Oh dear. Goonswarm Games are shutting down after Running With Scissors cancelled POSTAL: Bullet Paradise due to the use of generative AI. It’s a bit of a saga this one.
I covered the initial announcement, along with a follow-up update in there where Running With Scissors attempted to defend the developer. The backlash only continued, and eventually RWS cancelled it as per the statement GamingOnLinux was sent on December 5th via Vince Desi, founder of Running With Scissors
The apology admits use of AI in marketing material
After the studio was already shut down. If it turned out they hadn’t used generative AI would the results have been any different?
Also, oh no, marketing material. Definitely worth destroying a game studio over.
Not just marketing material, the game itself used it.
Yeah this is getting ridiculous. People are going to have to accept the existence of genAI sooner or later. To be honest I never understood what the problem people had with it was in the first place. Surely AI is something we were all looking forward to before it actually came out.
If you don’t personally have a problem with GenAI, that’s fine. Nobody else has to accept it or like it for themselves though.
A game studio has been shut down over this. So yes it’s a problem when others can’t at least tolerate it. It’s especially funny when people attack people for using GenAI when they actually didn’t use it.
It isn’t a problem for consumers to make decisions about what they want to support. Those decisions might not line up with your beliefs, but people can still make choices about what they do or don’t support.
Again though they did not intentionally use it, one of their contractors did without their knowledge which they then apologised for. There is no reliable way of telling what is or is not AI generated and that’s only getting worse as models improve. This means that ultimately witch hunts like this are only going to get more dangerous and more outrageous.
I feel we’re moving away from what I understood your point to be: the public has to get comfortable with Generative AI being used in media and products.
I don’t agree with that point.
If the public can’t tell the difference then how can they be comfortable or uncomfortable if they don’t even know?
You will increasingly find as well that more and more things will be made using AI to the point you can’t really avoid it unless you only consume older media. This is especially true for anything involving programming such as video games as almost all future programming projects will involve AI as it’s simply much faster and more effective to code with AI than without it. Since you don’t have access to the source code of most games there really isn’t any way to tell. So even if you try to avoid video games with AI generated assets you won’t be able to avoid games with AI generated code.
Basically I am trying to say that trying to boycott AI entirely is futile and hating it changes nothing. It’s the modern equivalent to being a luddite.
Yeah, I never noticed any particular negative reaction when someone walked into the Holodeck on Star Trek and said “Computer, create a mystery in the style of Sherlock Holmes” or whatever. Ask most people and they’d probably count that as one of the fictional technologies they were most looking forward to.
Sure but we don’t have that. And AI is costing people jobs, stealing content not actually doing anything well “spending” billions.
Don’t forget the ecological impact