GamesStrategyStellarisStellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it’s ‘ethical’ and ‘we’re pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don’t want to end up there ourselves’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesStrategyStellarisStellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it’s ‘ethical’ and ‘we’re pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don’t want to end up there ourselves’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Paradox)
The DLC’s store pagespells all of this out then, right at the end, drops this disclaimer:
“We employ generative AI technologies during the creation of some assets. Typically this involves the ideation of content and visual reference material. These elements represent a minor component of the overall development. AI has been used to generate voices for an AI antagonist and a player advisor.”
Well well well, say some Stellaris players, doth mine eyes deceive me? The use of AI creation tools in an expansion about AI consciousness taking over the galaxy? In particular, the use of AI to generate in-game voices raised a few eyebrows.
“The AI voice generation tools we use on Stellaris ensure that the voice actors that signed up and built the models receive royalties for every line we create,” says Muray. “Ethical use of AI technology is very important to us—we’re pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don’t want to end up there ourselves.”
Muray promises the devs will pull together a wider post on how it uses AI in a couple of weeks, but adds “we didn’t use it for concept art in The Machine Age” because there are “a couple of awesome concept artists on staff for that.” There are “a couple of AI generated pieces on the visdev exploration/mood board” among other thematic pieces, but these are being used as reference and not in any final art assets.
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The director says he uses AI image generation tools to make basic representations of ideas he’s chucking around with the game’s designers, but when things get further along “the artists then take our ideas and might or might not use them as inspiration to make final assets. None of those design images go into the game.” With generative text it’s apparently the same, lots of “ideation” but “none of the results or generated text go into the game.”
All in all, the approach the studio’s taken seems eminently reasonable. Using AI for creating image references in the concepting stage is one step up from using google image search, the more traditional method of cobbling together some sort of mood board, and as long as the AI imagery isn’t being used in the final assets it’s hard to see the problem.
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