AI is very trendy topic these days. And very controversial! It of course depends on what field we are talking about. There are some great and needed use cases, but most people are talking about AI that generates text, images, music and videos which is all over the place. But does it have a place in game development?

Apparently yes! A lot of roles were even replaced by AI. I saw myself, a lot of job offers for people who are specializing in AI generated images. Although these images are still easy to spot on by me and other artists, it's not so easy to do so for ordinary people, who won't spend extra 30 sec. on a picture to spot small artefacts that differentiate it from something made by humans.

I also had an experience of working on AI generated images for example for Don Quixote card game I was working on in May. But also during a few recruitment processes.

Author of Don Quixote decided to generate all illustrations in Midjourney. I'm not super fond of using AI by big companies, who earn a lot of money, but I don't mind if small indie game developers are doing it. It's based on necessity and tight budget, and not greed. It was my first time to work on this kind of project, so I was eager to see where it'll bring us!

I learned that all the illustrations where in a bit different style from each other, and it was super hard to achieve similar characters or style out of Midjourney. It wasn't the only problem. I realized that the images were a bit weird in the details. Let's take a look at the cover illustration that was used in the box...

I marked with circles all of the places in the art that were awkward and anatomically wrong. For example: eyes, arms, fingers, hair. Apparently attention to details isn't a strong point for AI. It looks ok in the first glance, but if you spend extra few seconds to admire it up close it starts to fall apart.

My conclusion is that, there's no way that AI generated images can be used straight from the generator. There always needs to be someone who will check the quality of it, and be able to spot these issues. And the most importantly - fix them.

What will happen if people ignore that? A lot.

Do you remember this fun Fallout poster that Prime used to marketing their new tv series? I know, it's not exactly games, but that's connected to games, so just bear with me for a minute.

If you forget to quality check AI generated images, that will be used in massive marketing campaign, you'll get a massive - but a backlash. People were mad! Company who could easily afford to pay a professional artist to do their work, were cheap and decided to save money using AI. And here we are, with the poster showing truly mutated world, where people have too long shadows, 3 legs, riding cars both back and forth and looking at beautiful trees growing on block out of cement.

I also heard that there were some companies, who hired AI artists to replace concept artists. And it backfired on them. How? It's easy to understand if you think about it! When you draw something, you can correct and fix some elements very quickly, because you work on layers. Even if it'll take more time, it'll be very straight forward and exactly as asked. Compared with AI artist, who needs to generate every image again and again, to get the right result. If you don't have any knowledge and skills, it's hard to fix what you're asked for. Of course, if you know some photoshop, and have some drawing skills - even basic, you should be able to do it. But still, a lot of AI artists, don't have any training in graphic design or digital/traditional illustration. That's why they rely solely on image generators producing very quickly a lot of pictures... but all in a bit different styles, with different artifacts to fix, hoping that something of that will be good enough.

If you don't have basics of art, perspective, proportions, color theory, and didn't spend any time on polishing your sense of aesthetics - how can you even see the issues that come up with generated images? Even big companies using AI can't see them apparently!

So my take on the AI generated images used in game production and in general is ok, if you are an independent game developer, or really small studio tight on a budget. But still, it needs to be quality checked and corrected before publishing! And no AI can do that yet! So we're somewhat save in that matter!

To be honest, I'd rather not use AI to do art. I'd prefer it to took over the chores that I don't like to do, like vacuuming or washing dishes. Why does it need to be art of all things?

People spend their lifes to learn the craft of art. Sometimes copy the masters to learn and find their style. But AI copy their hard work, not to learn but to copy-paste. Copyright doesn't apply to AI generated images because of that. And that's something that should also bother the developers. If you for example generate your logo, you can't reserve it's copyright - so anyone can use it. I don't think that not many are thinking about this matter in this context too.

Anyway, I'm ok with AI, but if you can afford of hiring the artist - please do so. It might give you less images in longer time, but of better quality, and exactly what you wanted.