It is very obvious that some devs like ATS and Incredible Trains have used AI to generate in-game text. What is the community's thoughts on this?
Do you have an example in mind ? As long as it's reviewed (and corrected if necessary) by a human, I say why not ?
It's pretty egregious on Manchester. The main thing that detracts from an otherwise brilliant remodel of Piccadilly is posters with planes with an odd number of engines on each wing, or horrifically deformed bottles of... unidentifiable stuff melting into other stuff with nonsense assemblages of letters..
AI Generated anything is not something I'd want to see in products that I purchase. Not only is it due to the ethical concerns that it raises with AI stealing resources and genuine human creations for it's own... cobbled together gobbledygook. But, even if you don't care about the above, it also raises technical concerns. It's not a technology that's in any way stable as of right now, AI coding tends to be a mess, AI art absolutely is a mess, AI text also is a mess. It's all for the single reason that current models aren't true Artificial Intelligence, they do not nor are capable of understanding any amounts of information that they consume which seems to be turning into a really strange version of snake eating it's own tail... All of this isn't something I want to see inside of my fairly expensive products. If a developer is so inclined to go down that route... which they shouldn't but unfortunately that's what some people decide to do to cut costs, IT MUST BE DISCLOSED IN THE DESCRIPTION as clearly as possible. Otherwise, it's just dishonest and disrespectful to us as consumers.
AI can be/is used for lots of things in game development. AI up scaling for example. I don’t think it’s really a bad thing as long as it’s being QA’d properly.
The only use I’d like to see for AI is to subtitle some of the audible messages you get on German and other European trains so we know what they are saying. Or for the passenger announcements. I know playing in the native language only is probably authentic for purely local, internal services but it would be nice to have an English translation as a subtitle.
Good morning folks, Could you please let me know where exactly you have found these AI-generated images/text? Especially in the case of the art assets, it might be a case of a placeholder being left in the game unintentionally. All the best, Jan
The art seems obviously AI generated. Obviously they cannot use legit ads in the game, besides the Pringles collab DTG did, it should work using AI generated stuff for this. Just correctly review the output and not let the egregious hallucinations through, while also disclosing that AI was used as per fair use and platform guidelines. I am not sure of the text though, it could be just badly written, one hyphen and long sentences wouldnt necessarily mean its an AI text.
Perhaps AI could be used to take over the profanity filters that DTG love to use? Then we might get something that can tell the difference between a passenger and someone's bottom.
Thank you for the images. This is obviously not ideal, I will get in touch with the appropriate teams to figure out what happened here. For now I would assume that these are placeholders that were supposed to be replaced by actual assets, but I will report back ASAP. EDIT: Regarding the text, this will be harder to figure out. While I can see where the suspicion is coming from, there is a good chance that this was just written like that. Or, maybe, a tool like Grammarly was used to check the text. Regardless, I will get in touch with the right teams and report back.
Could you let me know where exactly you found this? I was able to confirm the images mentioned by eldomtom above, but if there are any other instances, it would be good to know.
Similarly, in Spoorlijn Zwolle-Groningen the art for billboards and the restaurant in Assen are littered with awful 'Dutch' texts that doesn't make sense.
Having looked into these just now, they all seem to make sense, at least when translated using Google Translate or online translators like leo.org. Keep in mind that these were likely placed by devs who don't speak Dutch natively. If you have any specific feedback for mistranslations, I'd happily hear them, but this won't fit into the discussion about AI generated content in this thread. Still, always happy to hear feedback for translations, especially since I'm personally also very passionate about these kinds of things. We certainly had some similar issues with German routes in the past. That is true. However, keep in mind that with ElevenLabs we use licensed voices. In some instances you can hear Matt's voice that has been synthesized using ElevenLabs. So any AI generated voices you can hear in our games are used under license and the original voice actors these voices are based on are compensated.
I'm a bit surprised you running Matt's voice (of all people) through AI, could I ask why you are synthesising his voice? Ye (F.K.A Kanye West) did the same thing for one of his latest albums (Vultures 2) and it came of as pure laziness from his fanbase. I am inclined to feel the same way based off that previous experience, but would like to keep an open mind.
Nonsense like "the intensity of Euston platforms" and "the essence of daily commuter journeys and Euston-bound travel" are exactly the sort of stuff AI spouts.
As a native speaker of Dutch, I can tell you they don't make sense, and they make these assets look bad. I actually brought this up with Matt last year, I now invited you to the discussion I don't have the screenshots anymore, but if you want, I can look them up again, although I've described them.
Matt has voiced tutorials in the past, something we wanted to continue doing. However, Matt is a) not a trained voice actor and b) has become much, much busier since those days. So we trained ElevenLabs on his voice (with his consent of course) and are using it to now voice some of the newer tutorials. That way we can continue having a familiar voice while also saving Matt some time in his busy schedule. That would be great! Again, I did look at the restaurant menu and the billboards in the underpass, but from a quick Google Translator and leo.org search they seemed fine to me. However, if you as a native speaker say they make no sense we would really appreciate your input. As I said, we have had a history of simiar mistakes with German content because those first party routes are developed by a bunch of Brits that might not speak Dutch or German. At least for the latter I've been trying to educate since I joined nearly three years ago
Yeah the images seem AI, they don't bother me but I get where others take offense. About the text I can't see it as AI as a non English speaker so if it's AI it doesn't not bother me at all.
+1 for this. I personally don’t care about Ai advertisements, just as long as they fit the theme or region of the route. A three engined plane though? Yeah, that’s unacceptable and should have been noticed and fixed by the team. I think Ai advertisements are fine, but if they seem broken or unrealistic then human invention should occur.
It's interesting ( and sometimes amusing ) for an American speaker to read text written or spoken by English speakers. There are more variations or differences than you might think in terms of word order, phrases, syntax (grammar ) and actual words - " sitting " and " sat ", for instance. I'm not very knowledgeable about AI and I'm not suggesting that it's used on this site. But I wonder, never having used one myself, are there English and American versions of AI generators?
That text certainly reads like AI, or at least very generic. Doesn’t seem to add up very well with what the route actually offers.
This is news to me, says something about how little I play the tutorials I suppose. But yeah, no, I'd rather have a different voice, don't really care if Matt consented. The fact you're using AI here's kind of gross when you could just get a different guy to do it. The only reason Matt's kind of fun is because he's a guy we so regularly see and interact with. Telling us it's just a AI clone really takes away from that, and I'd rather just some other random DTG member doing it at that point. It's a bit funny, I just watched A2A's Aerostar videos, because I had been out of the flight sim scene for a while and wanted to play catch up. Some of the videos instead of Scott doing the voice over, they actually got his lead programmer to do it instead. And one of the top comments is praising the fact they actually just used his voice instead of using AI voice over. Find it a sad state of affairs that is praise worthy instead of, you know, the norm. Also I'm just saying, we already have different voices across the tutorial's, TSG has one of their own guys doing the tutorial's I believe, I think Rivet did similar. And I think pretty much all of us love that one guy who did Sand Patch's tutorials. So I don't get why suddenly there's a feeling we have to have Matt do the tutorial's constantly.
Spawn on foot at Manchester Piccadilly, head down to the Trams to Droylsden platform, and across the tracks, you should see this on the far right:
I agree with you, I use some AI tools for work and their output must always be carefully curated by human eyes. Fortunately I haven't come across any "slop" myself, but I do want to point out that Valve require all publishers to fill out an AI Generated Content Disclosure form which is displayed quite prominently between the main description body and system requirements section, as Dovetail have done for TSW 6: But indeed it seems that DLCs don't have this requirement, which is quite unfortunate.
I have no issue with AI text if it can summarize the route or scenario (as long as it’s vetted afterwards). I don’t like AI art personally so I’d prefer if it wasn’t in, although knowing it’s fake ads anyway in a train game, I’m not as concerned about it like I would if it was for other art type of things.
