Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification"

You can't? It's impossible? I can think of three ways, off the dome, you could do this without AI.

1- stock photo images and vocaloid voices, using an audio overlay so it sounds like it's just a weird interference.

2- literally use friends, family, and their friends and family for the project. Random people from the Internet who would have fun with it. Anyone who needs to pad their portfolio for acting, headshots, and voicework. Network your solution.

3- do a patrion or go fund me or whatever and one of the tiers, or the lowest tier, is that you get to be in the game.

Hell, for bonus ideas that are things you thought of already, just draw em and do so the voices and it'll be crappy but that's fun, actually bite the bullet and pay people, or like you said, do without.

Using AI is giving up. All those games where part of the appeal was the effort they put into it would be nothingburgers if they used AI. Cuphead took off because it was all hand animated, and if they used regular computer animation people wouldn't have cared half as much, and now it's got it's own cartoon and people are still buying merch for it.

So yeah, if you wanna cut corners and use AI, go right ahead, but people will know you decided to waste a huge amount of energy and water to make a lower end product.

Or... you could always figure something else out and let people see the effort you put into this project you care about, and let that effort be part of the selling point. We want games people put effort into, so please don't water down your grand idea with slop.

So, use AI, it'll be listed as such on steam and there's nothing wrong with that. Its just stating the truth. Doesn't mean your project is crap, just means you used it and the store says so.

The problem they're solving is that for some reason, devs want to hide that they're using AI. Why would they feel the need to keep it secret?

all you have is an name and written text (essentially making the whole idea of players liking some characters nonviable)

People have favourite characters in books and text-only games all the time - don't sell yourself short on your ability to write compelling characters before you've tried and failed

That's not the point. People fall in love with poorly drawn characters, bad voice acting, and even some times poorly written stories. It's all about how creative you are. You only rob yourself of the ability to improve or tell an honest story.

Despite all the "OK idea guy", "you just want to exploit artists", and "you'll get so much more creative control if you do it all alone" being thrown at anyone looking for a team, it's much easier to find people willing to cooperate with you than you think.

And that’s fair. No one is saying you can’t use it just that it should be listed.

Also, if I read something like your post on the description of a game, I wouldn’t hold it against it. LLMs as a tool to make working class people's lives easier is great. I’m against it when greedy fucks use it to exclude workers from the process.

I'm sure there are stock images of actual people you could get access to, for a fee. That plus some image editing to get the style you want might be a way to avoid using AI for the portraits. I totally understand wanting to use AI for the voices though, that seems fair.

You could write the base game without AI, then add the extended AI resources as a DLC pack

I'm gonna be that guy and say don't use it then. The AI imigies are purely based on stolen art; you'd be profiting off stolen art. I don't care how legal it is, it's someone's hard work being undermined just so your life can be easier. It's just another way giant mega corps take power from the people. Instead of commissioning some artist or voice actor, you're giving money to some giant mega corp that can lobby the government to place data centers that poison people's water supply and increase people's energy bills.

That said, I support disclosing that AI was used in making the game

Which was the whole point of the original post.

You don't need 100 voice actors. A decent voice actor can do multiples voices. But it would still be expensive.

Do you really need 100 differents voices? Even AAA games with large budget probably have less voices, focusing on the most important characters.

Games often use tricks, showing text/subtiles instead of actual voices, and inserting random "hum" / "clear throat" / whistle sounds to make the interaction more lively, avoid complete silence.

I guess you're not making a typical game and voice synthesis might make sense for your game. Hopefully you can specify somewhere you're using AI for voice only, not for storyline nor other artwork, to reassure players.

I'm sad people seem to be giving flak for this. Regardless of your opinion on current AI tools, they definitely lower some barriers, which can result in more things getting made because of lower risk.

A good game will be good regardless of where an art asset came from, and some people really care about not buying AI utilizing games. Labeling only scares people peddling low effort crap.

If you're looking for a way to not use ai for portrait art, one thing you can do is leverage combinations in your favor. Draw 10 noses, 10 mouths, 10 shirt collars, 10 hairstyles and so on. When you need a new character, paste together your pre-fab pieces at random , pallet swap the colors randomly and then touch up the details.

Look at town to city, their characters are like four voxels wide and have plenty of character. You can go the AI route but I think the art would always end up just looking like it's AI, always just a little bit off. It all depends on the style of your game.

If you're going the photo realistic route you can still do it without AI, just use something like metahumans or one of the many equivalents.

lemmy perfectly proving the point of why devs don't want people to know what tools they use.

First of all, they're not intelligent enough to come to any sort of rational conclusion on the matter, so there's that