Is Aniimo’s AI usage as obvious to anyone else?
I've been playing Aniimo for a bit. The gameplay is fun, but some of the artwork looks blatantly AI generated to me. I've seen images with double headed animals and wheat that seems to disappear. Maybe those are placeholders, but the dialogue, some creature and NPC designs, and even the voiceacting set off my spidey sense too.
The developers claim they don't use generative AI for creating the characters, world and story, but haven't been clear about where they do and don't use it specifically as far as I know. Is it as obvious to anyone else as it is to me? Has anyone found clearer evidence either way?
I may keep playing because it's fun, but I won't spend a single bit of my money on it. The fact that it feels like a Genshin rip-off makes the whole thing kind of funny, too.
Crowdsourcing a witch hunt is... not cool. Either trust the developer and play, or don't and move on. That should be the end of it. It could be that you never know, and that's OK. Everything else is supposition, imagination, guesswork, defamation, harassment. Be excellent to each other.
Nah, I'll push back on this. The situation with AI is so associated with grifting that I do want disclosure of AI usage. Especially if it technically breaks Steam TOS to not disclose it. If they can't be honest with how they develop, how will I trust anything else?
But you're right, there are plenty of other games to play if they can't be clear about this. I'm a dev who want to empower devs and gamers alike by making my process as transparent as possible. So stuff like this is about as counter to my mission as I can get.
What are you pushing back on? I'm not sure. Hopefully you don't think crowdsourcing a witch hunt is cool.
The point is you don't know, and may never know, the reality. Any version of events you fabricate without knowing details for certain can only be less true than the version the developer offers, which may be nothing. So your version of events could be worth less than nothing. Which is quite something.
I appreciate your goal/crusade, hopefully you get the facts you are looking for. Sadly I don't think it's realistic to expect everybody else to approach this exactly the way you would like them to.
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Especially in these times, I don't think we should suppress skepticism and simply ignore it. If you strongly suspect something is AI-generated (I left another comment here saying I don't), the very least you can do is report the game. If it prompts Valve to investigate and it finds nothing, that's more pressure than "just ignore it".
witch hunts don't really get anything done, nor does is implant the right incentives on neither side. No company ever looks back thinking "damn, I deserved that ratio", while having another company push down on them will at least prompt stronger means to avoid that. But at the same time, the act of "giving awareness" always comes with the non-zero risk of a witch hunt. I don't think that risk is worth avoiding communication as long as your message is framed with good intentions (which I believe OP had).
I can't do much myself on a systematic level. So it's best to focus on what I can do to practice what I preach. I simply want to remind people that there are tools built into pretty much all large websites that can be utilized and you don't need to rely on a mob to solve your problems.
Thanks so much for your well considered response. Your final sentence sums things up perfectly. I agree.
I'll preface this by saying I'm generally on your side of this issue, but this is simply a misunderstanding of how our social brains work. No, I suppose you can't know. I suppose I can't know if OJ killed his ex wife either.
Deduction from available evidence is how we make judgments on anything, and if we're unsure, at least the American judiciary defers to twelve-ish strangers chosen at random having presented the observable evidence to them. The jury at the OJ trial, to beat that example until it can't get up anymore, didn't know whether he was guilty or not either, completely, without a shadow of a doubt. If we could make those kinds of prescriptions at all, we would not have a process system in place at all.
The same thing applies to Amiino. Yes, we don't know, but just in the same way that @toterose doesn't know that it is, you also don't know if it isn't. You just defer to the accused party's statement on the matter, which is a little bit flimsy and, if for nothing but completeness' sake, insufficient to make a judgment.
And just to make the point in this specific case: The Amiino Studio did, in fact, admit that AI was used to generate some advertisements for the game, which caused so much backlash that they pulled the ads and apologised, and publicly admitted that "utility AI" was used for automated testing and physics. I'm not here to litigate whether that is a good thing or worth not supporting them over, that question must be answered by each of you individually, but for what it's worth, a random accusation did force them to actually reveal the truth of the matter.
That's not the intention of my post. I'm asking what other players have noticed, not calling for anyone to target the developers.
Some specific assets look unmistakably AI-generated to me, especially the artwork I mentioned. I can't verify how those assets were made, so I don't present it as a proven fact. But I also don't think discussing what's visible in the game is a witch hunt.
I'm enjoying the game and, like I said, plan to keep playing it so I don't see the problem on discussing this.
Thanks for the clarification. Personally, I see the discussion as front loaded so it can only really go one way. You've already made up your mind.
From my perspective, I'm a developer that has had similar, unfounded accusations directed my way. The most recent one, I had to resort to legal action. It's such a huge distraction from the act of making games, which is what I love to do every day.
All this to say that there is more than discussion at stake. There is the reputation and livlihood of developers of games you are enjoying. Based on a feeling.
I understand why it may sound like that. I could probably have worded my post in a way that felt less accusatory. I tend to be direct, but I can see how it came across here.
I'm enjoying the game, but I personally wouldn't feel good spending money on it if its art wasn't made by artists. Based on what I've seen, I suspect some of it wasn't, but I don't know for certain how much of it's development is. That's why I wanted to hear what other people thought.
I don't get why this game has attracted any players at all, everything about it sounds awful. AI, gacha, just being a ripoff of other franchises, generic overly smooth designs with no soul, etc etc etc...
Well, it ticks a lot of boxes for what people want from a game, myself included. There's an open world to explore, and you can play casually or go completely bananas with optimization and min-maxing if you want to farm day and night. As far as I can tell, you can play entirely F2P or pay your way through to the top, much like Genshin. I haven’t found any content that’s strictly paywalled, though I could be wrong.
It also has some Zelda-like puzzle mechanics. For example, you can use an ice-type creature to freeze water, then move the frozen slabs around to build a ramp. I hate to say it's entertaining to play, and the smooth look and feel probably make it more approachable for some people, even if the designs do look pretty generic. The NPCs and dialogue are soulless and generic, but the creatures surprisingly seem to have distinct personalities, and for a game that is kind of only about the creatures I guess it does make sense.
I played the game for about a half hour and it just gave me such an ick feeling that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I uninstalled it. I can't stand how every f2p game plays the same now anyway.
I've never played it, but looking it up and at the discussions elsewhere about its use of AI, it doesn't really feel particularly different to me than what I would have expected from an F2P Chinese game before AI image generators. There are a couple things that would be hard to explain without AI (e.g., odd-looking text), but a lot of it just feels like computer-generated art on a budget.
That is partly why I think it has the popularoty that it does right now, it could be just that but there is many assets that are clearly generated. Despite the game actually feeling smooth to play and checking a lot of the needs for a game lika that, the fact that they're lying or trying to hide the usage of these tools is pretty shady.
It looked so off-putting from the second I saw TGA trailer way back when. Instantly put off and simply avoided it. I can't definitively say whether or not it's gen-AI, but the TGA trailer definitely left that taste in my mouth. Looking at Steam trailer footage, I don't think it is. But the art direction of the creatures is all over the place.
I don't even like Palworld per se, but Palworld at least feels like there's a "style" there among the creatures (that clashes with the human and environment. But I digress). Not so much from what I've seen in Aniimo. You'll have this mostly pastel-esque lighting on the environment, then some very jarring creatures that clash with one another.
But not because of the designs. It's the materials and lighting. The "direction" makes the creatures feel like they are being grabbed from a dozen different games and plopped into this world Together like Fortnite. Ironically enough, this makes me less skeptical of AI use because grabbing and kitbashing random assets together is a very human thing to do, especially for a Chinese studio.
As for the genre, I'm (very very patiently) waiting for Azur Promilla to scratch that gacha monster-raiser itch for me. So I understand the appeal. I'd just rather wait for a release from a studio (also Chinese!) that has proven to be more to my taste.