Following accusations, James Pond Legacy devs say no generative AI was used in creating artwork
GoNintendo
Following accusations, James Pond Legacy devs say no generative AI was used in creating artwork
Out of their depth
I feel like they did a shit job tryinf to defend themselves if this is the best example of steps taken:
Like, For Real, this is worthless. Show the messy work files, the unfinished sketches, isolate the layers in the 2D mockup to show lineart and color independent of each other, a gif of the 3D wireframes rotating.
This image they posted won’t convince anybody. It will vindicate critics.
Yeah, I really don’t want to falsely accuse anyone but… the human 3d-artist forgot to model one of the horns? That redraw has a very, let’s say, familiar style as well.
Says “process” in the title unlike the others, body is missing inside, flame jets are missing as well.
Body, flame jets and electric textures can be explained as they’re not part of the 3d model but effects applied to it in-engine.
The missing horn though screams AI and I have a hard time imagining a human artist forgetting one of the horns when making the 3d model and submitting the work as completed
Nah the word process ain’t weird there. Render process is the name of the activity that has been done there, and you wouldn’t say “redraw process” or “paint over process”.
I mean, I look a the second step and be like nah that’s AI, I ain’t risking it - just talking about the word “process” specifically.
I’d honestly expect them to make 4 AI images and then set up this up together the normal way, instead of trying to get the prompts right for one image with 4 different styles at once. Then again, I don’t assume to know enough to be sure about that.
That can easily be explained! You see… uhm… uh…
frantically hammers fingers on keyboard to ask CheatGPT for advice.
Don’t forget to say “make no mistakes”!
i… these are literally all ai. like why would the render be missing a horn?
I’m gonna interject and say you generally model things one half at a time and then mirror for symmetrical objects.
Sure, but you wouldn’t just render one horn and add the other one in photoshop. That makes no sense at all. You would duplicate the horn before rendering it.
Notice that the milk-bottle-arm in the original somehow ended up as a mega man arm in the end. Like how could a real artist miss that
yeah but you generally also have a hierarchy of submodels so that mirroring a group mirrors everything in that group.
The theory on The Other Site is what I also agree with: They took #1, fed it into an AI 3D modeler to get #4, fed that image into a 2D style AI model to get #2, and then went back to #4 and used AI in-painting and lazy Photoshop to remove some elements to get #3.
oh yeah that makes sense, the little bubble window is literally just painted over.
As well as the weird dark blob where a detail is added in the “final” result. Why would the blob be there? Unless they started with the “final” result and painted it over to get to the “previous” step.
That and the mangled udders clearly scream AI to me. The original clearly has 4 rockets intended to look like udders. But because of the perspective two of them seem to overlap. So the AI just combined them into one, with a sort of double output? This makes no sense, that’s not how rockets work and that’s not how udders look. It is exactly how AI works tho.
You are 100% correct. 3 obviously was generated from 1, and 2 is just the most blatant 2D genAI image generated from that.
100% AI slop. These people must think we were born yesterday.
How is this not AI?! The redraw absolutely smacks of that style, not to mention the cannon arm is obviously meant to imitate a milk can which the redraw mangles. The rockets are supposed to be udders but the two we can see most clearly don’t match in construction and the other two seems to sprout off of another one. These errors carry over to the full render. The udders are a pixelated mangle of perspective in the original, but this point is absolutely missed.
Above the leg is also a weird split. You can see in the original this is a weird artifact of pixel shading, but it’s been rendered into an actual split in the material in the redraw and renders. This is a valid design choice I guess, but to me it’s an indication of how the AI misinterpreted intent and someone reviewing it didn’t catch or care about it.
This is pathetic. They could have just ai generated fake sketches but they didn’t even have the brain power to think of that.
Yeah that’s definitely AI. At least there’s no doubt now.
I’ll play devil’s advocate and say there are non-AI render processes that can miss a horn (e.g. working from a clay model and scanned, for instance). Hell, even a lazy wand picker in Photoshop can lose a horn! I’ll even say that the very-AI looking 2D illustration can simply be a byproduct of a lack of creativity and the fact this is clearly shovelware. I lived through the Wii era, I can attest that shovelware can look this bad without AI, lol.
HOWEVER, it sure as hell looks like AI generated artwork and they could do a lot better defending their process. The irony is … I don’t really think the trailer is AI? It’s… honestly too unpolished and weird to be? Every effect used is something I’m certain I could do myself, lol.
How the fuck does anyone describe an artist generating game artwork as “human-led process”? You know what this rather sounds like? A “human” prompting image generation.
Maybe it was a human director leading a pack of ostriches doing the game. You never know.
I really hate these ai which hunts. Like if an artist says it’s not ai and it’s just a doubt then I believe but.
But in this case like come onnnnnn. Unless you’re very painstakingly trying to mimic the ai generated lewk at every stage, complete with slopsign tells (and then why??) then I’m not buying it one bit.
Sure... I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, to some degree.
Unfortunately however, we do now exist in a zero trust world where you can't always naively believe what you see to be authentic and legitimate... If I was going to commission or hire an artist to do some paid work today, I would need to at least see some kind of "proof of work".
Because of the ethical implications of generative AI, people have every reason and right to be suspicious and critical of work that looks like it could be generated by AI. People who use AI understand this too, but sadly many of them choose the path of fraudulence and lying instead of reflecting on themselves.
When people make something like this, which to me is so obviously AI slop, and then is bold enough to try to deny it, it just adds insult to injury, frankly. "You can fool some people sometime, but you can't fool all the people all the time." These dudes want to pee on our legs and tell us it's raining...
Wow they really are stressing the phrase beginning / began with human artwork a lot in these statements. Suspiciously so.
It’s a hellscape, I’ve decided to retreat to Dead or Alive wAIfu’s from the early 2000’s due to concerns about the appeal of novel secret agent sexy fish.
First they came for the women of insta with filters and I did not speak out, now they are coming for the sexy fish I will make my stand.
Everyone draws the line somewhere.
AI or not it looks god awful
Unrelated to the topic, but
This sentence is so funny. How is a limited edition made for people who want to pay extra and have shiny object on their shelves working towards game preservation in any form? It’s so funny when they try to play “here, have more disposable plastic and pay 50 extra bucks for it! I swear you’re ALSO doing it for a good cause!”
It’s bad.
youtu.be/CFggndxGZk0
holy shit…that’s so bad.
I’m sorry, I don’t believe them one bit
All images I’ve seen of their art looks like slop
this was so fun, thank you
This might be another case of the phenomenon where people which get exposed to a lot of AI text start using similar structure and speech elements themselves after a while.
The look is pretty much what Pixar and Disney have formalized decades ago - no shit it will look similar to what ImageGen would look like if you go that route. And in the end this boils down to he said/she said with a dash of witch hunt mixed in.
The process image makes it clear that they are lying. Step 3 is step 4 with bits crudely painted out. You can see it easily on the shoulder and chest. They are making up intermediary steps after the fact, which would be unnecessary if there were intermediary steps.
Why should they use some kind of filter to achieve the same fuzzy, plasticy look that bad AI art tends to have? It’s not like that magically appears when you make 3D art.
First of all, they did do a bad job with their blog post.
…But I’m also shocked by the number of people who think they’re human AI detectors.
I suspect people are a year or two behind, looking for signs of messy Stable Diffusion XL output, like suspiciously styled appendages or that weird framing 1.5 always did. Or maybe the Ghibli-esque style Tweeters used to ape Sam Altman.
Models aren’t like that any more.
The other day, I was sitting at a TV, looking at photos side by side, I cannot tell my own mirrorless camera RAWs apart from some locally-run generations that used my photos as a reference, even if I zoom in to pixel peep or try to nitpick the depth-of-field from my lens.
Videos edited by H3 are shockingly good now, albeit at lower resolution.
I did some animesque character design mockups (just for my own thinking/brainstorming), and I can feed the model separate reference images for characters and art styles and poses and it… just gets it. It looks just like the original painted style, and I can’t find any artifacts or distortions that jump out. Not counting the ones in the original material.
I’m not trying to glaze diffusion or anything; quite the opposite. It’s messy, and sloppy. Besides, that’s not the point, and I don’t want to get into that.
What I’m saying, outside of really lazy slop or bad models like ChatGPT, people are behind if they think they can spot AI-generated stuff reliably.
So, maybe the studio lied.
The blog post certainly makes it suspicious. They could have uploaded some asset at least?
But, as suspicious as the style is, I can’t tell if that “process” picture is AI generated. Certainly not because the 2nd frame has a cartoon style, or the 3rd and 4th look like weird cg.
That would explain why an AI model would look like a human made it, not why a human would make something that looks exactly like a bad AI model.
I’m not going to claim to be good at detecting AI generated content, but for visual content there’s clear vibes that AI generated content give that I can never specifically point out, but when I spot them there’s usually at least one other person calling out the slop. Yes 3-4 years ago diffusion models would make errors like mangling hands and mushy details, but while newer models get images technically correct, they leave clear vibes that are easy to spot
Motion errors are also still very much spottable on AI video. Shit blurs, but not in the way caused by actual motion being captured on film and causes distortion of the thing moving in ways that don’t happen with motion blur (like a waving arm bending at points anywhere other than the wrist and elbow).
What I think the average person who may not have an eye for art or an attention to details might not understand is, a lot of AI art that comes across as convincing to the untrained eye is still, at the very least, living deep in the uncanny valley.
Much in the same way that an AI voice or video can look somewhat convincing but a little bit off, the same thing is true for AI artwork. People who are artists or who have at least learned to see the nuance in art can often see the weirdness in generative AI "art", even if it is sometimes hard to explain exactly why it feels off (maybe it's the subtlety of the lighting, the shape design, the line quality, etc.).
Can you make AI art that is convincing enough to fool an untrained eye? Easily.
Can you make AI art that is convincing enough to feel a trained eye? Sure, but it's going to be a lot harder.
In the case of these guys, they really aren't fooling almost anyone with their obvious slop. Frankly, it doesn't take a well-tuned eye for artistry to see that their artwork looks like every generic AI slop art output that we've been barraged with over the last year and change.
I fully admit that there are AI-generated images that could fool me. But that’s beside the point when like in this case, the images are in a very typical AI-style. It doesn’t look like they’ve put any effort into generating something that could fool people, but just went with what one of the more common models shat out. And those are still fairly obvious to detect IMO. Besides that, their process pictures really don’t make a lot of logical sense. I also find it quite unlikely that a human artist would miss a visual gag like the cow using a milk churn and just replace it with a generic blaster.
Guy, everyone thinks they’re a Human AI Detector, especially if they have an account on Twitter, Reddit, BlueSky, etc. Which often results in baseless accusations against human made content being called AI generated, which is hilarious to me honestly.
Well, apparently Nintendo fans and commenters in the linked news section do too.
But I don’t want do disqualify how sus the blog post is, either. It does feel a little like a corporate paint-over; the internet can reasonably be suspicious of that. But I haven’t been convinced by a single comment trying to dissect the picture.
I don’t know anything about this particular situation so won’t comment on it either way. I just think its funny that so many people can be so confidently wrong when it comes to thinking something is AI generated.
I get when something feels suspicious, and often feel this myself, but to be so confident to say it as fact and then be totally wrong when the artist posts a timelapse or something is hilarious to me.
Who cares?
Fans.
People who appreciate integrity. The work of lazy people should not be rewarded.
So no UE4/5 games?
Using an engine does not mean slop. It depends if they are lazy and do just an asset flip in example.