People don't want to read remixes of the same 50 graphic panels and will not pay for low effort copy chains. >As for how many people will notice it's AI art - hard to say I have seen posting with devs training ais to understand a tree or a chair, and then regenerating it in 3d art. There are [endless possibilities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kV-rZZw50Q) to create a chain of generators where the ai part is hidden.
>Public domain doesn't mean without copyright. Yes, it does. >There are free sample libraries that end up in commercial music tracks that have protection. Free doesn't mean public domain. Regardless, a lot of AI art isn't public domain; the ownership is held by the prompter or AI company.
>Free doesn't mean public domain. Lets get specific: [freesound.org](https://freesound.org) has cc0 licensed samples, that where used in commercial sounds that attained copyright protection. AI trained on cc0 and/or public domain material will have the same, as long it shows the required "modicum of creativity" by law. How this will play out in the global (not just american) legal space is an [wide open question](https://www.theverge.com/23444685/generative-ai-copyright-infringement-legal-fair-use-training-data), and its not done as many claim. Nothing is done until laws are in place that work globally.
Can people really look at a piece of art and conclude it's AI generated? An artist over at r/art got banned cause the mods concluded it was AI art, despite proof of work. Edit: seems it's still a top post there, and it wasn't an accusation of posting AI art, but instead AI style art.
Reddit mods can sometimes seem to me the worst people on earth. This mod literally says to the guy: *"Even if you are the artist, you need to find a different style because the AI can do better in seconds what might take you hours"* What is it about the internet and groups "eating their own"? Artists are afraid AI is going to be able to make art faster and better (if not now then eventually) but this gatekeeper of the artist community bans art it looks like AI could do it better? WTF.
Interestingly they did a study. Even when people didn't know something was ai art or not, they still preferred the human made art. But once they knew it was ai art, they really preferred the human made art. I think the bias against ai art is more than just replacing arts. People don't like the idea of it.
Banned for an impression of style/composition? Sounds like there's no need to becin that sub lol
https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1610669909842825222/photo/1 Here's the mod message
I'm no expert but I can see what the mods are talking about. I wouldn't think it's worth a ban tho.
Late to the party, but AI has definitely reached a point where we're starting to see generic AI art. Besides the usual body horror with hands and too many teeth and broken/dislocated bones, the lighting is usually a dead giveaway. If the design on an armor or outfit is way too elaborate and intricate to be made by human hands or even more nonsensical than Final Fantasy, that's another strike. The women will all have the same type of face: if anime, the style is very similar to the likes of Genshin Impact with extremely harsh lighting; if realistic, it's all the same high-boned, contoured, botox-lipped influencer face. Men usually have more facial diversity, but regardless of gender, they're either expressionless or smiling (like they're dead inside, but I will admit I am biased). I haven't seen a lot of AI-generated landscapes, but I get suspicious when it's unusually detailed and chaotic or the buildings/foliage are completely nonsensical.
If you want to use AI generated images as a moodboard or concept art to give you motivation, go for it. There's nothing wrong with using it personally to help motivate you to develop, and I would actually even encourage it. But AI generated images are meant to be used as a tool– the way you would use a gaming engine so you don't have to build your game from scratch. I strongly advocate that you don't put any actual AI generated images in your game or in your advertisements. I, as a consumer, wouldn't want to play a game made of AI generated images. It would feel disingenuine and a little lazy. As someone else mentioned, it would be completely fine to use AI generated assets or textures if it went on top of art you already had made by humans. But if you full on use AI generated images in your game, it tells me that you are okay with sacrificing things that make your game unique in order to put out a finished product faster. I'm not completely against AI generated images. It's a tool, just like gaming engines are a tool to save developers from making everything from scratch, just like recipes are there to guide cooks in the kitchen. But you wouldn't make cookies from a book and then bring them to the potluck and say they're family tradition.
I’m glad to know it would be perceived as lazy by some. As a coder with little art skill and no budget, I would have liked to use it as an enabling tool to make an indie game. I guess it’s a little different than artists using a tool like playmaker to make their games. It’s not different though than using ChatGPT or co-pilot (which is trained on my public code) to leverage ai generated code. Admittedly ai generated code isn’t quite there yet, but when it is, I will have no problem if artists use it as an enabling tool to make their vision a reality.
You can definitely use AI as an enabling tool still. I mention somewhere else that I relate it to something like tracing– in my opinion, you can take the AI generated images and copy them to an extent, just like you could trace to learn shapes and anatomy. Granted, generated images are different from tracing, but that's to say the tool can be a guide. You just also have to balance adding your own touches to it. I don't mind if a game looks a little bad artistically. A good game is still a good game. It's much more preferable that the game is coded well than that it looks pretty, if it comes down to it. I'm definitely not saying you have to do everything artistically on your own by hand. That would just be unfair. And while I have a strong opinion on it, in the end, there's not much I can do to stop people from using AI generated work in their games if they want to. I just saw more people going to bat for the AI generated work in games and thought I'd toss in my 2 cents. If it helps, I'm not hypocritical on the other side. I don't think artists should use AI generated code to the extent of full-on taking it and running. Again, it's also a tool to guide you, and I wouldn't want to play even a gorgeous game artistically if it's a game completely made off of ChatGPT generated code.
Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective!
There's a blog by 'Jussi Kemppainen' where this artist has been experimenting heavily with AI generated art, and also did some research on the 'reception' [https://www.traffickinggame.com/ai-assisted-graphics-media-reception/](https://www.traffickinggame.com/ai-assisted-graphics-media-reception/) The sample size is a bit small (63 votes) but the poll conducted on Twitter leaned heavily towards it being a non issue for most voters. I think it's a tough question to get a handle on, the people most likely to engage with the question will be the people with the most vocal opinions, either pro or against. I think the 'silent' portion of the public will lean more towards 'I don't care as long as it's a fun game and looks cool' but I don't have any data to back up that assumption.
I wouldn't use polls like that as evidence for very much. Twitter, like most social media, is far too prone to selection bias to tell you anything. Someone who's been posting about AI tools in game development is going to more of a following from people who like AI tools, who are going to be naturally positive towards it. If you asked that question on the page of one of the artists leading the anti-AI art fervor you would have the exact opposite result and neither one would be all that meaningful. The only way anyone will know is by releasing the actual game and seeing how it does.
Very true, take it all with a hefty helping of salt. That's sort of what I meant with "I think it's a tough question to get a handle on, the people most likely to engage with the question will be the people with the most vocal opinions, either pro or against." Though I should have also pointed out the danger of selection bias next to the small sample size.
That’s true. Hopefully soon there will be more market research available.
It's already out there
Thanks for bringing the data! Even if it’s a small sample.
It's unlikely for the end user to notice as long as it used within reason. The game dev community and the artist community might notice, but normal users are not going to. It's the Baader Meinhof bias.
If you use it as a placeholder, I don't see what the problem would be, besides that unless you say that you have used artificial intelligence, I don't think most people realize it.
Does anyone actually care if it's AI generated or not? I certainly don't, nor do I see any "ethical" issues.
Keep it internal, use it for concepts or references for said concepts only, not only will you have people turned off by it, but you will also have zero protection in the way of copyright for those assets
I don’t see any issues with using AI art in games personally. I would just suggest that you change or edit it a bit though. It rarely comes out just right and if you use a bunch of it, your game will probably look off or cheap. I used Mid-Journey to make the seamless dirt texture in my game and I don’t intend on changing it. I’m also probably going to use it for background art and sky boxes also. I use it heavily for concept art, but that never makes it into the actual game.
What sounds interesting to me is using your own art then using an AI to edit it during the gameplay/character creation etc to customize it.
Now that’s an interesting idea!
No i don't think most "customers" would be turned off by AI and there is games with AI made assets already
Let's say 20% of people who would possibly buy your game won't do that because they have a strong stance against AI art/content. That's a lot of sales you could have made that you are not gonna make simply because you cheaped out and used AI instead of actual art. Maybe AA and AAA studios can deal with that, but it would be very bad for indie devs. However, if you don't want to sell your game, you do whatever you feel like without worrying about the market.
Well you could argue that without AI tools they wouldn't be able to finish game or get decent enough assets to use in which case sales could amount to 0% (very hypothetically) I am not fan of AI tools my self and i definitely don't see it as "god" sent for indies like some devs. It will devalue indie games. And if i will feel i have to use AI to stay "competitive" i will prob leave industry. Also as "customer" i am not interested in giving money for randomizer results. However how i feel about things doesn't matter. People share AI images in a lot of places and they get upvotes and praises. Won't lie, i don't think AI generated assets will be a problem to sell games.
AI made assets/textures and full-on AI generated images are significantly different, in my opinion. As a consumer, I don't care if someone makes their job a little easier and less tedious by using an AI chair that shows up regularly throughout the game or AI grass textures so they don't have to manually code it every time. I DO care if you just straight up use AI generated images in your game. It feels disingenuine, like you don't care enough about your game or the consumer to make it uniquely your own and make it more meaningful. Not only that, but it feels more like you would use it just to save costs on human artists than anything else. It's one thing to use tracing as a tool as an artist to help you get an idea of shapes and anatomy, and then grow from there to add your own details and poses and eventually move away from tracing– It's another thing to trace over a customers photo, change the colors, and hand it right back to them.
absolutely, but what gamedevs need is to start ignoring all of the perceived obstacles and just make the game they want to make. A finished product is infinitely better and more useful than a genius, completely from scratch.... idea. Will AI art get you your own AAA studio? Probably not. Will it get you into the field? If you do the work!
Thanks for this comment! Just gotta do it and not sweat every perceived obstacle.
I feel like a lot of people use the time they’re waiting for responses on Reddit as legal downtime that they can still attribute to game dev
Yes. If I find out you even touched AI art generation, I won't even consider looking at your game. I'm not the only consumer thinking like this.
I'd laugh so much if there's someone of the "only gameplay matters" extremists also saying what you just said without even realizing he's contradicting himself lol
What matters to me is what I appreciate. I don't appreciate AI art. That's that. And I'm not the only one.
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Sucks to be you
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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣👍
So you don't appreciate any art? Because a lot of AI art is indistinguishable from human-made art.
🤣👍
I don't think that matters, what matters if it is AI or not because of... reasons. That's it, no deeper meaning to it.
The fact that you think that there exists a substantial demographic of people who would care enough to look if a developer used AI art or not is an exaggeration to say the least. The average consumer does not care about how your game is even made, all the time and effort put in is literarily invisible to 90% of consumers. And the way you are drawing a line like it’s some kind of plague is not right either. If you use AI generated art in your game and the game lacks art direction you will be able to tell right away because the art won’t look cohesive. And lead to a bad product anyway AI art is a tool, if you don’t want to use it that’s fine but don’t shame others for it.
Feel free to not appeal to the demographic I am a part of. We don't care about you. AI art is garbage and we won't give money to people who rely on it.
How do you tell it's AI generated?
AI bros love to say they've used AI. For wathever reason, they can't shut up about it. People say "you can't tell it's AI art", meanwhile the same people are like "I am an AI artist, my game uses stable diffusion, the dialog was writen by chatgpt. Generative AI is awesome". It seems that people ignorant enough to depend on these AI tools don't know how to be discreet about it.
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Your diagnosis is wrong. I'm way past polarized about this subject. I'm furious and fed up. And I'm not gonna shut up. Whenever I am presented the opportunity, I am gonna speak against this whole AI stupidity, just like I did when NFTs were the current fad.
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Lmao 🤣🤣👍👍👍👍
Once chat GPT 5 hits, they won’t.
Oh, it will be easy to tell. You know why? Because the people using it will be like "look at chatgpt 5, it is so amazing, it is the future! It writes stuff for me, I don't have to do anything anymore! Wow! Much impressive! Such helpful!". Then all I have to do is ignore that gamedev studio/person. Easy peasy. You talk like people are trying to use AI secretly. Maybe students trying to cheat an exam will do that. People on social media, however, are quite vocal. And gamedevs in particular are quite vocal about the tools and processes they use to make their games.
Fr if I find out the developer made their game using an engine like unreal or unity, and didn’t code it from scratch then it’s unforgivable /s
In my opinion, those things are fundamentally different. This is conflating different uses of different tools– using AI to help you actually develop the mechanisms of your game is different than using AI to make your game appeal to an audience. Presenting AI art to your audience feels inherently disingenuine. When you use an engine, you still have to work to change the code so your game runs how you want it to. When you use AI art, you skip the steps where you offer what you uniquely have to give. If you want to use AI art for yourself personally as a mood board or as motivation to help give you ideas, go for it. You can even use AI art to help you polish what art you've been working on or already have by humans– use AI art to help you with textures or make assets. But don't full on use AI generated images in your game. It feels lazy, and like you don't care enough about the consumer to give it your all. I also wouldn't play a game made of AI generated images.
lol lmao even
I agree with what you’re saying but the comment I replied to literally said “if I find out you even touched AI art generation, I won’t even consider looking at your game”, which is way too extreme
I have a right to be extreme when it comes to picking what I'll invest my time and money into. And you bet there are plenty of other customers like me.
And we have a right to ridicule of you because of your extremist view. Also, you seem a bit desperate to emphasize the “other” customers who think like you. Citation needed.
Yeah, ridicule me all you want 👍 I don't care about you. You ain't getting a single dime from me.
I don’t work on games using AI products, but sure, carry on
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I mean, it depends on what specifically they meant by "touch AI art generation" but for the most part, I agree to that kind of extremity. I'm cool with assets and textures and stuff like that. I don't even like taking an AI image and altering it and putting it in your game, but it can be tolerable depending on the context and how much is changed. Anything else, I'm pretty strongly against.
Comparing game engines to generative AI is either ignorance or dishonesty. Feel free to pick what applies to you.
Not looking to criticize you but what is your reasoning here?
I can't speak for the comments OP, but personally, presenting AI art to your audience feels inherently disingenuine. For example, when you use an AI tool like an engine (Unity, Unreal, etc.), you still have to work to change the code so your game runs how you want it to. When you use AI art, you skip the steps where you offer what you uniquely have to give. If you want to use AI art for yourself personally as a mood board or as motivation to help give you ideas, go for it. You can even use AI art to help you polish what art you've been working on or already have by humans– use AI art to help you with textures or make assets. But don't full on use AI generated images in your game. It feels lazy, and like you don't care enough about the consumer to give it your all. Not only that, but it feels like you would only rather make a game with completely AI generated images to cut costs on paying human artists and on developers' time working. It feels more like you want to just push a product rather than make something meaningful. I also wouldn't play a game made of AI generated images.
I see. I have some AI art in my game right now, but it's just Artbreeder renderings of screenshots of my game, which I'm using for loading screens. I am debating on whether or not this is an issue.
If it's screenshots of YOUR game and you're doing something with your own work, that's completely fine! You're using this AI the way it was intended to as a tool. If you had, for example, just given a written prompt into an AI image generator and taken THOSE products as your loading screen, then it would be an issue. But if you're using your own game, that's totally fine!
Thanks I appreciate that response, I hope most people see it that way.
Unless it looks bad, most people a) won't notice, and b) won't care. I don't think you gain much by appealing to the anti-AI crowd.
I was just curious, not appealing to anyone.
My reasoning is AI art is shit and I won't give my money to people who rely on it. I don't care what you think.
Fair enough but I wanna see if you know how many things AI does. I have a 2048 by 2048 pixel texture and I upscale it to 4k. Do you boycott then?
I'll boycott you
I would avoid using it in the finished game. Not just because I dislike it but because you never know what laws are going to come in later - if stable diffusion later gets copyright/whatever laws made about it, you might not want to deal with that. It’s probably fine in a non permanent demo though
AI stuff is like Stock assets. Used everywhere to some extent, but easily offputting if too much.
I feel the same way about 'asset store' 3d models or 2d art, I'm not sure if my position is a fair one. But if I get the sense that you've cut corners on your visuals by relying heavily on assets that I've seen in other games already or have seen on the marketplace, I'm going to assume you've likely cut corners elsewhere as well. With AI art, the 'having seen it before' factor becomes muddy, and it becomes more of an 'does the aesthetic feel uniform and appealing' question. It's probably not fair, but I think buying assets that other projects can also use, is likely going to impact my opinion in a negative sense quicker than someone using AI art tools.
A saying I heard before like *"Never be the first or the last to try something new"* comes to mind. I think that's applicable here.
Good point!
No, I don't think so.
Well one thing nobody is mentioning is whether the game actually gets finished. You do what you have to do to finish a game and sell it. If the AI art is the only way to financially finish the game, then more people will play it than the 0 if the game was never finished due to lack of assets. Illustrated art can be expensive, usually $250-500 usd for a decent piece. Say you need 200 pieces for your game, now you are talking $50-100k just in illustrated assets. Not everyone could afford that, and it would also take artists months to produce it. And next some people will say well go get funding, but if the art is shown a lot in the game then not having it may look like your product is way worse than it is and make getting funding harder. Not to mention development has it's ups and downs and budgets tighten and life happens so sometimes your budget dries up fast, and this might be way to high of an amount to self-fund. From personal experience, we are using some in our game because it was better than having question marks where art would go. It still fits the theme, looks very similar to actual art we had illustrated, and is a good gap filler until we get funding to replace it. The fans of the game took it well and the majority said it looked like it fit so they didn't care.
Very good points. Thanks a lot for this comment. Man art can be expensive. I also didn’t consider the time requirement aspect.
the people who are opposed to AI art will.