Friday, June 9th 2023
Cyan Worlds Defends Presence of "AI Assisted Content" in Firmament
As many of you have seen or noticed, our credits in Firmament mention "AI Assisted Content". This has been present in the credits for Firmament since release day, and we have never hidden this information: "The contents listed as "AI Assisted" in the credits are "Journals, logs, checklists, newspapers, stories, songs, poems, letters, loosely scattered papers; all backer portraits; all founders portraits; the "sunset" paintings; the art-nouveau wallpaper in the Swan dormitory hallways; propaganda banners; coastal spill decal kit; all voiced mentor, announcer, founder, and other speeches; backer-exclusive content."
"AI Assisted" does not mean wholly AI-generated. Unfortunately, there have been articles published recently which have implied (especially in their headlines) that Cyan generated much of Firmament using AI tools. This is categorically false and misleading, and we are disappointed and frustrated to see this happening. Some folks may be concerned about our usage of AI, so in the interest of clarification: The voice performances in Firmament were voiced 100% of the time by a talented member of our development team who elected not to be credited by name. Their voice was simply modulated for the final product with one of these tools (and with their full permission and control). This same member of the development team has elected not to be credited in prior games of ours as well, for privacy concerns, and not anything to do with tools usage in our games.
Additionally, our narrative team elected to use AI writing tools to ideate and experiment with how information they wrote themselves is presented in the game. The artists who used AI tools to assist in the creation of assets (itemized above, as well as in the credits) used them solely to ideate on texture assets for very specific scenarios. Other than the small handful of textural assets described, no AI tools were used in any aspect of Cyan's world-building or art creation efforts.
Cyan has a talented team of individuals (all human beings) with a breadth of skills and experience who have been working on this game for over 4 years, from scratch. We are disappointed to see their contributions minimized and overshadowed by egregious speculation about our usage of AI tools. Although individuals on the team did leverage AI tools to help with the development of the contents listed above, absolutely nothing in this small fraction of content for the game was generated and used outright from these services without extensive human oversight and revision.
For those who are disappointed in our use of these tools, we hope you have a better picture now of how we used them to assist with Firmament's development. To our disappointed Kickstarter backers, we hope you understand that none of these tools even existed when we Kickstarted the development of the project, but understand why you may be disappointed that we did not disclose our usage of them in the last year. These tools land in a gray area for many, but we hope that some accurate context (instead of a spicy headline) helps clarify this for you.
Source:
Cyan Dot Com
"AI Assisted" does not mean wholly AI-generated. Unfortunately, there have been articles published recently which have implied (especially in their headlines) that Cyan generated much of Firmament using AI tools. This is categorically false and misleading, and we are disappointed and frustrated to see this happening. Some folks may be concerned about our usage of AI, so in the interest of clarification: The voice performances in Firmament were voiced 100% of the time by a talented member of our development team who elected not to be credited by name. Their voice was simply modulated for the final product with one of these tools (and with their full permission and control). This same member of the development team has elected not to be credited in prior games of ours as well, for privacy concerns, and not anything to do with tools usage in our games.
Cyan has a talented team of individuals (all human beings) with a breadth of skills and experience who have been working on this game for over 4 years, from scratch. We are disappointed to see their contributions minimized and overshadowed by egregious speculation about our usage of AI tools. Although individuals on the team did leverage AI tools to help with the development of the contents listed above, absolutely nothing in this small fraction of content for the game was generated and used outright from these services without extensive human oversight and revision.
For those who are disappointed in our use of these tools, we hope you have a better picture now of how we used them to assist with Firmament's development. To our disappointed Kickstarter backers, we hope you understand that none of these tools even existed when we Kickstarted the development of the project, but understand why you may be disappointed that we did not disclose our usage of them in the last year. These tools land in a gray area for many, but we hope that some accurate context (instead of a spicy headline) helps clarify this for you.
23 Comments on Cyan Worlds Defends Presence of "AI Assisted Content" in Firmament
There will be people buying ''game as an art form'' and there will be people buying another game with default unity asset, and there will be people buying a good enough AI generated game that cost less but maybe 70% as fun as a hand made one in the future.
Whatever feeds the endless hunger of consumerism I guess.
It's begun
Therefore, we have to be VERY careful how we use AI and how much we allow it to be used.
I wonder how much ignorant fear there will be when actual AI comes, if just generative neural networks can cause people to soil their underwear...
tl;dr:
In the post-Luddite times some people had to learn doing things differently, using new tools. Nowadays it will be exactly the same, learn prompt engineering to be relevant in ten years.
What I believe to be the most important, and often overlooked, aspects is that there is no AI. These are merely machine learning algorithms and the only intelligence behind them is corporate greed racing to the bottom in terms of cost. It's not "AI taking over our jobs", it's "greedy corporations use machine learning because it's cheaper than hiring humans".
The problem of AI/ML and it's mis-use is extremely complicated but from my perspective, the current trend is a "dumbing down" or even loss of human creativity and ingenuity. We have people farming out their careers and hobbies to the machine and it is causing a degenerative effect because of that. I work with a pair of IT techs who have spent the last year with a ChatGPT window permanently open on their workstations. They've learnt nothing, they've made mistakes because they've taken the word of the machine as gospel and their knowledge and skills have essentially stagnated. Compare that to the junior engineers I have under my mentorship (who I have politely but firmly asked to not use ChatGPT) and they are learning how to research, think outside the box and problem solve.
I don't want this trend to continue or deepen. Modern society has already traded a lot away for convenience (and because of laziness) and it's ended up worse for it. And that's entirely putting aside the dearth of ethical and moral questions around AI/ML too.
Also, from my PoV:
I've been day dreaming about AI/MI-assisted video games since before "Machine Intelligence" became common parlance.
This year, I knew I'd start seeing what I'd dreamed of, even if it ends up a nightmare...
IMHO: Next up, are 'custom re-makes' (entirely made by a single-few coder/programming know-nothings, using AI/MI tools).
Should circumstances allow, the entire video game market is about to get shaken the F up.
Please explain to me how is machine learning threatening to destroy humanity more than, say, industrial weaving machines were?
Something else to consider: "It's always worked out so far," does not necessarily mean, "It'll always work out in the future."