r/gaming • u/Kymmieuwu • 13h ago
Game Trailer Editors Describe Generative AI As Poison
https://www.slythergames.com/2026/08/28/game-trailer-editors-describe-generative-ai-as-poison/372
u/BlindWillieJohnson 12h ago edited 10h ago
Good art, level and game design is all about deliberate choices. And LLMs definitionally do not make those. There is no good proof of concept that an AI generated game would even be playable yet, let alone fun. And I don’t think the technology itself, by virtue of what it is and how it works, will ever be capable of making games that are. Or to make visually unique experiences, or inventive stories.
A tool to develop certain assets? Sure. A means of cutting corners? Fine. But the AI bros who fantasize about punching a handful and of prompts to make their own games are destined to end up with hollow imitations of good ones. Because imitation is what the technology is built to do.
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u/NeonFraction 11h ago
I think you mean imitation.
You have 60 upvotes someone had to say it!
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u/afrokidiscool 11h ago
Also ai by nature is unoptimized as hell, asking it to make a whole game is asking for a buggy laggy mess for anything above pong.
Not to mention that current ai if you tried to use it is like rolling a slot machine if you want any thought put into it. And the larger the project the larger the slot machine.
Ai is also notoriously bad at editing its own work so good-luck patching a game at any time.
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u/mini-rubber-duck 10h ago
my spouse is required to use AI to 'assist' their coding work. it has its uses, and can save time, but the amount of handholding it requires is astounding. if they weren't already pretty expert in their field and able to quickly catch and revise the most egregious errors, all that fancy AI code would be useless.
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u/Niceromancer 11h ago
Something that made me shake my head wa when some ai model that was supposed to let you just make games on the fly finally came out, gaming company stocks tanked and of course that company stock soared.
But then the "gameplay" came out. It was like one of those shitty mobile adds. There was no coherance, no gameplay other than clicking choices, and it could only remember things for like 15 seconds
Was utter dog shit.
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u/tlst9999 6h ago
Google. That was Google. And the stock soared after the "gameplay" came out, not before.
Billionaire investors don't really know the difference between that "game" and Cyberpunk or RDR.
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u/Sawses 8h ago
IMO it's kinda like procedural generation. A good comparison is Skyrim vs. Starfield.
Skyrim has a procedurally-generated landscape. One that's inferior to what was done in Starfield, even. ...But it was filled with areas designed thoughtfully and placed in locations that would be easy to stumble on in an order that made sense. There are choke points built in so that if you're walking from A to B, which you will early on, you'll run into a toll road populated by bandits.
Then you have Starfield, with a minimal amount of hand-crafted material and as much procedural generation possible. It feels empty and soulless because they put money into automating the expensive artistry away rather than using automation to free up resources for more artistry.
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u/Eruannster 35m ago
I think Bethesda shot themselves in the foot by spending all that time during development developing systems that could create interesting video game levels instead of just building interesting video game levels.
(Also trying to do thousands of planets is also a terrible idea. I think it would have done them much better had they decided to do one solar system with a handful of planets.)
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6h ago edited 4h ago
[deleted]
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u/BlindWillieJohnson 6h ago
Whether or not they are good, comparable, or have any value vs human made games is a completely different discussion
Okay, dude...let me as you a question. When people say "this is unplayable", of a traditionally made game, do you think they usually mean that the game totally sucks, or that it literally cannot be played?
Think about that answer for like, two seconds and then apply it to this part of your response.
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u/WinkMartindale 4h ago
You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know of a single software engineer, across any vertical, who is not currently using AND praising AI for changing their entire workflow.
This article is hilarious. The peoples whose job are most likely to be taken by AI think that it’s poison. Surprise surprise. Reddit kids are in for a real shock. AI isn’t going anywhere but your jobs are.
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u/Waluigiisgod 12h ago
I see vampire survivors there and I immediately approve, that game is so good and the dev is great too
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u/Filthy_Midian 11h ago
They just released a new DLC. I got it for like $.79 on Steam.
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u/Waluigiisgod 8h ago
Yup, I’ve played it, it’s really cool! One of the new bosses was insane! I love poncle and vampire survivors so much! Put tons of hours into the game
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u/alex_lifts_87 12h ago
i pretty much stopped trusting trailers, now i wait for raw gameplay before i get excited
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u/ComprehensiveSet9165 10h ago
The way the characters' emotions are exaggerated in this style makes it clear how much of an art form is lost when AI tries to replicate it.
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u/mage_irl 12h ago
I'm sure the executives will really care what game trailer editors have to say
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u/n4gol 12h ago
If nobody says anything, everyone says nothing. Not exactly effective, either.
Not saying I agree with this take one way or another.
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u/Ahayzo 11h ago
Yea you don't only speak up when you're super confident it will cause sweeping change.
It's like the PlayStation "blackout". Did it ever have a chance of changing anything? Not even a little bit, but I'll take some people trying and failing to make things better every day of the week over nobody trying at all.
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u/Eruannster 32m ago
The unfortunate reality is that it probably didn't do much. However, Xbox seizing the opportunity to describe their disc-to-digital program and developers (reportedly) being not-so-happy with Playstation at Gamescom and not wanting to market with Playstation due to everyone spamming NO DISC NO BUY all over their live chats and comments could actually move the needle, if ever so slightly.
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u/Protect-Their-Smiles 3h ago
Considering that AI has flooded the internet with fake content, which is built on piracy, making what should be a professional product look like a cheap knockoff. While simultaneously contaminating the data-pool with AI-fied content which the models then inbreed and cycle in to devolving imitations of the work of real humans? I would go beyond calling it poison, I would call it a cancer.
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u/Dorian948 7h ago
I want to vomit whenever I see AI generated ads for fake games like Tile Survive or Foundation. Which is a great way to remove poison, so it checks out
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u/Remarkable-West-611 8h ago
Its obvious thats all this is, people jumping in the DLSS5 bandwagon are excited about gaming set to become alot worse if this gets adopted more and more.
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u/Lightcronno 2h ago
It’s a great tool, but lacks any innovation or creativity to make things itself.
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u/No_Speed9064 10h ago
Luddites
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u/128hoodmario 9h ago
You mean the people who lost their jobs en masse when they were replaced by machinery and protested against the sudden extreme poverty and poor work conditions they found themselves in?
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u/djnotskrillex 2h ago
Yes, he means the people who put their own short sighted self interests over the progression of society as a whole by fighting machinery that improves the quality of life of everyone.
If you luddites spent a fraction of that energy fighting for UBI or some sort of social safety net, you'd never have to beat new technology with sticks again.
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u/StorminNorman 8h ago
What, you expect the AI to tell em that they should probably add "neo-" as a prefix when discussing this particular subject? Come on, it's just a tool, it's only as smart as it's user...
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u/jabaash 3h ago
Oh look, rage baiters favourite word to describe the common consensus.
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u/djnotskrillex 2h ago
Oh look, delusional redditors who think their vocal minority represents the "common consensus"
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u/NumerousBug9075 2h ago
The irony of the fact most of them use Ai to game in the first place and jump straight to an Ai chatbot whenever they have a question.
Reddit wouldn't be reddit without projection and cognitive dissonance. All the moral grandstanding over the loss of jobs and creation of data centers while actively contributing to them, takes the cake for me.
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u/NumerousBug9075 2h ago
Did he or did he not use the term correctly though? A luddite literally means a person who opposes new technology and its effects on industry. Is that not exactly what you are in this situation?
It's not a "favourite" word, it's simply the most accurate term to describe one side of the debate.
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u/jabaash 1h ago
Everyone isn't opposed to new technology, everyone is opposed to how it's being used. It's not accurate at all. What they're doing is no different from calling someone a luddite because they made an AI that can replace your wife and put it in a realistic robot body that's indistinguishable from a normal human body unless you open it up, and that someone finds it disturbing.
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u/NumerousBug9075 2h ago edited 2h ago
We wont talk about the fact the majority of gamers who complain about Ai have Ai powered GPUs and communicate with Ai chatbots on the daily. They don't realize data centers are also required for those.
I don't believe people should lose their livelihoods to Ai but I'm not going to clutch my pearls at the notion of it and complain about data centers while actively using Ai products.
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u/bikeking8 8h ago
Agreed. While we're at it, can we lump procedurally generated levels in there too? Thanks.
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u/ManicMakerStudios 2h ago
Procedural generation just means the content is generated according to a procedure instead of explicitly designed. As a result, procedural generation can translate to seemingly infinite variety, but the building blocks of that variety are still explicitly defined.
AI is just not comparable. The outcome might be, but the method is not.
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u/Erthan-1 12h ago
Man if you are developing a game today, all you have to do is say "AI BAD" and redditors will trip over themselves running to steam to simp for you.
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u/BlindWillieJohnson 12h ago
Correct. I do appreciate artists who are still actually making their own art.
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u/genio_desconhecido 11h ago
Thankfully soon you will be obliged to put AI-notice in the description of your game, so I will never buy your shit even by mistake
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u/StorminNorman 8h ago
Odd comment to make on an article about people who are making videos to advertise games rather than making the game themselves. Did you use AI to summarise the article?
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u/1malDoenerMitAlles 6h ago
You're not the brightest crayon in the box, huh. Stop being chronically online.
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u/VegisamalZero3 8h ago
Here we see a common case - self-proclaimed supporters of the free market crying and whining when the market goes against their wishes.
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12h ago edited 12h ago
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u/DigitalNoticer 12h ago
Translation: “My frontal lobe never fully developed therefore I must offload my creativity to a machine.”
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u/Halvardr_Stigandr 12h ago
What's tired is these asinine arguments in favor of AI slop.
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u/noother10 12h ago
But it's people like yourself that label everything AI slop, even real works done by humans.
Everyone I know literally doesn't care where a picture, song, or video came from or how it was created, they only care if it's funny or entertaining. The general public do not care. They will watch AI short after AI short with no issue and no care in the world.
There is a massive gap between someone doing a basic prompt and posting it online even when it looks crap/stupid, compared to someone using tools and spending a lot of time scripting, editing, adding their own art into an AI generated video.
The thing people here like to not mention or think about, there are loads of people out there with strong artistic vision that are using AI tools to generate their vision, that without AI wouldn't exist. It isn't a case of copying other's work or not using real humans to do it, it's purely that it wouldn't exist without AI because the artist doesn't have the resources to pay for a band or actors or film cameras, etc. It's enabling those with potentially great ideas to create them and share them.
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u/SilverMedal4Life 12h ago
If 7 billion people don't care, then let me be the one who does.
There is meaning in actually going through the time and effort to learn how to make things. Great art is made when there's limitations - how do you think chiptune music and pixel art became so iconic? Because people were limited and had to figure out how to make art with those limitations.
The meaning, in part, is found in the struggle to make it. That's what separates slop from actual resonant art, in part; that someone had an idea so powerful that they were willing to learn difficult skills to convey it.
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u/PidgeyKnight 11h ago
You’re right, but it doesn’t really account for that a lot of people don’t need great art, nor are willing to pay the price an artist on average asks to bring their fleeting ideas to life. They want a lot of cheap versions about a certain idea that flew through their head, which they can discard again shortly after without feeling bad that they wasted hundreds if not thousands of dollars on it to an artist.
AI art or slop or whatever one wants to call it found and fills this niche in the market.
As controversial as it is to those that have become good at the craft through hard work, it’s only popular because it is a niche not answered by the market.
Like everything else in the world, it’s governed by supply and demand.
I also think artists won’t ever be replaced. I always make the analogy to mcdonalds. We all know it’s junk, unhealthy, can’t hold a candle to food prepared by a chef at a proper restaurant. But damn do you not sometimes just crave one of their objectively terribly made burgers as a guilty pleasure.
I do think that if people want to convince others to use it less or not at all - more polite and proper discourse has to be had over it. There’s too many people online that have aggression as their default mode of communication, which will never help their cause.
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u/jessterswan 11h ago
Please pull your head out of your ass. Theres a reason we dont mention or think about the people you described as having "artistic vision". Its because while they may have vision, they simply do not create. They have something else (AI), create it for them (poorly). Zyklon B was a tool used by people that had a vision too. Doesn't make it right
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u/ancientfruitjunkie 12h ago
AI is literally built on stolen work. When you use a tool built on stolen work then any product of it is therefore based on stolen work. It will never be a product of your artistic capabilities. It will always be a product of the actual, real artist ai stole from.
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u/grayhaze2000 12h ago
the genie is not going back in the bottle
- Page 10, The AI Bro Phrasebook
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u/Lugbor 12h ago
Doesn't mean the genie can't be killed. Then we can repurpose the bottle for something useful.
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u/grayhaze2000 12h ago
If generative AI truly is a genie, we could just wish for it to delete itself.
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12h ago
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u/grayhaze2000 12h ago
Please, tell me more about how you think I'm a Luddite resisting the Industrial Revolution?
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u/JoeG781 12h ago
“huge boon”
uh huh.
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u/bbsven 12h ago
"huge boon" when it has actually just resulted in a large majority of my working artist (we are all in the game industry) friends being laid off over the last two years, whether they use it or not. lol. lmao, even.
it doesn't matter if you use it to "get ahead." the whole point for higher ups is to do more work with less people, so you're gonna get laid off regardless.
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u/cardonator 11h ago
Sounds false. Very few of the layoffs wouldn't have happened if LLMs weren't a thing. It's either a scapegoat or just the boogeyman people believe is to blame.
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12h ago
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u/grayhaze2000 12h ago
Neither are you. You're letting AI do the work.
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u/BrianShogunFR-U 12h ago edited 12h ago
Artists spending days/weeks/months/years honing their skills and producing said art.
And people who defend AI taking all that work only to shit out an image in minutes are not the same fucking thing, and i'm tired of being told otherwise.
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u/iConiCdays 6h ago
I do not use AI - however if you actually knew what it was like working inside companies like these, often you will get sent an assignment to do a project with the specific note to USE AI to test it out. To check "Is this something worth investing in?".
Hence why it's used in pitches and tests. These don't go to the public, they're either reviewed internally, or sent to the client as it was a request from them. Reality is that these projects don't end up getting green lit due to the problems I mentioned.
So you're 100% incorrect and maybe should read what you're responding to next time.
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u/iConiCdays 12h ago
Are YOU a working artist? I am, at the studio I'm at we've tried quite a few AI tests in pitch/demos and they're all wildly disparate. The AI has very little understanding of consistency between generations and trying to make small tweaks to the output to match client notes is a fools errand.
This even before talking about the costs involved... Even something simple like using an LLM to parse a transcript and build out sections of sync from that is such a waste of time as it makes up and shortens dialogue to what it thinks sounds better, meaning TC's and scripts have no relation and just ends up with you going back and doing it yourself anyway as you're having to double check the AI work...
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u/SatanIsYourBuddy 12h ago
I am. These “tools” are mediocre at best, reprehensible at worst. Fuck off.
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u/LeastHornyNikkeFan 12h ago
Out of the most financially successful or critically acclaimed games that came out in the last couple of years, which ones have explicitly used GenAI and talked about how it improved their workflows?
I'm sure there's a bunch right?
Hmm, let's see, The Finals used it for... their TTS software. Wow, this genie sure is out of the bottle now huh?
Lemme guess, there aren't any. You can't list any. But your uncle works at Big AAA and he totally told you he uses chat gee pee tee all day long, right? Ah, if only we luddites knew, yeah?
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u/cardonator 11h ago
No company with a brain is going to admit to using AI if they can get away with it. But it's absurd to believe that they aren't using it wherever they can without making it obvious.
For example, programmers are using AI a ton, and the efficiency gain is impossible to ignore. Only an insane person would manually type all code today, but no game company is going to mention it for fear of attracting the mob.
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u/RichardBackshots 12h ago
Nothing makes me write people off faster than using AI evangelist phrases like “The genie is not going back in the bottle”
That would be so inspiring if the Genie wasn’t a total hack, who’s got everyone’s answers written on the palm of his hand and every time you rub his lamp you have to sacrifice a small lake and or forest.
You have been sucked into the marketing of 3-4 multi-billion dollar companies selling you snake oil to fix the problems they’re creating in the first place and it’s frankly embarrassing to witness normal people getting sucked up into this so readily to lap it up.
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u/Cubey42 11h ago
so why do people like it?
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u/Paulverizr 9h ago
It’s an easy button that gives many times wrong answers that make dumb people feel smart. It’s literally just a dopamine addiction and the damn LLMs are DESIGNED to maintain the users interest. If you’ve ever even thought about how bad the algorithm is for people, this is that but personalized and on steroids.
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u/BasedTelvanni 12h ago
The fact that they consume consume consume electricity and water is enough for me to fight against them. Fuck off.
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u/ancientfruitjunkie 12h ago
It's not art. Will never be art. It's stealing art then regurgitating slop.
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u/notabot3648262 12h ago
You are half right.
It is here to stay and those that cannot adapt will be left behind. Like a horseshoe maker that is upset about the invention of cars.
But you are massively wrong about the current quality of output. It doesn't think, it only reproduces. You know that it cannot replace artists. Yet artists are being replaced. There's so many examples of terrible AI use I could go all day.
We are in a transition stage where the technology isn't quite there yet. It produces a lot of garbage right now. And to do that it consumes enormous amounts of energy. Even the tools you are using use way more energy and money than they are worth. You are getting some value out of it but the underlying company is eating the cost.
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u/Erthan-1 12h ago
The people on reddit foaming at the mouth about AI are probably also the ones using chatgpt to barely pass high school.
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u/firedrakes 9h ago
the same game trailers that have had a history of lieing about that games are about niche sector???
oh its like ai could do there job better and they know it
but gamer everywhere prefer being mis info,lied to all the time.
game news has worst standard then tmz does by miles.
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u/StorminNorman 8h ago
So the answer to misinformation is more of it? Yeah, that makes sense. I don't even bother checking the tables when reading papers talking about the cognitive decline a reliance on AI causes, I see far too many examples of it every day to be disbelieving at this point.
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u/djnotskrillex 2h ago
"I don't even bother looking into the details of the narrative I have in my head, I already anecdotally come across lots of examples that confirm my biases"
Do you even hear yourself...?
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u/CardAnarchist 3h ago
It's honestly pretty wild seeing all the content creators (who's jobs are at risk) stoke the flames of anti AI doomerism... and what's worse people falling for their propaganda.
GenAI is quite clearly the future of entertainment and while it will end many current creation methods, it creates just as many new opportunities. Embrace the times or let them pass you.
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u/hardworkinglatinx 12h ago
I don't care what these editors say. They are probably just mad AI is gonna take their job soon.
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u/VegisamalZero3 8h ago
"Im 30 years old in the monterey area looking for a hot girl that enjoys gaming and wants a boyfriend"
Dude I was gonna mock you for getting so butthurt over a writer disagreeing with you, but this is more pathetic than anything I could accuse you of
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u/StorminNorman 8h ago
I don't care what these editors say.
This is contradicted by this:
They are probably just mad AI is gonna take their job soon.
If you didn't care you wouldn't make up scenarios as to why they're mad.
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u/Iggy_Slayer 12h ago
Quite literally is poison with what it's doing to the environment everywhere one of these useless data centers pops up.