The examples people found include a monitor showing random technical text that someone asked a LLM to write (presumably the writer who goofed is getting paid) and some localized subtitles that were left with a machine localization (the rest of the localization was contracted out).
Even assuming a bunch of other stuff in the game was AI generated and just went undetected, which is likely, if it's all iterations on what people noticed it definitely doesn't fit your description.
I hadn't clicked through to the Reddit thing (for obvious reasons). The example in the article proper is in a Portuguese subtitle, but now that you pointed me at it and I did check the Reddit thread... well, that text is not legible in game unless you really try, so yeah, I hadn't read it. I'm guessing that's the only English instance?
As a non-native English speaker, let me tell you, terrible localization was very much a thing that happened well before machine translation, so that by itself (and more subtle typos or one-off errors) was definitely not enough to infer that someone had forgotten to fix a machine-translated line once.
You can definitely tell when something has been machine-translated and not fixed, but the real challenge is lack of context. This leads to nonsensical localization even today, whether it's human or automated, especially in crowdsourced localizations, which are frequent in open source software. I contribute to some on occassion and maaaan, do I wish well intentioned people in that space would stop contributing to projects they don't use/lines they haven't seen in situ.
It is also correct that someone disagreeing with me can be doing so because of a moral panic. Our agreement is entirely disconnected to whether there is a moral panic at play or not.
For the record, I think "AI" is profoundly problematic in multiple ways.
This is also unrelated to whether there is a moral panic about it. Which there absolutely is.
For the record, the word as a general noun is widely recognized to mean what everybody thinks it means:
Luddite
noun
Ludd·ite ˈlə-ˌdīt
: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest
broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
One of the weirder annoyances of the AI moral panic is how often you see this spiral of pedantry about the historical luddites whenever someone brings up the word as a pejorative.
I mean, fair rhetorical play, I suppose, in that it creates a very good incentive to not bring it up at all. If the goal was to avoid being called a luddite as an insult or as shorthand for dismissing AI criticism as outright technophobia I suppose that is mission accomplished, disingenuous as it is.
Just so we're clear, the first pass of localization of every game you've played in the past decade has been machine-generated.
Which is not to say the final product was, people would then go over the whole text database and change it as needed, but it's been frequent practice for a while for things like subtitles and translations to start from a machine generated first draft, not just in videogames but in media in general. People are turning around 24h localization for TV in some places, it's pretty nuts.
Machine generated voices are also very standard as placeholders. I'm... kinda surprised nobody has slipped up on that post-AI panic, although I guess historically nobody noticed when you didn't clean up a machine-translated subtitle, but people got good at ensuring all your VO lines got VOd because you definitely notice those.
As with a lot of the rest of the AI panic, I'm confused about the boundaries here. I mean, Google Translate has used machine learning for a long time, as have most machine translation engines. The robot voices that were used as placeholders up until a few years ago would probably be fine if one slipped up, but newer games often use very natural-sounding placeholders, so if one of those slips I imagine it'd be a bit of drama.
I guess I don't know what "AI generated" means anymore.
I haven't bumped into the offending text in the game (yet), but I'm playing it in English, so I guess I wouldn't have anyway? Neither the article nor the disclosure are very clear.
That said, the game is pretty good, if anybody cares.
Dude I have never been or wanted to be a "seasoned senior software engineer". I mean, respect to them, can't get things going without them, but I don't think of that as an aspirational badge of honor thing.
Also, I'm shocked to find I've been mirroring your "rethorical approach". You really do overestimate how much of your posts I've been reading, because I could not tell you what that is. Is the "approach" to wonder if your callousness comes from not having first hand experience? Because let me tell you, I got there all on my own.
Anyway, it's good that we both find each other's opinion entirely irrelevant, because I sure have better things to do and not enough self-control to do them instead of this. Toodles indeed.
Yeeeah, you haven't worked in gaming at all, have you?
I mean, I believe that you've been paid to code at some point and I'm hoping you're not just being a dick on the Internet for sport, but man, all these I'm-such-a-competent-software-engineer rants are not giving you the authority brownie points you think they are.
Whatever, if you know you know. I'm not interested. Just... in the off-chance anybody here reads this far down this thread, couple of things: one, stop it, what are you doing. Two, this is not what a person that knows what they're talking about sounds like. He'll try to tell you it is, but it is really not.
You are factually wrong about that. A whole bunch of running an online game is dependent on the platform, depending on how you're running it.
If you built a game without cross-play and are relying on the first party for some of the online functionality, then making it work outside of it is extra effort. And even if that third party service isn't Xbox or Steam it is very likely to be a third party service like Pragma or whatever, so it's still something you'd have to replace.
So no, most of your Xbox games won't work if you remove all traces of Xbox Live. That's not how this works. And if your answer for future games is for it to be illegal to buy third party networking tools then your plan isn't going to work, either.
But also, it's not what's being proposed in the first place. This Ross guy even assumes it won't work like that explicitly. His argument is that third party providers would change to comply. Which... maybe? But then you're just moving the problem around. How would they change to comply? Who handles their costs when a client drops support? That's not how any of this works, their services aren't free for a reason, you can't just have them continue to provide them for free to every client by law.
You are wrong. A corporate entity will always provide some service under any version of "SKG".
I guess you could make it so it doesn't, but then all console games are excluded (since they all use some central first party API), all Steam games are excluded for the same reason and you'd be forcing developers to build their own substitutes for everything from hosting platforms to login platforms.
I suspect you're misunderstanding what some of the stuff means or you're visualizing something that just doesn't fit how online games are built. Are you picturing a situation where no third parties are providing anything at all? No Steamworks, no Xbox Live, no servers of any kind hosted anywhere? Because that can't be the requirement, unless you want to make every game since Quake 3 illegal.
No, that's the migration to EoL. He talks through the difference in very articulate ways. Specifically, it's the transition from those features being centralized to them being handled without their support. So the game goes from a central server to peer-to-peer, matchmaking goes from their service to the Steam API for it and so on.
That's what end of life looks like if you need to keep the game running, The game won't run without matchmaking, so you need a matchmaking solution. They went with this. They could have gone with a server browser. One thing wouldn't necessarily be less work than the other, the idea is they had to reimplement that chunk of the game in a way the community could maintain.
If you just put the game out and don't enable some solution for matchmaking then there's no matchmaking and you can only play by yourself.
If you're frustrated that this is done with such complications imagine how it feels for the people doing this on the way to a certain layoff or bankrupcy. Which is the whole point people are trying to impress here.
I was being sarcastic, those aren't indie hits, they are genre-making, classic games that define multiple generations of gaming. The guy is a massive part of gaming history.
Also not just a writer. You can go find elsewhere in the thread where I link to him breaking down a number of technical issues in the process of migrating Anacrusis from dedicated central servers to the peer-to-peer community edition. I'm not surprised. Not only did he start the studio, but he's a Valve vet, their whole thing is horizontal working.
I'm also not surprised because most designers, producers or creative directors working in an online game like TF2, Portal 2 or Left 4 Dead would be pretty savvy about networking issues, the same way most screenwriters can understand how a movie is shot.
Well, no, he specifically considers a future without Steam and acknowledges ongoing support for the game is dependent on Steam for matchmaking.
Because matchmaking is a central service.
And the reason he wants to keep all these dumb features nobody wants like matchmaking and cross-play and... you know, unlockables, is that he sold the game with them and doesn't want to take them away from players when they continue to support the game as a community.
I don't know, that seems reasonable to me.
The story he's telling you is precisely "developers figuring it out". Of course he'd want to still have cross play. Of course he still wants matchmaking. He made the game, that's the point.
And his game is pretty easy to fix, all things considered. It's a Left4Dead-like, you only need a handful of people in a session that can run over P2P. Expand what he's describing to peristent worlds with hundreds of people, seamless matchmaking and microtransactions and you have a very complex web to tangle. A web that, by definition, you can't afford. Because if it made money you wouldn't be taking it down.
And again, neither Faliszek nor me are saying we don't want games preserved. I'm saying that wishing really hard for games to keep working doesn't make them keep working. You HAVE to fix all the legal and technical issues. That's the job.
He hasn't been with Valve for a while. His last game was The Anacrusis, an indie game from a studio he founded. It launched, it bombed and it got converted to a community edition. I guess you not knowing it exists explains why that happened.
He is perhaps the most specific example of what this petition would require in the industry I can think of. Along with KO City, which also converted their game from third party published paid to free to play and then to a community server edition.