AI Animations decision

tl;dr Until such a time as the many problems with AI are solved, we are not going to use AI for our games.

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We recently released my small side project, Puzzle Date. And, in the sex scenes for that game we used AI to create animations. This generated a lot of discussion about AI, which led to me posting a poll for paying patrons. That poll has been running for a week, and I'm now ready to report findings. Thank you to the 100 of you who voted.

Roughly half of you said you didn't like us using AI. From the discussions, I know that there are two main reasons for this. The first is that the AI animations are lower resolution than the rest of the pictures, so they degrade the quality of the product. The second is a dislike of AI in general, from the way the models were generating (largely through theft of IP) to global climate concerns (AI datacenters burn a lot of power).

Roughly a quarter of you said you liked the animations. And roughly a quarter said that you didn't care one way or the other.

So, twice as many of you don't like AI animations as those who do like them. That's a pretty clear signal. For this reason, and others, we are not going to do AI animations in our real games, explicitly not in the one we're working on now (Darkness Falls: Signals).

When we finish Signals, we'll reassess. Maybe by then the animations will run at 1080p. Maybe by then the AI companies will have created new models trained only on licensed and public domain data. And, maybe they'll have found ways to reduce the environmental impact. Alternately, maybe by then the AI bubble will have burst and AI just isn't a thing anymore.

I suspect that none of that will have happened by the time we finish Signals. If so, we'll continue to not use AI. And then after we finish the next game after Signals, we'll reassess again. Etc.

Thank you for all of the discussion. And thank you for respecting each other throughout it.

Tlaero