this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Fans slam The Alters after discovering evidence of undisclosed gen AI in images, text, and translation (www.eurogamer.net)
submitted 1 day ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] MurrayL@lemmy.world 46 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

From the article:

Danilov posited that the mistake was either the work of a "careless translator taking shortcuts", or it was "done by someone on the dev/publisher side who couldn't be arsed sending last-minute missing lines for translation and decided to throw them in a random LLM without oversight".

Handong Ryu, who handled the Korean translation for the game, replied: "I was responsible for translating the vast majority of the Korean version of The Alters. Unfortunately, the same issue exists in the Korean version as well, which makes it more likely that the second scenario you mentioned is closer to the truth.

Sounds like this text was either added late in development or simply overlooked until after the last set of translation work had been completed, so the devs decided to let an LLM do it rather than getting billed for another batch of localisation.

Very dumb, especially as this puts them in direct violation of the Steam AI disclosure policy, but given the context I guess they figured no one would notice.

[–] Krukenberg@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They could have used Google translate for these short last minute additions, and not a single fuck would probably notice. I hate this stupid overconfidence in AI.

[–] duchess@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Google Translate also uses an AI model.

[–] FeatherConstrictor@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When people are talking about dissatisfaction with AI usage, in this context they specifically mean Llama and GenAI. Google translate may use LLMs as part of their translation model, but it doesn't make up the whole pipeline and will work completely differently than copy pasting some text into an LLM and telling it to translate something.

[–] FatCrab@slrpnk.net 5 points 23 hours ago

It probably uses a GPT of some sort at this point, tbh. There is no reason whatsoever using Google's ML translation or ChatGPT's ML translation should make any bit of difference to people who are actually upset over this if they have given any thought whatsoever to their concerns.

[–] x00z@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have done translations and even for my own language I often use an LLM. It's the one thing they are actually amazing at. It's also probably not about "anybody noticing". It can very much be a single developer doing it on their own ChatGPT account and the QA didn't notice it.

I really don't care about this stuff though. The AI label should be for gen AI and not revising some text or translation imo.

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[–] lath@lemmy.world 56 points 1 day ago (45 children)

"like it or not, gen AI is becoming an invaluable tool for developers"..

..who wish to take a dump on their work.

[–] duchess@feddit.org 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It will be used as a tool in pre-production and early stages of asset creation and no one will notice afterwards.

[–] lath@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You're expecting it to be used responsibly when we ourselves in general are very lacking in that department.

This here is a very good example of the actual use that will happen. A rush job to meet unrealistic deadlines. And that's what will happen as is the norm.

[–] pory@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

The translation flub is the only part that mattered here. The Alters was getting a ton of praise and good press for its story, characters, mocap, VA, mechanics, visuals, you name it. Finding out that someone used GPT for some glorified lorem ipsum to paste on a random background object doesn't change the quality one iota. The art team for this game was paid and hired and they did a phenomenal job with the game, but one of those paid artists took a shortcut for some assets. It's not a "the ayy eye is letting corpo CEOs skip out on paying real human artists!!!" situation here.

Do you know what else paid artists / game studios do other than pay a human to create an asset from scratch? They buy models and textures on the Unreal/etc asset store. The same exact boulder model is present in everything from ffviiR to Clair Obscur to Death Stranding, because it comes free with the engine and is "good enough" just like an AI generated rock texture would be.

Ever hire a professional photo editor? They're using generative AI. Every last one of them. They've been doing it for like 15 years ever since Adobe introduced "content-aware fill" algorithms that generate backgrounds to replace random bystanders or objects in a shot. Is the scary robot stealing someone's job and burning the planet there too?

However, using machine translation without even a proofreading pass is hilarious. Using a conversational model for translation is double hilarious. Surely purpose-built translation tools exist and are more efficient than "asking" chatGPT to "translate this line into Brazilian Portuguese".

[–] duchess@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

We don‘t know the cause in this case. Not replacing placeholder assets was a common mistake even before ai tools.

[–] lath@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's kinda the problem. We're already careless with the things we do ourselves. It can't be helped, nobody's perfect. But once we start delegating tasks, we lose the direct experience. Priorities shift, attention moves to something else and the chance of carelessness rises because it's no longer a problem we have to concern ourselves with.

Meanwhile, the LLM "learns". What it "learns", nobody knows because it does so mechanically. There's zero understanding.
It keeps "learning" every time it's fed something, so you don't have a static program that does what it's told. Instead it's a "living" program that applies what it "learns". And that makes it unpredictable in the long run.

This turns the user into a glorified middle manager who has to hover over their employee and make sure they did their job as they should have. And how many middle managers do you know with that kind of dedication, that isn't spiteful at its core?

The push against this is that the people depending on it to do the work become less dependable themselves. And unless you're an independent developer without a profit driven publisher breathing down your neck, this will be used in all the wrong ways as a standard instead of it being the exception.

[–] duchess@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don’t think it’s important where the placeholder assets come from, or that mistakes will be more common when someone used gen AI instead of non-licensed stock image from a web search.

[–] lath@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

You're right. It's an opinion and only as important as the one having the opinion decides it to be.

[–] FeatherConstrictor@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

According to the article as cited in this comment, we do know the reason and a rush job to meet a deadline is precisely why.

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[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org 18 points 1 day ago

"You're not actually supposed to read that text so this is not an issue." Good job missing the point.

[–] JasSmith@sh.itjust.works 1 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

Very soon protesting the use of LLMs is like going to be like protesting the advent of the television. There is no stopping it. We should endeavour to ensure it is used ethically rather than becoming puritanical about its use.

[–] Coldcell@sh.itjust.works 14 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Nope, fuck that, fuck genAI it is unethical by virtue of stealing to train and vastly draining resources to power slop garbage.

Television was a medium, communication. GenAI is not communicating shit, it's trash sold on a lie.

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

It will take a fundamentally different algorithmic approach to make further progress in ML.

We have never figured out a different approach since it's inception in the 60s

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 points 20 hours ago

There's still plenty of people who don't watch TV.

[–] net00@lemmy.today 16 points 1 day ago

That's kinda sloppy, mainly in the disclosure and translation department, but nothing that some updates won't solve.

I'm happy to support these devs with original ideas, even while they use some AI in a non-intrusive way. They have done something more important for in my book, which is following regional pricing.

It's stupid how several studios think charging my 3rd world country the same or even more than the US is a good idea. CDPR and bethesda think it's ok, but It's disgusting. I would rather support 11bit.

[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Damn, I was looking forward to playing this. Glad I read this first

[–] duchess@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Boycotting because someone made a mistake? Ok

[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Boycotting because they used generative AI to make their game instead of hiring writers. Even if this was the only part of the game they used it on (if you believe that, l have a bridge to seII you), I'm not going to give someone money if they couldn't even be fucked to hire some sci-fi writer off of fiverr to write their fill text with it.

I personally know artists and writers who are having to get jobs at fucking Walmart because of this shit. I'll be less irate about generative AI once we have universal basic income so that real artists can continue to generate real art alongside these soulless husks.

[–] duchess@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So they shouldn’t even use it as placeholder assets, instead of Lorem Ipsum?

[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (9 children)

Correct! If you're not going to support artists and writers, the least you can do is not support the industry that's actively destroying the fields of art and writing (on top of the myraid other problems with generative AI)

[–] pory@lemmy.world 0 points 3 hours ago

The guy who used ai to make some technobabble lipsum for an asset was an artist hired by the company. You can see a huge list of the artists that worked on The Alters in the credits. They all got paid. This artist would take home the same wage for typing "gshsjajfkfksiwn" in that asset, or copy and pasting some numbers that were in a readout from a space telescope, or literally using lorem ipsum. If we're really micromanaging every art shortcut as "potential pay to hire more artists" now, why not start counting how many rock/plant/sky/water textures and models in The Alters (or FF7 Rebirth, or literally any UE5 game) are pre-baked assets included with the UE5 license? Game devs actually use those instead of billable hours / salaried hires.

[–] duchess@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago

No artist or writer would have been hired for producing placeholder assets.

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