Owlcat Games studio, known for role-playing games Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader has been heavily criticized for its desire to use AI. The cause of the dissatisfaction was a new vacancy, which was brought to the attention of a Blizzard employee.
On February 26, Owlcat Games posted a vacancy for a concept artist, who, among other things, must create concepts based on neural networks. The list of requirements included the ability to use modern neural network models such as Stable Diffusion, Dalle and Midjourney. The studio later edited the description to remove references to AI.
At the beginning of March, Anna Fedina, concept artist at Blizzard, responded to the vacancy. Developer convicted Owlcat Games on X (Twitter), stating that they would not want to work with such a studio.
I really wanted to work on Owlcat games at the beginning of my career – now I don’t think I want to anymore
This appears to be the first artist job I’ve seen for a major game that calls for using AI to generate art.
After the post went viral and received over two thousand likes, Owlcat Games published an official appeal. In it, the team stated that AI would only be used in the early stages of development.
Guys, we would like to clarify this issue. We are using neural networks as a working tool for our future project, which is currently in an early production stage. AI will be used exclusively for additional work with concepts and acceleration of some internal processes (for example, for creative search, inspiration or coordination of vision before the actual development of the idea).
The final version of the game will not contain graphics generated by neural networks. The same goes for the final concepts. All content is original and drawn by professional artists.
In our previous projects – Rogue Trader and Pathfinder – we did not use neural networks at all.
We are very sorry that we confused you with information about artificial intelligence. We understand that the description may be misinterpreted, so we have removed the mention of neural networks.
It is still unknown what Owlcat Games is currently working on. Previously, a pixel shooter was released on Xbox Game Pass Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun.
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Source: VG Times