Epic's Sweeney Says Platforms Should Stop Tagging Games Made With AI (gamesindustry.biz) 66
The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it "makes no sense" to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of the way all games are made. "The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation," Sweeney said. "It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production."
Tag! (Score:2, Informative)
You're AI!
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High time for someone to rework this...
https://youtu.be/bkSNXwBWqHI?s... [youtu.be]
CEO sees roadblock to more profit and says let's n (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:CEO sees roadblock to more profit and says let' (Score:5, Interesting)
Bingo.
I do not want to buy a game that is "AI" generated. That is slop and garbage not deserving of being paid for.
If you want to make a "free" game with AI shit. Be my guest. You throw microtransactions of more AI slop, I hope nobody is that dumb to pay for it.
If a development house uses AI to generate place holder assets, those assets must never make their way into the final product.
Any AI generated material is public domain.
Re: CEO sees roadblock to more profit and says let (Score:2, Interesting)
I do not want to buy a game that is "AI" generated. That is slop and garbage not deserving of being paid for.
AI is pretty good for voiceover work, reducing not only the cost but the time to completion. Its only real flaw with the latest tech is the pacing, but it doesn't take much for a human to correct that. It's not at all what I'd call slop. A major problem with human voiceover is everything has to be well planned in advance, you have to get a sound studio and do it all in one run, and once it's done you can't go back and change anything without a big expense.
That and the modder scene can't do anything to repli
Re: CEO sees roadblock to more profit and says let (Score:4, Insightful)
Its objectively slop and the best models sound dead and lifeless. What *I* want is for Voice artists to still have the career they've been slaving their asses off to still exist. Your not going to get the traumatized performance of Astarion collapsing with grief after killing the vampire who enslaved him, without Neil Newbon drawing on his own experience of trauma, or even the narators snarky delivery without a voice actor whos spent her life playing D&D with absolutely diabolocial nerds informing her subtle intonations and knowing delivery. All you hear in AI performances is .......... nothing. No acting, no emotions, just a dead plagarism machine sewing together stolen performances.
It is the very definition of slop.
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Re: CEO sees roadblock to more profit and says le (Score:2, Insightful)
Then video games just aren't what you're looking for if you're being honest with yourself. The more that games advance, the tooling goes with it. LLMs are just another tool. Even movies are doing this, they have been for some time, CGI nearly instantaneously knocked out the stop motion video profession, which had a lot more human involvement and a lot more work despite that it looks like shit in comparison. You'll probably get the maximum value out of watching live Broadway performances.
Think about it. You'
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It's not slop everywhere else, just in many places. AIs that have been custom trained for a particular situation can often do quite well. This work particularly well in classification, but also works in several other areas.
The main criteria at the moment is "so you have an easy way to check correctness?". If you do, then AI can, when properly trained and configured, do a good job.
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I mean if it's so meaningless then nobody should care unless they're worried it'll affect sales. Personally i don't think most consumers will care much and this guy is a snake worrying about like a fraction of a percent in sales.
Fuck him i say label AI games.
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\o/ (Score:5, Insightful)
You're free to make games with AI - others are free to tag them - yet others are free to use the tags to inform their buying choices.
Presumably you believe in these freedoms?
What 'makes no sense' is trying to cast a 'good for you' into a 'good for everyone - for all time' or trying to go against customer desires.
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There's no actual way to know if a game was made with AI or not.
Re: \o/ (Score:2)
The developers know. I'd be surprised if they didn't talk.
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Why would they talk and damage their own game's sales?
Re: \o/ (Score:2)
Why does anyone do anything? Complex reasons.
Re: \o/ (Score:1)
Also, if they know something is going to damage sales if revealed, does it make sense to do it?
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But if they talk, should you believe them. People say all sorts of things. You can't really trust strangers whose motives you can only guess at. Perhaps they're about to be fired, so they want to damage the company.
For that matter, if someone said a game was NOT made with AI, I wouldn't believe them. They only know part of what was being done, so even if they're intending to be honest they can't be believed.
I think he was probably correct when he asserted "AI will be a part of the way all games are made
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IIRC, he was using that idea (which is speculation) as a starting-point from-which to develop the more general idea 'it does not make sense' - logic fail FTW.
I'm more concerned with the bizarre attempt to cover-up the use of AI than I am with the use of AI. What do they know which we might want to?
Re: \o/ (Score:3)
I don't think whether you notice the difference or not is a great standard. Even the attempt to hide the origin is dece
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You've got to give super-props to the way the music industry has been pumping-out bland vapidness for over twenty years. It's almost as if they had foreknowledge of the arrival of AI and that this strategy would enable them to seamlessly segue to AI-generated content.
Super *jumps in air* props!
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Just look for the copied artwork. It's pretty simple, really.
Re:\o/ (Score:4, Interesting)
No, sweeny does not believe in those freedoms. He believes in your freedom to give him money.
Specifically, Epic's financial interest here isn't their store. It's their engine. They want to sell ai features to developers. If you've ever heard Epic's pitch as to why you should use unreal, it's all presented in the form of having less employees do work. "Stop hiring shader developers, let the engine do it for you" "Stop hiring texture artists, let the engine do it for you"
Which, in and of itself isn't such a bad thing. But when the slop comes in, the quality goes down. And every damned one of us knows it. And he doesn't want us to know it, so his customers will pay for the new unreal features.
Tim Sweeny wants (Score:4, Insightful)
Tim Sweeny wants to be able to push out AI generated swill without you being able to tell until itâ(TM)s too late. News at 11.
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As long as they're free...
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sounds about right. then again, fundamentally i would agree with him. we don't tag games for being copycats or reskins, musical content for using autotune, media for being fx filtered, etc ... and the offer is literally flooded with those and everyone finds that's normal. we correctly assume that those are just tools of this age, even if they were unimaginable just a few years ago, now they are bread&butter. well, ai is the new kid in the toolbox, that's just how it is and that cat isn't going back into
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What that pig is mad over is the fact that the market doesn't like more of the money going to these pigs instead of the actual developers, (Cue complaints about the starving artists.....), and that the market attempts to avoid such transactions when found. That pig wants the market to just give the pig money without the pig
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Actually, we do tag games for being rip offs. We also give them negative reviews.
user opinion isn't the same as a required "this game is a rip-off" disclosure sticker on the game. that doesn't exist and game platforms generally don't care if a game is a reskin or not, they'll let the consumers figure that out. but they do care to flag e.g. "adult content" because there are concrete legal implications, which is mostly the same motivation behind "includes ai" for potential copyright violation claims, although that's still a debated thing.
That pig wouldn't be complaining if the market didn't tag crap and make decisions based on those tags.
i don't think he's talking about opinion, but about
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The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT [mobygames.com]. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.
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That'll show 'em.
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While you're not wrong about pushing a bunch of recycled crap in a lot of cases, you're just plain wrong (TM) on prices. The price of games has been falling for decades when you adjust for inflation. The average retail boxed game has cost:
1985: $35 ($110 after adjusting for inflation)
1990: $50 ($125)
1995: $60 ($125)
2000: $60 ($115)
2005: $60 ($105)
2010: $60 ($95)
2015: $60 ($85)
2020: $60 ($75)
2025: $80 ($80)
As you can see, the "$20" price increase is rather more modest when you account for inflation, and is
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Joke is on him. Steam allows refunds. And they get used.
Re:And Mr. Sweeny is right (Score:4, Insightful)
They are accepting the games - the issue is whether it should be disclosed to potential buyers that the developers used AI.
If superior games can be made with AI that's fine, let the buyer decide.
Some people would also say there are ethical reasons not to buy certain games, even if they are better games. You could probably make better games if you used slave labor too, but, I suspect, many people would prefer not to buy those games even if they were more fun than non-slave labor games.
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Every dev I know is using AI-based software authoring tools like Cursor, or at the very least AI-driven autocomplete. Any game developer who claim they don't use AI will be lying. They would have to aggressively police AI usage to prevent their own devs from using AI in any way and even then they'll probably fail.
Likewise, unless they develop every single asset in-house, it'll be extremely hard to weed out AI generated assets because in the real world, people sometimes lie about who or what created the asse
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I think you should look on steam to see how this is done. Games don't just have an AI tag, they are supposed to describe what elements used AI. For example "Femboy Futa House" says "Character designs are created manually by artists and writers, but we use AI to speed up the drawing of details. We also use AI to speed up the drawing of backgrounds and H-scenes. AI is not used to generate content directly during the game"
I think fewer people will object that a game was coded in AI compaired to a game's art
Re: And Mr. Sweeny is right (Score:3)
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Yeah that's a good point. I get the feeling that if you code the game using ai 99.99% of people won't care about that either, including steam. Its about the art.
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If 90% of devs out there are using it, it doesn't matter a dinosaur or two like you are not. Statistically only 1 in 10 single-developer games will be non-AI. For 2-person teams, it's 1 in 100 games (0.1 x 0.1 = 0.01). For a 10-person team it's 1 in 10 billion chance that none of them use AI.
Art and music are the same. You have no guarantee that whoever you're paying to create those is not using AI.
Personally I can't tell if a blade of grass is AI generated or procedurally generated. If people can tell, the
Re:And Mr. Sweeny is right (Score:4, Informative)
They can accept these games now
No one is not accepting anything. The AI label is no different than "This product may contain Peanuts". What Sweeny wants to do is push AI rubbish while hiding it from people who actually care about it.
Rich a$$holes (Score:3, Insightful)
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Rich a$$hole explains why it would be a mistake to inconvenience rich a$$holes.
Follow the money
A CEO's job is to promote their company (marketing) so that their owners (which includes Tim, personally, in this case) make more money.
There was the old joke, which was Q: "how can you tell when a marketing individual was lying to you". A: "Their lips were moving". I you listen to a CEO and believe they are not lying to you, you did not internalize the essence of the joke.
So authorship matters for art (Score:4, Insightful)
While games are, apparently, not art and their authorship does not matter. Do I have that right?
Dolphin friendly tuna. (Score:2, Flamebait)
Given the rate at which AI will supplant the human workforce, it seems to me that an ethically intended label isn't an unreasonable ask. Most gamers will blow right past it anyway.
Is Tim concerned about Pushback on AI Slop... (Score:1)
... that may affect some future roll-out of integrating more generative AI tools directly into UE5, or this is about the current 3rd party tools for UE5 that are enabling developers to add AI created stuff into their game projects?
Epic choosing or not to force game listings to display information on AI usage is one thing, and they have the right to do that or not, but it sounds like Tim is wanting the rest of the market to follow EGS for hiding this information. If it was a market vs market thing, then cust
And he is wondering why nobody wants Epic Store (Score:2)
Steam has its own problems, but it has an almost flawless reputation because most of the time Valve sides with customers. If Valve has put this label is because many customers want it.
It's not that difficult Mr. Sweeney. If you want people to use the Epic Games Store, you have to make users perceive they get greater value when purchasing games there instead of on Steam. The free games are nice, but just that will not be enough to convert those gifts to purchases.
what he means is... (Score:2)
Soon all games will be recycled AI stuff. Get used to it...
Five years ago he would be saying it about NFTs (Score:2)
People might overlook slop! (Score:2)
And buy the slop before they know! Great business idea!
I guess this asshole does not know that Steam does refunds and often does refunds far beyond the "2h played" official limit. I have used it several times, never an issue.
AI will make games better... (Score:3)
There will always be cheap, crappy games. AI will help make more shovelware. Who cares?
For serious game developers, AI will be a huge productivity boost, and it will make the quality of the games better. Imagine, when talking to an NPC, that you don't always get the same dialog. Instead, a small, built-in AI ad libs the dialog within given parameters. Generating and placing the plethora of minor characters, mundane objects and such - instead of pure tedium for the development team, hand it over to an AI. There are so many ways that game development can become faster and produce better results.
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"I'm sorry, I am ethically unable to answer how to save the princess from the castle."
Gaming executives hate this one weird trick (Score:1)
If AI generated content is in uncopyrightable (https://www.copyright.gov/ai/), then video games are about to become free! Oh, and don't forget about the gold fringe on the flag. Explains that one to the judge, too.
Been a while... (Score:1)
It's been a while since we heard from the Anti-Gabe. As expected, he's still retarded and absolutely anti-consumer.
Have fun joining Ubisoft and Activision on the trash heap, Timmy! Not even your Chinese overlords can save you from yourself!
Made with ai labels are meaningless (Score:1)
I see games as art. (Score:2)
I want every part of the artistic work for a game to be done entirely by a human being.
The front end visual assets, sound design, music, plot, dialogue, etc..
I'll make allowances for someone working on the back end engine to use AI coding assistance to make their workflow easier, but not the artistically creative elements.
That's an anti-competitive statement (Score:2)
Meanwhile Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being "AI free" [theverge.com]. (non-paywalled link [archive.ph])
(BTW. "Sweeney" sounds like the Swedish word "Svinig", which means: disgusting, pig-like, often used to refer to someone's behaviour rather than their appearance.)