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Fans slam The Alters after discovering evidence of undisclosed gen AI in images, text, and translation (www.eurogamer.net)

submitted 1 month ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to c/games@sh.itjust.works

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[-] lath@lemmy.world 56 points 1 month ago

"like it or not, gen AI is becoming an invaluable tool for developers"..

..who wish to take a dump on their work.

[+] duchess@feddit.org 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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[-] lath@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago

You're expecting it to be used responsibly when we ourselves in general are very lacking in that department.

This here is a very good example of the actual use that will happen. A rush job to meet unrealistic deadlines. And that's what will happen as is the norm.

[-] pory@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The translation flub is the only part that mattered here. The Alters was getting a ton of praise and good press for its story, characters, mocap, VA, mechanics, visuals, you name it. Finding out that someone used GPT for some glorified lorem ipsum to paste on a random background object doesn't change the quality one iota. The art team for this game was paid and hired and they did a phenomenal job with the game, but one of those paid artists took a shortcut for some assets. It's not a "the ayy eye is letting corpo CEOs skip out on paying real human artists!!!" situation here.

Do you know what else paid artists / game studios do other than pay a human to create an asset from scratch? They buy models and textures on the Unreal/etc asset store. The same exact boulder model is present in everything from ffviiR to Clair Obscur to Death Stranding, because it comes free with the engine and is "good enough" just like an AI generated rock texture would be.

Ever hire a professional photo editor? They're using generative AI. Every last one of them. They've been doing it for like 15 years ever since Adobe introduced "content-aware fill" algorithms that generate backgrounds to replace random bystanders or objects in a shot. Is the scary robot stealing someone's job and burning the planet there too?

However, using machine translation without even a proofreading pass is hilarious. Using a conversational model for translation is double hilarious. Surely purpose-built translation tools exist and are more efficient than "asking" chatGPT to "translate this line into Brazilian Portuguese".

[+] duchess@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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[-] lath@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago

That's kinda the problem. We're already careless with the things we do ourselves. It can't be helped, nobody's perfect. But once we start delegating tasks, we lose the direct experience. Priorities shift, attention moves to something else and the chance of carelessness rises because it's no longer a problem we have to concern ourselves with.

Meanwhile, the LLM "learns". What it "learns", nobody knows because it does so mechanically. There's zero understanding.
It keeps "learning" every time it's fed something, so you don't have a static program that does what it's told. Instead it's a "living" program that applies what it "learns". And that makes it unpredictable in the long run.

This turns the user into a glorified middle manager who has to hover over their employee and make sure they did their job as they should have. And how many middle managers do you know with that kind of dedication, that isn't spiteful at its core?

The push against this is that the people depending on it to do the work become less dependable themselves. And unless you're an independent developer without a profit driven publisher breathing down your neck, this will be used in all the wrong ways as a standard instead of it being the exception.

[-] FeatherConstrictor@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

According to the article as cited in this comment, we do know the reason and a rush job to meet a deadline is precisely why.

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[-] MurrayL@lemmy.world 47 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

From the article:

Danilov posited that the mistake was either the work of a "careless translator taking shortcuts", or it was "done by someone on the dev/publisher side who couldn't be arsed sending last-minute missing lines for translation and decided to throw them in a random LLM without oversight".

Handong Ryu, who handled the Korean translation for the game, replied: "I was responsible for translating the vast majority of the Korean version of The Alters. Unfortunately, the same issue exists in the Korean version as well, which makes it more likely that the second scenario you mentioned is closer to the truth.

Sounds like this text was either added late in development or simply overlooked until after the last set of translation work had been completed, so the devs decided to let an LLM do it rather than getting billed for another batch of localisation.

Very dumb, especially as this puts them in direct violation of the Steam AI disclosure policy, but given the context I guess they figured no one would notice.

[-] Krukenberg@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago

They could have used Google translate for these short last minute additions, and not a single fuck would probably notice. I hate this stupid overconfidence in AI.

[-] x00z@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

I have done translations and even for my own language I often use an LLM. It's the one thing they are actually amazing at. It's also probably not about "anybody noticing". It can very much be a single developer doing it on their own ChatGPT account and the QA didn't notice it.

I really don't care about this stuff though. The AI label should be for gen AI and not revising some text or translation imo.

[-] Thistlewick@lemmynsfw.com 11 points 1 month ago

The issue becomes: if they used Gen AI to create background filler text, can we be 100% certain it wasn’t used elsewhere in the production of the game?

If they really wanted background text, they should have paid someone to write some, or use Lorem Ipsum if they didn’t want to spend the money and no one would have cared.

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[-] Lumidaub@feddit.org 18 points 1 month ago

"You're not actually supposed to read that text so this is not an issue." Good job missing the point.

[-] net00@lemmy.today 16 points 1 month ago

That's kinda sloppy, mainly in the disclosure and translation department, but nothing that some updates won't solve.

I'm happy to support these devs with original ideas, even while they use some AI in a non-intrusive way. They have done something more important for in my book, which is following regional pricing.

It's stupid how several studios think charging my 3rd world country the same or even more than the US is a good idea. CDPR and bethesda think it's ok, but It's disgusting. I would rather support 11bit.

[-] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago

Damn, I was looking forward to playing this. Glad I read this first

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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025

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