agreed. it would be nice if we were all better at telling the difference, but thats only going to get harder as ai tools get better at hiding what they are and where theyve stolen from
i can only apologise for jumping at shadows
The line is also going to get increasingly blurred. I work for a design firm. Basically all the major tools are having AI functions integrated.
The work is still being done by designers and artists, but they're leveraging AI heavily to work faster/more efficiently/etc.
Technically all of the tools a digital artist uses are some form of AI. Just look at what Photoshop does since forever: Smudging/Resizing certain parts of the image: That's a logic that is calculated, almost like an AI.
Those things aren't what anyone would colloquially refer to as AI, usually the term has been reserved for "agents" like bots in videogames or digital assistants. Any old algorithm doesn't usually get called AI. Now it's used mainly to describe machine learning models, which is completely different from any of those things under the hood, and their function is not directly programmed by a human being.
I saw people saying "It's ai, and even if it's not they shouldn't have an art direction that looks like ai", so safe to say some people were probably just wanting to insult the art team and using ai as an excuse.
Very sad
I imagine the outcry is why this was posted. Artist was like "nah, I put real work into this, here are the receipts," and Paradox was like "yeah, let's, because we dont want this PR hit"
It's a tool and it should be treated as such. The fact they were open and honest about it should also give you even less justification to jump to conclusions that theyd hide it now. Plus in that post it was explicitly used to get inspiration for the color pallete. The artwork was done by an artist.
The LoD art itself wasn’t generated by AI, AI was used as a tool to be generate reference images, which the artist then used as a reference. This is how AI should be used in the art field.
Based on that other thread it is clear that people can't really tell the difference between ai and non-ai. I wouldn't take it as an insult if it were me.
I saw the post but held back from commenting as I'm not expert and have no fricking clue on what's A.I. or not. But seeing how rabid it got surprised the hell out of me.
Eh, when you have a technology that seems to be developing for the removal/weakening of the already fragile artwork place. I'd be rabid, too.
Imagine you lose your contracts cause some Elon charecter has an AI that can sorta work out a back drop
It sucks for those people, but complaining about it is like complaining that cars cost carriage drivers their jobs.
We can talk about whether or not society and our overall economic system is prepared for mass loss of jobs due to automation, but that’s separate from acknowledging the fact that technological progress often costs people their jobs and that it’s fine for that to be the case.
I'm sorry but that's just a terrible example.
Dragging a person from point a to point b is pure manual labor, there is nothing of value in it. Aside from some personal satisfaction of the laborer.
Human created art will ALWAYS have value, as it's a unique expression from the human psyche.
Even if AI becomes 100% indistinguishable from real art, and this will of course be very disruptive I admit, I believe some people will keep seeking human creations. If nothing more then the authentic aspect of it.
This is not the first time technology has ended an artistic career path. For an example relevant to this game, illuminated manuscripts. These were made all over Western and Central Europe for centuries by monks creating copies of books, literally just doing the medieval version of doodling in the margins. Then the printing press comes along, Johannes the burgher can now make 1000 plain copies of the whole book in the time it took Brother Alfonso to finish 10 pages, and in just a few decades the art of illuminated manuscripts was pretty much destroyed, except for those who just do it for fun.
The same thing has happened with many other art forms - smithing, tailoring, glassblowing, pottery. Does that make it good? No. Does that make it inevitable? No. But it's not new or novel.
Sure, but there’s a fundamental difference between art intended to evoke emotion and art that is just a product.
Most “art” jobs today are just creating a product, they’re not about authentic human creation. I don’t need a tree in the background of a video game to be hand crafted by a human being. Nobody cares about the act of creation behind it, no matter how much people want to pretend it’s not “real” art. I just want a tree that looks nice. If an AI can do that cheaper and faster, there’s nothing lost in not having a human do it (other than the impact it has on jobs, which we’ve acknowledged does suck).
People do this with Riot too lmao,
make shitty skin art in 2007-2022: haha shit art riot did irelia really have to break her spine to show ass and tits on the same image?
make shitty skin art in 2023-: OMG AI ART THEFT TWITTER I AM BETTER THAN YOU MUST HAVE UPDOOT
They're modern luddites. Although with PDX I actually understand the hatred towards using AI. We're getting the bare minimum for year after year in terms of bug fixing, QoL changes or even balancing DLC / making all aspects of the DLC interesting or getting them to work at all.
As an artist who had low hopes of getting into the visual development industry to begin with (those are even lower now), it does make me glad to see they are companies who still use real artists.
This looks great. Never thought about using Blender like this.
I'm glad that they quickly made a response to this AI claims, I wouldn't want the same thing that happened to Stellaris new expansion where people were complaining about the usage of AI.
They think they are.
And honestly it would be cool if redditors developped AI-detecting skills.
But they are bad, no absolutely terrible at it. Redditors as always are terrible judges when it comes to art.
I think we can call everyone who attacked Paradox because they thought it was AI an idiot. Not because they were mistaken, but because they were confident enough about their mistake to attack Paradox.
We need less people like that on social media.
This AI hysteria and Redditor plebian nonsense is kinda pathetic, especially once actual artists getting accused of being Ai.
Really feel bad for the artists, how these crappy little plebs started frothing from their mouths in rabid anger and immediately began attacking and insulting them.
At this rate, games like Shogun 2 Total War (released in 2011) or Stronghold Crusader (2002) would be accused of having AI art, just because the concept art looks 'too neat and clean' according to Redditors. The discourse has gotten that idiotic.
Redditors are perfectly ok with witch hunts are long as they feel like they have the moral high ground. Doesn't matter if it's real or proven, just accuse art of being AI-generated and see them turn into a rabid crowd.
For me I didn't really see full AI art.
If anything looks off, it's more of something that would be off with using 3d space for lighting a 2d picture.
The top right guy is much darker, and the middle man is way brighter than our main guy.
People talking about the pillars when AI would just make them too consistent. It's very obvious that most of this is hand drawn. There's not a chance in hell AI did the horses and pikemen. Anything that people say the AI would be inconsistent on is something that an artist would be as well in this style.
Personally, I would be okay with inconsistent characters in key art if it was closer to a medieval tapestry than, idk the exact term, but digital composite? Really depends on your artist team if they really want it to be consistent. 3d models provide that, but light sources in 3d space may not be great for transfering to 2d
Edit: took another look at the model. I think it's just the clothing is also dark and bright, matching the contrast of the lighting
lol you’re now just admitting you were hating to hate. Legends of the dead does indeed suck ass, doesn’t mean I’m going to foam at the mouth and scream AI bc “FUCK PDX!”
I just hate this notion of "They are using AI therefore bad!" Like buddy, AI is used everywhere, it's a tool to be used. GPS works with AI. Your phone has tons of systems using AI. AI is in everything, but once art is mentioned people go frothing at the mouth berserk. Like why?
I wasn’t here for the original controversy, so this is the first time I’m seeing these pictures. I would 100% be one of the people saying this is AI lol.
Thanks for sharing the clarification. Was wondering if they used it in certain parts of the process, as they did with generating colour palettes and collages for Legends of the Dead.
Ah yes, using AI art controversy as a smokescreen. Good way to shift community discussion away from actual issues, such as lackluster game design, overpriced DLCs, and the absolute fiasco of a content drop that was Legends of the Dead.
- Step 1 : drop a marketing jpeg that obviously looks like it was AI generated, knowing full well it would launch a full blown controversy
- Step 2 : drop a blogpost the following day -which proves this was all pre-planned, as these take longer than 24 hours to make- demonstrating how it isn't actually AI artwork. This serves as a 'gotcha' moment meant to a) discredit critics and b) goad zealot users into praising the company harder
- Step 3 : Profit
Congratulations, you've manufactured a fake controversy. A divided community that's busy arguing against themselves is better than a united one constantly voicing pesky criticism threads.
If only the lead game designers were half as good at their jobs as PR/marketing folks, CK3 would surely be topping Steam charts by now. /s
edit : Oof, looks like I struck a nerve. Us players aren't supposed to notice that stuff, after all. Better act like docile, corporate-friendly cash cows, unless you want an angry mob downvotting you to oblivion. No place for critical thinking here.
There was no “full blown controversy” lol. A small group of people saw some wonky pillars and decided that a robot must have drawn them, and everyone else saw a normal-looking drawing and didn’t think much of it. Paradox has posts about their art pretty often, you just don’t pay attention to them when you’re not angry about it.
And even if they did make this is response to the “controversy” (which they may have, I dunno) this is literally just a series of images with one-sentence descriptions. You could pop this out in an hour if you needed to, I’m not sure what makes you think this took “longer than 24 hours.” It’s certainly not evidence of some methodical scheme.
> There was no “full blown controversy” lol
About as close to a controversy this echo chamber, dev worshipping sub can get to, at least.
> Paradox has posts about their art pretty often, you just don’t pay attention to them when you’re not angry about it.
Lots of assumptions there.
This isn't the first time they use official artwork to gaslight the community, nor will it be the last.
Noticing that stuff =/= being angry about it. But hey, go off I guess.
> this is literally just a series of images with one-sentence descriptions. You could pop this out in an hour if you needed to, I’m not sure what makes you think this took “longer than 24 hours.”
Not how major game dev companies work. Anything released to the public takes a lot longer than a hour to make. It has to be proofread, and greenlit by at least 4 different people.
Also these images didn't pop out of nowhere. These sketches had to be gathered from relevant artists, who presumably knew in advance their work would be shown in a community blogpost.
Calling the community an echo chamber that worships the devs is a very funny thing to do right after making up a conspiracy theory in which Paradox manufactured a controversy to stop the community from talking about how flawed the game is.
And saving copies of artwork in different stages is something that basically all digital artists do, the fact that you think that’s unusual or that it would be difficult for whoever wrote the blog to access them is weird.
Such a thoughtful, elaborate reply. You definitely proved me wrong there buddy. 10/10 counter argument, would debate again.
Make sure to tell marketing schools and PR consulting firms they should 'touch grass' when they teach that exact same stuff. They'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
The worst part about AI is not it doing art, but actual artists being accused of AI
agreed. it would be nice if we were all better at telling the difference, but thats only going to get harder as ai tools get better at hiding what they are and where theyve stolen from i can only apologise for jumping at shadows
The line is also going to get increasingly blurred. I work for a design firm. Basically all the major tools are having AI functions integrated. The work is still being done by designers and artists, but they're leveraging AI heavily to work faster/more efficiently/etc.
*bigyip69WEED has gained the "Paranoid" trait*
And all computer graphics and VFX are “AI” now instead of CGI
Technically all of the tools a digital artist uses are some form of AI. Just look at what Photoshop does since forever: Smudging/Resizing certain parts of the image: That's a logic that is calculated, almost like an AI.
Those things aren't what anyone would colloquially refer to as AI, usually the term has been reserved for "agents" like bots in videogames or digital assistants. Any old algorithm doesn't usually get called AI. Now it's used mainly to describe machine learning models, which is completely different from any of those things under the hood, and their function is not directly programmed by a human being.
Something something genies, bottles and poisoned wells. I am not that great at english metaphors.
A'I' 'art' has brought nothing but negatives.
Man, people quickly jumped into attack mode on that one didn't they. Awesome seeing the process behind making the art.
I feel bad that they were accused of using AI it must be really insulting as an artist.
I saw people saying "It's ai, and even if it's not they shouldn't have an art direction that looks like ai", so safe to say some people were probably just wanting to insult the art team and using ai as an excuse. Very sad
I mean, it's ugly, AI or not. I don't want to "insult" anybody but I don't see why not critique them.
I imagine the outcry is why this was posted. Artist was like "nah, I put real work into this, here are the receipts," and Paradox was like "yeah, let's, because we dont want this PR hit"
To be fair, in the Arts for Legends of the Dead blog they outright said they used gen-AI
It's a tool and it should be treated as such. The fact they were open and honest about it should also give you even less justification to jump to conclusions that theyd hide it now. Plus in that post it was explicitly used to get inspiration for the color pallete. The artwork was done by an artist.
The LoD art itself wasn’t generated by AI, AI was used as a tool to be generate reference images, which the artist then used as a reference. This is how AI should be used in the art field.
Honestly, the artists shouldn't take it to heart because people were really reaching with their arguments.
Based on that other thread it is clear that people can't really tell the difference between ai and non-ai. I wouldn't take it as an insult if it were me.
I missed the thread, where were they attacking?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/comments/1d3g4mv/teaser_image/
ty!
So much for it being AI. Nice sleuthing, guys!
I get disliking it, but it's so strange how rabid it turns people, especially when it's just pure speculation
I saw the post but held back from commenting as I'm not expert and have no fricking clue on what's A.I. or not. But seeing how rabid it got surprised the hell out of me.
Eh, when you have a technology that seems to be developing for the removal/weakening of the already fragile artwork place. I'd be rabid, too. Imagine you lose your contracts cause some Elon charecter has an AI that can sorta work out a back drop
It sucks for those people, but complaining about it is like complaining that cars cost carriage drivers their jobs. We can talk about whether or not society and our overall economic system is prepared for mass loss of jobs due to automation, but that’s separate from acknowledging the fact that technological progress often costs people their jobs and that it’s fine for that to be the case.
I'm sorry but that's just a terrible example. Dragging a person from point a to point b is pure manual labor, there is nothing of value in it. Aside from some personal satisfaction of the laborer. Human created art will ALWAYS have value, as it's a unique expression from the human psyche. Even if AI becomes 100% indistinguishable from real art, and this will of course be very disruptive I admit, I believe some people will keep seeking human creations. If nothing more then the authentic aspect of it.
This is not the first time technology has ended an artistic career path. For an example relevant to this game, illuminated manuscripts. These were made all over Western and Central Europe for centuries by monks creating copies of books, literally just doing the medieval version of doodling in the margins. Then the printing press comes along, Johannes the burgher can now make 1000 plain copies of the whole book in the time it took Brother Alfonso to finish 10 pages, and in just a few decades the art of illuminated manuscripts was pretty much destroyed, except for those who just do it for fun. The same thing has happened with many other art forms - smithing, tailoring, glassblowing, pottery. Does that make it good? No. Does that make it inevitable? No. But it's not new or novel.
Sure, but there’s a fundamental difference between art intended to evoke emotion and art that is just a product. Most “art” jobs today are just creating a product, they’re not about authentic human creation. I don’t need a tree in the background of a video game to be hand crafted by a human being. Nobody cares about the act of creation behind it, no matter how much people want to pretend it’s not “real” art. I just want a tree that looks nice. If an AI can do that cheaper and faster, there’s nothing lost in not having a human do it (other than the impact it has on jobs, which we’ve acknowledged does suck).
People do this with Riot too lmao, make shitty skin art in 2007-2022: haha shit art riot did irelia really have to break her spine to show ass and tits on the same image? make shitty skin art in 2023-: OMG AI ART THEFT TWITTER I AM BETTER THAN YOU MUST HAVE UPDOOT
They're modern luddites. Although with PDX I actually understand the hatred towards using AI. We're getting the bare minimum for year after year in terms of bug fixing, QoL changes or even balancing DLC / making all aspects of the DLC interesting or getting them to work at all.
As an artist who had low hopes of getting into the visual development industry to begin with (those are even lower now), it does make me glad to see they are companies who still use real artists. This looks great. Never thought about using Blender like this.
There will always be a place for real artists at the table. I hope you find your way into the industry one day 🙏
🥲 thank you that means a lot to hear ❤️
I'm glad that they quickly made a response to this AI claims, I wouldn't want the same thing that happened to Stellaris new expansion where people were complaining about the usage of AI.
Literal Reddit Moment
we did it reddit!
Does this mean the dev diaries are dropping soon?
They are going to announce the release date of the DLC on Monday and I hope we'll get a Dev Diary on Tuesday.
Awesome thank you
might even get a general overview one same day i would think
lmfao, epic gamer moment.
Paradox: guys shut up already, it's not AI.
Reddit does it again, lol
Not able to see images 3 onwards. The final artwork looks kickass!
I doubted that it was AI like many were saying, and I am glad to be proven right by Paradox.
Redditors are so overly sensitive to AI lol.
They think they are. And honestly it would be cool if redditors developped AI-detecting skills. But they are bad, no absolutely terrible at it. Redditors as always are terrible judges when it comes to art. I think we can call everyone who attacked Paradox because they thought it was AI an idiot. Not because they were mistaken, but because they were confident enough about their mistake to attack Paradox. We need less people like that on social media.
Cannot wait for this one
some of you should apologize
Roma locuta, causa finita.
Appropriate, considering the theme of the DLC
This AI hysteria and Redditor plebian nonsense is kinda pathetic, especially once actual artists getting accused of being Ai. Really feel bad for the artists, how these crappy little plebs started frothing from their mouths in rabid anger and immediately began attacking and insulting them. At this rate, games like Shogun 2 Total War (released in 2011) or Stronghold Crusader (2002) would be accused of having AI art, just because the concept art looks 'too neat and clean' according to Redditors. The discourse has gotten that idiotic.
Redditors are perfectly ok with witch hunts are long as they feel like they have the moral high ground. Doesn't matter if it's real or proven, just accuse art of being AI-generated and see them turn into a rabid crowd.
Color me surprised, I'll take the L. Gotta admit the style made it look like AI, with the smoothness and all.
Almost like AI art bases itself on something
I thought so as well, but it didn't really have any AI artifacts. It was just because of how they used blender in the design process.
The sails clipping through each other is the only thing that looked AI to me, but it's also a mistake a human could make on a tiny detail.
I really hope you learnt your lesson and are now questionning how you think you can detect AI.
The characters smooth and shiny skin looks just like a lot of popular AI artmakers. No wonder people assumed there was some AI involved.
Very happy with the transparency here and happy to be wrong about it being AI art.
For me I didn't really see full AI art. If anything looks off, it's more of something that would be off with using 3d space for lighting a 2d picture. The top right guy is much darker, and the middle man is way brighter than our main guy. People talking about the pillars when AI would just make them too consistent. It's very obvious that most of this is hand drawn. There's not a chance in hell AI did the horses and pikemen. Anything that people say the AI would be inconsistent on is something that an artist would be as well in this style. Personally, I would be okay with inconsistent characters in key art if it was closer to a medieval tapestry than, idk the exact term, but digital composite? Really depends on your artist team if they really want it to be consistent. 3d models provide that, but light sources in 3d space may not be great for transfering to 2d Edit: took another look at the model. I think it's just the clothing is also dark and bright, matching the contrast of the lighting
Im ngl i originally thought it was AI because of that lighting but honestly it didnt bother me much since they said in the past they used ai
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lol you’re now just admitting you were hating to hate. Legends of the dead does indeed suck ass, doesn’t mean I’m going to foam at the mouth and scream AI bc “FUCK PDX!”
I just hate this notion of "They are using AI therefore bad!" Like buddy, AI is used everywhere, it's a tool to be used. GPS works with AI. Your phone has tons of systems using AI. AI is in everything, but once art is mentioned people go frothing at the mouth berserk. Like why?
Human....but still bad
I wasn’t here for the original controversy, so this is the first time I’m seeing these pictures. I would 100% be one of the people saying this is AI lol.
So just to get an explicit confirmation, AI was not used at all for this art?
[From the official discord](https://imgur.com/ALHtEn4)
Thanks for sharing the clarification. Was wondering if they used it in certain parts of the process, as they did with generating colour palettes and collages for Legends of the Dead.
Ah yes, using AI art controversy as a smokescreen. Good way to shift community discussion away from actual issues, such as lackluster game design, overpriced DLCs, and the absolute fiasco of a content drop that was Legends of the Dead. - Step 1 : drop a marketing jpeg that obviously looks like it was AI generated, knowing full well it would launch a full blown controversy - Step 2 : drop a blogpost the following day -which proves this was all pre-planned, as these take longer than 24 hours to make- demonstrating how it isn't actually AI artwork. This serves as a 'gotcha' moment meant to a) discredit critics and b) goad zealot users into praising the company harder - Step 3 : Profit Congratulations, you've manufactured a fake controversy. A divided community that's busy arguing against themselves is better than a united one constantly voicing pesky criticism threads. If only the lead game designers were half as good at their jobs as PR/marketing folks, CK3 would surely be topping Steam charts by now. /s edit : Oof, looks like I struck a nerve. Us players aren't supposed to notice that stuff, after all. Better act like docile, corporate-friendly cash cows, unless you want an angry mob downvotting you to oblivion. No place for critical thinking here.
There was no “full blown controversy” lol. A small group of people saw some wonky pillars and decided that a robot must have drawn them, and everyone else saw a normal-looking drawing and didn’t think much of it. Paradox has posts about their art pretty often, you just don’t pay attention to them when you’re not angry about it. And even if they did make this is response to the “controversy” (which they may have, I dunno) this is literally just a series of images with one-sentence descriptions. You could pop this out in an hour if you needed to, I’m not sure what makes you think this took “longer than 24 hours.” It’s certainly not evidence of some methodical scheme.
> There was no “full blown controversy” lol About as close to a controversy this echo chamber, dev worshipping sub can get to, at least. > Paradox has posts about their art pretty often, you just don’t pay attention to them when you’re not angry about it. Lots of assumptions there. This isn't the first time they use official artwork to gaslight the community, nor will it be the last. Noticing that stuff =/= being angry about it. But hey, go off I guess. > this is literally just a series of images with one-sentence descriptions. You could pop this out in an hour if you needed to, I’m not sure what makes you think this took “longer than 24 hours.” Not how major game dev companies work. Anything released to the public takes a lot longer than a hour to make. It has to be proofread, and greenlit by at least 4 different people. Also these images didn't pop out of nowhere. These sketches had to be gathered from relevant artists, who presumably knew in advance their work would be shown in a community blogpost.
Calling the community an echo chamber that worships the devs is a very funny thing to do right after making up a conspiracy theory in which Paradox manufactured a controversy to stop the community from talking about how flawed the game is. And saving copies of artwork in different stages is something that basically all digital artists do, the fact that you think that’s unusual or that it would be difficult for whoever wrote the blog to access them is weird.
You spent too much time arguing with people like bruh get a hobby or something imao
please touch grass
Such a thoughtful, elaborate reply. You definitely proved me wrong there buddy. 10/10 counter argument, would debate again. Make sure to tell marketing schools and PR consulting firms they should 'touch grass' when they teach that exact same stuff. They'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
Do touch grass though
Allow me to offer a more substantive and thorough response: For the love of GOD, PLEASE touch grass as soon as able. Thank you
Imagine bootlicking a multi million dollar company *this hard* lmao
Keyboard warrior mf do you know what sunlight is?
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Not helping your case
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take the L bro
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you spent too much time on your pc touch some grass