‘I f**king hate gen AI artwork,’ Hooded Horse chief says: ‘If we’re publishing the sport, no f**king AI property’

Completely different recreation firms method generative AI in numerous methods. Some, like Digital Arts, embrace it; others, like Larian, take a extra measured, cautious method. After which there’s Hooded Horse, the writer of video games like Countless Legend 2, Cataclismo, and the breakout hit Manor Lords, whose CEO Tim Bender just lately advised Kotaku, “I fucking hate gen AI artwork.”

“It has made my life tougher in some ways…immediately it infests shit in a method it should not,” Bender mentioned. “It’s now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the sport, ‘no fucking AI property’.”

Banning AI artwork is less complicated mentioned than finished, as some studios—Larian and Sandfall Interactive, to call a pair high-profile examples—have taken to utilizing gen AI in pre-production, ostensibly to assist pace issues alongside. To assist counter that, Bender says he urges builders to not use generative AI anyplace, even only for placeholders.

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“Some folks can have this thought, like they might by no means need to let it within the recreation, however they will assume, ‘It may be a placeholder on this prototype construct’,” he mentioned. “But when that will get finished, in fact, there’s an opportunity that that slips by means of, as a result of it solely takes a kind of slipping by means of in some construct and never getting changed or one thing.

“Due to that, we’re continuously having to observe and cope with it and attempt to stop it from slipping in, as a result of it’s cancerous.”

As unlikely as that sounds, it has occurred, and greater than as soon as. Ubisoft needed to shortly make modifications to Anno 117 after “placeholder” artwork mistakenly made it to the reside model of the sport, and in a a lot higher-profile case Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, one of many largest video games of 2025, misplaced two wins within the Indie Sport Awards after it too was discovered to have launched with “placeholder” gen AI artwork nonetheless in place.