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/Any_Economics_6166]

No, they use AI to deliver more content without depth. They literally use the free AI version and don't even check the quality of their update before release. It's just complete lack of effort from the devs, but it has been like this since launch

[u/No_Significance7064 → u/Any_Economics_6166]

what you said and what they said aren't mutually exclusive.

[u/Koanos → u/No_Significance7064]

Then when you combine both, what do we get?

[u/Koanos → u/No_Significance7064]

Then if we combine both, what do we get?

[u/Gotruto → u/Any_Economics_6166]

A lot of their minigames do lack depth, but a lot of other modes seem pretty well-thought out to me. Like 999 Nights, where they give you a lot of freedom to explore builds, where your life is made much easier for doing so during Challenge mode, and then when you enter Nightmare you get the tools to totally break the game and it's great.

This is just more about how they choose to spend their (relatively limited) resources. Tbh, I might not even care if the fishes had no pictures at all. They added all of their models into the aquarium though, unless I'm misinformed, which seems a lot more effort than the pictures.

[u/tiger_kittie → u/Gotruto]

I mean the mini games last for like 4 weeks. they're not meant to be something you play for like 20 hours lmao.

[u/Either-Pay8150 → u/Any_Economics_6166]

They do check the quality, but do you know how much manpower is needed to find all these tiny little things? They are constantly fixing and adding things too.

[u/TunderBlood → u/Any_Economics_6166]

It really isnt but go off I guess