discussion Why do you dislike AI art in games?

[dybolom]

What I've seen so far, using AI art for VN's does not work well because AI has a hard time keeping the character appearance consisted and there is no intend behind character poses. Few games that were had consisted AI generated character images were abandoned quickly.

 

[Captain Panda]

So programmers who using assets and previously written commands, shouldn't be paid.

As well as all musicians today, because all of them using "samples" from classic music.

Oh and kids in school, students in university and anyone who must do math or calculate anything and using calculator for that should have positive grades or paid as well?

Saying someone don't deserve something because it's wasn't made by him personally... Some artists so bad at painting, that I don't see a reason why I should paid anything for something I could do by myself

more in the sense that i use AI to make music but i would never ask someone to pay to listen to it, it feels like a short cut to get to what people work hard for. an as to the calculator thing a calculator used to be a job like hired to help with the moon landing but it is now a tool.

but using something as a reference to make new things is one thing, having a machine do everything and then earning from it is a little different. think there are some laws behind it but it is fuzzy cuz its all very new stuff.

 

[ZDaGoat]

I do not hate AI images in games at all. The consistency of characters is a real issue though. AI tooling is in constant development. Literally every month a new breakthrough tool comes out that might be very useful and top notch when developing your VN further.

When i started thinking about making my own VN, the switch from Stable Diffusion to SDXL was not completed yet. Later came Pony, then Illustrious, Flux, now Qwen. And then animation tools, from the first decent animations with AnimateDiff to WAN 2.2 is a huge development too.

If you stick to the development of your VN, you gotta be ready to take the effort to work for consistency. The newer tools like Qwen are quite good at it, but not perfect, especially if you aim for certain levels of lewdness.
It is very hard to get characters consistent over the various models you might use over time. At some point, you cannot just scrap all the old stuff and start over from scratch.

With these newer technologies like IPAdapter, Qwen and keyframe-based animations with WAN, consistency issues can be reduced, but it still is a constant struggle.

Some older AI games stick with their initial toolset and model, avoiding consistency issues due to tool breaches, but then they lack things you only get with the new stuff, impressive scenes that require a more elaborated model or even animated scenes. My game takes another approach, but i really struggle with consistency and I 100% admit that if you hate even minor inconsistencies, it might put you off.

This said the whole idea of my game, done with 3D/DAZ/hand drawn art, would be either impossible or a multi million dollar project, anyway not something one dude can do in his freetime while working a fulltime job.
AI can create vivid, chaotic sceneries, stuff that you will have a really hard time modelling, with a special visual quality following your stylistic choices. I especially take pride in literal hours of animations by the next version and AI-powered rich sound design with music and AI-generated sounds and voiceovers that is definitely contribute to the game. All made with AI. AI even helps me coding some of the RENPY stuff. It is just saving a lot of time. The result, i admit it, may not be for everyone, but you have to start somewhere.

 

[misterfluffums]

If you stick to the development of your VN, you gotta be ready to take the effort to work for consistency. The newer tools like Qwen are quite good at it, but not perfect, especially if you aim for certain levels of lewdness.
It is very hard to get characters consistent over the various models you might use over time. At some point, you cannot just scrap all the old stuff and start over from scratch.

With these newer technologies like IPAdapter, Qwen and keyframe-based animations with WAN, consistency issues can be reduced, but it still is a constant struggle.

Honestly though, your game showed me that great AI animations are doable for hobby developers and it absolutely stunned me when I checked it out last week. I haven't been able to pull it off myself yet, but it still amazes me that there's hope to one day pull it off at all, so thank you for showing me what's possible

For consistency, I'm having reasonable results training LoRAs for my characters based off images I produced with flux kontext (which I then can use with a model good at lewd). It's an incredible amount of work, but I only should need to create the training set once, and every time I switch to a more modern model I should be able to relatively easy retrain the LoRA and keep character consistency high. That's only a solution for still images though, I don't think you can do the same for animations.

This said the whole idea of my game, done with 3D/DAZ/hand drawn art, would be either impossible or a multi million dollar project, anyway not something one dude can do in his freetime while working a fulltime job.
AI can create vivid, chaotic sceneries, stuff that you will have a really hard time modelling, with a special visual quality following your stylistic choices. I especially take pride in literal hours of animations by the next version and AI-powered rich sound design with music and AI-generated sounds and voiceovers that is definitely contribute to the game. All made with AI. AI even helps me coding some of the RENPY stuff. It is just saving a lot of time. The result, i admit it, may not be for everyone, but you have to start somewhere.

When I started my game, I really thought that maybe one day I'd be able to get enough donations to commission real art for it, until I sat down and started calculating how much it would cost to replace all the images I already had.

It was completely unrealistic. And thats with still images, I dont wanna know what your animations would cost to commission from a traditional artist.

-----

On the flipside, you can now produce 9 slop mass produced VNs in the time 1 dedicated dev would put in a single chapter of his non-slop game, so I understand that AI graphics make people wary.

 

[HuiEtyud]

I have no love nor hate for AI art, personally. My profile picture is AI (it's actually my D&D character portrait, but I decided to use it here too).

Some AI art looks really good. Others.......less so. Though I do enjoy Of Devotion and Despondence, which uses the quirky AI art to its advantage, using the bad renders to shape and describe the world around them. (The game is basically set in an alternate dimension/the afterlife, and reality is fluid and always changing, which means that people and locations might not look the same between images. Honestly, it's a clever way to cover the gross inconsistencies with early AI art.)

On one hand, I'm of the camp that if you want to make money from your game, at the very least use AI art as placeholders until you can get an artist. Use AI to give yourself a foundation to build off of. But on the other hand...I don't care enough about the issue to have a firm end-all stance. I'm not your daddy. At the end of the day, I'm a consumer. And if it looks good enough and plays well enough, I'll consume it. If it's lazy, I won't. The market will always decide.

Edit to add: I'm using the royal "you," in case that wasn't obvious. I'm not speaking to anyone in particular.

 

[Whaddafok]

It's the inconsistencies between AI pictures of the same character, making them look like a completely different character. I don't know why but I find very distracting.
Don't get me on open blouses, I fucking hate seeing buttons on both sides or the space between buttons not being the same for all.
I hope I'm not alone with that...

If the prompter("artist") fixes those issues it's generally fine though.

 

[User_201062]

I know this is a really old thread, but my issue is that the styles are always the same. It gets boring fast.

 

[amypames]

i think AI art in general is not great for many reasons, but in a porn game i'm not gonna complain if it looks decent.

 

[irrevesible]

AI art could be good, if it weren't so detectable, you can currently spot AI art cause of how generically they all look the same

 

[fakeaccount]

AI art could be good, if it weren't so detectable, you can currently spot AI art cause of how generically they all look the same

Exactly what I came to say. AI art all looks the same. I mean sure DAZ character models are pretty generic, but a good dev can at least create some emotion or personality with them. AI art is all just shiny, weird faced girls.

 

[Quetz]

1-1) If the AI art was good (consistent, no artifacts and weird stuff like odd fingers and skin and eyes, thematically-appropriate skin tones and features, no weird disconnect between subject and environment), and the art style could be whatever type you preferred (hyperrealism, 3D anime like, cartoonish, or whatever), would you be ok with it being used to make games?

When AI-generated art gets indiscernible from manually created renders, then I think this will become a moot point.
The main issue I have with AI art today is that consecutive images often don't look sequential and that consistency of characters and environments isn't great. Posing in DAZ or Blender, on the other hand, allows a developer to meticulously manipulate poses and facial expressions. AI just isn't there yet.

1-2) Would you prefer "good" AI to asset swap art? (Asset swap is when you pick a 2D or 3D hair and snap it to a base model. RPG Maker is an example of asset swaps for sprite creation. Some WebGL games use asset swap libraries for 3D characters.)

Never gave this much thought, tbh. In general, I'm fine with the art and direction a developer decided to go in. If we're talking about a customizable main character, then sure.

1-3) Would you prefer "good" AI to porn inserts of real people?

Depends on the context, I think. If we're talking about taking someone's porn video and cutting it into a VN, then I'd rather see "good" AI art.
If it's a game that's created by using (and directing) porn actors, then I'm all for it.
There's probably a middle where AI gets used to create rigging of 3D models by watching porn.

1-4) Would you prefer "good" AI to DAZ 3D models?
1-5) Would you prefer "good" AI to hand-drawn art?

No preference.
One of the largest complaints on these forums is that a game takes too long to develop/update. If a "good" AI can allow a developer to finish their game in one year instead of five, then I'm all for it regardless of the art style.
Sure, there will be a lot of low-effort slop once "good" AI becomes easy to use, but that's what the rating system is for.

2) Have you tried making AI art yourself?

No, unless playing with Grok counts.

3-1) If you prefer 3D models, is it because they are more likely to be animated?

No, I just find 3D art easier to immerse myself in, even HS(2).

3-2) If "good" AI was animated just as often, would you still prefer DAZ assets?

Honestly, I wish people would stop using AI to animate every little scene. I'm reading an AVN, not watching a movie. They're different forms of art.

4-1) If you prefer 3D models, is it because you associate them with a less-anime look?

No, I'm fine with anime. I just find myself more easily immersed when the images look realistic. For instance, even Koikatsu games have to be much better written to get me immersed. It's even worse for hand-drawn or anime style.

4-2) If AI art looked more realistic instead of having an anime look, would you still prefer 3D models?

You lost me. What is this anime look that AI art is supposed to have?

 

[przemomarkam]

AI in good, hands will be good AI in bad hands will be realy out of place, fake and repetitive thats my take .If u give some tools to my jobless uncle or to engineer who will make better work with them i know on who i would bet ,sorry uncle.

 

[Republican Bear]

Honestly I don't hate or love it and it mostly depends on how it's used and implemented.

As you can tell it's A.I as most use the same style and it doesn't fit the game.

Then I've seen it improve 3D renders and make the characters more life life.

 

[Gluttony258]

A lot of posts I have read on the site say they don't like AI art in games. I am curious about the reasons why.


Edit on Nov 24 at 4pm British Time: Most of the answers so far are mostly saying the dislike is because of bad experiences with games that do a poor job with it. I am skeptical of games made with RenPy because a lot of RenPy games are trash in my opinion (easy to make with low effort), but I don't dislike RenPy because of that.

So I am curious about a few other things. The answers won't change the way that I made things (I usually don't make games or mods with character images at all anyway). I am just curious.

1-1) If the AI art was good (consistent, no artifacts and weird stuff like odd fingers and skin and eyes, thematically-appropriate skin tones and features, no weird disconnect between subject and environment), and the art style could be whatever type you preferred (hyperrealism, 3D anime like, cartoonish, or whatever), would you be ok with it being used to make games?

1-2) Would you prefer "good" AI to asset swap art? (Asset swap is when you pick a 2D or 3D hair and snap it to a base model. RPG Maker is an example of asset swaps for sprite creation. Some WebGL games use asset swap libraries for 3D characters.)

1-3) Would you prefer "good" AI to porn inserts of real people?

1-4) Would you prefer "good" AI to DAZ 3D models?

1-5) Would you prefer "good" AI to hand-drawn art?

2) Have you tried making AI art yourself?


This purpose of this thread wasn't to ask about DAZ models but so many people on this site seem to prefer them that I am also curious about

3-1) If you prefer 3D models, is it because they are more likely to be animated?

3-2) If "good" AI was animated just as often, would you still prefer DAZ assets?

4-1) If you prefer 3D models, is it because you associate them with a less-anime look?

4-2) If AI art looked more realistic instead of having an anime look, would you still prefer 3D models?

Usually for me it boils down to the art looking too similar.

1-1 - yeah, if the story is good
1-2 - I dont prefer either
1-3 - 100%, especially since AI can at least make the characters consistent. My biggest issue with those kinds of games is that one character changes hairstyles 7 times during a single sex scene
1-4 - not really
1-5 - no

2 - yeah, its quite fun to try

3-1 - usually its cause they have more thought put into them and there isnt much people can screw up
3-2 - if it was good, i wouldnt mind

4-1 - not really, the game can be done with koikatsu which is 100% an anime look and I still like the models
4-2 - hard to tell

 

[forthed]

AI on games is kinda weird, i dont like it bc i has the same problem as real porn, i think is even worse bc at least real porn isn't blatantly artificial

 

[Deleted member 211372]

Most of it seems like lazy and samey to everything else.
There is some where it's done well, like Taffy Tales is a good example.
But yeah most of it just feels like crud to me.

 

[porphyris52]

No not anymore. The generic stuff? Yes 10000% The realistic stuff? Not at all.

At one point I didn't even like screenshots from Illusion games but if the story is good, then I was hooked. If people can have the same control like making a scene in an Illusion dev mode, then why not?
Ethically it doesn't matter since all of this is pirated anyway.

Most of it looks generic, these days. If I recognize it as "AI-Art", I loose interest.

 

[pike]

Because 99% of the time it's completely monotonous, low quality, crooked, and soulless. AI slop is visible from afar

 

[Crime Meat]

Actual art requires putting something of yourself into it. Even in this nonsense little space, there is a bit of human connection, wondering about the horny lunatic who just had to draw that ass as fat as he possibly could. Eroticism without human connection is, I suppose, masturbation in its purest form. A fully self involved and hollow activity.

 

[Deleted member 212553]

Not a hate but lack of labor for quality.