I was interested in trying out the game as I had gotten it in a bundle, but I was disappointed when I noticed the AI art. I realise you've already clarified that you made this several years back when AI was just a novelty, and that you don't support AI being used to replace artists but I think saying "we didn't have the money to hire artists anyway" is a bit of a weak excuse for using it. For one, you didn't have to include any art where you've used AI. Even if this game was made with all storebought assets you clearly are able to utilise them in a way that creates art, and could have done something creative with those instead to make something similarly eerie. I think it also misses one of the other reasons why many people object to AI, which is that it is powered by stolen assets. There's nothing you can really do to un-steal all of the artist's works that were scraped from the internet to train the model. In addition I think there's an issue that for every instance where someone rationalises the use of AI art, that helps others to normalise its use which is a problem because AI image generators are environmentally ruinous, as they take a massive amount of energy to run just to produce a handful of images, and so every business that decides it's ok to use AI art is helping to accelerate climate change that much faster. I am not saying that you are a big business or anything, or personally responsible for accelerating climate change, I just want you to understand that your use of AI has larger consequences than just one artist being unpaid. Please replace or remove the AI art, it's not worth keeping. If nothing else, it will put off many players who similarly dislike AI art
We are not going to use any gen AI for future projects, so my plan was to keep working on new games and leave this one as it is. But it's a fair point about this normalizing gen AI. I mean, I don't think the game is big enough for that to be a problem, but we are quite against how the technology is used nowadays so it's hypocritical to keep those at least.
So I asked a friend who is an artist to redo the frescoes images at the end of the game. At some point during the next weeks we're going to update the game with those.
We also have some 'vision' videos, but I can't really think of a replacement for those, so we're not changing them at least for now. As opposed to the frescoes that were generated using Midjourney/Stable Diffusion, those were generated using VQGAN+CLIP. This one wasn't really a mainstream tool afaik, as their data models are really rough. And we selected a model that was suitable for commercial purposes.
So I'd say VQGAN+CLIP doesn't have the problem of normalizing the technology or harming the environment, as datacenters weren't created for the sole purpose of running it. The dataset we chose can be used commercially, so I assume it was trained with images without copyright. I couldn't find the details of how it was trained though, only that it was trained with Flickr images. Some of those images are allowed for commercial use, so I think it's a fair assumption that they only chose images without copyright.
After we remove the gen AI frescoes hopefully you can try the game!
Edit: we're actually changing the visions as well.
We've actually updated the game to remove all the AI generated content (frescoes and videos): https://paradnight-studio.itch.io/the-nameless-city/devlog/1130712/purging-ai-ge...