We live in tricky times friends. Depending on who you speak to, Artificial Intelligence is either the future or the end of the world as we know it. The truth will probably end up somewhere in between, but at the moment, for the majority of us, AI exists only to rewrite our resumes or generate images of us as an action figure. Hardly Terminator 2 stuff just yet.
The gaming industry is a mess, but it’s probably always been a mess. Yes, unscrupulous boardroom invisibles are definitely using art generated by AI and large language models instead of actual humans to cut costs and jobs. No, this is not cool, but it will ultimately go down in history as “progress”.
If that outrages you, I would urge you to check out what Henry Ford did to the fledgling motor industry when he introduced the assembly line, or just have a skim of the Wikipedia page for the Industrial Revolution – the fall guys were always humans.
Now, the excellent next game from the studio that brought us the stunning This War Is Mine – 11-Bit Studios is under fire for including some hugely sloppy AI content in an otherwise excellent spiritual successor, and the gaming corner of the internet has polished off their (AI-generated probably) pitchforks and are out for blood.
What Really Happened With The Alters?
Let’s start with what’s happened, long before The Alters came out. Valve now has a condition for publishing on Steam that any AI-generated content must be disclosed by the developers and publisher, so that purchasers of games know where the content originates. Fine. Keep that in mind, and also keep in mind that The Alters has no such declaration on its Steam page.
Imagine the horror then, when screenshots started to emerge over the weekend of the seemingly obvious use of generated AI text in The Alters. Now we are not talking about outraged YouTubers proclaiming the use of the emdash, a fairly standard punctuation mark used for hundreds of years, just that they had never heard of it, as definite proof of AI content. No, these were screenshots that, as previously described, were a bit sloppy.
Many of us have probably forwarded emails or texts on to people with something at the bottom that wasn’t supposed to be seen by them. Similar here.
If you have ever used ChatGPT to write something for you and then asked it to iterate, it will come back with something like, “Sure thing, buddy, let ‘s have another go at that and make it sound even more amazing, I really do love the way you write, pal.”
What you need to do at this point, if you use the content, is not to copy the “Sure buddy” bit and put that in your game too. I’m looking at you, 11-Bit.
Basically, on a screen in the background of one of the scenes, some text scrolls past that starts with the line, “Sure, here’s a revised version focusing purely on scientific and astronomical data”.
It may as well be a line of emdashes.
However, does it really matter? Obviously, it is a mistake and should not have been left in, but it’s not really a sign of a nefarious board eradicating humans from its workforce, but review bombers gonna review bomb because they live for it.
If somebody needed some sci-text quickly that was 99% irrelevant to the plot and got ChatGPT to knock some up for them rather than trawling Wikipedia, assuming nobody was ever going to zoom into a screenshot of it, do we need to virtue signal and be outraged?
11-Bit Studios is a small Studio competing against the big boys. They clearly pack a lot of talent into the few games they produce, and if using the tools available to them helps them, I’d be all for getting off their back, but now the internet detectives are trawling through every asset in the game looking to add to the pile-on. As yet, the studio has not responded.
Yes, it’s slack that text ended up there, and it should not have been there, and maybe there should be a declaration on Steam, but the outrage is silly. Without seeing that line, The Alters is a fantastic game, and suddenly seeing that line changes that? No, it absolutely does not.
Published: Jun 30, 2025 06:08 am