NTE Developers forget to remove AI watermark

[u/YourLilyInaPot]

In their newest update 1.3, a new area has been added, along with it came new fishing spots and fishing catches.

One of their fishing assets contains the watermark from Doubao (豆包) a popular Chinese AI chatbot assistant with image and video generation powered by Seedance (Bytedance).

This has sparked heated debate amongst Chinese players, while not hardly criticizing the use of AI they do make fun of the fact that Doubao’s AI image generation watermark comes from the free version of the app, with many comments calling them cheap, criticizing their carelessness and questioning the real reason behind their low production costs.

To quote one of the comments:

“AI is fine, but using Doubao is just funny. The free version no less.”

Other comments talk about AI across the Chinese gaming industry, how other companies such as Hoyoverse and Netease have self-developed AI tools while Hotta Studio uses an AI chatbot assistant.

To put it on perspective, asking Doubao to generate an image is very similar to asking ChatGPT.

Quote from another comment:

“Doubao Doubao, help me generate a game asset of a purple crowned seahorse.”

I’ll add that the Chinese community already knew about the extent of AI usage in Neverness to Everness, though they weren’t expecting to see Doubao of all things.

As of this post, the watermark has been removed with the asset remaining the same otherwise.

[u/corgi_pupper]

And much worse

[u/tiger_kittie → u/corgi_pupper]

Sure. It might be much worse.

But I don't see the average person lining up to go eat at a michelin starred restaurant every night instead of cooking up some instant ramen.

I wonder fucking why. /s

[u/heeeeyjude → u/tiger_kittie]

nte devs are not the average person lol

[u/Miwoo0 → u/corgi_pupper]

depends on the artist

[u/Grimsdol → u/corgi_pupper]

i mean looking at this end result, it looks fine. tho for anything lore important or anything like that should be hand done. but for someone to use AI to save them some time on minor details like this especially if you have a tight schedule, well thats not really a problem.

[u/Lessyaa → u/Grimsdol]

Fine? Even without watermark, it was screaming AI. The face is ugly man. The lighting, colour, shading, is a mess.....

[u/Grimsdol → u/Lessyaa]

uhh not really. like it's suppose to be ugly, its meant to be a freaky seahorse. and for the lighting and stuff, i and 98% of players ain't gonna notice that.

[u/ParticularClassroom7 → u/Grimsdol]

It's something you'll never give a shred of attention to. It doesn't matter. That's where gen AI is most useful, it allows artists to focus on important stuff.

[u/bigpunk157 → u/ParticularClassroom7]

These games shit money, they can afford to hire more artists here and there to fill out this kind of content.

[u/ParticularClassroom7 → u/bigpunk157]

Lol no. more people = more management = more time needed to sync everything. These games are on a 5-6 week update cycle, they can't really afford to have too many people working on them at once. Gacha conpanies avoid contractors like the plague, because they can't ensure quality on short notice. If you want an example of a game that takes forever to deliver new content, look at Love and Deepspace, which has had all kinds of problems lately due to that fact.

Besides, only Hoyoverse (maybe Kuro and whoever runs F/GO) makes fuck you money, everyone else is still fighting off bankruptcy every patch.

[u/bigpunk157 → u/ParticularClassroom7]

Tens of Millions of dollars monthly and fighting off bankruptcy is a crazy take

[u/ParticularClassroom7 → u/bigpunk157]

NTE took like 50 mil for development, probably 75 mil when marketing is accounted for. They haven't made back what they spent yet, not accounting for active development costs. These games already have multiple teams making different updates at the same time and pump out another game's worth of content every 5-6 patches. If it's so easy, everyone would be doing it, there's a reason why Sony, ubisoft or EA don't have their in-house gacha

[u/Lessyaa → u/ParticularClassroom7]

They absolutely did. You guys use sensortower too much. It's extremely lower number than reality, especially with numbers under 10mil. It can be literally 5x times the number, from my experience with studios myself.

[u/No-Bag-1628 → u/bigpunk157]

Running a game of this scale costs unimaginable amounts of money itself. You can’t just expect the company to hire as many artists as it takes for a game this big.

[u/bigpunk157 → u/No-Bag-1628]

How much money do you think artists make in this industry?

[u/No-Bag-1628 → u/bigpunk157]

around 30000 USD per year I would bet.
However if they used traditional artists and graphics/model designers for literally everything in the game, I wouldn't't be surprised if they'd need over 300 artists and graphics/model designers for everything. This game is absurdly huge, and normal artists don't work at the speed of sound.
There's also the need to pay programmers (also in the dozens if not hundreds), game testers, writers and management, as well as paying for advertisements (usually for much more than the game budget itself!) and more.
For Reference, this game isn't even making money right now. the money poured into its marketing exceeds the money it is currently making.
https://finance.biggo.com/news/da9e8c18-e491-4225-86d6-b0c67d3a56c5

[u/akuto → u/bigpunk157]

The cost of an artist is both money and time.

This was likely done by someone from their art team anyway, either in-house or contracted. I don't imagine a programmer would be tasked with using AI to generate those miscellaneous assets.

[u/tiger_kittie → u/bigpunk157]

Even minimum wage workers in the US make more than pretty much everyone in the third world yet no one argues that they should spend more money on staples for living just because "they can".

[u/deeznutz133769 → u/bigpunk157]

but if they're not needed, why should they? They're not running a charity. They're in business to make money.

Tell that to all of the transcriptionists that have lost their jobs due to AI or countless of other jobs / professions that are outdated now.

By all means, all of the people complaining about them not hiring artists, start your own companies and hire them if you want them to have jobs. If it's so much better than the AI then you'll make more money from it... right?

[u/bigpunk157 → u/deeznutz133769]

I'mma be so fr, as someone that does transcription work sometimes, AI transcription is pretty dogshit, same with code and art.

[u/AgnesDigitalsLover → u/deeznutz133769]

You don't strike me as someone who's willing to make an actual argument in favor of the AI. "If it's so much better than the AI then you'll make more money from it... right?" is not an argument of any kind. Regardless, the whole game is filled with dogshit like this from background assets to main character designs, so I'm not playing it anyway.

[u/Lessyaa → u/ParticularClassroom7]

Yes and no. It might be better than the rest, but personally, I like quality everywhere on my games. I'm the type of player to listen to voices while reading stories to the very end, even NPC random voices. Just to give you an idea. So for me, it's part of the quality package and is important.

[u/Lessyaa → u/Grimsdol]

Well, I definitely notice it at first glance, at least. It's just... so visible to me.

[u/No-Bag-1628 → u/corgi_pupper]

The sprite looks good what you mean?  Almost the entire game is ai generated sprites. It still looks passable.

[u/imbasicman → u/corgi_pupper]

Meh, that's debatable at this point. I wouldn't use AI for the really important stuff like character designs, but for the small stuff there's no point in using an artist for it (from a pragmatic point of view of, I'm not here to debate the ethics of doing it).

[u/johnsolomon → u/imbasicman]

These people live in an echo chamber and think AI is still stuck churning out malformed videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti

They're just coping hard because they're upset about their lifelong dreams being obliterated. I don't blame them but they're annoying. It's like a translator yelling at you every time you use Google translate saying the translations are AI slop

It's kind of hilarious and sad at the same time

[u/BlueHelmet2021 → u/johnsolomon]

Yeah, but too bad that you have forgotten that other competitors may also use AI, completely negating your cost savings relative to your competitors. Guess what happens when people are too dependent on it? The prices increase significantly if you use cloud APIs. If you go local, you still stuck competing having no competitive advantage against others who are using AIs to generate arts.

So I don't see any economical advantage other than race to the bottom and race to the dependency.

[u/johnsolomon → u/BlueHelmet2021]

This makes no sense. Since when were cost savings relative to competitors matter?

Using AI on non-essential art frees up finances so you can invest into other resources. At the end of the day it comes down to the company and what they do with it, but a better product will make more money

I'm willing to judge a company based on the sum of their end product rather than if they used AI

The reason I see your argument as bad faith is that it assumes the worst possible combination of choices

[u/BlueHelmet2021 → u/johnsolomon]

I mean, if the competitors can match your pricing due to their use of AI just like you're doing, you're basically making no difference to the customer of the end product since you and your competitors have the same price. In the end, if you can't beat on cost because all of you are cheap, you are also expected to deliver quality, which you also said that the AI can do... This leads to customers less likely to buy your products because other competitors' products exist in high quality (in your terms) and cheap just like you because of AI use.

In the end, businesses are controlled by supply and demand... If the supply (you and your competitors' product) exceeds the demand, then the customers have all the power to choose which product they want to buy, which is unlikely to be you due to the presence of other competitors.

In the end it is all about customers wallets that may never goes to you.

Not that hard to understand.

[u/clocksy → u/BlueHelmet2021]

To be honest I also find the argument that "if they use AI on the small stuff they have more time/money for the big stuff!" pretty laughable. We are already talking about gacha companies, one of the most greedily monetized genres, and expecting them to cut corners so they can... deliver more high quality content in other areas? C'mon guys, don't make me laugh, that's really not how businesses work.

Ignoring any ethical standpoint I also just think (as we see in NTE's case) that some amount of people are just going to view your product as lower quality if you cheap out like this. It may or may not matter but personally if I am going to be spending $$ on gacha .pngs I kind of want to know artists are behind them. If I'm getting some art that anyone can produce with a prompt then why should I pay for it?

[u/Tenken10 → u/clocksy]

The money saved from AI doesn't go into making the game better. It doesn't go into making the game cheaper for the consumers. No.......all it does is go into the pockets of the shareholders. And these AI D!ckriders need to understand that companies greed are limitless. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. Soon enough they're gonna fire even more workers and make games that are 80%-90% AI slop.

[u/imbasicman → u/clocksy]

I mean, like i explained in another reply, if they use AI to make the icons for the UI, they can spend time that would be doing that instead working on character designs and similar. Does that mean they'll spend more time and money on the bigger things? Not necessarily, but it means they can at least advance production ahead of schedule which helps with time crunchs, if the endgoal is a shitty game that won't change, but that's more on the company than the tool itself.

And like I said, big things is different from small things. Are you spending money on icons and background art most people won't even see in a 3d game? Nope. Now if they started using AI for character models then yeah, I wouldn't spend money either because I still prefer to support the arts as much as possible. But I'm not going to really care if the graffiti on the wall on a random alleyway was made with AI.

[u/imbasicman → u/BlueHelmet2021]

That's not really how it works. Say you need to design a UI for the "lobby" on your gacha, you can have an artist spend a few hours designing the icons or just tell the AI to create the icons in only a few minutes. This frees the worker to use those extra hours into something else, and they will, because the company isn't paying their devs to be idle. This doesn't mean they will make more content, but it means they will speed up production towards their goals, which when you are churning out content on a biweekly/monthly basis can actually help a lot. Of course, if their goals were a shitty game from the start that won't change but that's another discussion.

Ultimately the time saved converts into cutting costs for the company. I work in advertising (well, i work with advertising, I'm actually a data analyst but oversee our marketing and market research teams) and using AI for making media content helped a lot with time crunchs. Before we used to take days making a set of 12+ photos between photography then editing them, nevermind all the work that went into prepping the product in the studio too. Now we simply take photos from several angles with a high spec camera to take all the details, throw it into the AI and with the right prompts it gives us what we want; at most we do some quick editing. We didn't see any pushback from customers both in reviews or sales numbers, and our margins actually got better since we can produce more content in a smaller time frame for running more campaigns.

"But isn't the competition doing the same?" Yes, which is why we had to start doing it. We couldn't keep ahead of the curve otherwise. Maybe in the future the industry will shift and customers will actually start caring about AI usage, or AI will get too expensive, and we'll go back to doing things the old way if it makes more sense but right now it doesn't. The problem with NTE is how sloppy they are, what they did like leaving the AI logo is amateurish (and so is using a free model tbh), meanwhile there's a lot of other companies using AI all over the place (gaming, adv etc...) that customers don't know because those companies actually know what they are doing.

Don't get me wrong, i didn't go into the creative industry because i wanted robots doing my job, i grew up with the idea robots were going to do physical and dangerous jobs and leave humanity the creative jobs. But this is where the wind is blowing. My bosses know what our productivity with AI is like, and make the deadlines based on that. It sucks but shrugs

[u/BlueHelmet2021 → u/imbasicman]

Your whole essay completely missed my point because I wasn't even talking about the artists themselves.

I am talking about the economic reality of people using AIs to replace artists, and if everyone replaces artists with AIs, everyone (who suggest to use AIs) will be competing against each other for profit and may lower their prices to get even a slice of that profit instead of none. This pretty much negates the cost-saving arguments because most people don't consider other competitors are pressuring the products' price to decrease.

That being said, you said you use AIs to get ahead of the competition... Which I assume that means other competitors are also using AIs to cut costs and you just followed suit. That basically proved my point that you all are literally racing to the bottom because everyone is using AIs for "cost efficiency".

Not that hard to understand.

[u/imbasicman → u/BlueHelmet2021]

I understood your point well enough, I'm simply arguing it doesn't work like that. Before AI, companies wanting to offer a cheaper product employed artists willing to work for less pay, usually newer or less talented artists, and tools for automatizing processes. But since every company wanting to offer a cheaper product did that, that also "negated" the economical advantage... but because that's the industry standard you need to adhere to, not adhering puts your company in a disadvantage. Right now many competitors in my company niche are using AI, even if that becomes "all" and means that we can't offer a cheaper product because everyone is cutting costs the same way, not using it means you don't cut those costs and becomes less competitive.

Every company understands that it's impossible to rely forever on a specific tool to stay ahead of competitos. Sooner or later the rest of the industry will start using it too if it makes sense, becoming the industry standard, while newer technologies will be developed that become the new cutting edge, and the cycle starts anew. Automation changed the game at the turn of the 19th century, but by the 20th century it became industry standard on the industrialized first world, outcompeting industries in poorer countries, before the technology also became common in the third world. Nowadays you can't be competitive without automation, and having it is not even cost saving - it's necessary to even compete.

But the point is that the companies who first used it were keeping ahead of the curve at the time, benefiting immensely from using it before every other company adopted it. They managed to flood the market with their products, cut bigger shares of the market for themselves and use the extra money for R&D and expanding. When automation started to become common, whereas everyone was still learning how to integrate it into their operations, the pioneers were already refining the technology and processes that used it. Industries are dynamic, no one expects AI to be an advantage forever, but while it is, they'll use it for whatever it's worth.

That's how companies think and it makes sense. "But if everyone uses AI they will simply drag down prices!" Sure, and markets will either stabilize at those prices (not accounting for inflation ramping the prices up again) or naturally up the prices when they can offer advtanges to customers that justify higher prices. Markets are dynamic while you are applying a logic into it that only makes sense in a stagnated system.

Also not sure why you'd call it an essay, it's basically the length of a tweet lol.

[u/BlueHelmet2021 → u/imbasicman]

You know one of the biggest weakness of your whole essay? You assume that people aren't willing to pay premium for things.

We have seen this kind of behavior when it comes to choosing cars. You may pay a car because you like the design, electronics, fuel efficiency or the status itself. Gold and diamond jewelries? Same stuff, expensive, but people buy it as status indicator or it looks good on them.

Now problem with argument is that if everyone uses the AI tools, you can notice that the design, reliability and so on converge across different competitors' products, including yours. If you know anything about machine learning, this is to be expected due to averaging of cost functions. So... You using AIs will get an average quality nearly equal to your competitors who use AIs. There goes your differentiators.

Do you want to know why do some consumers tend to resist products that have AI-generated contents? That is because they show the same "premium" behaviours like the car and jewellery owners. They kind of want... Not an average output produced by machine, but rather the uniqueness of the output and effort made by a person. Sure, you can play AI-generated contents all you want, but you wouldn't be able to retain those "average" buyers since you will be competing against other competitors that uses AI. There will be always a premium segment that prefers human uniqueness and hard work, and those people are tough to lose because competitors would need "premium" product to match that. In this case, very few competitors would do that because they are too busy with using AIs instead of humans.

[u/Little_History5182 → u/corgi_pupper]

Nah.

[u/johnsolomon → u/corgi_pupper]

Not always. I'm not a fan of this bad faith argument. We can all agree that AI is a PITA in many ways but this cope that all AI art sucks is nonsense -- most of it is better than what your average artist can put out

People use it because it's cheaper AND better unless you're dropping $$$$ on a top tier pro artist, which they understandably aren't interested in doing for an open world that uses hundreds~~ thousands of throwaway assets

[u/corgi_pupper → u/johnsolomon]

You do not understand art

[u/johnsolomon → u/corgi_pupper]

🤡

I'm here to play good games, not to bellyache about whether AI art is art or not

[u/corgi_pupper → u/johnsolomon]

You have every right to eat up the slop offered to you lil piggy <3

[u/BernhardIsAGod → u/corgi_pupper]

Soulless people are fine playing soulless games. They don't get the fact that the human factor is CRUCIAL in art, so they are fine with AI slop. Hell, they even pay for it. I'd feel ashamed, personally, but whatever.

[u/johnsolomon → u/BernhardIsAGod]

This is the funniest thing I've heard all day

Keep telling yourself that. One minute you guys are saying God doesn't exist, the next you're waxing poetic about art having a soul. Anything to avoid facing reality

[u/c7d3n → u/johnsolomon]

God has nothing to do with this. When people say art having a soul they mean actual time and effort that's a big reason why people enjoy art so much

[u/johnsolomon → u/c7d3n]

It's stupid. There are plenty of other reasons to enjoy art. This is just another weak argument some people use to try to downplay the quality of effective AI art. Working hard on something does add a certain level of value, but it's not a requirement for something to be good.

[u/c7d3n → u/johnsolomon]

Working hard on something definitely adds value I don't know what made you think it doesn't that's why you don't ever see children's drawings in art museums. Ai art just undermines people that practiced for years. AI art has no value in any way

[u/johnsolomon → u/corgi_pupper]

You people are so cringe it's unreal

[u/RHS-II3 → u/johnsolomon]

using ai makes a game bad because the higher ups don't trust their devs to make good content or care enough to pay a real artist for original content, you are being a rube defending this

[u/FoRiZon3 → u/johnsolomon]

Sorry. If you craving for "good games" then theres not much to offer in Gachas, mostly.

They need to bring value on something else. And if that main value also being cheapen out then we do not waste time for it as a return.

[u/johnsolomon → u/FoRiZon3]

You're entitled to that opinion

Personally I believe the games I'm currently playing are all quite good

[u/fufu_butt → u/johnsolomon]

I can't fathom having standards so low that you eat up pig slop made out of actual talent and pretend it's somehow better than the things it steals from

[u/valeasz → u/fufu_butt]

or you can actually admit that AI art has progressed so fast and we should find ways to stop it, not just cope that it's bad and soul-less.

Edit: all the dumbasses downvoting are in for a rude awakening if they think calling AI "soulless" is enough to stop it from taking their job.

[u/fufu_butt → u/valeasz]

I mean if you wanna lap up the AI sludge then you do you man I ain't stopping you; but it's soulless by definition, no leaps and bounds of logic can change the fact its made out of actual peoples work lol

[u/valeasz → u/fufu_butt]

Except that people are less and less able to differentiate between AI and normal art, so maybe this "soulless" thing is just made up, you can call it whatever you want, but it won't change the fact it IS improving and people will use it more.

[u/johnsolomon → u/fufu_butt]

Pretty sure it's better than anything you've ever drawn in your life 🥱

[u/derrisle1234 → u/corgi_pupper]

You say much worse but there are actual artist getting accused of AI when the AI studied off them. I also saw an artwork that was from 10 years ago get accused of being AI because people didn't know how old that drawing was. AI is way more advanced now.