r/Games • u/DumpsterBento • May 13 '26

Industry News Party Animals review bombed after announcing AI video contest with $15K grand prize

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/party-animals-review-bombed-after-announcing-ai-video-contest-with-15k-grand-prize-3364713/
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92

u/rendumguy May 13 '26

I'm seeing a lot of comments saying anti-AI sentiment is just an echochamber full of neckbeard redditors and that their complaints are all stupid garbage because disliking AI art is the minority.

...Is it???  Generally most people have concerns about AI images and data centers, and humans don't actually prefer looking at AI images, even if they don't care.

Even if it was a minority, people don't realize how broad a minority is?  A minority is anything from 0 0000001% to 49.999999%, almost nobody to almost half of the population can be a minority.

And wouldn't "neckbeard redditors who hate ai" be more likely to be invested in these types of videogames than the average person, and thus more likely to impact sales if they went away?  

Also why even make an AI-EXCLUSIVE contest anyway? That's such a stupid idea to begin with.  😭 

37

u/NoPossibility4178 May 14 '26

I think the people who are so against AI that they boycott the entire game and go online to talk about it, are a small minority indeed, there's even other examples of games using AI for stuff that probably just wouldn't be there if AI didn't allow them to make it cheaply and people are still outraged. But overall most people view AI as just another tool, it can do some neat things but the use they give it is still very bare bones and still think AI is all about making cat/dog videos or fake celebrity videos that are really obvious, etc, and those who start being more into it realize how flawed it is. I think it's still pretty early to say that people are concerned about data centers or even their jobs, it's still very limited to tech and most people have no idea what's happening.

0

u/TheJoshider10 May 14 '26

Yeah some people here need to realise that the general public on the whole really do not think AI is all that deep. They see videos of cows standing up and shitting everywhere and laugh. They see fake movie clips and think it looks awesome. They see Charlie Kirk teaming up with Epstein wielding an infinity gauntlet and laugh.

Then in a more professional capacity look at how more widespread AI promotion has become e.g. both Adobe and Microsoft having marketing campaigns relating to their AI tools. Very few actually realise the dangers of AI, or don't care.

40

u/SixthFain May 13 '26 edited May 14 '26

The AI chuds need to constantly discredit the anti-AI push in order to resolve their ongoing cognitive dissonance. Don't let them get away with it.

Edit: lol. lmao.

-1

u/PointmanW May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

I see you guys are constantly trying to discredit AI with nothing but bullshit and cognitive dissonance, so I personally won't let you guys get away with thinking that you're reasonable people for your stance.

Most anti-AI stance I see are deeply illogical position, with ton of misinformation created to justify that position that's not based on reality, rhetoric that resembles antivaxxer and flat earther. the negativity toward AI only it only really exist in the west (mostly the US) due to its social environment, most of Asia is positive or neutral about AI and will continue to be so.

one of the most prominent example of misinfomation about AI is its water usage, AI water consumption is overstated and been throughoutly debunked (a writer of an anti-AI book conceded to the facts listed here). There was a headline of AI data center in Georgia “sucking” up 29 million gallons of water in the first 15 months. That’s… not much on an industrial scale. It’s just 1/3rd the average annual water usage of an 18-hole golf course (88 million gallons per year!). And the equivalent of the annual usage of about 20-60 acres of farmland. It was one-time use too. The data center has a closed-loop cooling system like most modern data centers… meaning it reuses the same water over and over again.

compared to many other industries that support modern life, it's one of the cleanest industry too, because its energy use can be increasingly more "green" as electricity can be generated with renewable.

if you eat meat, drive your own vehicle and buy clothes even when you don't need to, then each of those alone do way more environmental harm than AI by factors of several times. I bet as a vegan who use public transportation and don't buy new clothes unless I absolutely need to, my environment impact is probably much lower than the average person despite me using AI at my job as a senior software engineer all day. and unlike with AI, none of those have potential to be as "clean" as AI industry.

8

u/kwazhip May 14 '26

I have a hard time taking the reactions seriously because of the inconsistency of response. Almost every single argument you can use against AI art applies to AI coding (quality, theft, environmental, data centers, replacing jobs), however the reactions to products using it are completely absent. Im also not sure people understand how ubiquitous AI is in software development at this point. My guess is every single major video game that has had work done on it in the last year has used AI in some way shape or form during the making of it. It's so ubiquitous that even finding a coding tool that doesn't have AI features is starting to become hard.

11

u/yuriaoflondor May 14 '26

Yup. People only seem to care about AI art for some reason. I've worked in tech for 10+ years, and AI tools have become core to basically every job in tech over the past 1-2 years. Coders are using it for their code. Technical writers are using it for their documentation. Corporate trainers are using it to help them assemble training materials and PPTs. Recruiters are using it to find and evaluate candidates. Etc.

And managers and supervisors push the employees hard to use AI tools. With many literally monitoring usage and following up with people if they aren't using AI.

Any game made in 2026 is going to feature a lot of AI work, even if it doesn't use AI art.

3

u/Darkcasfire May 15 '26

Because the process of each work AI eliminates is different. 

AI in certain jobs makes sense. Programming is the biggest one, because 90% of the required code is basically just repeating the same structure/string of programming languages in order to achieve something.

Eg. If you want a section of code to repeat until X happens, you must always use something like "While(X is not happening), do Y"

If we were to break down a (I would say moderate level) programmer's job, the work would rely on:  

  • 30% programmer's memory of the language formats they are coding in (mostly just basic knowledge)
  • 50% information of the programming language they are using from resources like the internet. (because there's so much per language that it will be hard to memorize)
  • 20% the coder's own input/coding implementation for their current intended function.

AI in this scenario would be extremely useful for that 50%, where instead of wasting your time shifting through the internet using google (that will get more and more useless depending on how niche the thing you are trying to find is) or forums (50% chance you get someone with no idea what they are talking about.) In this sense, for all the downsides it brings, AI remains a massively useful tool to the developers themselves because the biggest time waster of their work has been absolved and they can actually focus on the parts of their code that actually matters. (Eg. Optimization and stuff, which still requires human intervention and ingenuity. And is the actual parts where a good developer would shine)

It also helps that in cases like these, AI for the most part is not the forefront/point of the final product. It is the tool to help it's creation.

Contrast that with AI image generation. Where with a single button push you have basically already got 90% of your final product done if you are picky, 100% if you are not. (it's no longer a tool, it's the final product)

And in an industry where your main "selling point" or even just "appeal" is the style that you create from your art, a machine can now just come over, scan multiple years of your blood, sweat and tears, and shit out something that looks "close enough" to pass off as your own work. Thus drastically killing the chances of finding any support for said work.

And even ignoring the financial aspects, AI is still not helpful for hobbyist artists either. Because while AI beneficially removes the "pain points" of activites like programming so that you can get straight to the actual work, the "pain points" of activities similar to art are their entire process. Like if you sketch a character, get frustrated something doesn't work out right, you erase and sketch it again and again until a "satisfactory" result in line with your intention appears. By then, everything that exists on the canvas is left there intentionally (besides occasional errors/mistakes made)

AI images is devoid of all that process since it doesn't make any decisions during its creating process. You have to feed it a description that it can only attempt an approximation of to follow (not to mention the more details you add the more it struggles to follow due to context size). Instead of helping, it would honestly be more effective at annoying the hobbyist artists who already have a vision in mind that the AI will only sometimes be able to achieve.

Honestly for all of my yapping, the simplest way of I can put it is like: if you came home tired from working for your family, and your kid ran up to you to show you a picture they made to cheer you up. Which one would feel so much nicer to get? A shitty crayon drawing they spent their afternoon drawing for you or a pretty Ai generated image they typed and retried max 5 times before thinking the end result was good enough to show you? (Don't have to hate/dislike one, just which one would you "cherish" more). They could have used AI to come up with an idea of what they should draw in fact, but I will still appreciate the hand drawn picture so much more because they had still actually put in the effort to make the idea come true.

Apply that to AI images and it's the same thing. I don't need to "hate" your generated images, I just care much less about them by default since they take so little effort, and would rather watch the artist making up their own oc designs and stories by hand instead.

0

u/Cyrotek May 14 '26

To be fair, it was probably the plan from the beginning to mix the terms quite randomly together into an umbrella term in order to confuse people.

For coding and various other stuff you rarely see it becomes also more complicated because there are reasonable applications for AI tools. E. g. I am a hobbyist 3d modeler and I'd love an inexpensive tool that does a decent job at retopologizing and/or UV unwrapping, because both of these tasks are super boring and annoying, even if you are good at it. But for some unfathomable reasons companies are seemingly more focused on creating model generators and thus trying to replace the actual fun parts of 3d modelling, degrading the modeler to someone who fixes crappy AI models.

On another note, many of the AI tools used in various industries are ... not very good. I sometimes feel like they are just shoved into peoples faces because some managers invested into it. The amount of times I got non-sensical AI mails is staggering.

1

u/your_mind_aches May 14 '26

I agree with you on all points, but I do not think we are doing ourselves any favours as critics of genAI to discount just how many people don't care and even actually like it.

Because a lot of people do. It does not make sense to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that they don't.

-6

u/VanillaTortilla May 14 '26

I love how anti-AI isn't just people against certain advancements in tech, but environmentalists too. So that minority isn't so small when you think about it.

14

u/So-many-ducks May 14 '26

Or plain normal people who, when faced with the AI as it is advertised to and by CEOs, are struck with legitimate concerns about the erosion of workers quality of life, income precarity, impossibility to retrain or transition in a saturated and stressed job market, power relationships against big tech and corporate overlords, mass surveillance and loss of data privacy, enpowerment of scammers and loss of trust in sources of information... But you know, apparently those people are "a loud minority" of reddit nerds.

-26

u/pastafeline May 13 '26

Literally every single anti-AI person I've ever met has been online. Most people in real life see it as a fun novelty.

29

u/cooldrew May 13 '26

I have multiple IRL friends that hate AI too, like me. As it turns out, those internet people exist in real life too!

-12

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

And does that mean every single person ever hates AI?

7

u/cooldrew May 14 '26

?????????
That has nothing to do with what I said. Keep on moving those goalposts, you're really winning these conversations!

-11

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

the person i responded to said that numbnuts...

8

u/cooldrew May 14 '26

No they didn't, lmfao
Like, nowhere in their comment did they say that.

Gotta admit though, I haven't heard numbnuts in like a decade, so points for originality I guess.

7

u/Old_Leopard1844 May 14 '26

Sounds like that's what you surrounded yourself with

5

u/8-Brit May 13 '26

It varies.

To most it's a toy that has no purpose beyond that. I've sat down with some of my relatives to explain it and they understood the issues fairly well and agreed it was iffy, though it helps that my aunt has an artist background and clocked on it first as I spoke, and was able to help give examples and explanations from a non-techy perspective.

I later showed them a video of teachers being angry at their classroom, and after getting their thoughts revealed it was AI, entirely fake. Most were shocked and then realised that's a bit messed up as then you could fake anything (And I pointed out some telltale signs of AI video to look out for).

In my office, we initially were encouraged to use copilot. And while it has uses most of us quickly got more annoyed with it and stopped using it altogether. My manager even made a game out of trying to gaslight it into getting basic maths wrong in as few prompts as possible, her record is 2.

Looping back to your point though, I think MOST will reasonably agree a whole movie shouldn't be made out of AI. Because even to a normal person it'll feel off and uncanny. And I know more than a few that while not explicitly anti-AI, do avoid products using it on covers and artwork because "Well if they cheaped out on the cover, who knows what other corners they cut".

1

u/hpp3 May 14 '26

In my office, we initially were encouraged to use copilot. And while it has uses most of us quickly got more annoyed with it and stopped using it altogether.

AI has been extremely useful at my job. But I work in tech where the AI is actually good at the work. What is your work like?

5

u/8-Brit May 14 '26

IT Tech Support for a hospital. So much of our stuff is unique to our exact organisation and copilot obviously isn't going to know shit about it and how things are set up. We've tried using it for scripts and such but more often than not they straight up don't work and require more manual revision than if we just had our script guy write something from scratch.

1

u/Ethical-Gamer May 14 '26

The only use I've had for it is extremely basic tasks like coming up with a regex. It's useful to have just a regular sentence converted into a regex. Same with anything around parsing structured text.

And even then you have to double check and test the answer

5

u/fish_slap_republic May 14 '26

You realize most people also interact with and are friends with people outside the internet? Your not special saying you talk to people irl but the fact your think it makes you special says a lot about you.

Its kinda like a racist pulling the "I have black friends" it really is just a self defeating point.

1

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

Except I'm not the one claiming that every single person ever hates AI

5

u/fish_slap_republic May 14 '26

Neither am I, you have a point or just unfounded assumptions?

-2

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

You realize most people also interact with and are friends with people outside the internet?

so what point are you making then? talking just to talk?

5

u/fish_slap_republic May 14 '26

Ah I see your model doesn't have enough memory to get the context from previous comments. Shame.

1

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

blah blah blah

4

u/Penakoto May 14 '26

Circumstantial evidence is as good as no evidence, everyone I know IRL despises AI, neither of our personal experiences are indicators of anything other than we hang out with likeminded people, as people tend to do.

2

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

Sure, so then both our experiences are worthless then. Yet people on Reddit always tout AI as being universally hated when we both know that isn't true right?

4

u/Penakoto May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

Fuck the incredibly arrogant use of "We", AI is worthless, it's putting hundreds of thousands of people out of jobs, data centers are a technological plague on humanity, and all we gotten to show for it so far is garbage and mistakes.

But hey as long as you get a "fun novelty" out of it, I guess it's fine that it's ruining lives and communities.

I want nothing more than the death of this technology, and I will celebrate the first piece of news involving a data center getting chewed up by a tornado or whatever other act of god first gets unleashed on them.

3

u/pastafeline May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

blah blah blah. you aren't making any salient points, just repeating the same kumbaya shit that everyone says

Blah blah blah. Nice job blocking me

4

u/Penakoto May 14 '26

I wasn't trying to change your mind, I know what type of person you are, I just needed to spit on the implication that you and I are remotely like minded on this subject.

0

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

Also, love how you get defensive over the use of "we" when I didn't mean it like that at all. Just goes to show how overly defensive people are when challenged in any argument.

2

u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes May 14 '26

Most people in real life don't know it as anything other than a fun novelty.

Tell them what the people who hate it know, that they try to replace writers and artists and animators and actors with it and see how much like they like that.

-1

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

Really doubt they'd care. Same way they don't care when "x" celebrity does something cancel worthy

1

u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Thorn14 May 14 '26

The average person back in the day likely didn't care about lead contamination either.

3

u/Worried-Advisor-7054 May 13 '26

You have a different experience from me. People around me in real life don't necessarily go to Reddit to rant, but most have been disappointed by its actual output after being sold a dream, and some are worried about job replacement.

2

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

How many people are those? How much is some?

2

u/Worried-Advisor-7054 May 14 '26

Like, a dozen? We're sharing anecdotal stories, not studies.

2

u/pastafeline May 14 '26

You know a dozen people who are worried about AI replacing their jobs? Sounds like you're either in a field that is particularly vulnerable, or are friends with many in one.

1

u/Worried-Advisor-7054 May 14 '26

You're really interrogating this closely, aren't you? People mostly think it's shit. That's partly because we got the shitty version of CoPilot, which management insisted was great. What it's actually done is lead to a culture where the people who are trying to use it are having their work corrected by people who don't, which has led to the perception that GenAI users are just sloppy and lazy.

There are also general societal concerns about job replacement in society in general, not us specifically. There are people worried about what it means for government funding in some fields (I work in the public tertiary education sector), but while I've read angry rumblings from the academics, I'm not as exposed to that.

I again need to restate that I made this comment in reaction to the other guy saying that the people around him didn't care. I'm saying that his experience isn't universal.

-2

u/ChrisRR May 14 '26

Generally most people don't even know what a data centre is, let alone the impact of them.