Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”.
“I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender told Kotaku in a recent interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.'” I assume that’s not a verbatim quote, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
The publishers also take a dim view of using generative AI for “placeholder” work, or indeed any ‘non-final’ aspect of game development. “We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?” Bender went on.
seeing as how using genAI even during development is still rare enough that it makes the news, I can’t imagine it’s been as big of a problem for them as they make it seem. this sounds more like a smaller publisher taking a popular public stance for the PR.
That just sounds as they aren’t using it property or having way too high expectations of what it can do from all the hype around.
GenAI can definitely help and accelerate your work, but when it is used sensibly. If you let it do most of the work, it will generate so much crap that you will not have capacity to review nor shape it to a desired state.
I’ve seen games in store listings that were obviously AI slop copying their entire game, Manor Lords (which is awesome btw)
Honestly, asset flips or pure ai slop are often not something you would consider a ‘real game’. They are closer to a scam than anything. And they certainly wouldn’t be published by a reputable publisher. I think that’s also what OP was referring to, a game that meets some minimal level of development and involvement.