Waiting for the “Whoops, we ‘forgot’ to remove it”.
Fuuuuck. I don’t really care about this one, but now I’m worried they’re slopping up Dark Heresy too.
Huh, weird, you weren’t supposed to see that in the final version. But we fired the guy responsible and we’re sorry that we got caught
If we conveniently forget about how unethical all AI is, Slay the Spire shows that no game needs generative AI for “placeholder” content and Expedition 33 shows that it can and will slip through the cracks. Don’t. Fucking. Use. It.
Yep. I saw one slop picture from the new game that I was actually excited to buy, and even though it was “oh, we only used it as a placeholder and just forgot to remove after tehehe”, I immediately lost all the interest, and will not buy it now. Later I learned that the quests there are nonsensical and a bit disjointed, and the story is stupid, and I can tell you, I’m not surprised at all.
LLM is like that black goo, everything it touches gets corrupted forever.
If you’re using AI in your process, even early in development, it means the game is no longer 100% human made, so stop the bullshit.
Literally every game that’s made today is using AI as part of the development process.
Damn near every Dev has tab completion on in their IDE. Which is AI based.
What do you mean “tab completion is AI based”? We have had tab completion for years before LLMs were a thing.
Some people just dont want my money. [Steps out into the airlock]
Lots of folks here acting like this is something strange. Every single game developer is using some kind of AI in its development cycle. This industry is fucked up enough without having clueless morons crusading against the few studios left not fucking the customer sideways.
(X) Doubt
And just like that I added it to my ignored list on Steam
Same. Steam is so inundated with AI slop that I’m now following like a dozen different curators that flag AI usage, for the cases when the developers “forget” to fill out their AI disclosure field D: (which I’ve restyled to be red and on the top of the page)
I only know of AI Check which had to make a second account cause they already hit the limit with how many games they were marking as containing AI.
I went through my curator list just now; these are the largest/most active ones:
- Game uses Ai - 961 reviews - last update: 2026-03-27
- Is it AI? - 774 reviews - last update: 2026-03-26
- AI_games_flag - 1,998 reviews - last update: 2026-03-17
- AI Check - 2,000 reviews - last update: 2025-12-23
- The Curator Page I Made to Flag AI Slop - 383 reviews - last update: 2026-02-13
- Ai? No buy! - 343 reviews - last update: 2026-03-23
- Does This Game Use GenAI? - 193 reviews - last update: 2026-03-27
- NO AI #HumanArtists - 119 reviews - last update: 2026-03-25
- AI Check 2 - 86 reviews - last update: 2026-03-23
Thanks! Followed all of them, although not a fan of “Does this game use GenAI” adding games that they don’t think have any. I get it’s being informational, but at that point you might as well do like Half-Life just to say it doesn’t have any.
Gonna preface this by saying I’m obviously a huge Expanse fan so my opinion is definitely biased. My username is a character from The Expanse and I consider it both my favorite TV show and book series ever. Wanted to make that clear up front.
That being said, if the game is good and they eventually replace the slop assets with proper assets, then what does it matter? As much as I like Lemmy, the hardline stances the community tends to take pisses me off at times. “Oh you’re not a full blown communist and haven’t read Marx? You’re no better than a nazi you filthy shitlib”
Or regarding “AI” (hate that they called it that, it’s basically just a smarter auto correct thats existed in smartphone keyboards for years now) anyone that doesn’t automatically and passionately hate AI or any of its uses is automatically demonized as a supporter of big tech. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate 90% of what “AI” does and is used for, especially how corpos are using it as an excuse to lay off real people and how dumbasses are relying on it as pure truth when it constantly hallucinates bullshit. I don’t support “AI” and I can’t wait for the bubble to burst.
There’s almost zero nuance here, it’s 90% “you’re with us or you’re against us” with no room for anything in between.
If the game is good and they replace the slop assets with real assets when it’s released next year then who fucking cares that they used AI, what matters is whether the game is good or not and whether the devs are treated and paid well. Expedition 33 used AI in earlier iterations and it all got replaced with real assets eventually but that didn’t stop Lemmy from shitting on one of the best games to come out within the last decade once that became public.
You wanna make this place a more mainstream alternative to big tech controlling everything? Get off your high horse and accept that there’s nuance to everything, it’s not just black and white. Otherwise this place will continue to scare off new users faster than it can gain them. I consider myself to be a progressive, I’m Canadian and I’ve only voted NDP since I was able to vote and I’m now 32. I also really respect AOC, Mamdani, and Sanders in the states, so I’m already close enough to the target demographic of Lemmy if you exclude the tankie trifecta (ml, hexbear, and grad) and even I get sick of the circlejerk here at times.
Judge something when you can actually have a proper opportunity to do so rather than getting preemptively pissed off because they had the audacity to use something you don’t like.
If the game comes out and still has slop in it and/or just sucks in general, then yeah, shit on it all you want, and I’ll be first in line to join the club cause I absolutely love The Expanse and I’ll be immensely disappointed if it turns out bad.
Again, in the interest of honesty and transparency, I usually prefer to just throw my opinions out there and not read or respond to replies when it’s something that I know is gonna be controversial so I won’t be replying to anyone that replies to this comment. I really hate arguing with random people on the internet so I just ignore replies for the most part.
It’s my favorite book too. I’m conflicted. AI isn’t going back in the box.
At the same time, it’s kinda like the way Belters are treated, barely getting their needs met in favor of corporate profits. AI is doing the same thing to a lot of people looking for work and is built off stolen labor.
So what you’re saying is we should drop rocks on the data centers, right?
No. I’m saying we should be more thoughtful about how we use it and train it.
Pensa you some welwala, ke?
You’re right. It’s the same god damn mindless circle jerks you get in every online forum. This is why bots are undetectable, because they fit right in by commenting without actually thinking.
Ok, but what if I don’t want new people and like how small it is filled with like-minded individuals?
Don’t go in the internet, move to a cave and don’t bother interacting with the society. It solves both our and your issues.
If your placeholder doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, it’s a bad placeholder. There is literally no workflow in which temporary assets shat by AI would be useful.
They just want to normalize AI use until people don’t care anymore. And with the waste of resources this shit represents, I just hope this never happens.
You don’t see the use in an artist viewing an approximation of the finished product in order to see what can be improved?
Do you suppose all conductors just write symphonies in their heads and never have to hear them out loud before deciding they’re done? Would it be useful to replace the tuba with a placeholder of a duck quacking, or do you think they might want it to sound like a tuba even though it’s not the final product?
Even a cheap toy synthetizer can make something close enough to a tuba sound to get an idea of what it sounds like. Need something better? people make sound fonts for that.
But maybe it’s better to use generative AI to potentially have something close to the real thing, just so you can have huge datacenters consuming absurd amounts of power and water too.
What are ya, a shill for the toy synthesizer companies?!?! They just want to take jobs away from us hard working tuba players!!n
Open up paint and doodle it for Christ’s sake, these guys “forget” to go back and change it I’ve noticed, so just don’t use it, boom, problem solved.
Guarantee they still have a chip on their shoulder about their art teacher telling them to stop using stick figures back in the day.
I think using AI for storyboarding is okay. They are already pretty shitty, quick af sketches used to figure out how to arrange the action and get animators on the same page. Now that can be done just a little quicker.
However, using them as placeholders that could end up in the final thing even accidentally, is dumb. A placeholder doesn’t even need to be representative visually of what it’s holding a place for. Textures could be text that says “texture of wood 1” and words can be normal ass Ipsum Lorem.
Storyboarding is practically blocking for anination though. It’s creative direction. I wouldn’t let AI do that.
EDIT: I wouldn’t let AI do anything, but defo not that lol
Not the process, just the images used on one.
Choosing the image for a storyboard is actually a crucial part and an important choice, it’s what everything afterwards is based off of. It’s like, the one thing you wouldn’t want done by a pizza glue loving robot
Yeah that’s the thing, placeholder textures need to be obviously placeholder so they don’t get forgotten about. Using ai for something that’s approximate to what it should be is stupid in that regards. You’re just making your job harder at the end of the day.
The only time I can think of it being worthwhile is if you need to show off progress with a vertical slice, for an investment round or whatever, but you don’t have all of the required textures sorted yet. But these changes should be done on a separate branch so they’re not a part of the main development of the game so the above can’t happen .
I disagree. Artistically it can be nice to get an approximation of what something looks like so you can see it in context and decide if you want to change it.
Like what if you think something should have a one texture but then when you actually play the game you realize it doesn’t feel quite right and want to tweak it?
I don’t know much about how big games are developed, but I’ve made things before, and sometimes seeing an approximation of the finished product is necessary to see how it can be improved.
My point is more it should be on a separate testing branch if used so it can’t accidentally be left in the final product
Whelp, my interest in The Expanse Osiris Reborn has officially died…Rest in Piss, Owlcat!
Well, fuck. At least we got Rogue Trader and the Pathfinder games before enshittification began.
Haha haha hahah what a fucking clueless comment. Gosh. I left Reddit because it was full of Israeli, Chinese and Russian shills, incels and dumb echo chamber to move to Lemmy. Funny thing, I meet the same shills, the same inbred incels and the same morons sucking each other dicks clamoring how great and mighty they are.
You’re awfully spicy today.
Did you catch the guy that put that sandpaper on your toilet seat this morning?
Or are you so full of impotent rage because he’s still out there?
My question is if everything is going to be human made in the end why bother using at all? You won’t even get any of the much vaunted time savings at that point.
Every other commenter under this seems to forget that stock assets exist and worked fine for decades without involving AI slop.
Stock assets (at least if you need more than the absolutely basics) cost quite a bit. Programmer art can work, but if you want something close to the tone of the finished product, still takes time and thus money. Slop is quick and free.
Frankly, given the fact that placeholder assets are literally meant to be utilitarian, disposable, “just good enough” work, it’s actually not a terrible use case. Placeholders are meant to be slop either way, so not much is lost by automating it, so long as it is actually removed after.
Placeholder assets are generally better if they look out of place because then you don’t forget to replace them 😅
AI art generation is trained to be just good enough to fly under the rader if not looked at too closely…
That s not entirely true , you may want to see what it would look like and big cube purple and black are not ideal for that.
Depends on the use case. If its just to be a piece to fill the spot and nothing else, yes. That said, assets impact tone and gameplay, and if you’re trying to judge how something will feel or play, then sometimes you need something closer to the given use case. For example, if you have a survival horror game and are trying to judge the ambiance and visibility of an in-progress level, using wildly out of place assets will mess with the tone, and may result in difficulty in judging factors like the visibility of gameplay elements. Like was said before, the same role as stock assets and programmer art.
It depends on what you are using placeholder assets for. If you want to use it to gauge how a scene would look before setting out to build it, then placeholders that stand out get in the way. You would need a way of tracking all the slop, but then you could have a build tool track how much slop is still in the game to make sure you catch it all before release.
It’s similar to the pre-vis stage of movie special effects. You’re using basically anything available to create a facsimile of the final scene, to see if your framing and pacing work the way you intend to. In film, artists will often use action figures shot with their phone, because it doesn’t matter if it looks janky since it’s not a scene going in the movie to begin with; it’s a test to see if your scene works at all. Game development and filmmaking share a lot of overlap in workflows these days.
For an example, see the leaked Heart of the Swarm ending animatic (spoilers, obviously). It’s a super janky rough cut to try out the scene’s flow before pouring their full resources into it. They had most of the art assets already since it’s a sequel, but for the parts they didn’t they used concept art and even the music is ripped from the Transformers movie.
It is conceivable (though I certainly understand skepticism) that they use it for concept and placeholder art, proofs of concept and the like.
As always, the question should be whether the final product is any good.
The question should be whether the final product is worth what was sacrificed to make it. That line is different for everyone, but it’s important to keep that in mind. Plenty of companies I boycott make acceptable products but are supporting a genocide.
I don’t think generative AI use is worth it however it’s employed and regardless of the quality of the final product. If enough people agree maybe they’ll stop using it.
For instance. You can try things out without first creating them by hand. Then you pick and choose and make the final version by hand.
Because development isn’t exactly asynchronous by nature. If you are waiting on placeholder assets, you are blocking everything dependent on “what comes next”. Even at the cost of going back to repopulate your assets with non-placeholders, you save a tremendous amount of time.
