Unrelated to the topic, but
led by a strictly limited physical collector’s release created with game preservation at its heart
This sentence is so funny. How is a limited edition made for people who want to pay extra and have shiny object on their shelves working towards game preservation in any form? It’s so funny when they try to play “here, have more disposable plastic and pay 50 extra bucks for it! I swear you’re ALSO doing it for a good cause!”
I really hate these ai which hunts. Like if an artist says it’s not ai and it’s just a doubt then I believe but.
But in this case like come onnnnnn. Unless you’re very painstakingly trying to mimic the ai generated lewk at every stage, complete with slopsign tells (and then why??) then I’m not buying it one bit.
Sure… I’m all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, to some degree.
Unfortunately however, we do now exist in a zero trust world where you can’t always naively believe what you see to be authentic and legitimate… If I was going to commission or hire an artist to do some paid work today, I would need to at least see some kind of “proof of work”.
Because of the ethical implications of generative AI, people have every reason and right to be suspicious and critical of work that looks like it could be generated by AI. People who use AI understand this too, but sadly many of them choose the path of fraudulence and lying instead of reflecting on themselves.
When people make something like this, which to me is so obviously AI slop, and then is bold enough to try to deny it, it just adds insult to injury, frankly. “You can fool some people sometime, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” These dudes want to pee on our legs and tell us it’s raining…
were produced through a human-led process
How the fuck does anyone describe an artist generating game artwork as “human-led process”? You know what this rather sounds like? A “human” prompting image generation.
“Human-led process” really does sound like some marketing doublespeak bullshit. Like technically correct but doesn’t answer the question.
No generative AI was used in the creation of the artwork. Every stage began with the authentic original James Pond graphic and was completed using traditional digital illustration, 3D rendering and manual artistic refinement.
Maybe I’m picking words apart here, but they very carefully didn’t say gen-A.I. was not used at all. They only said it wasn’t used to create the final product. So the described process is:
- original graphic
- vague middle stage
- finished off manually
I wouldn’t be surprised if they did something like use A.I. to create the design, and then essentially traced over it.
I’m not sure whether that’s actually better or not, but I’m inclined to believe them if they say that the final step was made by hand at least.
First of all, they did do a bad job with their blog post.
…But I’m also shocked by the number of people who think they’re human AI detectors.
I suspect people are a year or two behind, looking for signs of messy Stable Diffusion XL output, like suspiciously styled appendages or that weird framing 1.5 always did. Or maybe the Ghibli-esque style Tweeters used to ape Sam Altman.
Models aren’t like that any more.
The other day, I was sitting at a TV, looking at photos side by side, I cannot tell my own mirrorless camera RAWs apart from some locally-run generations that used my photos as a reference, even if I zoom in to pixel peep or try to nitpick the depth-of-field from my lens.
Videos edited by H3 are shockingly good now, albeit at lower resolution.
I did some animesque character design mockups (just for my own thinking/brainstorming), and I can feed the model separate reference images for characters and art styles and poses and it… just gets it. It looks just like the original painted style, and I can’t find any artifacts or distortions that jump out. Not counting the ones in the original material.
I’m not trying to glaze diffusion or anything; quite the opposite. It’s messy, and sloppy. Besides, that’s not the point, and I don’t want to get into that.
What I’m saying, outside of really lazy slop or bad models like ChatGPT, people are behind if they think they can spot AI-generated stuff reliably.
So, maybe the studio lied.
The blog post certainly makes it suspicious. They could have uploaded some asset at least?
But, as suspicious as the style is, I can’t tell if that “process” picture is AI generated. Certainly not because the 2nd frame has a cartoon style, or the 3rd and 4th look like weird cg.
I’m not going to claim to be good at detecting AI generated content, but for visual content there’s clear vibes that AI generated content give that I can never specifically point out, but when I spot them there’s usually at least one other person calling out the slop. Yes 3-4 years ago diffusion models would make errors like mangling hands and mushy details, but while newer models get images technically correct, they leave clear vibes that are easy to spot
Motion errors are also still very much spottable on AI video. Shit blurs, but not in the way caused by actual motion being captured on film and causes distortion of the thing moving in ways that don’t happen with motion blur (like a waving arm bending at points anywhere other than the wrist and elbow).
AI or not it looks god awful
Wow they really are stressing the phrase beginning / began with human artwork a lot in these statements. Suspiciously so.
I feel like they did a shit job tryinf to defend themselves if this is the best example of steps taken:
Like, For Real, this is worthless. Show the messy work files, the unfinished sketches, isolate the layers in the 2D mockup to show lineart and color independent of each other, a gif of the 3D wireframes rotating.
This image they posted won’t convince anybody. It will vindicate critics.
Yeah, I really don’t want to falsely accuse anyone but… the human 3d-artist forgot to model one of the horns? That redraw has a very, let’s say, familiar style as well.
Says “process” in the title unlike the others, body is missing inside, flame jets are missing as well.
Who cares?
People who appreciate integrity. The work of lazy people should not be rewarded.
So no UE4/5 games?
Using an engine does not mean slop. It depends if they are lazy and do just an asset flip in example.
Fans.
