Indie game devs says generative AI means he couldn't make his 2021 breakout today

GamesAdventureIndie game devs says generative AI means he couldn’t make his 2021 breakout todayWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. GamesAdventureIndie game devs says generative AI means he couldn’t make his 2021 breakout todayWhen 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: Strange Scaffold) An indie developer claims he couldn’t make his 2021 indie game today in 2024 - and it all comes down to generative AI. “Today I couldn’t make it because of generative AI,” Nelson Jr. says in the video below. The game originally started without the dogs entirely, but then the developer accidentally put in an eight-foot-tall stock photo of a dog behind an airport counter, and the course of the game was settled: the team would use stock photos of dogs to “build something beautiful and new.” The problem these days is how generative AI has become “injected” into public domain images, Nelson Jr. notes. The new stuff is all coming from a “poisoned well,” the developer says; now you can’t be 100% sure whether the public domain image you’re using is free to re-contextualize and repurpose. Someone could have trained an AI image on corporate-owned art and injected it into the public domain. The result? A developer like Nelson Jr. isn’t sure whether the public domain image they’re using in their game is actually free or whether it’s ripped off the work of others. “If I wanted to do a sequel or a spin-off I could not use the same creative processes because those doors are now closed kind of forever,” Nelson Jr. laments. The developer adds that although generative AI is “really cool” and that there are people looking into how to handle it in an ethical fashion, we’ll ultimately never be able to go back to a time before generative AI “proliferated” around the internet. Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more You can also read up on ourupcoming indie gamesguide for a look ahead at the future of smaller games. 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