11bit Studio, the developers behind the recently released survival/management sci-fi hybrid The Alters, has admitted to using generative AI in their game. This comes after several players took to social media over the weekend to say that several elements featured in the game were AI, with several of the scientific scrawls featured on computers in-game being created that way, with the prompt from the AI still being left in for the final product of the game.
The studio confirmed on Monday with their own posts to social media that they did indeed include several elements created this way. They, however, went on to suggest that this constituted only a small portion of the game itself, claiming that only 10k words featured in the game, or 0.3% of the overall text, were actually AI. They additionally claimed that this text was intended as temporary during the development process.
“During Production, an AI-generated text for a graphic Asset, which was meant as a piece of background texture, was used by one of our graphical designers as a placeholder,” The studio claimed in their statement. “Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this singular placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game. We have since conducted a thorough review and confirmed that this was an isolated case, and the asset in question is being updated.”
While it is good that this is being addressed and rectified, many fans were quick to point out that placeholder text has been added to games without the use of AI for years, with limited issues. One famous example of this is the “Allan, please add details” placeholder text that was accidentally left in Hitman and has since become a running joke. It is hard to say whether they are attempting to save face now or really were caught off guard, though, needing scientific sounding records on a text scrawl you intended to replace doesn’t follow a logical order of operations. We gave The Alters an 8.5 out of 10 in our review, which you can read here.
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