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.
There’s a problem in movies that I keep thinking about in relation to this.
Movies often use music from other movies in early cuts to get something rough together. They time the scenes around the music, they work with it for ages, and finally it’s time to make an original track to replace the rough copy.
But they have to use something that’s the same tempo, because of how the scenes were timed around the old music. And it has to fit in the same vibe, because that’s what the old music felt like.
So you end up with a piece of music that’s usually pretty close to the temporary music, and a lot of Hollywood osts sound almost identical as a result. When I see people talk about using gen ai for placeholders and concept art, I see that same problem turning up.
I had never heard about temp tracks, but this makes so much sense. That’s a powerful homogenizing force.
Famously, Stanley Kubrick used classical music as a temporary track for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and intended on having Pink Floyd do the soundtrack. However, he grew to like how the classical music felt so much that he decided to keep it.
Same thing happens with games to some degree.
There are many stories from gaming about placeholder music becoming integral part of the game.
In original doom games Carmack and Romero loved Black Sabbath and listened it during testing amd working on the game. That led to now legendary doom ost.
During the development of Max Payne 2 Remedy used Poets of the fall song as a placeholder and in the end they decited they wanted it in to the game, but because they could not get in to agreement with the publisher, and because PoF members are just cool guys, they eventually made song just for the game to get around the licensing debucle. That song was later released as a single.
I remember hearing story about Brutal Legend having some licenced music as a place holder in meeting with investors and it lead that music ending in to the game.
Im writing this while im little busy, so everything is coming from my memory, without fact checking, so who ever is reading this take it with a pinch of salt.
Judas Priest, not Black Sabbath.
I wonder if that’s why so many sequences use “4 on the floor” arranged roughly around a 12 bar pattern, or a specific piece of classical music that the studio could have gotten from public domain
Yep, that was exactly the reason.