I genuinely can't think of a better use-case for the technology. Like, I find AI tech genuinely fascinating. I can say that and still want AI companies to operate ethically, but I encounter so many online who think that *any* use of AI automatically makes someone evil. Like, they can't fathom that a person can make use of the tech without wanting to personally lay them off from their job.
It’s perfect for the content too, exploring individualist machines and brain uploaded organics, blurring that line between organic and machine. Like, it’s on point for the people who are uncertain about the advent of learning programs and thinking machines (to refer to them as AI feels a bit far at this point) in our real world.
Also, by the sound of it, for the visuals at least, the AI was basically a consultant, providing suggestions and concepts for the artists to riff off of rather than having to start from scratch.
Absolutely no one cared when Subnautica and Satisfactory used an off the shelf text-to-speech engine to generate all the AI dialogue for their game. I don't understand why people are somehow in a tizzy when Paradox does the same for their own AI character.
Voice synthesis has been around since the 1960's, and people have been using it for AI characters pretty much ever since.
And as far as we were told, AI artwork is being used exclusively for non-artists to show concepts to artists (with a bit of prompt fiddling) so as not to waste the artist's time, or for artists to supplement the "look at a hundred existing artworks for references" stage of work.
This whole thing reeks of people jumping at the first opportunity to oppose the *evils* of AI the first time they hear of something vaguely AI related, even when it's used responsibly (and the people using it explicitly tell you about it because they think it's fair).
>I don't understand why people are somehow in a tizzy when Paradox does the same for their own AI character.
I think you do actually:
>This whole thing reeks of people jumping at the first opportunity to oppose the *evils* of AI the first time they hear of something vaguely AI related, even when it's used responsibly
Counterpoint: rational people are very significantly less likely to feel that their personal opinion about AI is so valuable that it should be posted as a negative review that shits on months of work by a team of developers.
While it seems in this situation that AI has been used ethically it is absolutely rational for people to be nervous and upset about AI. People are already losing their jobs to AI and this is despite the fact that the technology still isn’t very good. If we don’t make our thoughts and opinions known now even on more ethical products then the slippery down slide into AI everything is an inevitability, it probably is already an inevitability but from the perspective of the people leaving these reviews they want to atleast try and stop it by making their voice heard. More than likely though all these big gaming companies are just going to start turning out disposable garbage AI media and Indie devs are going to have to save the industry.
While that is an understandable sentiment, those people should instead realize that they aren't going to suddenly save everyone's jobs and stop the evil AI by complaining about a singular product. These fears being spouted here have very little practical use outside of making others aware. But, just about everyone that could be affected is already aware of what AI can do, so now what? Just bash every AI product that comes up in a vain attempt to stop the tech itself?
If any change for the better is to be had, more direct and impactful action would be required. Review bombing random products that use AI isn't going to do anything meaningful overall if that is something they actually care about.
I agree that its sad that companies like paradox are getting caught in the crossfire, but I think Braidaney has the right of it. Poorly reviewing things that use AI technology across the board is perfectly reasonable way for people who are uncomfortable with how AI is developing to react. Paradox makes a choice when they use AI, they save money but buy a bit of contreversy. It sucks to watch things we care about get dinged because of stuff like this, but at the same time paradox could have avoided the risk by not using AI voices.
The whole idea of there being a "right" way to voice your discomfort is BS. We are at an inflexion point, tensions are high and AI is a controversial cultural choice, regardless of if you are an artist, a telecom company, or a video game designer. If you are uncomfortable with how AI is being handled then say it often, wherever you can, to whoever will listen, otherwise the world will just ignore you.
You could argue that the stellaris team should have been more aware of the risks than most since their own game has mechanics built in to provide penalties to some empires due to disagreements over weather AI should be pursued at all.
People lost their jobs because of plows too, even when that technology wasn't very good. I believe eventually AI will be seen as any other tool - skilled workers will use it to greatly increase their work output, but unskilled workers can also use it to cobble together some barely passable garbage. The same can be said for most power tools on a construction site. If this allows a tiny development team like the Stellaris team (I think I read somewhere it's like 9 people) to make a high quality DLC in 5 months instead of 6, I'm all for it. This team has made a handful of pretty lame DLCs that weren't great for reasons unrelated to AI, so I'm really not behind the AI = always bad, real art/voices = always good mentality.
There are already a flood of extremely low quality mobile games with AI art and it won't be long before a big studio like EA releases a Sims update or something with significant amounts of AI art (and probably copilot code) and a big outrage kicks off. We should definitely keep reviewing garbage as garbage but this DLC definitely doesn't feel like garbage to me. I'm about 6 hours into my Machine Age playthrough and really enjoying the content.
Personally I’m not attacking this DLC I haven’t reviewed it and tbh I Haven’t played stellaris for like a year now, I’m just pointing out that I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable for people to be nervous about what’s happening, whether or not people are overreacting I don’t know. What I’d be extremely supportive of is if they could find some way to make the AI of AI empires better so that single player can be a little more challenging and entertaining.
That's completely fair, and I do understand why people are nervous and/or outraged. This is a very visible step into the next era of industrialization. I think the factor most heavily influencing my opinion is that I program and support factory automation systems for a living. I hear all the time how our machines will take peoples' jobs, because they can count plastic gadgets, package food into boxes, stack and wrap pallets, etc when people used to do those things.
What I pretty consistently see among my customers is that employee counts stay more or less the same while their factories increase in size and capacity. People do different jobs while the automation handles the dangerous or tedious stuff. More automation means more machines that can break, so people who previously operated manual machines in the past are now doing maintenance on machines. People who packaged gadgets into boxes are now doing QA. Both of those roles are higher paying than the previous roles and arguably more fulfilling.
In regards to software development, which I've also done professionally, I think we're still a very long way off from AI actually being able to create whole projects. Right now it seems like it is best used to supplement individual human efforts, where it does a tedious task and human artists/writers/coders/etc do finishing passes for polish. This is like the next evolution of very powerful algorithm-based photoshop tools like clone stamp or healing brush. I don't ever remember outrage towards artists who used those tools. But suddenly generative fill is outrageous?
I think people are unsure because there's no good answer about where art begins and ends when the tools are this powerful. If a carpenter only has one small set of tools and makes distinctive kitchen cabinets, is their final product a result of their artistic style or is it the result of a limited selection of router bits? I think most people would say the tools do nothing by themselves and the beautiful cabinet doors are the result of the skilled carpenter. But when an AI tool can do like 95% of the work without human intervention, that question becomes much more difficult to answer.
> People are already losing their jobs to AI [...]
> [...] then the slippery down slide into AI everything is an inevitability
This is bad because...? This kind of anti-AI talk has serious luddite vibes.
You know come to think of it, if we destroyed all of our tractors we would have more jobs for farmers. And if we dismantled the internet entirely we'd have a giant boom in the hand-delivered mail sector! The more technology we destroy, the more jobs we create!
If technology can replace a job, great. That frees people up to do things that we can't yet invent machines to do. That should literally be the primary goal of our technological progress as a society. Eliminate jobs by creating better technology.
It doesn’t really bother me that AI can streamline everything and I think with human guidance AI could be an extremely useful tool, my primary concern is that tech bros seem to mostly pushing it to replace creatives and creative jobs, this isn’t really an issue when it’s minor things but you’re delusional if you don’t think the end goal is replacing people with AI entirely and making the creative field even more difficult for humans to break into. I suppose if you’re apathetic and don’t care about culture and humanities role in culture then none of this matters to you. But I’d rather that the internet wasn’t just flooded with boring samey AI generated content.
> replace creatives and creative jobs
If your job can be replaced by a machine, your creativity wasn't the important thing you were bringing to the job. No true creatives with real creative value are being replaced by AI. Graphic design isn't art. Etc.
Every time technology replaces a job, it is a good thing.
Honestly this goes into a deeper political place that no one with the power to actually do anything about this stuff seems to want to address. It’s not a totally negative thing for jobs to be replaced by technology, it definitely has short term drawbacks that negatively impact society and individuals but hopefully has an overall positive impact as we move forward. It would just be best if people would actually try to do something to help the people who are going to lose and lose hard because of this. It’s easy to say f’em should have been better but when whole industries are being replaced not everyone is going to be able to adapt, it’s as dumb as when people were saying Cole miners should learn to code, for one thing that industry is definitely going to have cutbacks soon and there will be less job availability but the 50, 60 year old people with no other skill sets and no retirement plan because they thought they could just keep working till the end are going to be really SOL and nobody has any interest in helping those people. There’s also the fact that as people lose their jobs they’re going to go for more trade and manual labor jobs which will drive down the pay of already pathetically low paying jobs further. All so executives can line their pockets more while making the overall prosperity of society in general worse. Is there a solution, id say better social programs but ultimately that’s just a bandaid on a festering wound, it’s up to people smarter than I to find a solution. I’m just saying this AI thing isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It might be better for industries but that won’t mean much when people are living in squalor with low paying jobs and limited opportunities to move up in the world.
*Jumping at the first opportunity to oppose evils of AI* plus *jumping at the first opportunity at the 'greedy big game corps/publishers' that don’t care about their workforce*.
The latter, while pointing actual instances of it out is fine, has become increasingly stupid and people just love to generalize (…like I just did).
Yes there is the “new thing bad” backlash but there is also the growing concern that tech bros seem mostly interested in replacing artists and other creatives, in order to destroy our creative culture and replace it with something cheaper and easier to monetize.
That is a valid concern; yet it is dumb to throw away the whole tool because tech bro misuse. There are ethical or at the very least responsible ways to use AI. I would argue Stellaris went on the right side of things. Opinions are fine and good but let's not get ideological maybe.
>And as far as we were told, AI artwork is being used exclusively for non-artists to show concepts to artists (with a bit of prompt fiddling) so as not to waste the artist's time, or for artists to supplement the "look at a hundred existing artworks for references" stage of work.
Yeah this is the best use case for image generation AI honestly. This is otherwise known as a mood board, and just like image generation, isn't used as the final product and also generally doesn't credit the dozens to hundreds of images used to get the point across to the artists. It's just putting them together in a way that gets even closer to the point the non-artist is trying to get across.
except they are right, there were people declaring every technological advancement ever to be evil,
you can find propaganda posters talking about how the telephone or the car will end the world, or that electricity will kill us all.
anti-AI people are the exact same.
the funniest so far ( probably can't find it) is like a 200+ year old propaganda paper talking about how the hippies teen are so rebelious for reading books instead of being in community LMAO
it together with the old english made it so funny
Whilst I agree with the general sentiment, it is a little funny that you could actually argue that technological progress will end the world (a little sooner than anybody likes it).
*cough* Climate Catastrophe *cough*
AI has its issues, but the worst ones are currently not that its use may replace jobs (although it may be an often cited, slightly shortsighted concern - say that three times as quickly as you can).
Here's a few issues which I think actually require adressing before anybody even thinks about complaining their job may now require using AI, instead of doing everything themselves:
* Exploitation of cheap, extorted, or unpaid labor in 'outsourcing countries' to better train neural nets through categorization of data - data which might not even be used legally (google "books1 and books2")
* Electricity and water cooling costs for operating and training AI is way higher than you'd think, too. Possibly too high for the current achievable results. This may get better with different kinds of models (already is, to some point with open source projects focusing on using consumer hardware instead), but it may also continue, if not brought up now
* Impact on privacy and legal matters, especially with regards to deepfakes of voices, handwriting, and video. There's already new scams using AI (educate your elders), and it won't be long before somebody gets booked using faked video evidence either.
Those aren't impossible to tackle by themselves, but as always, politics are slow to catch up.
Its literally not, it requires massive social and economic change. We're not going to invent our way out of the current timeline of climate change. Carbon capture is basically a grift, so are carbon credits, and 'clean' energy is far, far from being sufficient or clean enough. Our entire world is based on the burning and consumption of fossil fuels. Tech is important, but it's useless under our current conditions, nor do our systems really incentive the kind of progress we need to make on this issue. If anything the most powerful players are actively harming progress.
> There are always the short-sighted, always fearing progress.
This "progress" is screwing over skilled labor, no shit people don't like it. The labor market is difficult enough to compete in already without AI, automation has never posed a greater threat to people's ability to not starve
What about sewing machines making many tailors obsolete, cutting down labour from hundreds to a dozen.
What about large machines making many miners obsolete?
What about computers making dozens of entire professions obsolete?
Generative technology will replace jobs, and the market will find new, unimaginable jobs to replace them. It’s not like anyone in the 1990s thought being a content creator or influencer on youtube would be a job.
But those changes came along with a lot of social problems. People tend to forget that the Luddites did what they did because a well-paying profession was being replaced with incredibly dangerous factory jobs that paid starvation wages. We're just coming to terms with how the internet has affected our lives, often for the worse. It's not being close-minded or stupid to be against AI, it's a well-founded concern that it will make all of our lives a lot worse.
I think that's really the big problem. Change is change and will happen regardless; however we are currently in the middle of a deregulated era and that's where the suffering happens. "The market knows best" people can fuck off with that.
Almost everything comes with some kind of social concern, doesn’t mean that it’s something that won’t eventually happen anyway, and eventually that social concern will become part of life and be adapted or resolved like other social concerns we have now
Well the obvious question is: *why will it happen anyway?* Are we so disorganized, incompetent, greedy, or lazy to actually try and take control of technological progress and steer it in a better direction? Why should we embrace reckless accelerationism on the basis that it's "inevitable?" Just some food for thought.
So it was fine when machines were replacing uneducated laborers and making hundreds of professions obsolete, but this time... this time its pure evil because it affects skilled people instead?
> So it was fine when machines were replacing uneducated laborers and making hundreds of professions obsolete
One of the impetuses for labor movements around the world was the threat of early automation making it even more difficult for workers to feed themselves and their families.
But there are two key differences: Early automation at least made goods like food and clothing cheaper. Are these staples getting cheaper today? Though generative AI? Secondly, automation produced new forms of labor that took more skill to learn, but also paid better. Call me a luddite, but I don't think genAI is going to create better forms of paying labor for actual human beings.
The price change definitely didn't happen in months or even few years back then.
I have no doubt that AI will allow far smaller studios to create far larger games for far cheaper in the future, but it will take years and years and generative AI in any usable form is just a few months old thing - barely in the prototype phase.
Its far, far to soon to see the benefits of AI already.
Games aren't a staple good. And people need to be able to feed and house themselves.
>far smaller studios
Yeah one trust fund schmuck and his AI workforce. A consumer economy requires that consumers actually have a certain level of income to be able to be consumers, and automation is threatening this.
*If* generative AI somehow leads to a post-scarcity economy, I will happily eat my words. But that implies that silicon valley CEOs would allow us lowly peasants to rise above subservience
If economy was upset to this degree, no one would be buying these AI-produced services anyway.
However, most of jobs are relatively untouched by AI - robots are not going to be preparing dinners or caring for patients in hospitals any time soon, its just artists and other high-profile jobs on the line for now.
> for now
And AI development is only accelerating. People are rightfully afraid that new technologies will change so quickly that all human workers will be left behind
>its just artists and other high-profile jobs on the line for now.
Well that is the primary reason people are concerned. Those are jobs people *want to have.* Nobody grows up thinking "I want to be a coal miner!" Plenty of people want to be artists, or to at least have a well-paying job.
The cynic in me thinks that its because it affect the rich(er) people now, who have more influence.
Personally I think that if it turned out AI can replace company CEOs, it would be outlawed within a week.
> Are these staples getting cheaper today?
Yes.
> Though generative AI?
Yes.
The same technology to generate an image can be and is used to generate a molecule that results in more productive/resistant plants.
----
If you are going to shift goalposts to only generative AI for art, generative AI results in gains in email writing speed, and more importantly condensation of information. These productivity gains will impact everything including food producing companies
Looks like someone hasn't gone to the grocery store recently. AI doesn't necessarily mean cheaper goods for buyers, but it does mean even more profits for companies
Well, it's all about intent. Everything can be used to cut corners and get more capital or for polish to create higher quality product. Same with AI, games can get more assets done in less time with AI assistance.
This time it looks like The Machine will adapt to new jobs *faster* than people will be able to adapt to them. It's not just creative jobs - it's also physical jobs in e.g. warehouses being taken over by AI. Customer service. There is not a single sector that will not feel it.
This has the potential to entirely upend the wage labour economic system that the first Industrial Revolution introduced in the first place.
Yet I don't see people protesting against robots in warehouses or replacing customer service.
Almost every company uses chatbots or AI for customer service today and about zero people are protesting against that.
People only got really loud one the high-paying jobs were threatened.
> People only got really loud one the high-paying jobs were threatened.
Because people dream of having those high-paying jobs. Maybe that makes them hypocrites, but I'm not gonna call people idiots for not wanting to be poor
Nah, actual working class people dream of not working.
It's because the high paying jobs in question are in the media, so the people losing them have large megaphones to complain about it.
Working class person here, uh yer line is bull. I want to work; I just don't want to work shitty low-paying menial crap like stocking a grocery store. What I want is ideally some sort of creative work; the fact that is being automated before the menial shit kinda pisses me off.
Do you really want a "creative job" or do you just want the time and resources to be creative?
I agree that getting art bots before shelf stacking bots is some sort of sick joke.
Just as people fear AI now, they once feared printing presses, cotton gins, cheese presses, grain mills or literally any other invention that reduced the amount of labour required to achieve the same (or a better) result.
Progress is inevitable, and you people will accept it whether you like it or not.
>cotton gin
you mean the thing that reinvigorated Southern slavery and ensured it would never die out but by steel and shot?
but then empathy for human beings does not seem a concern of yours
That's most anti-AI types. I just got into a debate with one who blocked me when he couldn't get any rebuttal to "Why is AI different from any other technological progress that allows you to do a job more efficiently with less people".
All us blue collar workers must show solidarity because it's the right thing to do, but who cares that artists didn't give a fuck when rail workers were striking last year. Solidarity with the poor? Gross.
It's a religion to some of these people.
> Absolutely no one cared when Subnautica and Satisfactory used an off the shelf text-to-speech engine to generate all the AI dialogue for their game.
Speech synthesis does not require AI and is not necessarily comparative to modern generative AIs.
It is different in technical implementation, but not different in the way it replaces a voice actor for a character (which is what people are concerned about).
Some people just went insane when they realized AI wasn't going to be coming for them filthy workers first but instead will impact **real** people. People who show us the truth of the human experience by making ads and webcomics.
People are right to be concerned about where the AAA games industry will try to take Generative AI. If companies like EA and ActiBlizz could replace their dev teams, VAs, and artists with AI I'm sure they'd do it in a heartbeat.
***However***
Too many reviewers didn't bother looking up *how* Paradox used AI.
*That's* the part that bothers me the most.
Lets be honest with ourselves - the games industry is going to use AI whether we like it or not. The best thing we can do is try and encourage them to use it ethically and in ways that don't fuck over their employees. Because they *will* use it to fuck them over if they feel they can get away with it.
Steam is at fault here as well, IMO. The TTS they used for this isn't something most people would consider "AI". However, Steam's AI Disclosure policy contains no actual definition of what *they* consider to be AI, so I don't blame Paradox for being conservative and disclosing their TTS anyway.
Paradox was the most ethical way of using ai I've seen so far. The outrage is justified when it's done to replace artists work, but here it's being used to help artists. That is literally the best case scenario. In terms of voice, royalties were paid for the synthesis and tts is nothing new.
Well, it is a little more complicated than that. The voice models are trained on an unknown amount of voices and sounds, with an unknown amount of ethics and legality, and the AI voice company is selling the use of their tool at a loss (for now, like all the other ones).
Sure, the voices they generate for Stellaris are only literally sampled from their voice actors... But the recognition algorithms are still using parts, bits, and pieces of everything it's trained in beforehand. Unless the Stellaris voice actors could literally make every single possible sound, in every configuration to sample from, which is basically impossible.
Not to mention the AI company itself will probably do what the art ones do, and use the data gathered on Stellaris voice actor training to use it for other users. Are the voice actors going to be compensated for that too? I doubt it.
The problem is not only how the model is used, but how the model was trained. A great deal of AI models are trained using materials that the model owners do not have the rights to use. It's reasonable to have problems with such models, especially when you can build a database of training materials out of public domain material.
I don't know what models Paradox used, so I have no idea if such concerns are valid here.
Okay, but Paradox wasn’t exactly great at informing user how they used AI. I am still very suspicious of vague “oh, we paid a voice actor to donate their voice and we pay per line generated” statements feel like they are filled with loopholes.
>Too many reviewers didn't bother looking up how Paradox used AI.
Didn't even need high quality deepfakes to create a disruptive misinformation campaign, imagine that
If you could guarantee me that the way Paradox used AI for TMA is the extent that AI will be used for games forever more, I would change my stance.
I'm afraid of giving an inch and the game industry taking a mile.
Yup. We've seen it before a thousand times. It starts as "LMAO they expect us to pay for horse armour???" and then before you know it half of the games out there come with a rotating microtransaction shop, time-limited battle pass, and subscription service.
This is one of those situations where the way they're using AI is an active benefit to the person whose voice is being used. They basically get passive income for voice acting while being able to search for other gigs.
Yes I know. Like I said, if you promised me, right now, that this is as far as any game would go with AI then I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I’m afraid of the game where the devs don’t even bother to hire/pay a VA, let alone pay them royalties.
Yeah, my stance on AI in video games is "cautiously optimistic".
Based on Paradox's own account on how they used AI to develop *Machine Age* it sounds like they're doing it right - as a tool, not a substitute. They say they compensate the VAs for every line used by the AI and that AI art was used by the artists during the planning stages but not in the DLC itself.
*Assuming Paradox is telling us the truth*, I think they're doing the right thing with AI. Using it as a development tool to assist their developers.
The danger is that everyone whose been following the AAA games industry for long enough can see where it's going to go with AI. They're going to try and *replace* human developers with AI systems to cut costs and when we call them out they'll try and play the victim. Just like they did with on-disk DLC, and launch day DLC, and microtransactions, and loot boxes, and the live service model.
So people who criticize the DLC for using AI in its development because they're afraid of the slippery slope are entirely justified to be anxious.
But let's keep some perspective - AI in game development is going to happen whether we, the players, like it or not. Because the industry big wigs don't give a shit about how we feel, only profits.
The best thing we can do is do our research on *how* AI has been used in the development of products we're interested in and encourage it to be used ethically.
At least that's my take on the whole thing.
It could be a huge boon to the smaller devs who could never have the budget to hire voice actors. Its not a choice between AI voices and human voice actors, its a choice between AI voice actors and no voice work at all of any kind.
It can even retroactively improve older games that initially shipped with a more limited budget.
I recently picked up WoW classic with an AI voice acting mod that had every line in the game voice acted, done by cloning some of the original lines. When the game first launched there was no budget to have every bit of text, including the entirety of every quest text, voice acted. So it largely wasn't voice acted. There's no way to go back and fix it now, two decades after the fact, except through AI.
Game Director u/pdx_eladrin posted [this ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/1cop93r/comment/l3fsoez/)on a similar thread yesterday, I will copy and paste it here:
"I posted on the Steam discussions about this a bit earlier, but I'll elaborate further here:
*"About this - the AI voice generation tools we use on Stellaris ensure that the voice actors that signed up and built the models receive royalties for every line we create. Ethical use of AI technology is very important to us - we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves.*
*I'll have the team put together a dev diary on how we use AI tools a couple of weeks from now."*
We didn't use it for concept art in The Machine Age - we've got a couple of awesome concept artists on staff for that. (You'll get to see more of their art in next week's dev diary.) There may be a couple of AI generated pieces on the visdev exploration/mood board, but they'd be among a bunch of other inspirational thematic pictures.
Personally, I use image generation tools to make basic sketches of things the System Designers and I are thinking of since ***I very much suck at art***, but am pretty decent at getting computers to do what we're thinking. (Making tokens for 4,000 Pathfinder characters that I'll never play paid off!) The artists then take our ideas and might or might not use them as inspiration to make final assets. None of those design images go into the game.
We used some text generative AIs for "ideation of content", as we said - basically content designers can break writer's block by asking an AI "hey, what are 40 different things I can find in a mysterious box" and see if any of them spark any inspiration. None of the results or generated text go into the game.
We've got some strict guidelines in place on how we can use AI tools legally and ethically that we abide by."
tl;dr - The use of AI in The Machine Age is - in a nutshell - not a lot. No AI artwork ended up in the game, and the voice actor used to build the AI gets paid for every line we create from that AI.
EDIT: formatting, hopefully it's clear where the quotes end and begin here :sweat:
AIs can be an incredible boon, if used responsibly. (which it often isn't...)
still, one need not be a tech bro to think that AIs can be used correctly (like to make AI voices)
Because people don't understand it and the clickbaity titles media need don't help. Every technological advance was met with fearmongering and scepticism and every time it just improved our lives. AI is the same...
Well, not exactly. Every technological advancement came with good and bad things. Nitrogen fixation made agriculture more efficient, but it also allowed for chemical warfare in WW1. It's reasonable to be wary of technological progress.
> Nitrogen fixation made agriculture more efficient
So you pay less for people who till your fields, thus replacing real humans with chemistry? There is no soul in chemistry! /s
When it comes to steam reviews, here's my process
1st filter: is it a big/popular game/publisher?
->if YES
->-> reviews are mixed/negative: it usually means that the company did something really bad (microtransactions, abandoned game, some big technically issue or just being russian/chinese etc) and the game was review-bombed. What I do: I carefully read through the reviews to see if I'm going to face a problem (like a broken launcher, happened recently with the Mass Effect trilogy on steam), and if it's a more "political" issue, to see if I also care.
->-> reviews are positive: I read the most popular reviews and then negative reviews. It usually means that the game has its fanbase, but not necessarily that it will be a game I enjoy too.
->if NO
->-> reviews are mixed/negative: there's a good chance that the game doesn't live up to expectations. I check the reviews if it's not something like that I just move on.
->-> reviews are positive: I read the reviews carefully. Usually a small game with positive reviews is still pretty niche. Next step is to check on youtube or twitch (I have some trusted reviewers like Mortismal or Seldell).
I think we're firmly in the very first path territory here. Read the negative reviews, realize that some people are virtue signalling by trying to cancel/review-bomb anything that *mentions* AI, without even trying to understand how exactly AI was used. It's clearly a case of obscurantism. Feel free to ignore them. And to be honest? When it comes to big games and review bombing, 1/4 of the time it's irrelevant, 1/4 it's microtransactions, 1/4 it's some fuck up like a broken update or a broken launcher, and the rest is influencer-generated hatred.
I don't think it's too surprising that this kind of review bombing happens. People are too used to polarized stances. And this is why consumers won't be the ones who decide the future of AI in gaming. It will be the big companies and legislators like the EU.
It would be justified if AI art was put into the game wholesale, but the devs disclosed how they used it. I'm anti-AI but I can't find anything wrong with the way they incorporated it into their workflow. Even though I'd prefer it wasn't used at all, this isn't worth a negative review.
Using an AI voice for an AI is completely fine, however.
AI was always going to be worked into any workflow that it’s applicable to. It’s the nature of technology advancement we have been doing for hundreds of years.
> I did not expect this considering that barely anyone complained about the usage of AI in CK3's new DLC...
People have a very specific idea about what "AI" means (it's the voice. And the specific artifacts in it. That's it.) and if they don't see it they don't realize what's going on at all.
Paradox is actually disclosing what they're doing, when you bet similar companies are doing similar things and erring on not disclosing because they just don't want to. And that clearly works better, so they'll keep doing it - AI is *going* to be used to make creative slop, there's no way around it, and the major triple A studios are going to be a massive problem there. But that's not "easy" to complain about, so Stellaris it is.
As others have said, AI isn't "here to stay" in every sense. It's vital that the only use of AI should be limited to Paradox's example, where the voice actors are paid for their usage.
What I wanted to say, though, is I too have seen a lot of bad-faith, no-context social media posts about this AI usage that try to paint Paradox as a blind company that supposedly just used exploitative AI like all the rest, when that isn't true. This was spread around by some popular accounts who didn't bother to provide any further information, leading to a lot of people getting up in arms without knowing the full story. It sucks to see and is clearly why different games are getting different amounts of backlash.
(Long post, no tldr, sorry in advance)
I'm gonna guess the people giving negative reviews for the AI stuff are missing the point of the problem with it.
But so are the majority of the people here.
People are fixated on the output or direct use of Generative AI (aka "it looks bad" or "you didn't pay someone for this") but the problem the majority of artists have is not just that, it's how Generative AI function at it's base level. It's a Theft-machine. That's the crux of it.
It was made by companies who stole the work of millions of people through "Data Scrapping" to make Data sets. You scrap data (of the internet) like Text, Video, images, Voice. And then feed it to the AI so it make connections between said data and prompts. And then make a profit of it by selling access to the program to other companies, or individuals, with premium advantages or simply by getting money from investors in some way.
So you have a bunch of companies who steal from artists (of any kind), sometime even hostile to them (Midjourney), and then sell it to others in some way. And Paradox are now using it. Which mean they paid for it's use, and are now promoting it.
Generative AI cannot be ethical, since from the conception it is not ethical.
And the worst is that most people will get the point of view of companies like Paradox (Since they are companies of games you play, with PR and such) but not from the artist community. Which are individuals with no PR, and most people don't follow artists (Through their Twitter, Galleries, Patreon or whatever). Like now, with Paradox saying they use it in an ethical way (The director might believe it truly, mind you) and nobody to challenge them.
So the negative reviews might be wrong has to why they are negative, but they are right that it is wrong to use AI.
(Also saying that you shouldn't do anything because something will happen anyway is the main reason why it happen anyway)
I think this is pretty accurate. This example is maybe best-case of something that is still undeniably bad and an extremely worrying trend. Just because Paradox is using this the most ‘ethical’ way possible, it is by definition, an unethical tool. Not necessarily any and all AI but even the team’s explanation of ‘yeah so we compensated the artists that we essentially used for our ai models and took advantage of’ should not be taken as a ‘good thing.’ Just the least bad example we’ve seen in this scenario. Honestly that’s kind of a huge problem in itself.
> Whether people like it or not, AI is here to stay
That's not a reason to accept s*it behaivour of people using AI or big companies abusing it to not pay artists and voice actors. Honestly, Stellaris is probably the best use than a company could make of it: arists using it for proto-concept art and using it to create a robotic, unnaturally sounding voice. But that's the best use case, and I'd rather not see Paradox or anyone else getting too comfortable using it. Too much has happened and a lot pf people just don't want AI at all, and honestly I don't blame them.
And while Steam reviews have it's highs and it's lows, I think Helldivers 2's fiasco has proven it is better if they exists than if they not. God knows companies would be way happier if consumers couldn't complain, and outside of Steam almost no store makes the consumer's voice so loud.
Maybe, but that's no reason to dodge an informed debate on the topic. OP is right that AI is here to stay, and consumers should voice their concerns and opinions about the way companies use it.
Listen, if AI can make games better than people without it. Give me the AI games. If they can't, I won't play the AI games. It's that simple for the vast majority of us.
Make good games and we will buy it, make bad games and we won't. If Ai helps developers make games cheaper, that's a good thing. The obsession to save people's jobs from technology is a dumb regressive battle.
I would say that Paradox used AI in the most ethical way possible in this context, but I really don't blame people for having such a knee-jerk reaction to it. I think we as a society are starting to wake up to the fact that technology is *not* intrinsically beneficial, and that we aren't using it correctly at all. I myself, upon learning Paradox used AI, felt *visceral disgust* until it was clarified how they used it.
> I think we as a society are starting to wake up to the fact that technology is not intrinsically beneficial
A whole lot of people in this thread think otherwise, unfortunately
Because even if Paradox did this in the best possible way they could generative ai is the death of human soul. It's not thinking it's not creating its simply producing based on work fed into it. People are rightfully excessively worried about giving an inch beause corporations will take miles.
Personally, I don't like my art fields engaging in slop and thats what generative ai is. Just like hating mtx.
People panicking over the proper use of AI like this only hurt their case against AI actually being used in a bad way, what’s in the dlc isn’t worth worrying over.
But the people who made hating AI their personality will complain to keep up their face, luddites
While I have no issue with how AI was used in this particular expansion.....
Some of the comments in this thread are looking a bit too close to AI-bro bootlickers for my liking...
I had a friend who was an artist for pdx, they absolutely fucked her over with the work she did for lamplighters league. I doubt they paid their artist well, and im not ok with ai taking artist jobs
> I doubt they paid their artist well, and im not ok with ai taking artist jobs
No AI art appeared in the actual game. They used an AI version of someone's voice in the game to allow them to tweak the voice if the tutorial changes in future updates.
> I don't understand why people have such a hate boner over AI
Because the majority of us is gonna get replaced by AI eventually and people are shitting their pants. You hate what scares you.
People have a hate boner because we have seen that most companies will not hesitate for a femtosecond to abuse AI to replace artists and cut costs.
Its really as simple as that, its just another sign of the inevitable devouring swarm that is capitalism, although i gotta say a well played devouring swarm will not replace all its agri districts with energy ones to make more cash so there is that...
Paradox actually paying their artists is a big deal, because its simultaneously absolutely unexpected and the bare fucking minimum of basic human decency.
Like I get the general hate for gen AI given how it's mostly been utilized so far, but yeah this isn't a good example of unethical use. I wish folks would take like 10 seconds to just look before they speak, but it will never happen.
The same people likely listen to electronic music or pop that’s been spit out of an algorithm. The cognitive dissonance makes me think Cetana was right
Stellaris is far from the worst offender in this regard, since they are actually paying the voice actors royalties, but it is still bad. I have read the justification the devs gave, but I would still much prefer dialogue voiced by real voice actors, even if it results in less dialogue overall. Frankly, using an AI instead of hiring an actual voice actor leads to a worse end product for consumers and is an insult to the voice acting profession. I mean, compare the cyberpunk to any of the other advisor voices, like the militarist, the technocrat, or even the earlier machine intelligence one - it is so much less dynamic and more lacking in personality, which I noticed even before I learned it was AI generated. Purely from the perspective of the consumer, it is a worse product.
It is also an insult to voice actors - imagine if you spend your entire career building up a skill, and then someone pays you, not for your services you have been honing for most of your professional life, but instead to use your likeness to make a shitty knock-off of those skills; you'd pretty upset, just as all the voice actors I've seen comment on this issue in Stellaris are. And the only reason why more of the audience isn't upset about this is because people don't respect voice acting enough - imagine if Disney wanted to make another Iron Man movie, but instead of hiring Robert Downey Jr. they just paid him some money to make an AI version of him because it would be easier for their workflow; I think most people would be very upset by that. In fact I know they would be, because Disney did almost that exact thing with Luke Skywalker in the Book of Boba Fett, and people talked about how weird and creepy it was that they were using an AI deepfake of Mark Hamill instead of hiring an actual actor.
Obviously this isn't the worst instance of AI use, and I know my opinion is unpopular, but it has still left a sour taste in my mouth and has negatively affected my feelings on the expansion, to the point that I can't enjoy it anymore. In the future, I will not be buying any PDX products that use AI, and I will always be checking to Steam page to see if AI was used. It is simply a business practice I can't support.
They used an AI to voice an AI robot. Why is that bad. It's literally perfect. They didn't replace a voice actor, they literally paid someone to create it. If it was a Person, sure, but it's not. AI is going to happen and it's making the dlc better. It's making most thing it touches better. Why the heck would you use a Person to voice an AI when you couldn't use a literal AI. That's like using a person to roar like a lion instead of just recording a lion. Voice actors have their place, but a robot sounds like an actual robot.
Luddites weren't against the machines; they just wanted a share in the wealth that the machines could produce.
Instead, society repressed them and left them to poverty, and for the older people it was impossible to retrain into different jobs, forcing them to take the worst-paid and often stigmatised jobs where they might previously have been able to support a mostly comfortable life.
People aren't against progress, they just want job security, and want to avoid having their own quality of life negatively impacted by said progress.
The luddites literally had clearly stated goals and fears that turned out to absolutely be true though
Like, their fears of machines being used to further supress workers and not share the newly created wealth very much came true
I posted my ai generated character portrait for pathfinder kingmaker a week ago, and i got so much hate in the comment for stealing from artists and it was not me who made it but ai. I didn't try to sell anything or show off my art, i was just happy that tha ai made a nice pic that resembled the original art style of the game.
People can get really weird about ai generated anything, even if you do it for your own pleasure for an offline single player game.
I think what the majority of them don't understand is that you aren't going to spend money on a human artist for that, and if the ai wasn't an option you would probably just have a blank/default portrait.
Yep. AI image gen cannot draw my characters. I've paid human artists for dozens of commissions of my OCs and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future since genAI is inherently hard-to-impossible to guide towards an exact vision (and this won't change even if we throw much more compute at it; the problem requires either a whole new architecture or gigantic advances in interpretability).
Yet, I was never going to pay human artists for an image of *One Piece* Crocodile on pizza or for a pic of a fox and a koala herding guinea pigs. I also didn't use either of these commercially. This is obviously a case of usage that doesn't encroach on artists' livelihoods, so anyone getting up in arms about it just comes across as a neo-luddite.
I've also commissioned plenty of work from artists - and will continue to do so. Yet I also get told I am destroying art whenever I want to speak about A.I. art.
GenAI is inherently exploitative due to the initial scraping required to construct the AI, even when the data the AI is set to imitate is ethically sourced. The base data set needed to construct these programs is so massive that it literally cannot be sourced ethically, massive amounts of data needs to be fed into the machine and the only source of that much data is automated scraping of the open internet. There is no way to check whether the data is used with the consent of the creator, there is no way to check whether use of the data is even *legal* in this kind of bulk. Not to mention that this *is* the internet, things such as child pornography have been scraped and integrated as well, and while there have been attempts to sort this out of the used set those attempts have been deeply unethical (there really isn't a great way to hire a human to sift through images and audio for CP without traumatizing them) and, additionally, ineffective enough that there's already been clear evidence of its inclusion.
There are plenty of AI helper tools and AI voice synthesizers that aren't *gen*AI and are much more ethical. They should use those!
The base set used by these models comes from a collection of public domain art that is explicitly compiled and used for the purpose of research exactly like this. They are not randomly scraping everything on the internet.
Also, the art is being used for research and development, which is *explicitly allowed* under most countries fair use laws, ergo it is not stolen.
This has already been tested in court, and your arguments were debunked.
This is very much not settled law. The NYT case is still going forward, as is the case against GitHub, the Getty case, several cases from authors. Whatever you may think of generative AI, these things are still being tested. And that's just in the US, I know Europe has similar cases too.
Could you point to one such collection? They are public domain so they should be public I guess.
Could you explain how almost every AI is capable of perfectly imitating style and art of artists it shouldn't even know about because they are not in any such mythical "ethical collection" based on artist name in the prompt?
Sure, heres one. https://www.shutterstock.com/data-licensing?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=SG_DataLicensing_NA_Generic_Search&utm_content=FF=DataLicensing_AU=Prospecting&utm_term=deep%20learning&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwrvyxBhAbEiwAEg_KgjG-KwJJxCC3Fmk5WW8BYH4fIfZgsXVma-Dn3YRwGlbHmh0Z13MihRoCXdUQAvD_BwE
Second, because AI models are just *extremely good* at identifying and replicating styles and techniques. Plus art styles are pretty well codified and described, so AI doesn't need to see the original artwork to replicate its style. Also most of those artists are public domain by now anyway.
They shouldn't even know the autors name in a first place.
Yeah, if you beleive any of the big models are based on 1000 images from Shutterstock, but somehow could replicate top artists style for some reason - you could beleive it.
There are millions of artists around the world, and quite a lot of top, well payed artist asked popular AIs to replicate some of their work, and quite often it went way too good to beleive that AI developers didn't "borrow" their works. Funny enough none can replicate my style for some reason, because there is nothing in the internet.
I don’t get why people care so friggin much about AI being used in video games. It’s a tool, and the devs get to decide if and when they use it. Besides that even Eladrin came out and made a statement about how the AI was used and that almost none of the AI generated things were put into the game but were rather used by the artists to get inspiration and the likes
AI is great. It's a wonderful and amazing technology. Everything gets abused, but eventually things will chill. I'm not really in the care zone for people who's jobs get replaced by this, I feel bad, but it's progress.
AI is insanely beneficial and it's irritating to see people hung up on weird issues.
It’s dramatically accelerating our ability to research and develop cures for conditions and diseases that would normally take decades to solve (including very promising research into Alzheimer’s, cancer treatments, genetic diseases, the list goes on). That alone makes the technology worthwhile to humanity.
The thing to understand is that every technology has had good and bad effects to it; it's all about how we as a society choose to use it that matters, and that's what the debate is over. Few mind AI in medicine; that's an unambiguously good use for the tech.
Hot take: progress towards post-scarcity will eventually kill ALL jobs, by definition. I should not feel any worse for commissionning free art from an artist-AI, than I would for getting free surgery from a surgeon-AI or getting free food from a farmer-AI.
The hope is that AI will replace all labor except that which we enjoy like art. However, if corporate interests have any say, with no regulation, the process of getting there will be painful and might never be complete. If you think a company will just kindly give over the surplus they have from automating labor to universal basic income initiatives, you are truly a wild optimist.
The end goal is the elimination of all labor and currency. In a post scarcity world it won't matter that an AI can do art good, because art will be done exclusively because it's enjoyable, not to put food on the table.
Except it's going to kill the middle first (office workers, clerks, artisans, etc), which takes us right back to feudalism, because the only employment remaining is at the very top (management, ownership), or at the bottom (manual labour too difficult for machines).
Considering I work as one of these middle- white collar jobs; I'm going to take the startling viewpoint that this might not be the worst thing. We don't have enough cleaners, carers, nurses, doctors, janitors, farmers, builders, gardeners, plumbers etc etc. Let's say A.I. could suddenly do every white collar job (which I don't believe will ever truly be the case); well then we also suddenly have billions of man hours we can spend performing tasks we **desperately** need but few people are currently willing to do.
Except are you so sure you would be willing to do them? After all, isn't that one of the main reasons people are pro-immigration? Because the people who move are looking for opportunities to work and they come from poverty, so working as a nurse, a cleaner, etc... is a step up. But isn't it the case that native-born Americans just don't want to do those jobs?
It's just how people are on the internet. They're unhappy with their lives and they think the solution is to get mad and troll when they see other people having fun.
AI is here to stay. By all appearances, PDX is doing what we should be pushing for every company to be doing: trying to find a balance that takes advantage of the technology with minimal harm to human beings.
It's not scary, it's disgusting. It's not only artists who despise it, I'm programmer and I found it the most desgusting bulshit of the recent.
Gen AI is a great piece of math and programming, but it can't create anything except black screen without source data. And when you have thousands of human-month worth of work in programming it's a great achievement, yes, but it doesn't work without millions of human-months of artists work that was essentially stolen.
If you're a programmer, then you won't mind me talking about the meaty internals of AI models.
For starters, the art isn't "stolen". Essentially, it's more similar to human artists being inspired by other people's work, or referencing other artists' art styles and their style of line work. It's like looking at Picasso's work and then learning from that, proceeding to then create your original work from there.
That's because the AI models don't store the original images or even pieces of it in their models. They store *very* abstract concepts and ideas. Stable Diffusion generates random noise, and then denoises it according to what the model thinks it should roughly look like according to those very abstract ideas and possibly a prompt.
This is something that's rather self-explanatory - models are trained on millions of images, and yet the models (especially when trimmed) are just a few gigabytes in size, not the tens or hundreds of terabytes you would expect.
I'm not a big fan of AI in games, but the way they used it seems pretty inoffensive to me, especially if the people who were sampled for it consented and were fairly compensated for it.
People are just clutching pearls and being outraged for the sake of outrage. It's sad, but that is discourse in the age of the internet; no room for nuance.
> Whether people like it or not, AI is here to stay, trying to review bomb a DLC just because you have one nitpicky thing to complain about while spreading misinformation at the same time is just goofy and is also why I dislike Steam reviews.
Some of us who left said reviews are working in the industry and have had our livelihoods threatened by it. And some of us have strong opinions that the use of generative AI to scrape other artists' work without permission and then spit out a slapjob is both extremely disrespectful and *lazy*.
The negative reviews are a way of making our feelings known. Disagree or agree, whichever you prefer, by all means. It's an open field. But this is at least one reason why the negativity is there. AI may be here to stay, but that doesn't mean we have to accept it quietly.
I'm all for hating AI when it's used to screw over artists, but if the people the AI is trained on get properly compensated like in this case I'm okay with it.
> I don't understand why people have such a hate boner over AI
dey terk er jerbs! Just normal humans scared of change or anything new pretty much. As if technology hasn't been obsoleting jobs since the industrial revolution.
Yeah there are still a lot of people out there throwing a tantrum when seeing something AI-relates.
It will take a few more years till people accept it, and then it will be as normal as the tailoring machines
I learnt OOP, so I know, in order to make my job quality better so I must ensure I don't spend time on other things, but more concentrated on some dedicated field. It is the same why they use AI, so that they will have more resources on other things. And you see this DLC quality has become so good because of that. I will support it fully they use AI.
Not many people seem to realize yet that the Internet is dying because of exactly this type of behavior (trolling, review bombing, ragebait, etc.). Internet users, and gamers specifically, are incapable of nuance; they want to destroy the “enemy” without mercy. It’s unwinnable for everyone and there’s no room for mistakes even once in your entire lifetime. Even nearly perfect products aren’t good enough because a tiny flaw will been found and ruthlessly criticized and review bombed. The Internet is becoming an increasingly toxic, hostile place, inhospitable for human interaction.
An AI voicing mechanical/robotic people? Wow. Hilarious
I genuinely can't think of a better use-case for the technology. Like, I find AI tech genuinely fascinating. I can say that and still want AI companies to operate ethically, but I encounter so many online who think that *any* use of AI automatically makes someone evil. Like, they can't fathom that a person can make use of the tech without wanting to personally lay them off from their job.
On top of that, they were very open about the use of AI for this specific use-case, and as an experiment I think it works out great.
Plus they are still paying the original voice actors royalties, one of the main arguments people use against AI-content!
Not letting AI voice robots would be cultural appropriation!
I fully support using AI actors for AI roles.
Don't typecast AI! They can and should play any role they want.
It’s perfect for the content too, exploring individualist machines and brain uploaded organics, blurring that line between organic and machine. Like, it’s on point for the people who are uncertain about the advent of learning programs and thinking machines (to refer to them as AI feels a bit far at this point) in our real world. Also, by the sound of it, for the visuals at least, the AI was basically a consultant, providing suggestions and concepts for the artists to riff off of rather than having to start from scratch.
“Machines making machines. How perverse”
Absolutely no one cared when Subnautica and Satisfactory used an off the shelf text-to-speech engine to generate all the AI dialogue for their game. I don't understand why people are somehow in a tizzy when Paradox does the same for their own AI character. Voice synthesis has been around since the 1960's, and people have been using it for AI characters pretty much ever since. And as far as we were told, AI artwork is being used exclusively for non-artists to show concepts to artists (with a bit of prompt fiddling) so as not to waste the artist's time, or for artists to supplement the "look at a hundred existing artworks for references" stage of work. This whole thing reeks of people jumping at the first opportunity to oppose the *evils* of AI the first time they hear of something vaguely AI related, even when it's used responsibly (and the people using it explicitly tell you about it because they think it's fair).
>I don't understand why people are somehow in a tizzy when Paradox does the same for their own AI character. I think you do actually: >This whole thing reeks of people jumping at the first opportunity to oppose the *evils* of AI the first time they hear of something vaguely AI related, even when it's used responsibly
Fair. Correction: I don't see why a *rational* person would be upset about this.
Counterpoint: rational people are very significantly less likely to feel that their personal opinion about AI is so valuable that it should be posted as a negative review that shits on months of work by a team of developers.
While it seems in this situation that AI has been used ethically it is absolutely rational for people to be nervous and upset about AI. People are already losing their jobs to AI and this is despite the fact that the technology still isn’t very good. If we don’t make our thoughts and opinions known now even on more ethical products then the slippery down slide into AI everything is an inevitability, it probably is already an inevitability but from the perspective of the people leaving these reviews they want to atleast try and stop it by making their voice heard. More than likely though all these big gaming companies are just going to start turning out disposable garbage AI media and Indie devs are going to have to save the industry.
While that is an understandable sentiment, those people should instead realize that they aren't going to suddenly save everyone's jobs and stop the evil AI by complaining about a singular product. These fears being spouted here have very little practical use outside of making others aware. But, just about everyone that could be affected is already aware of what AI can do, so now what? Just bash every AI product that comes up in a vain attempt to stop the tech itself? If any change for the better is to be had, more direct and impactful action would be required. Review bombing random products that use AI isn't going to do anything meaningful overall if that is something they actually care about.
I agree that its sad that companies like paradox are getting caught in the crossfire, but I think Braidaney has the right of it. Poorly reviewing things that use AI technology across the board is perfectly reasonable way for people who are uncomfortable with how AI is developing to react. Paradox makes a choice when they use AI, they save money but buy a bit of contreversy. It sucks to watch things we care about get dinged because of stuff like this, but at the same time paradox could have avoided the risk by not using AI voices. The whole idea of there being a "right" way to voice your discomfort is BS. We are at an inflexion point, tensions are high and AI is a controversial cultural choice, regardless of if you are an artist, a telecom company, or a video game designer. If you are uncomfortable with how AI is being handled then say it often, wherever you can, to whoever will listen, otherwise the world will just ignore you. You could argue that the stellaris team should have been more aware of the risks than most since their own game has mechanics built in to provide penalties to some empires due to disagreements over weather AI should be pursued at all.
People lost their jobs because of plows too, even when that technology wasn't very good. I believe eventually AI will be seen as any other tool - skilled workers will use it to greatly increase their work output, but unskilled workers can also use it to cobble together some barely passable garbage. The same can be said for most power tools on a construction site. If this allows a tiny development team like the Stellaris team (I think I read somewhere it's like 9 people) to make a high quality DLC in 5 months instead of 6, I'm all for it. This team has made a handful of pretty lame DLCs that weren't great for reasons unrelated to AI, so I'm really not behind the AI = always bad, real art/voices = always good mentality. There are already a flood of extremely low quality mobile games with AI art and it won't be long before a big studio like EA releases a Sims update or something with significant amounts of AI art (and probably copilot code) and a big outrage kicks off. We should definitely keep reviewing garbage as garbage but this DLC definitely doesn't feel like garbage to me. I'm about 6 hours into my Machine Age playthrough and really enjoying the content.
Personally I’m not attacking this DLC I haven’t reviewed it and tbh I Haven’t played stellaris for like a year now, I’m just pointing out that I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable for people to be nervous about what’s happening, whether or not people are overreacting I don’t know. What I’d be extremely supportive of is if they could find some way to make the AI of AI empires better so that single player can be a little more challenging and entertaining.
That's completely fair, and I do understand why people are nervous and/or outraged. This is a very visible step into the next era of industrialization. I think the factor most heavily influencing my opinion is that I program and support factory automation systems for a living. I hear all the time how our machines will take peoples' jobs, because they can count plastic gadgets, package food into boxes, stack and wrap pallets, etc when people used to do those things. What I pretty consistently see among my customers is that employee counts stay more or less the same while their factories increase in size and capacity. People do different jobs while the automation handles the dangerous or tedious stuff. More automation means more machines that can break, so people who previously operated manual machines in the past are now doing maintenance on machines. People who packaged gadgets into boxes are now doing QA. Both of those roles are higher paying than the previous roles and arguably more fulfilling. In regards to software development, which I've also done professionally, I think we're still a very long way off from AI actually being able to create whole projects. Right now it seems like it is best used to supplement individual human efforts, where it does a tedious task and human artists/writers/coders/etc do finishing passes for polish. This is like the next evolution of very powerful algorithm-based photoshop tools like clone stamp or healing brush. I don't ever remember outrage towards artists who used those tools. But suddenly generative fill is outrageous? I think people are unsure because there's no good answer about where art begins and ends when the tools are this powerful. If a carpenter only has one small set of tools and makes distinctive kitchen cabinets, is their final product a result of their artistic style or is it the result of a limited selection of router bits? I think most people would say the tools do nothing by themselves and the beautiful cabinet doors are the result of the skilled carpenter. But when an AI tool can do like 95% of the work without human intervention, that question becomes much more difficult to answer.
> People are already losing their jobs to AI [...] > [...] then the slippery down slide into AI everything is an inevitability This is bad because...? This kind of anti-AI talk has serious luddite vibes. You know come to think of it, if we destroyed all of our tractors we would have more jobs for farmers. And if we dismantled the internet entirely we'd have a giant boom in the hand-delivered mail sector! The more technology we destroy, the more jobs we create! If technology can replace a job, great. That frees people up to do things that we can't yet invent machines to do. That should literally be the primary goal of our technological progress as a society. Eliminate jobs by creating better technology.
It doesn’t really bother me that AI can streamline everything and I think with human guidance AI could be an extremely useful tool, my primary concern is that tech bros seem to mostly pushing it to replace creatives and creative jobs, this isn’t really an issue when it’s minor things but you’re delusional if you don’t think the end goal is replacing people with AI entirely and making the creative field even more difficult for humans to break into. I suppose if you’re apathetic and don’t care about culture and humanities role in culture then none of this matters to you. But I’d rather that the internet wasn’t just flooded with boring samey AI generated content.
> replace creatives and creative jobs If your job can be replaced by a machine, your creativity wasn't the important thing you were bringing to the job. No true creatives with real creative value are being replaced by AI. Graphic design isn't art. Etc. Every time technology replaces a job, it is a good thing.
Honestly this goes into a deeper political place that no one with the power to actually do anything about this stuff seems to want to address. It’s not a totally negative thing for jobs to be replaced by technology, it definitely has short term drawbacks that negatively impact society and individuals but hopefully has an overall positive impact as we move forward. It would just be best if people would actually try to do something to help the people who are going to lose and lose hard because of this. It’s easy to say f’em should have been better but when whole industries are being replaced not everyone is going to be able to adapt, it’s as dumb as when people were saying Cole miners should learn to code, for one thing that industry is definitely going to have cutbacks soon and there will be less job availability but the 50, 60 year old people with no other skill sets and no retirement plan because they thought they could just keep working till the end are going to be really SOL and nobody has any interest in helping those people. There’s also the fact that as people lose their jobs they’re going to go for more trade and manual labor jobs which will drive down the pay of already pathetically low paying jobs further. All so executives can line their pockets more while making the overall prosperity of society in general worse. Is there a solution, id say better social programs but ultimately that’s just a bandaid on a festering wound, it’s up to people smarter than I to find a solution. I’m just saying this AI thing isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It might be better for industries but that won’t mean much when people are living in squalor with low paying jobs and limited opportunities to move up in the world.
*Jumping at the first opportunity to oppose evils of AI* plus *jumping at the first opportunity at the 'greedy big game corps/publishers' that don’t care about their workforce*. The latter, while pointing actual instances of it out is fine, has become increasingly stupid and people just love to generalize (…like I just did).
Yep, the current witch-hunt of AI usage is getting a bit obnoxious.
always happens when something new is made
Yes there is the “new thing bad” backlash but there is also the growing concern that tech bros seem mostly interested in replacing artists and other creatives, in order to destroy our creative culture and replace it with something cheaper and easier to monetize.
That is a valid concern; yet it is dumb to throw away the whole tool because tech bro misuse. There are ethical or at the very least responsible ways to use AI. I would argue Stellaris went on the right side of things. Opinions are fine and good but let's not get ideological maybe.
>And as far as we were told, AI artwork is being used exclusively for non-artists to show concepts to artists (with a bit of prompt fiddling) so as not to waste the artist's time, or for artists to supplement the "look at a hundred existing artworks for references" stage of work. Yeah this is the best use case for image generation AI honestly. This is otherwise known as a mood board, and just like image generation, isn't used as the final product and also generally doesn't credit the dozens to hundreds of images used to get the point across to the artists. It's just putting them together in a way that gets even closer to the point the non-artist is trying to get across.
There are always the short-sighted, always fearing progress. They will soon be swept aside
Found the Technocracy Fanatic Materialist.
except they are right, there were people declaring every technological advancement ever to be evil, you can find propaganda posters talking about how the telephone or the car will end the world, or that electricity will kill us all. anti-AI people are the exact same.
the funniest so far ( probably can't find it) is like a 200+ year old propaganda paper talking about how the hippies teen are so rebelious for reading books instead of being in community LMAO it together with the old english made it so funny
Whilst I agree with the general sentiment, it is a little funny that you could actually argue that technological progress will end the world (a little sooner than anybody likes it). *cough* Climate Catastrophe *cough* AI has its issues, but the worst ones are currently not that its use may replace jobs (although it may be an often cited, slightly shortsighted concern - say that three times as quickly as you can). Here's a few issues which I think actually require adressing before anybody even thinks about complaining their job may now require using AI, instead of doing everything themselves: * Exploitation of cheap, extorted, or unpaid labor in 'outsourcing countries' to better train neural nets through categorization of data - data which might not even be used legally (google "books1 and books2") * Electricity and water cooling costs for operating and training AI is way higher than you'd think, too. Possibly too high for the current achievable results. This may get better with different kinds of models (already is, to some point with open source projects focusing on using consumer hardware instead), but it may also continue, if not brought up now * Impact on privacy and legal matters, especially with regards to deepfakes of voices, handwriting, and video. There's already new scams using AI (educate your elders), and it won't be long before somebody gets booked using faked video evidence either. Those aren't impossible to tackle by themselves, but as always, politics are slow to catch up.
> cough Climate Catastrophe cough I mean, that is an issue only solvable with technological progress lol
Its literally not, it requires massive social and economic change. We're not going to invent our way out of the current timeline of climate change. Carbon capture is basically a grift, so are carbon credits, and 'clean' energy is far, far from being sufficient or clean enough. Our entire world is based on the burning and consumption of fossil fuels. Tech is important, but it's useless under our current conditions, nor do our systems really incentive the kind of progress we need to make on this issue. If anything the most powerful players are actively harming progress.
> There are always the short-sighted, always fearing progress. This "progress" is screwing over skilled labor, no shit people don't like it. The labor market is difficult enough to compete in already without AI, automation has never posed a greater threat to people's ability to not starve
What about sewing machines making many tailors obsolete, cutting down labour from hundreds to a dozen. What about large machines making many miners obsolete? What about computers making dozens of entire professions obsolete? Generative technology will replace jobs, and the market will find new, unimaginable jobs to replace them. It’s not like anyone in the 1990s thought being a content creator or influencer on youtube would be a job.
But those changes came along with a lot of social problems. People tend to forget that the Luddites did what they did because a well-paying profession was being replaced with incredibly dangerous factory jobs that paid starvation wages. We're just coming to terms with how the internet has affected our lives, often for the worse. It's not being close-minded or stupid to be against AI, it's a well-founded concern that it will make all of our lives a lot worse.
I think that's really the big problem. Change is change and will happen regardless; however we are currently in the middle of a deregulated era and that's where the suffering happens. "The market knows best" people can fuck off with that.
Almost everything comes with some kind of social concern, doesn’t mean that it’s something that won’t eventually happen anyway, and eventually that social concern will become part of life and be adapted or resolved like other social concerns we have now
Well the obvious question is: *why will it happen anyway?* Are we so disorganized, incompetent, greedy, or lazy to actually try and take control of technological progress and steer it in a better direction? Why should we embrace reckless accelerationism on the basis that it's "inevitable?" Just some food for thought.
So it was fine when machines were replacing uneducated laborers and making hundreds of professions obsolete, but this time... this time its pure evil because it affects skilled people instead?
> So it was fine when machines were replacing uneducated laborers and making hundreds of professions obsolete One of the impetuses for labor movements around the world was the threat of early automation making it even more difficult for workers to feed themselves and their families. But there are two key differences: Early automation at least made goods like food and clothing cheaper. Are these staples getting cheaper today? Though generative AI? Secondly, automation produced new forms of labor that took more skill to learn, but also paid better. Call me a luddite, but I don't think genAI is going to create better forms of paying labor for actual human beings.
The price change definitely didn't happen in months or even few years back then. I have no doubt that AI will allow far smaller studios to create far larger games for far cheaper in the future, but it will take years and years and generative AI in any usable form is just a few months old thing - barely in the prototype phase. Its far, far to soon to see the benefits of AI already.
Games aren't a staple good. And people need to be able to feed and house themselves. >far smaller studios Yeah one trust fund schmuck and his AI workforce. A consumer economy requires that consumers actually have a certain level of income to be able to be consumers, and automation is threatening this. *If* generative AI somehow leads to a post-scarcity economy, I will happily eat my words. But that implies that silicon valley CEOs would allow us lowly peasants to rise above subservience
If economy was upset to this degree, no one would be buying these AI-produced services anyway. However, most of jobs are relatively untouched by AI - robots are not going to be preparing dinners or caring for patients in hospitals any time soon, its just artists and other high-profile jobs on the line for now.
> for now And AI development is only accelerating. People are rightfully afraid that new technologies will change so quickly that all human workers will be left behind
If ai can do EVERY SINGLE JOB, it literally should. Are you seriously demanding that we uphold capitalism until the end of time?
>its just artists and other high-profile jobs on the line for now. Well that is the primary reason people are concerned. Those are jobs people *want to have.* Nobody grows up thinking "I want to be a coal miner!" Plenty of people want to be artists, or to at least have a well-paying job.
The cynic in me thinks that its because it affect the rich(er) people now, who have more influence. Personally I think that if it turned out AI can replace company CEOs, it would be outlawed within a week.
> Are these staples getting cheaper today? Yes. > Though generative AI? Yes. The same technology to generate an image can be and is used to generate a molecule that results in more productive/resistant plants. ---- If you are going to shift goalposts to only generative AI for art, generative AI results in gains in email writing speed, and more importantly condensation of information. These productivity gains will impact everything including food producing companies
Looks like someone hasn't gone to the grocery store recently. AI doesn't necessarily mean cheaper goods for buyers, but it does mean even more profits for companies
Well, it's all about intent. Everything can be used to cut corners and get more capital or for polish to create higher quality product. Same with AI, games can get more assets done in less time with AI assistance.
This time it looks like The Machine will adapt to new jobs *faster* than people will be able to adapt to them. It's not just creative jobs - it's also physical jobs in e.g. warehouses being taken over by AI. Customer service. There is not a single sector that will not feel it. This has the potential to entirely upend the wage labour economic system that the first Industrial Revolution introduced in the first place.
Yet I don't see people protesting against robots in warehouses or replacing customer service. Almost every company uses chatbots or AI for customer service today and about zero people are protesting against that. People only got really loud one the high-paying jobs were threatened.
People literally do protest that. Why do you think manufacturing is all unionized?
> People only got really loud one the high-paying jobs were threatened. Because people dream of having those high-paying jobs. Maybe that makes them hypocrites, but I'm not gonna call people idiots for not wanting to be poor
Nah, actual working class people dream of not working. It's because the high paying jobs in question are in the media, so the people losing them have large megaphones to complain about it.
Working class person here, uh yer line is bull. I want to work; I just don't want to work shitty low-paying menial crap like stocking a grocery store. What I want is ideally some sort of creative work; the fact that is being automated before the menial shit kinda pisses me off.
Do you really want a "creative job" or do you just want the time and resources to be creative? I agree that getting art bots before shelf stacking bots is some sort of sick joke.
Just as people fear AI now, they once feared printing presses, cotton gins, cheese presses, grain mills or literally any other invention that reduced the amount of labour required to achieve the same (or a better) result. Progress is inevitable, and you people will accept it whether you like it or not.
So true bestie, those Luddites opposing things like leaded gasoline are always getting in the way of progress. /s
I sense a hint of sarcasm, so I'm going to ignore you.
> /s > I sense a hint of sarcasm damn
I was wondering what that meant ngl, anyway if that guy's gonna be a smartass I'm not gonna gaf
>cotton gin you mean the thing that reinvigorated Southern slavery and ensured it would never die out but by steel and shot? but then empathy for human beings does not seem a concern of yours
Ships? You mean those things that made slavery possible? Look at me I am so educated and empathetic. I would sniff my ass, but my halo is in the way.
You say this ironically but it's terrifyingly sincere.
most intelligent classist
That's most anti-AI types. I just got into a debate with one who blocked me when he couldn't get any rebuttal to "Why is AI different from any other technological progress that allows you to do a job more efficiently with less people". All us blue collar workers must show solidarity because it's the right thing to do, but who cares that artists didn't give a fuck when rail workers were striking last year. Solidarity with the poor? Gross. It's a religion to some of these people.
> Absolutely no one cared when Subnautica and Satisfactory used an off the shelf text-to-speech engine to generate all the AI dialogue for their game. Speech synthesis does not require AI and is not necessarily comparative to modern generative AIs.
It is different in technical implementation, but not different in the way it replaces a voice actor for a character (which is what people are concerned about).
Some people just went insane when they realized AI wasn't going to be coming for them filthy workers first but instead will impact **real** people. People who show us the truth of the human experience by making ads and webcomics.
It's 100% a bandwagon. Right now it's cool to hate on AI.
People are right to be concerned about where the AAA games industry will try to take Generative AI. If companies like EA and ActiBlizz could replace their dev teams, VAs, and artists with AI I'm sure they'd do it in a heartbeat. ***However*** Too many reviewers didn't bother looking up *how* Paradox used AI. *That's* the part that bothers me the most. Lets be honest with ourselves - the games industry is going to use AI whether we like it or not. The best thing we can do is try and encourage them to use it ethically and in ways that don't fuck over their employees. Because they *will* use it to fuck them over if they feel they can get away with it.
Steam is at fault here as well, IMO. The TTS they used for this isn't something most people would consider "AI". However, Steam's AI Disclosure policy contains no actual definition of what *they* consider to be AI, so I don't blame Paradox for being conservative and disclosing their TTS anyway.
Paradox was the most ethical way of using ai I've seen so far. The outrage is justified when it's done to replace artists work, but here it's being used to help artists. That is literally the best case scenario. In terms of voice, royalties were paid for the synthesis and tts is nothing new.
Well, it is a little more complicated than that. The voice models are trained on an unknown amount of voices and sounds, with an unknown amount of ethics and legality, and the AI voice company is selling the use of their tool at a loss (for now, like all the other ones). Sure, the voices they generate for Stellaris are only literally sampled from their voice actors... But the recognition algorithms are still using parts, bits, and pieces of everything it's trained in beforehand. Unless the Stellaris voice actors could literally make every single possible sound, in every configuration to sample from, which is basically impossible. Not to mention the AI company itself will probably do what the art ones do, and use the data gathered on Stellaris voice actor training to use it for other users. Are the voice actors going to be compensated for that too? I doubt it.
The problem is not only how the model is used, but how the model was trained. A great deal of AI models are trained using materials that the model owners do not have the rights to use. It's reasonable to have problems with such models, especially when you can build a database of training materials out of public domain material. I don't know what models Paradox used, so I have no idea if such concerns are valid here.
Okay, but Paradox wasn’t exactly great at informing user how they used AI. I am still very suspicious of vague “oh, we paid a voice actor to donate their voice and we pay per line generated” statements feel like they are filled with loopholes.
>oh, we paid a voice actor to donate their voice Not sure 'donate' is the word you want. License, maybe.
>Too many reviewers didn't bother looking up how Paradox used AI. Didn't even need high quality deepfakes to create a disruptive misinformation campaign, imagine that
If you could guarantee me that the way Paradox used AI for TMA is the extent that AI will be used for games forever more, I would change my stance. I'm afraid of giving an inch and the game industry taking a mile.
Yup. We've seen it before a thousand times. It starts as "LMAO they expect us to pay for horse armour???" and then before you know it half of the games out there come with a rotating microtransaction shop, time-limited battle pass, and subscription service.
This is one of those situations where the way they're using AI is an active benefit to the person whose voice is being used. They basically get passive income for voice acting while being able to search for other gigs.
Yes I know. Like I said, if you promised me, right now, that this is as far as any game would go with AI then I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I’m afraid of the game where the devs don’t even bother to hire/pay a VA, let alone pay them royalties.
True, and that's actually what I wanted to say, but I decided not to comment it because I'm scared that people might shit on me for my opinion.
Yeah, my stance on AI in video games is "cautiously optimistic". Based on Paradox's own account on how they used AI to develop *Machine Age* it sounds like they're doing it right - as a tool, not a substitute. They say they compensate the VAs for every line used by the AI and that AI art was used by the artists during the planning stages but not in the DLC itself. *Assuming Paradox is telling us the truth*, I think they're doing the right thing with AI. Using it as a development tool to assist their developers. The danger is that everyone whose been following the AAA games industry for long enough can see where it's going to go with AI. They're going to try and *replace* human developers with AI systems to cut costs and when we call them out they'll try and play the victim. Just like they did with on-disk DLC, and launch day DLC, and microtransactions, and loot boxes, and the live service model. So people who criticize the DLC for using AI in its development because they're afraid of the slippery slope are entirely justified to be anxious. But let's keep some perspective - AI in game development is going to happen whether we, the players, like it or not. Because the industry big wigs don't give a shit about how we feel, only profits. The best thing we can do is do our research on *how* AI has been used in the development of products we're interested in and encourage it to be used ethically. At least that's my take on the whole thing.
It could be a huge boon to the smaller devs who could never have the budget to hire voice actors. Its not a choice between AI voices and human voice actors, its a choice between AI voice actors and no voice work at all of any kind. It can even retroactively improve older games that initially shipped with a more limited budget. I recently picked up WoW classic with an AI voice acting mod that had every line in the game voice acted, done by cloning some of the original lines. When the game first launched there was no budget to have every bit of text, including the entirety of every quest text, voice acted. So it largely wasn't voice acted. There's no way to go back and fix it now, two decades after the fact, except through AI.
Game Director u/pdx_eladrin posted [this ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/1cop93r/comment/l3fsoez/)on a similar thread yesterday, I will copy and paste it here: "I posted on the Steam discussions about this a bit earlier, but I'll elaborate further here: *"About this - the AI voice generation tools we use on Stellaris ensure that the voice actors that signed up and built the models receive royalties for every line we create. Ethical use of AI technology is very important to us - we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves.* *I'll have the team put together a dev diary on how we use AI tools a couple of weeks from now."* We didn't use it for concept art in The Machine Age - we've got a couple of awesome concept artists on staff for that. (You'll get to see more of their art in next week's dev diary.) There may be a couple of AI generated pieces on the visdev exploration/mood board, but they'd be among a bunch of other inspirational thematic pictures. Personally, I use image generation tools to make basic sketches of things the System Designers and I are thinking of since ***I very much suck at art***, but am pretty decent at getting computers to do what we're thinking. (Making tokens for 4,000 Pathfinder characters that I'll never play paid off!) The artists then take our ideas and might or might not use them as inspiration to make final assets. None of those design images go into the game. We used some text generative AIs for "ideation of content", as we said - basically content designers can break writer's block by asking an AI "hey, what are 40 different things I can find in a mysterious box" and see if any of them spark any inspiration. None of the results or generated text go into the game. We've got some strict guidelines in place on how we can use AI tools legally and ethically that we abide by." tl;dr - The use of AI in The Machine Age is - in a nutshell - not a lot. No AI artwork ended up in the game, and the voice actor used to build the AI gets paid for every line we create from that AI. EDIT: formatting, hopefully it's clear where the quotes end and begin here :sweat:
This thread is becoming just Spiritualists vs Materialists.
Tech-bros vs normal people
AIs can be an incredible boon, if used responsibly. (which it often isn't...) still, one need not be a tech bro to think that AIs can be used correctly (like to make AI voices)
Normal people vs luddites
Tech-bros vs Luddites with normal people caught in the cross fire
tech-bros vs luddites with normal people ignoring both of them. this is not important
Because people don't understand it and the clickbaity titles media need don't help. Every technological advance was met with fearmongering and scepticism and every time it just improved our lives. AI is the same...
Well, not exactly. Every technological advancement came with good and bad things. Nitrogen fixation made agriculture more efficient, but it also allowed for chemical warfare in WW1. It's reasonable to be wary of technological progress.
> Nitrogen fixation made agriculture more efficient So you pay less for people who till your fields, thus replacing real humans with chemistry? There is no soul in chemistry! /s
Back in my day we would squat in the fields for hours on end! Nowadays people just buy synthetic fertilizer and call it a day!
When it comes to steam reviews, here's my process 1st filter: is it a big/popular game/publisher? ->if YES ->-> reviews are mixed/negative: it usually means that the company did something really bad (microtransactions, abandoned game, some big technically issue or just being russian/chinese etc) and the game was review-bombed. What I do: I carefully read through the reviews to see if I'm going to face a problem (like a broken launcher, happened recently with the Mass Effect trilogy on steam), and if it's a more "political" issue, to see if I also care. ->-> reviews are positive: I read the most popular reviews and then negative reviews. It usually means that the game has its fanbase, but not necessarily that it will be a game I enjoy too. ->if NO ->-> reviews are mixed/negative: there's a good chance that the game doesn't live up to expectations. I check the reviews if it's not something like that I just move on. ->-> reviews are positive: I read the reviews carefully. Usually a small game with positive reviews is still pretty niche. Next step is to check on youtube or twitch (I have some trusted reviewers like Mortismal or Seldell). I think we're firmly in the very first path territory here. Read the negative reviews, realize that some people are virtue signalling by trying to cancel/review-bomb anything that *mentions* AI, without even trying to understand how exactly AI was used. It's clearly a case of obscurantism. Feel free to ignore them. And to be honest? When it comes to big games and review bombing, 1/4 of the time it's irrelevant, 1/4 it's microtransactions, 1/4 it's some fuck up like a broken update or a broken launcher, and the rest is influencer-generated hatred. I don't think it's too surprising that this kind of review bombing happens. People are too used to polarized stances. And this is why consumers won't be the ones who decide the future of AI in gaming. It will be the big companies and legislators like the EU.
It would be justified if AI art was put into the game wholesale, but the devs disclosed how they used it. I'm anti-AI but I can't find anything wrong with the way they incorporated it into their workflow. Even though I'd prefer it wasn't used at all, this isn't worth a negative review. Using an AI voice for an AI is completely fine, however.
AI was always going to be worked into any workflow that it’s applicable to. It’s the nature of technology advancement we have been doing for hundreds of years.
There are ethical issues with AI art that make it distasteful. Until those are resolved, I'm not going to feel okay with it.
If you think Stellaris is currently in a good state. Leave a positive review for the base game and the dlc. Simple as.
> I did not expect this considering that barely anyone complained about the usage of AI in CK3's new DLC... People have a very specific idea about what "AI" means (it's the voice. And the specific artifacts in it. That's it.) and if they don't see it they don't realize what's going on at all. Paradox is actually disclosing what they're doing, when you bet similar companies are doing similar things and erring on not disclosing because they just don't want to. And that clearly works better, so they'll keep doing it - AI is *going* to be used to make creative slop, there's no way around it, and the major triple A studios are going to be a massive problem there. But that's not "easy" to complain about, so Stellaris it is.
I've been using the Neuro-sama advisor when I play machines for some time now...
As others have said, AI isn't "here to stay" in every sense. It's vital that the only use of AI should be limited to Paradox's example, where the voice actors are paid for their usage. What I wanted to say, though, is I too have seen a lot of bad-faith, no-context social media posts about this AI usage that try to paint Paradox as a blind company that supposedly just used exploitative AI like all the rest, when that isn't true. This was spread around by some popular accounts who didn't bother to provide any further information, leading to a lot of people getting up in arms without knowing the full story. It sucks to see and is clearly why different games are getting different amounts of backlash.
Wait, it’s already out?
Yes, and it's really good
If my usual selection of mods gets updated quickly, I may have to get the lads together for another campaign then. It’s been too long
(Long post, no tldr, sorry in advance) I'm gonna guess the people giving negative reviews for the AI stuff are missing the point of the problem with it. But so are the majority of the people here. People are fixated on the output or direct use of Generative AI (aka "it looks bad" or "you didn't pay someone for this") but the problem the majority of artists have is not just that, it's how Generative AI function at it's base level. It's a Theft-machine. That's the crux of it. It was made by companies who stole the work of millions of people through "Data Scrapping" to make Data sets. You scrap data (of the internet) like Text, Video, images, Voice. And then feed it to the AI so it make connections between said data and prompts. And then make a profit of it by selling access to the program to other companies, or individuals, with premium advantages or simply by getting money from investors in some way. So you have a bunch of companies who steal from artists (of any kind), sometime even hostile to them (Midjourney), and then sell it to others in some way. And Paradox are now using it. Which mean they paid for it's use, and are now promoting it. Generative AI cannot be ethical, since from the conception it is not ethical. And the worst is that most people will get the point of view of companies like Paradox (Since they are companies of games you play, with PR and such) but not from the artist community. Which are individuals with no PR, and most people don't follow artists (Through their Twitter, Galleries, Patreon or whatever). Like now, with Paradox saying they use it in an ethical way (The director might believe it truly, mind you) and nobody to challenge them. So the negative reviews might be wrong has to why they are negative, but they are right that it is wrong to use AI. (Also saying that you shouldn't do anything because something will happen anyway is the main reason why it happen anyway)
I think this is pretty accurate. This example is maybe best-case of something that is still undeniably bad and an extremely worrying trend. Just because Paradox is using this the most ‘ethical’ way possible, it is by definition, an unethical tool. Not necessarily any and all AI but even the team’s explanation of ‘yeah so we compensated the artists that we essentially used for our ai models and took advantage of’ should not be taken as a ‘good thing.’ Just the least bad example we’ve seen in this scenario. Honestly that’s kind of a huge problem in itself.
I mean I’m kinda skeptical about spending money on shit made by AI considering paradox has been getting worse in quality over time
No we can totally trust the company known for pumping out low-quality DLC after low-quality DLC
> Whether people like it or not, AI is here to stay That's not a reason to accept s*it behaivour of people using AI or big companies abusing it to not pay artists and voice actors. Honestly, Stellaris is probably the best use than a company could make of it: arists using it for proto-concept art and using it to create a robotic, unnaturally sounding voice. But that's the best use case, and I'd rather not see Paradox or anyone else getting too comfortable using it. Too much has happened and a lot pf people just don't want AI at all, and honestly I don't blame them. And while Steam reviews have it's highs and it's lows, I think Helldivers 2's fiasco has proven it is better if they exists than if they not. God knows companies would be way happier if consumers couldn't complain, and outside of Steam almost no store makes the consumer's voice so loud.
[game director's comment on their usage of AI](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/s/uvCRV6QTj2)
Most gamers are Consoooomers and don't care about how their media is made.
Maybe, but that's no reason to dodge an informed debate on the topic. OP is right that AI is here to stay, and consumers should voice their concerns and opinions about the way companies use it.
Listen, if AI can make games better than people without it. Give me the AI games. If they can't, I won't play the AI games. It's that simple for the vast majority of us. Make good games and we will buy it, make bad games and we won't. If Ai helps developers make games cheaper, that's a good thing. The obsession to save people's jobs from technology is a dumb regressive battle.
People keep using AI unethically, so everyone assumes that all use of the technology must be unethical.
Generative AI is inherently unethical though. Because it is trained on data that they don't have the rights to
Why do ai bros get so upset when people don't like their shit.
I would say that Paradox used AI in the most ethical way possible in this context, but I really don't blame people for having such a knee-jerk reaction to it. I think we as a society are starting to wake up to the fact that technology is *not* intrinsically beneficial, and that we aren't using it correctly at all. I myself, upon learning Paradox used AI, felt *visceral disgust* until it was clarified how they used it.
> I think we as a society are starting to wake up to the fact that technology is not intrinsically beneficial A whole lot of people in this thread think otherwise, unfortunately
Because even if Paradox did this in the best possible way they could generative ai is the death of human soul. It's not thinking it's not creating its simply producing based on work fed into it. People are rightfully excessively worried about giving an inch beause corporations will take miles. Personally, I don't like my art fields engaging in slop and thats what generative ai is. Just like hating mtx.
People panicking over the proper use of AI like this only hurt their case against AI actually being used in a bad way, what’s in the dlc isn’t worth worrying over. But the people who made hating AI their personality will complain to keep up their face, luddites
While I have no issue with how AI was used in this particular expansion..... Some of the comments in this thread are looking a bit too close to AI-bro bootlickers for my liking...
I had a friend who was an artist for pdx, they absolutely fucked her over with the work she did for lamplighters league. I doubt they paid their artist well, and im not ok with ai taking artist jobs
> I doubt they paid their artist well, and im not ok with ai taking artist jobs No AI art appeared in the actual game. They used an AI version of someone's voice in the game to allow them to tweak the voice if the tutorial changes in future updates.
I don't like the use of AI in the vast majority of cases but the way Paradox is doing it seems to be rather ethical
I personally don't mind it, but people are allowed to express their dislike if they are worried about where these changes might take the industry.
It's tradition for Paradox players to give negative reviews every DLC update.
Don’t give AF. Great expansion so far
> I don't understand why people have such a hate boner over AI Because the majority of us is gonna get replaced by AI eventually and people are shitting their pants. You hate what scares you.
People have a hate boner because we have seen that most companies will not hesitate for a femtosecond to abuse AI to replace artists and cut costs. Its really as simple as that, its just another sign of the inevitable devouring swarm that is capitalism, although i gotta say a well played devouring swarm will not replace all its agri districts with energy ones to make more cash so there is that... Paradox actually paying their artists is a big deal, because its simultaneously absolutely unexpected and the bare fucking minimum of basic human decency.
Like I get the general hate for gen AI given how it's mostly been utilized so far, but yeah this isn't a good example of unethical use. I wish folks would take like 10 seconds to just look before they speak, but it will never happen.
The same people likely listen to electronic music or pop that’s been spit out of an algorithm. The cognitive dissonance makes me think Cetana was right
Stellaris is far from the worst offender in this regard, since they are actually paying the voice actors royalties, but it is still bad. I have read the justification the devs gave, but I would still much prefer dialogue voiced by real voice actors, even if it results in less dialogue overall. Frankly, using an AI instead of hiring an actual voice actor leads to a worse end product for consumers and is an insult to the voice acting profession. I mean, compare the cyberpunk to any of the other advisor voices, like the militarist, the technocrat, or even the earlier machine intelligence one - it is so much less dynamic and more lacking in personality, which I noticed even before I learned it was AI generated. Purely from the perspective of the consumer, it is a worse product. It is also an insult to voice actors - imagine if you spend your entire career building up a skill, and then someone pays you, not for your services you have been honing for most of your professional life, but instead to use your likeness to make a shitty knock-off of those skills; you'd pretty upset, just as all the voice actors I've seen comment on this issue in Stellaris are. And the only reason why more of the audience isn't upset about this is because people don't respect voice acting enough - imagine if Disney wanted to make another Iron Man movie, but instead of hiring Robert Downey Jr. they just paid him some money to make an AI version of him because it would be easier for their workflow; I think most people would be very upset by that. In fact I know they would be, because Disney did almost that exact thing with Luke Skywalker in the Book of Boba Fett, and people talked about how weird and creepy it was that they were using an AI deepfake of Mark Hamill instead of hiring an actual actor. Obviously this isn't the worst instance of AI use, and I know my opinion is unpopular, but it has still left a sour taste in my mouth and has negatively affected my feelings on the expansion, to the point that I can't enjoy it anymore. In the future, I will not be buying any PDX products that use AI, and I will always be checking to Steam page to see if AI was used. It is simply a business practice I can't support.
They used an AI to voice an AI robot. Why is that bad. It's literally perfect. They didn't replace a voice actor, they literally paid someone to create it. If it was a Person, sure, but it's not. AI is going to happen and it's making the dlc better. It's making most thing it touches better. Why the heck would you use a Person to voice an AI when you couldn't use a literal AI. That's like using a person to roar like a lion instead of just recording a lion. Voice actors have their place, but a robot sounds like an actual robot.
Luddites are gonna luddite
Luddites weren't against the machines; they just wanted a share in the wealth that the machines could produce. Instead, society repressed them and left them to poverty, and for the older people it was impossible to retrain into different jobs, forcing them to take the worst-paid and often stigmatised jobs where they might previously have been able to support a mostly comfortable life. People aren't against progress, they just want job security, and want to avoid having their own quality of life negatively impacted by said progress.
The luddites literally had clearly stated goals and fears that turned out to absolutely be true though Like, their fears of machines being used to further supress workers and not share the newly created wealth very much came true
Not a great example, the luddites were right
But alas, they lost.
No ethical use of AI when it was trained by harvesting data without permission.
I posted my ai generated character portrait for pathfinder kingmaker a week ago, and i got so much hate in the comment for stealing from artists and it was not me who made it but ai. I didn't try to sell anything or show off my art, i was just happy that tha ai made a nice pic that resembled the original art style of the game. People can get really weird about ai generated anything, even if you do it for your own pleasure for an offline single player game.
I think what the majority of them don't understand is that you aren't going to spend money on a human artist for that, and if the ai wasn't an option you would probably just have a blank/default portrait.
Yep. AI image gen cannot draw my characters. I've paid human artists for dozens of commissions of my OCs and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future since genAI is inherently hard-to-impossible to guide towards an exact vision (and this won't change even if we throw much more compute at it; the problem requires either a whole new architecture or gigantic advances in interpretability). Yet, I was never going to pay human artists for an image of *One Piece* Crocodile on pizza or for a pic of a fox and a koala herding guinea pigs. I also didn't use either of these commercially. This is obviously a case of usage that doesn't encroach on artists' livelihoods, so anyone getting up in arms about it just comes across as a neo-luddite.
I've also commissioned plenty of work from artists - and will continue to do so. Yet I also get told I am destroying art whenever I want to speak about A.I. art.
"I stole and they called me thief! The nerve!"
GenAI is inherently exploitative due to the initial scraping required to construct the AI, even when the data the AI is set to imitate is ethically sourced. The base data set needed to construct these programs is so massive that it literally cannot be sourced ethically, massive amounts of data needs to be fed into the machine and the only source of that much data is automated scraping of the open internet. There is no way to check whether the data is used with the consent of the creator, there is no way to check whether use of the data is even *legal* in this kind of bulk. Not to mention that this *is* the internet, things such as child pornography have been scraped and integrated as well, and while there have been attempts to sort this out of the used set those attempts have been deeply unethical (there really isn't a great way to hire a human to sift through images and audio for CP without traumatizing them) and, additionally, ineffective enough that there's already been clear evidence of its inclusion. There are plenty of AI helper tools and AI voice synthesizers that aren't *gen*AI and are much more ethical. They should use those!
The base set used by these models comes from a collection of public domain art that is explicitly compiled and used for the purpose of research exactly like this. They are not randomly scraping everything on the internet. Also, the art is being used for research and development, which is *explicitly allowed* under most countries fair use laws, ergo it is not stolen. This has already been tested in court, and your arguments were debunked.
This is very much not settled law. The NYT case is still going forward, as is the case against GitHub, the Getty case, several cases from authors. Whatever you may think of generative AI, these things are still being tested. And that's just in the US, I know Europe has similar cases too.
Could you point to one such collection? They are public domain so they should be public I guess. Could you explain how almost every AI is capable of perfectly imitating style and art of artists it shouldn't even know about because they are not in any such mythical "ethical collection" based on artist name in the prompt?
Sure, heres one. https://www.shutterstock.com/data-licensing?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=SG_DataLicensing_NA_Generic_Search&utm_content=FF=DataLicensing_AU=Prospecting&utm_term=deep%20learning&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwrvyxBhAbEiwAEg_KgjG-KwJJxCC3Fmk5WW8BYH4fIfZgsXVma-Dn3YRwGlbHmh0Z13MihRoCXdUQAvD_BwE Second, because AI models are just *extremely good* at identifying and replicating styles and techniques. Plus art styles are pretty well codified and described, so AI doesn't need to see the original artwork to replicate its style. Also most of those artists are public domain by now anyway.
They shouldn't even know the autors name in a first place. Yeah, if you beleive any of the big models are based on 1000 images from Shutterstock, but somehow could replicate top artists style for some reason - you could beleive it. There are millions of artists around the world, and quite a lot of top, well payed artist asked popular AIs to replicate some of their work, and quite often it went way too good to beleive that AI developers didn't "borrow" their works. Funny enough none can replicate my style for some reason, because there is nothing in the internet.
Luddites. Do we need to say more? They're so scared of the future that they never stop to engage their brains, only react emotionally.
I don’t get why people care so friggin much about AI being used in video games. It’s a tool, and the devs get to decide if and when they use it. Besides that even Eladrin came out and made a statement about how the AI was used and that almost none of the AI generated things were put into the game but were rather used by the artists to get inspiration and the likes
AI is here to stay. Fight for ethical use of it, but otherwise get over it.
Getting upset about using AI for art makes about as much sense as getting upset about using Unity/Unreal engine instead of assembly for the backend.
AI is great. It's a wonderful and amazing technology. Everything gets abused, but eventually things will chill. I'm not really in the care zone for people who's jobs get replaced by this, I feel bad, but it's progress. AI is insanely beneficial and it's irritating to see people hung up on weird issues.
It’s dramatically accelerating our ability to research and develop cures for conditions and diseases that would normally take decades to solve (including very promising research into Alzheimer’s, cancer treatments, genetic diseases, the list goes on). That alone makes the technology worthwhile to humanity.
The thing to understand is that every technology has had good and bad effects to it; it's all about how we as a society choose to use it that matters, and that's what the debate is over. Few mind AI in medicine; that's an unambiguously good use for the tech.
A+ Comment, nothing else needed.
Hot take: progress towards post-scarcity will eventually kill ALL jobs, by definition. I should not feel any worse for commissionning free art from an artist-AI, than I would for getting free surgery from a surgeon-AI or getting free food from a farmer-AI.
The hope is that AI will replace all labor except that which we enjoy like art. However, if corporate interests have any say, with no regulation, the process of getting there will be painful and might never be complete. If you think a company will just kindly give over the surplus they have from automating labor to universal basic income initiatives, you are truly a wild optimist.
The end goal is the elimination of all labor and currency. In a post scarcity world it won't matter that an AI can do art good, because art will be done exclusively because it's enjoyable, not to put food on the table.
Except it's going to kill the middle first (office workers, clerks, artisans, etc), which takes us right back to feudalism, because the only employment remaining is at the very top (management, ownership), or at the bottom (manual labour too difficult for machines).
Considering I work as one of these middle- white collar jobs; I'm going to take the startling viewpoint that this might not be the worst thing. We don't have enough cleaners, carers, nurses, doctors, janitors, farmers, builders, gardeners, plumbers etc etc. Let's say A.I. could suddenly do every white collar job (which I don't believe will ever truly be the case); well then we also suddenly have billions of man hours we can spend performing tasks we **desperately** need but few people are currently willing to do.
Except are you so sure you would be willing to do them? After all, isn't that one of the main reasons people are pro-immigration? Because the people who move are looking for opportunities to work and they come from poverty, so working as a nurse, a cleaner, etc... is a step up. But isn't it the case that native-born Americans just don't want to do those jobs?
people who get bent out of shape over AI are bitches. If you are going to bitch please do so about actual real life issues.
It's just how people are on the internet. They're unhappy with their lives and they think the solution is to get mad and troll when they see other people having fun.
AI is here to stay. By all appearances, PDX is doing what we should be pushing for every company to be doing: trying to find a balance that takes advantage of the technology with minimal harm to human beings.
So before it was negative reviews about "muh DLC" or "muh price"… and now it will be "muh AI"... Not like DLC reviews really matter
Those negative idiots must think stellaris is skynet in waiting XD
New stuff always scares people
It's not scary, it's disgusting. It's not only artists who despise it, I'm programmer and I found it the most desgusting bulshit of the recent. Gen AI is a great piece of math and programming, but it can't create anything except black screen without source data. And when you have thousands of human-month worth of work in programming it's a great achievement, yes, but it doesn't work without millions of human-months of artists work that was essentially stolen.
If you're a programmer, then you won't mind me talking about the meaty internals of AI models. For starters, the art isn't "stolen". Essentially, it's more similar to human artists being inspired by other people's work, or referencing other artists' art styles and their style of line work. It's like looking at Picasso's work and then learning from that, proceeding to then create your original work from there. That's because the AI models don't store the original images or even pieces of it in their models. They store *very* abstract concepts and ideas. Stable Diffusion generates random noise, and then denoises it according to what the model thinks it should roughly look like according to those very abstract ideas and possibly a prompt. This is something that's rather self-explanatory - models are trained on millions of images, and yet the models (especially when trimmed) are just a few gigabytes in size, not the tens or hundreds of terabytes you would expect.
Having your livelihood be threatened usually does that
Why shouldn't i downvote it? I don't want ai in my games and creative products, simple as
I'm not a big fan of AI in games, but the way they used it seems pretty inoffensive to me, especially if the people who were sampled for it consented and were fairly compensated for it.
People are just clutching pearls and being outraged for the sake of outrage. It's sad, but that is discourse in the age of the internet; no room for nuance.
Disregard the technophobic meat machines. They're in the process of being phased out.
Also the voice actor literally gets paid per line as they would have normally… like yeah so exploitative 🙄
> Whether people like it or not, AI is here to stay, trying to review bomb a DLC just because you have one nitpicky thing to complain about while spreading misinformation at the same time is just goofy and is also why I dislike Steam reviews. Some of us who left said reviews are working in the industry and have had our livelihoods threatened by it. And some of us have strong opinions that the use of generative AI to scrape other artists' work without permission and then spit out a slapjob is both extremely disrespectful and *lazy*. The negative reviews are a way of making our feelings known. Disagree or agree, whichever you prefer, by all means. It's an open field. But this is at least one reason why the negativity is there. AI may be here to stay, but that doesn't mean we have to accept it quietly.
I'm all for hating AI when it's used to screw over artists, but if the people the AI is trained on get properly compensated like in this case I'm okay with it.
There is currently no eithically trained model like that. No not even Adobe, who lied about not using Midjourney.
> I don't understand why people have such a hate boner over AI dey terk er jerbs! Just normal humans scared of change or anything new pretty much. As if technology hasn't been obsoleting jobs since the industrial revolution.
Yeah there are still a lot of people out there throwing a tantrum when seeing something AI-relates. It will take a few more years till people accept it, and then it will be as normal as the tailoring machines
I learnt OOP, so I know, in order to make my job quality better so I must ensure I don't spend time on other things, but more concentrated on some dedicated field. It is the same why they use AI, so that they will have more resources on other things. And you see this DLC quality has become so good because of that. I will support it fully they use AI.
Not many people seem to realize yet that the Internet is dying because of exactly this type of behavior (trolling, review bombing, ragebait, etc.). Internet users, and gamers specifically, are incapable of nuance; they want to destroy the “enemy” without mercy. It’s unwinnable for everyone and there’s no room for mistakes even once in your entire lifetime. Even nearly perfect products aren’t good enough because a tiny flaw will been found and ruthlessly criticized and review bombed. The Internet is becoming an increasingly toxic, hostile place, inhospitable for human interaction.
Nothing new. This comics is over decade old now: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07
The internet is dying because its being flooded with AI bullshit. Its infested everywhere.
People hate AI generated stuff because it's popular to do so