cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/28095114
Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.
But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.
And then after the backlash, the project director came out thinking the only issue was that the AI didn’t look good enough. Yeah bro that was the issue glad you’re in charge here to figure it all out.
I don’t get it how do artists get captured by the Shortcut Machine like this? Genuinely what worm is entering these people’s brains where suddenly they don’t know or care what art is and just want to ask grok to “make it look cool with dinosaurs and lightning and an erupting volcano.” Brother if you can’t do what you planned to, change the fucking plans. Those constraints are how we get cool and interesting new works and themed and art directions. People love the ps1-era graphics look and it’s not because Square Enix asked chatgpt to generate a Tomb Raider cutscene in the style of Monet or whatever.
To be fair, the issue is basically that it didn’t look good enough. Just look at the backlash expedition 33. Games still beloved and came in as one of the best jrpgs ever made made that AI usage. The only problem was that people noticed the AI usage.
As long as it’s just a tool and it’s transparent like any other tool and people have no f****** issue with it.
That’s just literally a fact.
As long as it’s not being used to slop out s***** products then it doesn’t really matter. Getting matter over AI usage is like getting mad over people using Photoshop. It’s just a tool. It doesn’t matter what tool people use. As long as they’re actually putting effort into making sure the final product is good and not lying about it, then it’s fine.
“It would be better if you couldn’t tell that you were being lied to, and I’m annoyed that we got caught.”
“We aren’t creative enough to tell this story ourselves.”
That dude’s dumb as rocks, glad they’re facing a consequence.
“We don’t want to pay someone who is better than we are because they want a lot of money.”
Yeah, pretty good reason, actually. It’s not like indie devs are generally known to be swimming in pools of money.
To try to come up with an explanation that doesn’t pretend these peoples brain fell out of their heads:
Some people are crafters. For them the process and even the tools around that process are important, maybe even more important than the outcome. It makes sense that they would be wary of AI, to put it mildly.
Other people are builders. For them, all they want is to solve an issue, build a solution, create an art. The way they get there is an implementation detail they don’t care about. They don’t care whether it’s real oil, or digital oil, as long as the oil painting in there head becomes a real thing somehow. It’s understandable why they might at least try to use AI for art.
His response is shockingly tone deaf and approaching genuine hilarity.
True, maybe we need to police artists more to ensure moral purity and alignment with political correct ideology. Make them delete their “work” line by line, file by file /s
PS: Reminds me of this: https://lemmy.world/post/51139260 . The age of pluralism is definitely coming to a middle.
AI boosters are controlling the narrative around AI, and what constitutes as extreme positions on it. They made the general population believe, refusing to use AI, refusing to engage with genAI output, especially if paired with mean online comments, is extremism. Meanwhile they claim the “golden middle road” is using it as a tool, such as an already established artist using it to brainstorm ideas, use it for reference material, or use their preexisting capabilities to fix up the AI generated output. Similarly, pro-AI extremism is being downplayed to “slop posting”, especially if it is paired with severe AI psychosis.
Reality:
You can just say that you believe that no one should use AI. You don’t got to write so much man.
You’re also falling victim to The logical extreme fallacy. You’re functionally stripping out every bit of nuance there is from this discussion. Enforcing people into one of two extremism camps.
There’s nothing in the world that is like that. That’s not how people work.