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/doomed151]

It's also completely free to run it locally, no watermarks and no limits. I don't know why they are still using online services.

[u/argumenthaver → u/doomed151]

could be an employee on their own using it to cut corners at work

[u/SoloWaltz → u/argumenthaver]

How can be it an employee when the point is to not employ

[u/argumenthaver → u/SoloWaltz]

wat? ai is to reduce employees not remove them entirely lol

[u/army128 → u/argumenthaver]

...then have the employee install the program on their computer?

[u/argumenthaver → u/army128]

I mean instead of looking at the company as a single entity/hivemind, it could just be the result of the decisions of an individual person (though there's no scenario that excuses the fact it went unnoticed to the live game)

[u/_Bisky → u/army128]

At what company are you working, where employees can freely install programs onto their devices?

[u/Alternative_Dish_194 → u/doomed151]

Local AI needs to self-learn by using their own assets, while online AI can crawl whatever on the Internet to improve itself. Give it 1 day and the online AI can be way better than the local one. Besides running a local AI would require high end NVIDIA card which supports AI and a lot of RAM, which is skyrocketing in prices right now.

[u/doomed151 → u/Alternative_Dish_194]

Local AI needs to self-learn by using their own assets, while online AI can crawl whatever on the Internet to improve itself.

There's no such thing as self-learning as of now. AI model training requires expensive hardware, a LOT of compute, dataset curation, and could take a few hours to a few months to complete. The knowledge of an AI model is frozen the moment training is done.

I think you're referring to models with reference input capabilities where you can give it images to use as reference. Local models have it too. For image models, there's Qwen Image Edit and FLUX.2 [klein], both of which only require a midrange PC to run. Then we have MiniMax H3 for videos, it's slightly heavier, but runs fine on a machine with RTX 5060 Ti (16 GB) and 32 GB RAM.

[u/Alternative_Dish_194 → u/doomed151]

What I meant was large AI companies would update their models frequently, we already had multiple versions of ChatGPT in 1 year. Depending on the subscription plan, ppl can have access to the latest model without having to train a local AI with limited resources.

[u/n0pl4c3 → u/Alternative_Dish_194]

Nobody was talking about them training their own though. Just to self-host one of the openly available Chinese models.