The Alters is a narrative-driven sci-fi survival management sim about a research facility populated by clones. It released in June to positive reviews, with critics praising it for wedding interesting character interactions to the usual management sim churn. Now it’s getting flamed for incorporating AI slop. The studio behind it took to social media to defend itself, saying that a viral screenshot of an LLM text-generating prompt was an isolated incident and was never supposed to be kept in the game.
The text in question is part of a terminal display in the environment and was first shared on Reddit over a week ago, but it didn’t start to attract widespread attention until the weekend when it was shared on Bluesky. The station log displayed in the image includes a bunch of astronomical data, though it was the out-of-place words at the top that raised questions. “Sure, here’s a revised version focusing purely on scientific and astronomical data,” it reads, suggesting it was copy-and-pasted from a ChatGPT-like prompt box.
Another image from one of the in-game movies that characters can watch also displayed clear leftover language from a machine-translation service in the Portuguese subtitles. The allegations began to spread, with some on social media claiming to have spotted other examples of AI-generated content in The Alters, including a character portrait. With various parts of the game becoming suspect, developer 11 Bit Studios posted a response on June 30 to try to clarify the situation.
“During production, an AI-generated text for a graphic asset, which was meant as a piece of background texture, was used by one of our graphical designers as a placeholder,” the company wrote. “This was never intended to be a part of the final release. Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this single placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game.” 11 Bit Studios said it conducted a thorough review and found no other incidents. Its defense for the movie translations, meanwhile, was that it planned to replace them with authored ones after launch, but didn’t have time beforehand and didn’t want to deprive non-English speakers of helpful context.
“Those few external movies are approx. 10k words out of 3.4 million across all languages in the game, or just 0.3 percent of the overall text,” the studio wrote. But despite being “committed to transparency in how we make our games,” 11 Bit Studios has not yet responded to requests for comment from Kotaku or others that elaborate on the company’s actual stance regarding generative AI tools. Are they permitted to help create in-game assets or text? What makes something “meaningful, handcrafted storytelling” if even just a few of those elements were offloaded to AI, whether in the brainstorming process or the final version of the game?
“The use cases, admittedly very transparently laid out here, have been done without genAI for decades,” wrote artist and illustrator aurahack on Bluesky. “This all reads a lot like ‘we’re sorry we got caught’ because there’s no recognition here of why this poses any kind of problem ethically or creatively. 0.3 percent is not a lot but it’s more than enough to cast a shadow over the rest of your work! If I know it was used there, willingly, how do I know it’s not used in parts we can’t ever know about? During drafting, during concept art, during texture creation?”
A recent GDC survey showed AI tools are making their way into more and more game studios, whether the people working there like it or not. So far reactions have run the gamut. Some have argued for use cases in areas like QA, while others worry the technology will put most creatives out of business. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer previously claimed AI could be used to make more games backwards compatible, but so far the technology has only produced rubbish or, in the case of The Alters, accidental, placeholder slop.
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