Look I've seen the hours those studios and devs put into design... If they want to prototype using a tool? Nobody's losing a job over that. Its a couple hours saved from doom scrolling though your existing assets looking for something temporary.

Yeah, it slipped out though the cracks. But then how many games are loaded with "Unintended Easter eggs" because people are human. I don't get it. The event is no more novel than finding an untextured brick off the beaten trail or a picture of a dev left in following an in joke amongst the team.

Want to mention that I really appreciate this reasonable, nuanced perspective of the situation that takes pains to see the humanity in the devs, that they are humans who make mistakes, and not ascribe malice to what can easily be ignorance.

The benefit of the doubt is lost in modern day and it's nice to see it still being given.

Yeah this is something that keeps getting completely lost in this conversation.

The assets in question were from development during 2022-2023 at the latest. GenAI image tools at that time were extremely primitive compared to what's out there now - remember DallE-Mini? That's the kind of thing they were using. And because these tools hadn't breached containment yet, literally no one was talking about ethical issues yet. Sandfall was basically just experimenting with brand new tech long before it was "good" and long before anyone was talking about it.

Now? It's good to see them committed to avoiding it. GenAI is a plague and should be treated as such. But 2022-ish was totally different than today.

Fr. Witch hunting over fucking nothing.

I have an idea for a game, I know how to code, but I'm clueless about gamedev. Hell yes I will use AI to help me with it. That is if I'll find time for it, because it will be insane amount of work to have something playable.

Some people seem think that you write a couple of prompts and you can ship it as an early access game.

The game was released with AI assets. The rules required disclosure, and they failed to properly disclose. Whether this was on purpose or by accident, they were disqualified quite fairly. It's a shame, but fairness must apply equally to all studios.

They used it to create placeholders during development. It wasn't something they decided not to use before. It's just something that was meant to be replaced. Usually these placeholders are a missing texture image or just a magenta texture, but they used generative AI to create something that fit into the world. Because it fit they forgot to replace it.

Honestly, I'm not opposed to this usage. It's not like it's replacing an artist. No one was going to create a placeholder to be replaced. However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you'll forget to replace items with this technique, like we saw here. The old style of incredibly obvious placeholders were used for a reason; so that you can't forget to replace them. It's probably smart to keep doing this.