The Alters Developer Gets Criticized For Not Disclosing AI Use

As repulsive and off-putting as many in the gaming community find the use of artificial intelligence by game development studios, I'd go out on a limb to claim that a lot of people would likely tolerate the use of generative AI for smaller elements of a game – placeholder assets and Lorem Ipsum-esque text, for instance – had the AI usage been openly disclosed by the developers.

That disclosure – or lack thereof in this case – is precisely why 11 bit studios and their latest hit The Alters found themselves at the center of controversy over the weekend, after two instances of AI-generated content were discovered in the game – one relatively minor, and the other much more blatant and in-your-face.

To get the minor one out of the way first, as seen in the screenshot above, what very much looks like a generic ChatGPT response was spotted in The Alters' Command Center module by Reddit user EarthlingKira.

While the text is incredibly small and clearly not meant to be read – similar to book pages in the original TES IV: Oblivion, which all used the aforementioned Lorem Ipsum – AI use is AI use: lesser, greater, middling, makes no difference, so some were quick to accuse the devs of trying to slip in their usage of artificial intelligence under the radar by not disclosing it on the game's Steam page, something the platform's rules require them to do.

However, as noted by the OP and many in the comments, it just as well might have been a simple easter egg – a joke implying the captain was too lazy and delegated the task of writing the observations to ChatGPT. With both interpretations seeming equally likely, many on the anti-AI side chose to give the studio the benefit of the doubt and didn't see it as a solid reason to criticize 11 bit.

And that probably would've been the end of it, had it not been for that other, more prominent instance of AI use I mentioned earlier. Following EarthlingKira's initial discovery, Overloadr's Heitor De Paola also shared a screenshot of his own, demonstrating a bit of AI-generated text in the game's Brazilian Portuguese dialogue translation, suggesting the localization in this particular language was done by an LLM chatbot.

Here's the screenshot in question, complete with the English translation provided by Lucile Danilov:

Background text is one thing, but an implication that the entire Portuguese-speaking gaming community was fed a lazily-made localization is a whole another beast, so naturally, many lambasted 11 bit for failing to disclose that the translation was done by a machine rather than a human and for the mere fact that AI was used at all, refrencing the "how you do anything is how you do everything" principle and rightfully asking, "If AI was used for localization, where else was it used?"

Although a ChatGPT response appearing in the dialogue window is the smokiest of guns and proof like no other that an LLM was utilized, the main criticism the studio received wasn't for the AI use itself but rather for not making this fact clear to buyers, thus breaking Steam's rules. This, however, raises one more question – was 11 bit studios actually aware of this, and are they really to blame? Surprisingly, the answer is not as straightforward as some might assume.

I did some digging and found that The Alters' Brazilian Portuguese localization was done by an external team of eight people, none of whom are listed as 11 bit employees. This implies the studio may not have been informed about the AI usage and could only be blamed for insufficient QA, rather than any deliberate attempt to cover anything up.

The individuals in question are Paulo Gorniak, Igor Stork, Ricardo Douglas, Larissa Gabilan, Angela Zanelato, and Maria Clara Schaeffer – confirmed via Schaeffer's LinkedIn post as actual translators who worked on The Alters – as well as Cyro Leão and Lílian de Melo, whom you can also easily find on LinkedIn, but I couldn't 100% verify to be the Cyro Leão and Lílian de Melo, so no hyperlinks.

Out of those eight, five are employed or were employed until recently by Roboto Global, a Poland-based translation agency with 22 years of experience and partners like Sony, SEGA, Atari, EA, Riot Games, Plaion, and many other big names. With a reputation of that scale, it's unlikely – though not impossible – they'd risk ruining it all by using AI-generated translations – there's simply too much on the line.

That narrows the potential suspects to three freelancers – Gorniak, Leão, and de Melo – who seem more likely to have used AI for their translations. We've reached out to all eight to determine who was responsible for that specific portion of the translation and will update the report if we receive any responses.

As of this writing, 11 bit studios has not addressed the controversy, and the game's Steam page still lacks a disclaimer about the use of AI-made l10n. To be continued...

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