Waiting for the “Whoops, we ‘forgot’ to remove it”.
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?
You don’t see the use in an artist viewing an approximation of the finished product
I don’t because that’s not what artists do.
Artists are not people who bring nearly finished projects over the finish line. And if your finished project does not look anything like your nearly-finished AI assets, what are you actually using them for?
You’re saying artists never look at their work and decide to change something. Ok, buddy.
Okay, well if you’re going to be like that, I’ll talk to someone else:
An artist’s job is to pull together research, resources, history, knowledge, opinions, their own fluency in the language of the medium they’re using, and a bit of inspiration, and turn that into something interesting, or cool, or flashy, or thought provoking.
AI generation, even for the concept phase, skips 90% of that effort.
You can’t fabricate something with AI and then re-make it by hand later because these are two halves of the same process. By the time the hands are involved, there is very little left for them to do.
That’s a narrow definition of an art that doesn’t apply to real life. Like it or not, Marcel Duchamp won the argument over whether or not he was an artist.
Marcel Duchamp is not working on video games.
Marcel Duchamp does fit my definition.I’m certainly more interested in his work than yours.
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
Here’s a good example of placeholder art being very visible from Slay the Spire 2
Crude MS-Paint drawings are the best placeholder art. Scribbles can be made as fast, if not faster than AI. It shows the information it needs to show, but most importantly its incredibly obviously unfinished art that needs to be redone before release.
AI art looks pretty good at a distance without close inspection. You have to look closely and spend time to tell AI from art. Late in production when rushing for the deadline is not a point when you have the time to look closely at the assets, so AI placeholders will get missed.
Placeholders is a bad use case for AI.
And what you describe is probably the best case scenario, that the well meaning artist misses it in a rush.
In the real world much of the time I bet the artist is well aware and frustrated because the game already shipped (with no input from them or their boss) to make it by the end of the quarter and now the press assets all have some bland slop BS front and center instead of the real version staring back from their own monitor.
Welp. Waiting for a 75% off sale instead of day one purchase 🤷🏻
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.
That’s fine, I’m not gonna play it.
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 one of them, ke? Inyalowda no care bout welwala like you, sasa.
I know you’re writing in Belter creole, but I can’t help but read it as Jar Jar Binks.
Ok, but what if I don’t want new people and like how small it is filled with like-minded individuals?
What if I like my insulated echo chamber?
Well if that were the case, then you would suck.
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.
Nah the block button works much easier (maybe not as well here cause it’s more a mute button, but having 10s of thousands of accounts blocked on other sites makes being online great especially when I don’t get banned for stating the fact rich people and conservatives deserve a bullet to the brain).
Careful with what you wish for. Not everyone here is idiot enough to think everything is resolved with a bullet to the head.
Enjoy your 1 day ban.
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.
I wish I could upvote this harder.
Your hitting on one of the biggest ongoing issues that Lemmy faces. I’m really not sure how best to combat the echo chamber though. I mean I see the problem clearly, but I don’t actually know of a solution.
if you generate graphics, story and stuff with llm and make them more pretty through human labour, you still have llm generated crud. Generated story acted by humans is still same as fully generated one. using generated slop as placeholders might be fine, but it most likely still influences what they actually make so still no.
if you are just starting something and have no idea about anything and no mental image about what is what at all, THEN using generated stuff might be okay as an example so you can get the idea what is going on, as long as you stop using anything generated as soon as you can.
llm and any datacenters involved with it need to go up in flames.
Welwalas.
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
(X) Doubt
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?
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.
Tab completion is a table lookup and has been common for like 20 years. There’s no LLM needed.
I used the wrong term, but I guess y’all were unable to infer meaning from usage?
Auto tab or w/e it’s called (Some products literally call it tab completion). Visual Studio was doing it around 2018 IIRC, it was ML based, always has been. Modern versions of it are almost entirely LLM based.
No, it’s not that we were “unable to infer meaning” (gaslight much?), you’re just wrong.
Firstly, tab completion has been around for effectively ever, and way predates whatever VS Code may have been doing. Ctags indexing, for example, has been around since 1992.
Secondly, even if you want to move the goal post by talking about some specific implementation of ML based indexing, ML is not LLM.
Like I said plenty of products call this tab completion, and it’s context aware completion, or predictive completion. I used an overloaded term but I would have thought after my explanation you would have understood what I meant by this point. You’re continued explanation of classic tab completion is shows otherwise.
and way predates whatever VS Code may have been doing
Also I said Visual Studio, not VS Code. 🤦
Secondly, even if you want to move the goal post by talking about some specific implementation of ML based indexing, ML is not LLM.
I very specifically said that it was ML based, The word was indicates past tense. 🤦
“Modern versions of it are almost entirely LLM based.”
I don’t know how you managed to completely skip reading that last line?
Here we are though arguing over reading comprehension issues. Which honestly is pretty classic for the internet.
What do you mean “tab completion is AI based”? We have had tab completion for years before LLMs were a thing.
Apparently meaning from usage cannot be inferred here? Or you’re just being intentionally obtuse?
- predictive completion
- context based completion
A not insignificant number of products literally just call it tab completion these days, because tab completion in many products & IDEa is by default predictive completion, which is ML based. And these days, LLM based.
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.
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.
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
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.
I’m indifferent about AI in games. Where necessary I don’t see a problem but only where absolutely necessary.
Take for instance the new Star Trek voyager game. It notoriously has barely any voice acting due to budget. Which is fine, paying for actors time etc is costly. But what about perhaps a contract for a few choice words that they can train on and use to make as much content as required. That could be a lot cheaper.
Also the fact Majel Barrett recorded a search of her voice specifically for this before dying and yet no one has used her for the computer since 😭
I’d rather games get a better budget and hire people than use the suicide inducing, water hoarding, electricity sucking, art stealing, job destroying, loud noise making, community destroying, glue on pizza ass scam that is AI.
What if they used local voice training though, not a service.
That’s still cutting into what work they could be doing, with less optional results. I want bespoke dialog thanks
