Eigong… and then the other Eigong…

I mean I don’t actually believe this, and I do think disclosure should ve required at all levels if any AI generated content remains in a final product because the goal should never be to dupe people into thinking someghing is sincere and legitimate. Again, the point is the principle behind the shortcut. If you afen’t interested in making dialogue portraits, don’t have dialogue portraits. If you don’t want to write believeable banter, don’t include it. You engage with the artist when you engage with art. If you gave me Undertale today and said it’s completely AI generated then I would be completely unmotivated because it’s not anybody’s story, it’s just content. If you never told me it was AI and I found out on my own at the end credits I would never speak to you again, if not report you as some sort of untrustable source. No matter how believeable the AI is it will never change the fact that it undermines real work and sincerity from real people and will never have a place with anyone who actually cares.

Of course if you want to be cynical those people might be the minority here and that’s a different problem.

TL;DR don’t use AI. Or do, but I won’t play it.

I played a game, Crust, I’ll name and shame, don’t give a shit. Right up my alley, make a moon base, dig in the ground and deform terrain for resources, get it all automated, great stuff…

I’m playing the tutorial and I realize, there a shit ton of banter and dialogue in this tutorial for my factory game, can I please play the game? I do not care what these coworkers are up to.

Then I listened to what they were saying. First, the dialogue was extremely flat. No affectation. Strange emphasis on the words. Oh, it’s AI text to speech. Okay. It’s a small studio, it’s early access, I could forgive that. Then I realized the actual dialogue made no sense. There was some weird logic to the flow of the conversation. Ah, okay, the dialogue is AI. Okay… i mean, it’s early access, and a factory game, and I’m listening to two AI’s talk to eachother and do some weird puppet show of character develolment. Even the portraits are AI generated, none of this is real.

Then they told a joke. I have no memeory of what it was, but one character said something in the pattern of a joke, the other laughed, and I still can’t even play the game. I am a captive audience of an AI telling an AI joke to an AI who made an AI laugh.

I think anyone considering using AI should take a long hard look at what they want to make and their goals. No moon base factory game needs fake ass banter with no bearing on the plot to drive a tutorial. I uninstalled that shit so fast and am now and active enemy of that game. Why? Because someone thought generated content was more important than the gameplay. I don’t care about what happened later on I know everything I need to know about the dev and I hate it with an unexpected passion.

So yeah, no, if a game uses AI content it’s not a game, it’s the weird hollow perception of what someone thinks a game should be, which is an easy flag for me to pin something as inescapably ass.

Just for fun I ran the Mario 3 release price through the Bureau of Labor and Statistics inflation calculator and it came back with $127 today for what 50 bucks was worth in 1990.

I’m not saying $100 for Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 is good and correct but I will say I always find people wanking on about game prices to be a bit short sighted. Gamers are the most spoiled price point consumers on the planet.

Man Cody/Katie/Wormbo from Even More News look like they got put through the early 90’s prime time TV show filter.

Yeah baby I’m a scorpanceitarius