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PayPalAI continues to be everywhere, and now it's appearing on the GOG store too most recently a big banner for their New Year Sale. In related news: GOG recently launched the GOG Patrons program to support them directly to revive classic games, and then they were acquired by one of the original co-founders.
More recent related news is that they're even looking to bring GOG Galaxy to Linux (finally!) with a new job opening - that link is quite relevant here now too since it notes one of the responsibilities is to "Actively use and promote AI-assisted development tools", and so this news could further derail a lot of good-will for GOG from customers to game developers.
A post on Reddit I spotted pointed out there seemed to be some AI generation on the GOG store page, and when you look at it properly - there's a lot of issues with it. Like how the console is just melting. Also a bit of an odd choice anyway, since they're a PC store - why feature a clearly Nintendo-styled old console? Here's the image currently in question:
One of the GOG team "KosmicznaPluskwa" ended up replying on the official GOG forum, with quite a wall of text styled ramble noting they're not a company spokesperson but they're replying on this "because I personally want to", and just before the rant they did confirm clearly "OK, so to clear the air - current sale banner is fully AI. Not my work. This is all I can say on this". As for their ramble, they clearly feel pretty strongly on this, so perhaps GOG are going to see some internal pushback on this.
I'll copy the end of their little ramble because it felt important:
Maybe it doesn't matter some store put out sloppy work on promo banner - in the end everyone is just there to buy the product - but I know I enjoy seeing cool new artworks out there, when I'm out to buy new products as well. When I buy a new cool figure I like to keep the box around if it's pretty - this is kind of the same, but on digital level. More cool art to see on top of buying art (video games in our case here) is always more cool art in the world and this is what I'm happy to have. So with everyone also feeling strongly in this thread - I'm with you. And continue speaking up - in the face of future we don't like to see, complacency is not the way.
Regardless of any thoughts on it one thing remains clear - the more AI generation is used for the little things "it's just this, it's just that!" - the more it will be accepted, and the more it will replace actual people. We'll see less actual art, less real intentional character in what we see - and more slop with melting consoles.
Not the best look for GOG. When you're a smaller store, one that has clearly struggled in the past, this kind of cost-cutting by replacing artists and marketing people with AI generation is probably not going to go over too well with the wider gaming community.
GOG have been contacted for a statement, I will update if they reply.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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You can also find comments for this article on social media: Quoting: apocalyptechI'm trying not to think about GOG using genAI to fiddle with the games. It does sound like an idea they'd be entertaining. Then again, it wouldn't make for great marketing material a la their recent yt videos. "Oh, ya, we just prompted Copilot and then our lone programmer who works part time twice a year looked at the code for 5s, plz tip, the end."Quoting: suchI disagree in that not paying for a few pieces of art isn't a proper saving, just one you report to particularly... challenged management to get them off your back. That goes triple if you're generating this much negative sentiment. That can have more of a sales impact than your sales banner.Oh sure, I was honestly more referring to the other indications that they're going all-in on AI (such as that quote from the job posting that I'd pasted above). Having generative images as banners on the site is, I'm guessing, just the tip of the iceberg.
Quoting: tmtvlI'm still going to keep buying games on GOG because the anti-DRM stance is more important than 'oh, they used an AI-generated image' (we don't even know whether the model used is an ethically trained model or not) or 'oh, their launcher doesn't run on GNU/Linux' (you can just download the game from the website and there's Lutris and Heroic and Minigalaxy). I also buy games on Steam and Itch because I know any and all of those bastards will stab me in the back when the mood takes them (and seriously, fuck Valve, fuck GOG, and double fuck Itch for stiffing the fucking devs out of the money their fans pay).It's slop. If you like it, OK, but it's undeniable the image quality is abysmal. On top of that there are all the other problems (massive copyright violation, that I suspect is happening here also, environmental disaster, hoarding causing 5x RAM price increase...). But even setting these aside, if you don't care about the presentation of your store and put slop on it...
Is AI bad? Well, Adobe Firefly is apparently trained on specifically licensed content where Adobe paid the creators for making the materials the model was trained on, there's also Vaisual and Tess and Mitsua and gods know what else. Maybe whoever provided the banner art for GOG used one of those? But no, AI = bad, so let's not use our brains and just condemn; that's always worked out best.
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