Posted in: 11 bit studios, Games, Indie Games, Video Games | Tagged: The Alters

11 Bit Studios Issues Statement About AI Usage in The Alters

After being criticized for using AI in a piece of the game The Alters, the developers at 11 Bit Studios have issued a statement

11 Bit Studios came under fire over the weekend when it was pointed out that the developers used AI in a piece of their new hit game, The Alters. It was found and confirmed by keen-eyed players that a section of the game still had a prompt from an AI chat system at the start of a long string of text (which they forgot to remove), asking it to create "scientific and astronomical data." The discovery raised a lot of questions about how much AI was used in the development of the game, as well as harsh criticism from people who were mad that AI was used rather than having someone on staff make up original content for the title.

The company issued a statement today on the use of AI, which we have for you in full to read below. The shorthand is that they used it for the development phases of the game for temporary use and simply forgot to take it out or replace it, which they are doing now for the next patch. While it is extremely disappointing to see (especially from a writing perspective, where we don't condone replacing writers with AI for any creative endeavor), it does appear to be an isolated incident and did not play a bigger role in the major aspects of the game. But it now has programming sleuths diving into the game's code to see if there are any more instances, so only time will tell how isolated it may have been.

11 Bit Studios' Statement on AI in The Alters

We've seen a wide range of accusations regarding the use of AI-generated content in The Alters, and we feel it's important to clarify our approach and give you more context. AI-generated assets were used strictly as temporary WIPs during the development process and in a very limited manner. Our team has always prioritized meaningful, handcrafted storytelling as one of the foundations of our game. During production, an AI-generated text for a graphic asset, which was meant as a piece of background texture, was used by one of our graphical designers as a placeholder. This was never intended to be part of the final release. Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this single placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game.

We have since conducted a thorough review and confirmed that this was an isolated case, and the asset in question is being updated. For transparency, we've included a screenshot to show how and where it appears in the game. While we do not want to downplay the situation, we also want to clearly show its limited impact on your gaming experience.

In addition to that, a few licensed movies that the alters can watch in the social area of the base were added at the final stage of development. While those were externally produced, our team was not involved in the creative process, and these required additional last-minute translations. Due to extreme time constraints, we chose not to involve our translation partners and had these videos localized using AI to have them ready on launch. It was always our intention to involve our trusted translation agencies after release as part of our localization hotfix, to ensure those texts would be handled with the same care and quality as the rest of the game. That process is now underway, and updated translations are being implemented.

To give you a better understanding of what a small part of the overall scope of the game's narrative layer they are, those few external movies are approximately 10k words out of 3.4 million across all languages in the game, or just 0.3% of the overall text. The alternative was to release those specific dialogues in English only, which we believed would be a worse experience for non-English speakers. In hindsight, we acknowledge this was the wrong call. Even more so, no matter what we decided, we should have simply let you know.

As AI tools evolve, they present new challenges and opportunities in game development. We're actively adapting our internal processes to meet this reality. But above all, we remain committed to transparency in how we make our games. We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we work towards that goal.

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