I’ve already talked about AI-generated assets before, but what do they mean? I’ll have to explain the ramifications of using AI to generate assets, whether it be characters, objects, or environments, and then use them without any alterations. From entire AI assets sold on asset stores, it comes in all sorts of flavors, and none of them will make a game good.
As more shovelware ends up on Steam, itch.io, Google Play, the App Store, and many other digital storefronts, any game that uses any form of generative AI will almost always be cringeworthy and lazily made. They are doing the equivalent of typing in a text prompt, generating an asset, and then selling it off as their original work. For the past few years, it has become more ubiquitous by representing a real blight and too many players end up falling for it as they don’t know how shameless some of those developers are.
If you look around on any of the storefronts I’ve mentioned, you may come across a game constructed with characters, objects, and environments constructed with generative AI. To me, I don’t think generative AI would be a bad thing for game development. While they can be an effective cost-cutting measure, I do intend for AI to be used as a basis – a foundation on which you add your own original elements. To unoriginal devs who are lazy and sloppy, they will simply use the generated assets as is, or even sell the assets on asset stores.
I don’t know how many games that are 100% made with AI are out there, but it will end up becoming an artistic car crash because AI will end up being used to generate random enemies or objects that are irrelevant to the scenario. For example, USPS post boxes and London phone boxes can be generated with AI. It can also output Mummies, mutants, and werewolves generated with different art styles all with a lack of artistic cohesion. You could even create a photorealistic lion and place it into a cartoony environment.
All of these don’t work well. Randomly created objects and environments can be cobbled together and the developer can charge between $1 – 50. These games can be an atrocious mess. If you sell it on Steam for a dollar, good luck trying to make your money back. As I’ve already said, if you use AI to form a basis for your work, it’s not a bad thing. If all you do is stitch a game with these assets without any artistic rhyme or reason, that is not considered game development.
Sadly, this is becoming more and more common. If you go on itch.io or GameJolt and then search “AI”, it will be littered with games of this type, making an incoherent mess. They can also be laden with inherent graphical bugs that were not fixed because the developers don’t seem to know how to draw anything. Some games that use generative AI have been proudly received, but they aren’t if all you do is generate the graphical and audio assets with AI. These types of games are already bad, but there could be worse things down the line.
Some developers can end up being even lazier. I will explain some notable games that utilized AI in some form:
- Angry Birds: Block Quest was initially positively received at launch, but ended up getting a mixed reception after some art assets were found to have been generated with AI.
- The Day Before gained attention for being a scam game and its voice acting was generated with AI. It was even ranked as one of the worst games of 2023 by The Angry Joe Show.
- The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival was critically panned for being a rip-off of The Last of Us. Moreover, the voices in the trailer and promotional art were both made with AI.
All three of these games didn’t build anything from the AI-generated assets that were used. They did the AI equivalent of flipping a house – they generated one or more assets and tried to sell them to you. Even some major studios have used AI assets in their products. Here are some examples:
- Bandai Namco made a virtual pet game that utilized AI.
- The game Foamstars by Square Enix entirely uses AI assets.
Again, AI could have been used as a basis for those two projects, but all they did was use them as is and even claim them as their own original work. In reality, AI-generated assets are ineligible for copyright protection as most copyright acts around the world state a work has to be created by a human being to be eligible for protection.
It exploits the potential of the next generation of artists by placing them out of jobs and making them disrespected. It’s abuse of the system by making people unpassionate and is now a huge deal. Thanks to AI now becoming more common, there’s no guarantee that artists can have a position in the industry. Some AI services are paid and developers even invest into the thing. It’s surprisingly easy to create an AI-generated artwork of your favorite anime character and try selling it off as your own original work.
This can also make a plight for an artist’s financial future. You would not be able to invest hundreds of dollars for your own personal things such as eating at your favorite restaurant, a short vacation, or paying college tuition. It would cut your income and leave you in debt, forcing you to declare bankruptcy if the debt is bad enough.
If you encounter something that appears to have been AI-generated and then sold, do be warned. Let the community know on social media or Reddit. These pitiful excuses for interactive entertainment can take a toll on the industry.
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Really appreciated this post—clear, grounded, and full of conviction.
You’re not just critiquing AI misuse—you’re defending the soul of the creative process. That line between “using as a basis” and “slapping it in untouched” is a crucial one, and you articulated it with both passion and clarity.
I’m a teacher and artist, and while I live far from the game dev world, I share your concern: when the process is hollow, the product usually is too. Thanks for saying it out loud.
Keep creating with integrity.
—Dean
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I’m seeing a pattern here. I’ve heard the same exact complaints about code 3 years ago. As a software developer myself, do you know what I did when they first arrived? Began to use them effectively in my own work rather than hold a virtuous belief that humans should only be the ones to write software. I didn’t care that they were error proned; the idea itself was marvelous. In my mind, this opened the door to people who had no coding experience. I showed colleagues that weren’t engineers how they could incorporate LLMs into their workflow. Our sprints have 8x’d in speed from the previous few years, and our QA’s time has been isolated to fully integrated implementations rather than trivial sprint focus tests.
You can dismiss, shun, and degrade developers for using AI art for now. There will come a point in time where assets will be superior to human made assets. You may find yourself paying an arm and a leg for to claim you have moral superiority to have someone hand make your assets, when a computer can do it for a ten-thousandth of the cost. Pences on the dollar. Meanwhile, a kid who has the bandwidth to fully integrate their generated software and assets into a cohesive beautiful manner will pump out a game in unimaginable speed.
The bar for people to put their ideas into fruition will be cut down, it’s the name of the game. You can take the time to build your log cabin with your basic hand tools, and after thousands of hours, sure, you will have a beautiful cabin that’s artistic, rustic, and you can feel accomplished. Jimmy 10 miles down the road will have built an entire subdivision of customly designed homes (and not cookie cutter homes, fully designed with intention). The difference is he’s brought more value to the people who move into those homes. You might find yourself with a few neighbors who also built log cabins, but your reclusive moral secret society will be much more alone than the neighborhood down the street.
And yup, these models are trained on IP. Literally any model nowadays is trained on IP. Tough luck.
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