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.
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 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'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.