And then after the backlash, the project director came out thinking the only issue was that the AI didn't look good enough. Yeah bro that was the issue glad you're in charge here to figure it all out.
"If someone asked me what I think about using AI, the honest answer is that I would have to think about it for a long time," the director wrote. "The reason I chose AI was that I believed it could reach a level of expression our existing resources could not, and that it would let us focus more on the game itself, outside of story and cinematics."
He continued: "That was a hasty judgment on my part. Unless AI takes one more leap and reaches a point where no one can tell the difference, what I believed was still closer to an ideal than a reality. I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big."
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"The truth is, we spent a long time trying to tell this game's story with cutscenes made entirely by our own hands," the statement goes on. "The results were devastating every time. We came to believe we could not properly deliver this game's complex, difficult narrative that way, and that is why we turned to AI. But if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings."
I don't get it how do artists get captured by the Shortcut Machine like this? Genuinely what worm is entering these people's brains where suddenly they don't know or care what art is and just want to ask grok to "make it look cool with dinosaurs and lightning and an erupting volcano." Brother if you can't do what you planned to, change the fucking plans. Those constraints are how we get cool and interesting new works and themed and art directions. People love the ps1-era graphics look and it's not because Square Enix asked chatgpt to generate a Tomb Raider cutscene in the style of Monet or whatever.