UKGE <3 AI Apparently

A note before we begin: I’m no journalist. This situation just pisses me off and I want to talk about it.

A few days ago, the UK Games Expo posted this ad on their Instagram. I learned of this from a post by Ramona Alder:

There are a LARGE number of hidden comments, though that seems to have stopped as the post got inundated by comments from people not pleased and the work of hiding it likely became too much for the person in charge of social media to deal with. Luckily, the Gates of Krystalia account was doing the hard work of defending their game for us, with gems such as (get ready, it’s going to be a lot):

freylygill makes a very good point. Why didn’t they use the crowdfund to pay the artists? For example, we can see from their two previous Kickstarters that they raised $128,123 USD of a $3,946 goal, and 31,645 pounds (at the time of writing this) of a 13,000 goal (about 41.6k USD raised of a 17k goal). Maybe all that money could have paid the artists?

Here we have the excuse that they basically were left without any other option to create their project. Because books cost money to print and they had to hire translators. Let’s disregard my feeling that they would probably use AI translators if they were decent. This is a bullshit excuse. The money is there. They didn’t have to have over 1,000 illustrations. I can’t tell you if the illustrations were necessary, because I refuse to purchase AI slop.

The art isn’t good. It just isn’t. It’s bog standard anime garbage with no sense of personality, exactly as expected from AI.

I’m trying to avoid this just being a photo dump. So I’ll summarize a few things from their comments. They swear that they use a complex, secret process of training the AI on their owned images, that they had consent of the artists and it’s all legal, and that they go in after and edit these photos. Well, here come some more images:

GatesOfKrystalia comments they didn’t attribute the art the AI was based on (legally, of course) because they didn’t want to make the artists … uncomfortable. BECAUSE THEY KNOW PEOPLE HATE GENERATIVE AI. Or … and hear me out … all the art is stolen and that’s why there’s no attribution.

They say the AI scandal makes their product more successful, because money is all they truly care about. Their process is secret and they don’t want anyone stealing their method (huh, they’re fine with stealing other peoples work but don’t want anyone stealing from them, weird). And that they’re SO BUSY being successful that they don’t have time to update their sites with current info (like blatant use of AI).

But, this has to be a good product though, right? With that much art, that they definitely went over and edited piece by piece like they said in some other comments:

But surely the publishers, Top Notch International Ltd, don’t condone this haphazard approach to writing? SURELY?

Yeah, this is from their website. They’ve got a random, public facing, mock book with latin fill words. No notes.

All that to say, people are going to be shitty. People are going to look for the easy way out, even if it means stealing from artists with AI. And the one thing people hate is admitting that they were wrong, especially about something they have literally made 100k on. These writes are going to defend their bullshit to the death. We, the people, will be sold any bill of lies as they defend themselves instead of the bad actors learning from their mistakes and admitting they fucked up.

Here are the makes of Gates of Krystalia. What surprises me most is that Andrea Ruggeri here states that not only is he a member of the Italian RPG community, formerly owning a game store, but that he is a professional graphic designer. Bro, for real? You would turn on your own community like this?

Yeah. If these are one and the same, the chances of convincing this guy, who must use AI in every aspect of his life, that what he’s doing is wrong is nil.

Here’s the worst part, for me at least. Bad actors gonna bad act. But UKGE still has the Instagram post up. They still have the ad on their website as of writing this:

Like Ramona said way above, UKGE is hiding comments. They’ve not made a single post anywhere I can find about the situation. And, according to some comments I saw but cannot verify myself, there was a kerfuffle involving AI earlier in the year regarding UKGE.

It’s just shit. UKGE should be an expo that celebrates creativity and the hard work of those that make this hobby of ours possible. Not some slop a computer shat out based on stolen art. But apparently, the ad money must be worth it to them.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go scrub my eyes.