Call of Duty f*cked up..

Call of Duty is using AI art now. That's how far things have gone. Not just art? No, I mean, no, no. If the whole game was AI, it would probably be better. So it's probably not AI. Okay, everyone, today's story is actually pretty damn big. So here's what's going on, right? Players are getting refunds for Call of Duty this year. And it's not because of the absurd campaign or some sort of matchmaking disaster. No, they are demanding their money back because they're finding the game is filled with AI generated art that was never mentioned in the marketing. And what matters

there is they're actually getting the refunds. But it's not just Call of Duty because Ubisoft is also under fire. And that's because- What a surprise. While we're talking about AI slop. So we've got Activision and Ubisoft. Two of the, um... You know, you talk about gold standards of gaming? Well, these are the brown standards of gaming. Right? The real problem isn't necessarily the output. It isn't necessarily the intents that people say. Really, we should start looking at what people actually do, and we should look at the process.

Because in reality, it's the management of these companies that are getting just as sloppy as the games. All right, so this year's Call of Duty is once again full of generative AI. Because whenever I think Call of Duty, I think of piss, filter, poison,

Ghibli adjacent fantasy art of some peasants,

impressing.

It's so obvious that it's AI generated too. They do not give a fuck. They totally phoned this in. They ran out of time making the art for it, and they just straight up AI generated the frames for the achievement things. This is in Call of Duty. Yeah, it's not even good AI art. Yeah, you can make good AI art,

but this isn't even it. Like, you did... a five-year-old could have done this.

Guard by catching a catfish. Yep, that's called Judy all right.

Oh yeah.

The images you're seeing right now are basically those of Colin Coughlin.

And also, why is it that they're in, like, a fantasy universe? Like, these are, like, peasants in, like, a fantasy universe. Like these are like peasants in like a medieval era with a knight's helmet. Why is this in Call of Duty if it's in a future with machine guns? Cards, they're floating around social media.

What is this? Black Ops 7 launch. Cause people have looked at them and thought, oh my God, what the hell is this? Unbelievably lazy, yes.

It's weird, tonally mismatched stuff that bears all the hallmarks of cheaply produced and barely reviewed generated art. And look, this isn't some blind, see AI get really angry thing. No, sure. There's people who could probably do this stuff tastefully. What actually matters is this is a huge set of games where it's not being done tastefully

and that's actually happening at scale. Now the funny thing about this with Call of Duty is that after the mass of Black Ops 6, audiences kind of expected this stuff, right? We all

expected- Wow, look at that guys. The generic Steam AI disclosure thing. We all expected Activision responding to the news outlets, confirming something that they didn't do anything wrong and denying anything that they could have done wrong. And the reason why is actually because we've already had all of this happen this very year.

Yeah, with the AI generated stuff, right?

It all went down in August where Associate Creative Director Miles Wesley told IGN that everything Gen AI that people saw in Black Ops 6 was there quote, by accident. And that was never the intention.

Oh!

And the claim that he makes is that these are basically just tools to your artists, but that the outputs are never to make it in game. They're not to replace, but they do not replace any fantastic team members. How long are they going to pussyfoot? This is the reason why China and these other companies,

our countries, are beating American companies. Because in America, they're too worried about being too efficient. They're worried, oh my god, wait, we can't use AI, people on Twitter don't agree with AI. So instead of actually trying to make the game good, instead of trying to make a good

product, no, instead of that, they're going around and getting upset and apologizing for

it.

Jesus, this is embarrassing.

Oh shit, you know, just a placeholder asset meant to sit there and reflect the vibe that the artists wanted until eventually a human could come in and replace.

Yeah, that's fine.

Look, I'm happy enough to steel man this guy's position and I'm all for artists

having better tools Now look, I'm happy enough to steel man this guy's position, and I'm all for artists having

better tools and less drudgery in their job. But this keeps on happening, and I think that means we should be quite a bit more suspicious. I bet that AI generation for video games is probably a lot farther along than you would imagine, And I bet with many of these triple A games, there is more things that are generated with AI than you see that you see. And I think that here's a good way to look at it, right? Do you really think that in a game where they've blatantly

used AI and multiple other things, do you really think that the only times that they've used it, you can see it? There's no way you could logically come to that conclusion, right? You would assume obviously some of the AI is good enough to where it blends in. So you're only seeing the worst offenders. Because good AI is invisible. Instead it keeps happening, obviously that's right for Call of Duty, but it's also an industry wide thing. First there's a game that I should love,

and that's Anno 1117 Pax Romana. Should be a bright spot in Ubisoft's calendar. But there are problems with the game, sadly. There's an unfinished campaign, some odd art decisions, and for today's purposes, an AI art problem. You see, Anno's art tends to be gorgeous, right?

And that's why seeing it replaced with a thoughtless imitation with no experiential humanity behind it is a big nope for me. That's the type of art where even if it wants to look pretty... Well, they didn't even go through it. Like, what's embarrassing is that you could have used AI to generate the image and then go through and edit it to make sure that there aren't any inconsistencies. But they didn't even do that. And I think that's really what the main story of this is. It's not

even the fact that they used AI. It's the fact that they used AI and they didn't even try to edit it. They didn't try to improve it. They didn't try to do anything. This building has made me think of ball pit. Yeah, really? And there's also developers that use AI without telling the company. Yeah yeah no doubt. But what I'm saying is that a lot of these companies, they're phoning it in on like a massive level.

Like there's people, there's like random gimmick accounts on Twitter that put more effort into it than a AAA games company. That's crazy.

This is going to provoke a feeling in me. So here's actually what went down with this. Something in these loading screens caught people's eye. Yeah. Basically something was up. They were off putting.

We saw these renderings of somewhat human shaped shadow figures. What's his arm doing?

Ghost Adventures episode.

Just random ass shadow figures.

Yeah.

And that led to people then checking for the Steam AI disclosure. The disclosure was there, and of course it's a first for the Anno series. Now, I want you to remember that this is all happening at the same time. And I think that's no problem. And also, like, here's the truth. Players very clearly do not care about this.

That's why the game was rated 94. So the entire, like, upset, oh my God, it's AI, this is completely created by media. And it's created by media because they're operating in their own best interest. They don't want to get replaced by AI, and so they're trying to create an ecosystem where companies are afraid to use AI. But the truth is that the AI complainers are a vast vocal minority.

Solid take? Yeah, that's just it. 94% by who? By the actual players, people that played the game. Ubisoft are catching some flack for allegedly machine translating the German language options for the game. So, yeah, the Germans aren't pleased and I suspect that also extends to the official German- I mean, I don't even care about this if you want me to be honest because like there are other games- like video games have always had bad translations. All your base are belong to us was a bad translation for example. So like this isn't even really an AI problem, this is a like- what this really shows

is it is shoddy development that they just don't care about. That's the thing, is they never even went back and looked through this to make sure that it was good. That's I think the big story, not even the AI. ...by which I mean the government. I say that because the German government awarded Ubisoft a 5.7 million euro cultural development grant in 2023. So they probably won't like the look of this weird slop job with the damn German translation. Now admittedly that grants likely because the games development

team is a large German employer and that's probably why the government would want to back them. But Hey, if you're a French publisher making a historical strategy game, do I really have to say it? Don't piss off the Germans. Come on. It keeps on going badly when we do

that. Jokes aside.

Yeah, cause like that one time and the time before that.

Yeah.

It is a bad look in both counts. And that is why Ubisoft did actually respond to things. So according to them, the offending scenes were just generative AI placeholders that slipped through review. Now they just slipped in,

but thankfully that now they are being fixed. When we actually look at the fixes, you see they're not done in a way that would inspire hope because they're just touching up the offending mistakes with what's there rather than replacing it fully.

Which, exactly. That's what they should have done. And this is the future. Like, you're not going to convince a company to hire a bunch of artists to draw something that they can generate in three seconds. It's just not going to happen. Like why would somebody do something in ten hours that would take normally ten seconds? I mean, you've got to be retarded, right?

Of course that's not what's going to happen. AI will not replace people. People will learn how to use AI that will replace people. Well, AI, like this is what AI will do. AI will give one person the ability to do five people's jobs. So it's not, it will replace people, but it won't be a 100% replacement rate. It will be like an 80 to 90% replacement rate at high levels of efficiency. That's what's happening.

I think suggests that whenever push comes to shove. Yeah, they actually are happy to just do the quick, dirty thing and get some corners. Can't imagine any of us find that particularly surprising. But what's made more surprising is just how sloppy they're getting and how far the standards are falling.

So, look, it's not necessarily the technology itself that is turning people's stomachs. It could also be the use of that technology, and in this case, the sheer sloppiness, the lack of care. Now we've heard the placeholder excuse multiple times this year.

Hell, even Expedition 33. Yes, that game, even it fell foul of it.

Basically, there's-

I was going to say Expedition 33 used generative AI for these textures. Why would, I don't know, it doesn't look like it's generative AI to me. I mean, I don't know how you can tell that.

In-game poster that was found, turned out to be a placeholder, and it was replaced a week after launch.

I suppose it's the more innocuous of today's three main examples. That's the thing is that people don't care about AI, they care about bad AI.

That's basically what happens. Devs use generative AI tools to create an almost production-ready asset. They then populate the game. They put those assets in.

They trace it or something like that, yeah. You know what? Because they've used the quickly made AI placeholder thing, actually when the placeholders are in, they probably do get a bunch of the vibe that they're looking for. But then what happens is there's a release date for the game. There is a rush to ship and that can mean that those assets may never get replaced. So you can see why they do it. You can even see some benefits over the traditional style placeholder, which was meant to be so egregious and obvious that you really, really just couldn't ship them. You know, just a blank

texture saying delete me or something. That would mean that people would notice the placeholder is there and it wouldn't get shipped. And sometimes- Yeah, another good example is where Winsmeat, somebody brought this up, is that they have like AI chatbots in the game. And like some other things with the game are AI as well. Like for example, like the riddles that they do. And I think nobody really complains about that. Nobody cares because it's done in a way that isn't really negative for the game.

So I love chatting with them. I've never even done it before. I've just heard about it. And like people have told me about it. So the real future is good AI. The future is not having individual artists do things themselves, that's going away whether you like it or not.

Now, you'll always have games that have that, but I think in a lot of cases that will not be the the norm. Yeah, a mistake would happen. Something would slip in. Maybe a wrong build is uploaded, or human error happens. Now that happens even without gen AI built placeholders, but when the placeholders, if when the placeholders,

if you were to sort of squint your eye and look at them, almost look like the finished

product. Yeah, if you're not paying a lot harder. If you don't pay attention and you're not really looking at it, you will think that it looks fine. Yeah, that part of the process. Right. And look, not everyone hates Gen I on principle. That's a totally fine thing to think about the way. I mean, if people broadly did, we wouldn't be praising game of the year nominee expedition 33, which did decide to use that stuff as a part of its pipeline. It's not relevant, not intended to be final results, but as a part

of its pipeline. So here's the thing, right? Plenty of people will tell you that if you hate, well, the truth is, is that like having something as part of your pipeline means that that thing is probably being is removing a person's job This is what I think a lot of people don't understand is that even if the final product isn't AI if you're using AI in your development process, you're doing so in order to circumvent or to basically streamline some human behavior. And that's

generally what happens. Eric Raiders is an example to game is good. So the majority don't really care that much. Yeah, exactly. And that's it. I mean, it doesn't matter. Like just because it's not the final product doesn't mean that it's not removing somebody's job. AI that's okay. Just don't buy those games. Right? Yeah, easy

enough. There's tons of options out there. I hate these fucking mobs. And sure, audiences do have different standards. We actually saw that recently with Ark Raiders, where some people drew their personal line there, others didn't. No, no, no people drew a personal line with Ark Raiders. It's not true, it's not real. There was just like 10 people on Twitter talking about it. The game is massively successful, insanely successful, nobody successful. Nobody actually

cared. It is completely okay. Almost all things are actually a spectrum of belief. This isn't some binary AI good. It's not real. Yeah. But what I would say is that when the product itself becomes messy or the company doesn't seem to care or appears to be disrespectful player time,

well then it is so much easier to I think that think that AI will have the same, like AI encroaching in video games will be the same as microtransactions, where at the beginning you had some people who just simply refused to play video games with microtransactions, but then as more and more video games had microtransactions, those people had less places to go. And now, almost every single video game has microtransactions and there's almost nobody who actually refuses to play video games with microtransactions. And I think

that AI will be the same, is that right now you're still having some people that will hardline against AI, but once their favorite series starts doing AI, do you really think they're going to quit playing video games? Of course they're not. They're going to just probably just stick with it and complain for a while and then get used to it and then that's the new normal. Like that's what's going to happen because that's what happened with microtransactions. El-Tay couldn't be more wrong. Oh, I am right. I'm right about this. It's obvious I'm right

about this and time will prove me right again. It's obvious the way that people think. a player's position on that spectrum. And that's why even if they do want to use these tools, the industry has got to hold themselves to a higher standard. Because whenever the generative AI placeholder art isn't replaced and it's just tidied or updated, it's actually kind of clear that functionally those ended up not being placeholders. They actually were just a cut corner. They just, no, they said they were placeholders in order to make people not mad

if they could have shipped the game with AI art, they would have done it. I don't know why anybody's pretending like it's not. They're lying to you. They're lying to you because it's easier to lie to you and tell you what you want to hear rather than

tell you the truth. Why would they tell you the truth if they could just lie to you and then make you agree with them? Yeah of course. Yeah, new Gemini image generation looks very real. Well yeah it's just going to get better in general right? And so I think that's what happens with anything else for sure. I'm pretending otherwise I think is what's actually frustrating people here. Thus far we've covered a big reason why people are frustrated. I'd actually wager it goes far, far, far deeper than that.

So let's dive in. Some people are fine with Gen. AI whenever it is intentional or feels thoughtful. Now you may remember the Screen Actors Guild Voice Actor Strike.

Just before that came to an end, Epic Games unveiled a chatbot-powered Darth Vader and-

This was so good! good holy shit this was amazing see for fortnight now epic use making him say the n-words with his family's blessing and then

they ran it through an llm trained on scraped internet text which is why we could have Darth

Vader reciting the story of kingdom hearts to us very well sky but i will not stop until I get to 200 sentences the tale begins on the destiny islands Where young Sora and his friends Riku and Kairi?

Exploring new worlds beyond their idyllic home. He's just talking gross thing Maybe just like how I know could approximate some Roman art or call of duty could treasure I hate the Ghibli style and people were mostly fine with it.

Yeah, nobody really cared.

For Fortnite. But from what I can tell, with COD and Anno... Well, it's because Fortnite was good. And also people are fine with it with Anno. That's why it had a 94 in the video game in the Metacritic thing that he showed. The game was massively well received. It was really COD that was the bad one because the game was weird. That's it. He's hit people completely differently and I think that's what gets us to the heart of this issue. What's different then? Well I would say Vader was

intentional as a product experience. I think it's I think it's because Fortnite is good. I think it's actually that simple. Fortnite's a good game, so people don't care.

Sounds very buzzword-ish, but what I mean is, it was a toy in a live service game like Fortnite. It was dropped, people did unhinged things for the first little while, they found the limits, stuff was patched up,

but basically that was kind of the point. Goofy Vader was the cell, and they had permission from all of the major people involved. To be honest, the easiest way I can put this is, it was honest about being a form of throwaway funny slop.

And I think that meant that people weren't as outraged, especially because of the permissions. Now with that in mind, no wonder more people could gel with something like that than say, the abominable new Coca-Cola ads. Because yeah, Fortnite Vader is a pale imitation, but it's a silly little toy and that was kind of the point. What Coke were doing with the recent advert that's pissed people off, well, that's just a cheap imitation of a real thing that we actually had. Where it's levels of glitz and glam and deep. Yeah, it's worse. That's the reason why

people are mad. They don't want something to be a downgrade. ...detail and lighting are so over the top that it doesn't feel real anymore. That's a huge part of why it comes off uncanny. It makes it seem like the creatives involved are working for the tool, rather than the tool working for them. And that's where COD and Anno are vital to today's story, because these, in my view, aren't really placeholders.

I gotta say, allegedly.

They were not. Like, I mean, let's be honest. Like, do you really think that they were placeholders? I mean, come on. How do you, how do all these companies make the same mistake over and over? I mean, it's because they don't give a shit. I'll be right back. Give me a second. Sorry. In my opinion, but you may have heard the term, the purpose of the system is what it does, which does strip away some of the intent and focuses a little bit more on the end product, which here is useful because that's the bloody thing we buy because those assets are still in there. Even though when you look at them, they are clearly out of place. Things that feel

cheap. Yeah. They don't look good at all. Especially like trash.

Stuff.

Yep.

Slop, almost the definition of slop. And it's clear the management of these studios don't care enough to pay for real art in the first place, or maybe thought they could just cut some corners. And then whenever it came time to ship their game, they didn't care to make what they had better.

Sure. Well, they didn't care about the story either. Like, that's the thing is that if you see cheap AI generated stuff in a game, it's the same as seeing ugly women in a game. It's a mining canary for the fact that the developer doesn't really care about making the game good. That's the issue.

It's not what it is. It's what it means. Whatever. That's the issue. It's not what it is. It's what it means. Whatever. That's what I think. Some Ghibli slop. Let's not think about whether that does or does not fit Call of Duty. Let's not think about making an amazing user experience. Let's just shed out some money. It's a

lot. And hope that'll do the job. But as if that's not bad enough. I actually think it's a lot more chilling. I think maybe plenty of people here do actually care, but the system that they're in has no room for their caring. Yeah, because they got to do what they got to do. And if you ask me, that's what's actually scary here. We've got some of this tech that may end up being genuinely transformative.

It seems we're on the cusp of major medical road safety, knowledge work, and a whole bunch of other improvements. That's the thing, the technology is just a tool. What matters is how we choose to use that tool. And I fear that what could be great progress and maybe in its best way could mean more artist tools to make their jobs better, to help them be more creative. I fear that that positive vision will be corrupted by systems

of influence that can only see the next cost saving, even most-

I think that's always true. You're always going to have, and this is the problem with any sort of a company that doesn't care about its product, is that any company that doesn't care about its product will outsource and, you know, send everything that they're doing. Like Blizzard did this with Warcraft 3 Reforged for example is that like they basically had some random fucking overseas company make the game and then they put Blizzard's logo on it and it was horrible is that really that making

you know what do you call is it is it really that because they did that is that evidence that outsourcing a video game development for a remake is actually a bad thing? No I don't think so because Oblivion did the same thing and it was good. So it's really about whether you give a shit or not. I think that every tool is only as good as its user. So generative AI is the same as outsourcing or the same as anything else where if you're using it and you're not doing it in a way that is

authentic to like what you're making, then it's going to be garbage. Diablo 2 resurrected is good. Yeah, exactly. So there's plenty of examples of this. Chillingly, in spite of how everyone involved feels, because at the end of the day, Yep. Everyone's just turning up. Dark Souls remaster was a hundred hours. It was really good. Maybe that's the thing we should really start thinking about here. You know, rather than getting needlessly angry at each other and devolving into stupid internet there's a lot of that. Just waste everyone's time. Yeah. Let's shout at each other less

and be a little bit more strategic. And speaking of strategy, you know, who's really good at Gaben has now got himself a big yacht called the Maraitha. Yes, literally. But for you and me, it's all about the steam machine, and that's what you can learn about

in this next video.

Yeah, I feel like generative AI being used in video games is inevitable, and the people trying to avoid it will be like the people trying to avoid microtransactions that are just in an increasingly shrinking island until they only have a very limited option of video games. And they end up is this is also another thing that happens is that video games that you previously played have micro transactions added into them like World of Warcraft, right? And so after that happens, give the video like I thought that

was a it was a good one, right? Every coder already uses AI. Well, I think a lot of them do. I feel like that's what makes sense, right? And so, yeah. Belyeu doesn't know the odds for research? Yeah, it has to be, right? It's like the people who avoided Photoshop 20 years ago. Well, I think that AI is a little bit different than that,

but I think that users and, you know, like, especially like game players, They will probably avoid AI until a franchise that they like uses AI and then they will be okay with it I think that's what's going to happen is that and again every video game boycott is one three minute cinematic away from being over I've always said this that every single time that like all players are like, oh they hate this. They won't accept this They're mad now. Uh-uh just put out a new game, make the game good, and they're going to buy the game. That's the only thing that matters.

Now, is it going to be maybe worse if you have a bad reputation?

Yeah, sure.

But like overall, you'll still succeed if you're making a good video game, right? ScreenX is a tool. ScreenX opted to use machine learning instead of AI on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth? Well yeah, I mean maybe it wasn't ready at that point or they didn't think it would be a good option. I think that's the way with anything. Generative AI in its current form is sloppy. There has to be some game or company that has to crawl out and walk so others can go down the line. I think that the generative AI that you see is sloppy is not the only generative

AI in the game. And I think that just because you can detect some forms of AI. Like is anybody actually delusional enough to think that they can see every type of usage of AI in a game? I mean, come on. So it's pretty obvious to me that they're probably using it in tons of other ways too that you just don't know about yet. So yeah, they're probably using it in tons of other ways too that you just don't know about yet. So yeah, that's the way I see it.