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One of the games that got us excited during the Summer Game Fest deluge this past weekend was 1666: Amsterdam, a long-in-development project headed up by Assassin's Creed creator Patrice Desilets. The narrative teaser, about witches, cats, and supernatural spookiness, lacked any kind of look at gameplay, but it sure set a powerful mood.
And yes, as we predicted last week, it is now time to say, "Ugh, that game with the cool trailer used AI."
To help get the hype machine properly cranked up, developer Panache Digital Games also released a playable prologue on Steam: A short "narrative experience" introducing the game world, characters, and mystery. It didn't take long for players to notice some telltale oddities in the game's visuals, and Panache eventually confirmed that, yup, that's AI.
"A number of people have raised questions or concerns to us about whether assets in our marketing and game use generative AI," the studio wrote on Reddit. "We have a dedicated team of over a dozen talented and experienced artists. With them, we looked into the assets in question and found that there were indeed some early versions of assets that made their way into the the prologue. This includes some in-game portraits and external marketing assets.
"We are actively reviewing the assets in question. Human made versions will be released in an update dropping soon. We own up to this oversight and apologize for any upset caused. Please be assured that the Early Access and full game will not include any assets generated by AI."
It's a lot of words to say "Yes, we used AI to make this game," and the fact that 1666: Amsterdam won't have AI-generated assets when it releases (unless it does, I suppose) is almost irrelevant: If you use AI to help make the game, and then replace it with human-generated copies, well, AI was used in the making of your game.
What I find more galling, though, is the quiet implication that the studio was shocked—shocked!—to find AI-generated assets in its game demo, and now they're all trying to find the guy who did this. And of course, the apology: "for any upset caused," not what caused the upset in the first place.
As we said last week, this sort of thing—AI whoopsies like this one, and also AI disclosures for new games on Steam—is inevitably going to become more common, particularly during big extravaganzas like Summer Game Fest when new games are rolled out by the truckload. Gamers rage against it, developers apologize, and then they keep doing it anyway, leaving us to play AI detective with every new trailer, and in many cases to decide just how much of it we're prepared to live with. 1666: Amsterdam really does look cool—is the use of generative AI in its development disqualifying?
For myself, I don't think so. But as a matter of principle, I take issue with the use of generative AI in place of what is supposed to be an artistic undertaking—and as cool as 1666: Amsterdam looks, this admission has really diminished my enthusiasm for it.
