1666: Amsterdam, best known as the brainchild of Assassin's Creed co-creator Patrice Désilets before its reveal was marred by some impressively terrible AI art, has as of recent times “totally” moved on from AI. That’s according to Désilets, who, speaking with GamesRadar, claimed that his company had fired up the plagiarism machine “mostly at the beginning … in conception and pre-production.” Now, though, AI’s out of the pipeline. Hm, where have we heard this kind of thing before?

Oh, right, earlier this year from the developers of Blood of Dawnwalker, the vampire-flavored skulk ‘n’ stab from former Witcher devs that comes out this week. And also from the studios behind Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, the Steam page for which discloses that “AI-assisted tools” were used to support “some early exploration and temporary development content,” but that “any AI-assisted assets were either replaced or refined by humans in order to maintain the creative and artistic vision of the development team.” Oh, and from Larian CEO Swen Vincke at the very beginning of the year, who—while facing sustained blowback following an admission during an interview last year that his studio had been experimenting with AI—clarified that developers used the tech to “explore things” but that “there is not going to be any GenAI art in Divinity.” 

At this point, a meta has calcified: Use AI, get caught and/or admit it, and then walk it back by saying that no AI-generated assets will appear in the final game, you’re done with AI for the time being and, actually, you never used it all that much to begin with, so really, what’s the big deal? Then the bad press dissipates, and you can move on with your life. 

This should not be allowed to function as a get-out-of-AI-jail-free card, both because it’s a plainly disingenuous reaction to criticism, and because it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Creativity is a process, one that begins with ideation and conception. Indeed, these are some of the most enjoyable parts of creating something; writers get to envision whole new worlds, artists get to sketch out their most deranged fever dreams, designers get to invent new genres and mechanics. It feels almost banal to say at this point, but that’s the last place where we want AI intruding. Unbridled human imagination does not need a pair of clumsy, cold hands leading it to water. 

And even if the words, images, and designs AI produces don’t make it into the final game, its fingerprints still wind up all over the thing. Those are still AI’s malformed hallucinations being painted over by people. That is still AI effectively helping steer the ship, if its contributions really are constrained to a project’s early goings. It’s the video game development version of humans being trained not in any specific skillset, but rather in how to prompt AI to do it for them. After a certain point, that becomes almost worse than using AI to whip up an ugly in-game painting or two. Instead, it’s filling in perceived cracks in the foundation. It’s becoming the base on which everything else rests. I don’t care what studio heads say about individual assets; AI is absolutely in a game made that way.

This is a bait and switch, and it can’t become the accepted default. AI suffuses these games even if it’s not literally staring you in the face moment to moment. Execs and studio heads will keep trying to talk out of both sides of their mouth here. Don’t let them. Words need to mean something, or else AI will have truly won.

Recommended

Some time ago I visited a used book fair and came across this awesome piece of 80s scifi-asthetic.

This book is a collection of short stories by the Polish author Stanisław Lem originally published in 1964. Its English title is The Cyberiad. One story, about Trurl's electronic troubadour, turned out to be surprisingly topical.

Spoilers for the whole story follow

The inventor Trurl (revealed in other stories to be a robot) wants to create a machine that can generate poetry. He begins by obtaining several hundred tonnes of books to use as training data.

Trurl gets to work constructing the electric poetry machine. In the process they have to create massive data storage containers that stretch further out than one can see using binoculars. This is considered a necessary evil to get this great invention going.

The machine will not work as expected. As a last resort Trurl rips out all logic circuits and replaces them with "narsistors". Then things start working.

Trurl invites his friend Klapaucius over to test the new machine. They give it all sorts of weird and wacky instructions like "create a pastoral love poem that also contains mathematics and cybernetics". Basically they do a whole bunch of prompt engineering. They talk and behave exactly like people of 2021-2023 did when LLMs first appeared.

Eventually the machine causes uproar among poets and there are protests demanding it to shut down. These go nowhere in part because the media secretly love the machine. They are using it to create their own content for pennies and thus don't want to see it come to harm. As all of this is going on various people develop symptoms quite similar to modern day AI psychosis.

Things eventually crash when Trurl gets the machine's electrical bill, which turns out to be astronomical. He needs to get rid of the machine and manage to dump it on a visiting dignitary who takes it to his home planet where causes a supernova explosion. Trurl deems that to be sufficiently far away to not be his problem any more.

The difference between fact and fiction

In the story all the problems are caused by the fact that the machine's output is vastly higher quality than anything humans can create. Even the great Stanisław Lem could not predict that in reality the output would turn out to be mediocre garbage and still lead to all the same problems.

Even though the story specifies that the machine is given some "basic instructions" first, nobody tries to do a prompt injection attack on it. That would only appear almost 30 years later in 1993's Paranoia novel Title Deleted for Security Reasons. An earlier example may well exist somewhere, it almost always does.

Earlier this year, Meta created a “plan” to reduce some of its teams by as much as 60 percent to make the company “AI native,” Reuters reported today, citing two people familiar with Meta’s internal affairs.

Reuters’ report highlights the challenges organizations face when analyzing the best uses for AI and determining when the technology is a better fit for certain tasks than employees.

Meta confirmed to Reuters that the plan, reportedly codenamed Project OT (short for organization transformation), explored scenarios in which Meta reduced some team headcounts by 60 percent and that the plan called for two rounds of layoffs. Meta wouldn’t confirm which teams Project OT affected.

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