Riven co-creator defends his use of AI art: 'Any artist can take a brush and, without thinking, an artist can create slop'

An image of Age 234 in the Riven soundtrack's gatefold, created with AI by Robyn Miller — (Image credit: Fangamer)

Fangamer's videogame tie-ins have drawn our attention multiple times in the past, from the Stardew Valley boxed edition complete with farm-ownership deed, to the angry psychic squid from Into the Breach in huggable plushie form. They recently released a fancy vinyl edition of the soundtrack to Myst sequel Riven, but this time the response has been divided.

As noticed by multiple commenters in a thread on the Myst subreddit (via Time Extension) the gatefold art by composer Robyn Miller, depicting the mysterious Age 234, has the look of generative AI. Miller replied to confirm he'd used AI tools in the art, but defended his use of them to finalize art he says began with old-fashioned pencil sketches of the concept:

"The tools are advanced enough that, once one has a concept, especially a sketch, arriving at a final image is not so difficult. This involved iteration after more iteration, adjusting small parts of the image, and shifting portions of the image. Even once the final design was complete, I could shift elements such as the angle, type of film that was used, the age of film, film grain, time of day, weather, lens on the camera, camera used, ISO, etc... changing the image slightly each time. It's a process of two steps forward, one step back. Dozens of iterations."

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"From the beginning of my career," Miller wrote, "I have always been an early adopter of tools. Tools do not make the art. The artist makes the art. Any artist can take a brush and, without thinking, an artist can create slop. In fact, the internet is overwhelmed by endless amounts of ART SLOP. And 3D SLOP. When artists design without intent, or copy other people's styles, or create with any thought or care... the result is slop. And it's everywhere."

Fangamer responded to Time Extension's initial reporting with this statement: "Our internal policy prohibits art created by generative AI in our products, but it’s one we hadn’t directly addressed with all of our outside artists, especially on products like this one, where development began well before the widespread use of image generation. In this case our role in the soundtrack was limited to layout and production, so we weren’t aware of which tools were used to create the gatefold illustration; anyone who has ordered the soundtrack and is unhappy with the product is welcome to contact our customer service and request a cancellation or return, which we’ll process no-questions-asked. We’ve begun updating our artist and partnership agreements to reflect our AI use policy, so that moving forward we can proactively address it with everyone we work with."

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.