The Alters devs hit back at accusations of AI use and say they always prioritized meaningful, handcrafted storytelling

Yesterday, we brought you news that a predictable section of the gaming sphere was outraged beyond all belief at the discovery of a small number of AI-generated assets in 11-Bit Studios’ excellent The Alters. You can catch up on the full story up to this point right here, but now the studio has responded with a lengthy statement on X explaining both what happened and its overall ethos for producing games.

“We’ve seen a wide range of accusations regarding the use of AI-generated content in The Alters, and we feel it’s important to clarify our approach and give you more context. AI-generated assets were used strictly as temporary WIPs during the development process and in a very limited manner. Our team has always prioritized meaningful, handcrafted storytelling as one of the foundations of our game.

During production, an AI-generated text for a graphic asset, which was meant as a piece of background texture, was used by one of our graphical designers as a placeholder. This was never intended to be part of the final release. Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this single placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game. We have since conducted a thorough review and confirmed that this was an isolated case, and the asset in question is being updated… While we do not want to downplay the situation, we also want to clearly show its limited impact on your gaming experience.”

Misstep or massive mistake? 11-Bit’s clarification on AI use in the game’s localization

11-Bit  Studios also faced accusations that, rather than using actual human translators to localize the game into other languages, they instead ran it through a Large Language Model to do all the hard work. The statement explained: “Due to extreme time constraints, we chose not to involve our translation partners and had these videos localized using AI to have them ready on launch. It was always our intention to involve our trusted translation agencies after release as part of our localization hotfix, to ensure those texts would be handled with the same care and quality as the rest of the game. That process is now underway, and updated translations are being implemented.

To give you a better understanding of what a small part of the overall scope of the game’s narrative layer they are, those few external movies are approx. 10k words out of 3.4 million across all languages in the game, or just 0.3% of the overall text. The alternative was to release those specific dialogues in English only, which we believed would be a worse experience for non-English speakers. In hindsight, we acknowledge this was the wrong call. Even more so, no matter what we decided, we should have simply let you know.”

The whole thing has been a bit messy and unnecessary, and hopefully, in the long term, will not take the shine off the game, which is more than worthy of your time. The vast majority of comments following the post were from players who found it slightly ridiculous that a fuss had been made at all, with many pointing out that many larger companies employ the use of AI in the development these days.

Somehow though, we doubt The Alters will be the last to fall foul of this thorny issue.