Hey, Game Devs: The ‘Placeholder Assets’ Excuse For Using AI Is Running Really Thin

We’ve been talking a lot of about the use of artificial intelligence lately, for obvious reasons. Many of those conversations have revolved around the video game industry and I’ve been fairly vocal about pushing back against the “all AI is bad everywhere forever” dogma that I see far too often. There are plenty of folks in our community that don’t agree with me on that, and that’s fine. But if the picture you’re getting is that I’m an AI evangelist, that’s simply not true. There are potentially good uses of AI in my view, as well as a whole lot of potential negative outcomes of its use. I’m not blind to that.

And, in the video game industry specifically, one bit of pushback that seems to be sorely needed is on game developers that use generative AI in their games, fail to say so, and then excuse its use as accidental after the fact. That is becoming as common a refrain from game developers as the laughable excuse in trademark instances that is, “Well, I have to be an aggressive jerk about my trademarks or else I lose them.” Neither is true.

The most recent version of this concerns the recent hit launch of Crimson Desert. In what is becoming something analogous to the antiquated process by which people who watch golf tournaments on TV looking for missed rules violations could then send into the PGA, which I’ve coined as McPromptism, new game releases get put under a microscope by people looking to find AI uses within them. Crimson Desert went through this process and, wouldn’t you know it, people found clear uses of AI-generated assets in the game.

The game’s extremely high fidelity and impressive graphics are a big part of the sales pitch, which made it all the more disappointing when players began to come across what appeared to be AI-generated artwork littered throughout the game. In light of the disappointment, developer Pearl Abyss has apologized for including the slop in their game, promising to remove and replace all of it.

“We also acknowledge that we should have clearly disclosed our use of AI,” the Crimson Desert account posted on X. “We are currently conducting a comprehensive audit of all in-game assets and are taking steps to replace any affected content. Updated assets will be rolled out in upcoming patches. In parallel, we are reviewing and strengthening our internal processes to ensure greater transparency and consistency in how we communicate with players moving forward.”

Like I said above, this excuse is getting old. Very old. Game developers and publishers will be more than aware at this point that a sizable percentage of the gaming public is very allergic to the use of AI in games, particularly when that use is not acknowledged at the forefront. If placeholder assets generated by AI are to be used at all in the development of a game, it is inexcusable for a developer to not have a process to remove them in place of human-created art before the game is published. That’s sloppy at best, and a lie of an excuse at worst.

Especially because it’s not like there aren’t other options that have nothing to do with AI.

The practice is becoming more common in AAA developer spaces, but critics argue that setting aside the use of AI in your game, it’s pretty foolish to use temporary assets that don’t call obvious attention to themselves. In games of such massive scale, BRAT-green blocks that scream “DO NOT USE” are much easier to flag than something approximating the final product.

I’m struggling to come up with a counter-argument to that.

I’m still in a place where I think there are valid uses of AI in gaming development. If a dev or publisher wants to explore those uses and, importantly, is upfront about it, there may be a place for that.

But the excuse of laziness when it comes to stripping AI assets out when their use was not intended is lame and needs to go away.