Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”.
“I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender told Kotaku in a recent interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.'” I assume that’s not a verbatim quote, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
The publishers also take a dim view of using generative AI for “placeholder” work, or indeed any ‘non-final’ aspect of game development. “We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?” Bender went on.
The problem here is that you lose nuance.
Yes, a lot of datacentres use evaporative cooling, meaning that the heat is taken away as the water evaporates. It’s a cheap and effective way of doing things and the water returns to the water cycle and doesn’t really get locked up anywhere. So it’s not really a problem, right?
Well yes, in a vacuum that’s fantastic. However there’s two caveats to this: evaporative cooling works best in arid areas, because the air can hold more water. Thus they build these AI datacentres in naturally arid areas. Smart, they’re using physics to their advantage!
What’s the second problem then? They’re now using up the ground water in those arid areas to cool their datacentres and thus ruining it for the people that live there, leaving them without safe water to drink.
Also I don’t know how many anti-AI people will be all “bUt gOlF CoUrSeS ArE OkAy, We lOvE ThOsE!!” These things exist purely for rich people that don’t contribute anything, so we could get rid of both and the world would be a better place.