No AI
Friends,
Thank you very much for your lightning-fast feedback! We care very deeply about your thoughts and always strive to listen carefully to everything you tell us. As such, we are shutting down any and all experimenting with the use of AI in any of our projects. We have never and will never use AI in Knightly Passions, and we have removed all of our posts promoting Girls & Blocks. We hear you, loud and clear: No AI.
Comments (18)
Hi! We are the developers of the game Girls & Blocks. Thank you for your feedback. We heard you. Opinions are divided. Thank you to those who support us. We will continue to make our game, it is close to completion. To then start developing a large-scale visual novel in the original setting. The new project will be about furries in the 19th century.
Thank you so very much. As so many have already said in the comments in prior posts and this one, until the development and use of AI can be done without the wanton violation of artists' copyrights and theft of their works, I cannot and will not support it. Still LOVING the hell out of Knightly Passions!
I like the decision, AI has impacted a lot of artist commissions too quickly. Artist's work will still change in time owing to the lower costs of AI, but I'd rather a slower shift than the toilet flush some here condone. Human livelihoods are often of lesser importance to consumers, devs, and tech savvy artists because they are unknown folk suffering and they can rationalize their personal gain... Change is good/needed, but some here lose sight of the human tradeoffs... Thank you Feyada.
AI doesn't make art all on its own. People seem to think that an artist using AI as a tool to create their art is somehow not entitled to the same opportunities as an artist who doesn't use the new tools. This is classic gatekeeping. The same arguments were made when photoshop and its peers allowed people to make art digitally, and before that when photography allowed for rapid snapshots. This isn't about AI replacing humans, this is about a new generation of human artists using newer tools that established artists feel give them an unfair advantage and will do anything to keep these new artists from being recognized as artists.
It's probably already been said, but why all the drama? If Devs are upfront about AI art usage, then that's cool. If ya don't like AI art, don't play the game... Good grief, buncha NIMBY crybabies.
The drama is because there are trade-offs to change, like the human element, market shift element, employment shift element, fear of lack of oversight element, and yes simply fear of change element. Lets not oversimplify folks arguments for having valid counter arguments because one doesn't understand or like it...
I don't think the use of AI is wrong or bad in and out itself. I DM a RPG group and I use AI generated art for some NPC's or bosses. It makes things livelier and it's faster and easier (and cheaper) than commisioning art. If I were to develop a game, I would for sure use AI to generate backgrounds whenever it could be done. And I would probably use AI generated templates for characters, to better see how the end product is coming along and to give the artists something to work off and streamline the process. I don't think in it's current state it's a good idea to let AI generated characters into the end product, they are usually too inconsistent, and you want your characters to stay consistent between scenes. But the weird "Girls and Blocks" thing was way too weird, and I would have not supported it in any way. In fact, I at first thought your account had been hacked or compromised in some way. The game looks like one of the thousands of simple puzzle games with some ripped off or AI generated art you can find everywhere. It takes zero effort to make one, I could have about 20 of them ready by the end of today, that's including generating the "artwork" or finding some disgraced soul on Pixiv willing to sell their art for peanuts. That kind of lazy money-grab is something that I despise.
I don't get the outcry. You would've used it to improve the workflow, not outright generate images to throw into the game, no? Then where is the problem? Is it that general "all-AI bad" mindset? I know lots of professional artists who embrace AI, especially for the little things no one likes to spend time on or to escape creative blockages. Most people complaining are either hobbyists, amateurs who thought they could easily make a living out of their doodles, or have no clue about art and just repeat what is said on Twitter. Use whatever tool improves your work. Whether "improve" means it's better for the consumer or less task intensive for your team, doesn't matter. As long as the quality doesn't drop no one can complain. And a quality drop obviously would include blatant AI art. Using it as support though? Who can complain? We wouldn't even know AI is used anyway. I certainly wouldn't care even if it eventually turns out you eventually adapted AI, but no one noticed any changes apart from maybe releases being faster, you added more art each release, or your artists were able to relax a bit. Not to forget, AI can help get the creative mind going as well. It's a shame that there's such a witch hunt. Reminds me of Germany's bureaucracy. It's half a century behind because they are sticklers for fax machines, letters, and unnecessarily convoluted, slow, manual office work. Just accept the digital world for the sake of your customers' and your worker's sanity and adapt emails, automated (digital) document archival, and enterprise resource planning software. Sincerely, a German. Back to the topic, you, obviously, do you. If you think putting a black and white ban on something is the right thing to do, only few will (dare) complain, in regards to AI. It never hurt to have an open mind though.
Well, I do respect the decisions you guys made and respect of receiving fan feedback which I do respect you for doing that in response. However, I do think you shouldn't completely ban A.I. at least not outright. I am not recommending using AI for everything and to your day-to-day operations when working on games. However, I do think the use A.I. on more small and incremental tasks such as little minor bug fixes and errors; things of that sort. At least maybe think about that in the future.
I believe the idea was to use it as a tool in their art workflow, to generate rough quality images rapidly with human artists refining the pieces to final quality. The issue is that a lot of people right now consider AI art of any kind to be theft because everything it generates is based on the work of human artists. IMHO this is very hypocritical as no human artist has ever learned art in a vacuum and everyone builds on the experiences and styles of their predecessors. Somehow people see it differently when the tool itself is leveraging that experience on behalf of the artist instead of the artist doing it directly. Tools advance... people felt the same way when digital art started to take off because you could copy/paste/flip/undo/redo/use layers/etc... all these things that made art a lot easier and more accessible to the everyman... you no longer had to spend a small fortune on expensive paints and anyone with access to a computer could make art. Here we are on the precipice of a paradigm shift and the same complaints come around again about how making art more accessible to new artists is unfair to artists who had to learn their craft without the new tools.
This is so sad to hear. I was really looking forward to seeing a developer use AI as a proper tool in their development workflow and Girls & Blocks looked rather promising. I know this may be the right choice given the public distrust of AI, but I'm disappointed all the same.
Definitely know what you mean.
What will be happening with the second team who was in charge of the project?
I hope it'll continue forward, just with girls drawn 100% by humans
People are afraid of anything new. But, good for you, for listening to your customer base!
I really respect yall for hearing people out and not getting angry or defensive. Yall have made a fantastic game. That you should be proud of and I'm glad to be here to To support yall. And I'm looking forward to seeing what you have next.
Thank you <3
That's not an easy decision to make. Thank you for listening.