On Wednesday it was time for the dev stream preparing us for the launch of 7.8! And it was... okay? To be honest, there were less "news" than I'd hoped for, though to some degree that was to be expected considering we already knew a fair bit about the patch's major features. Still, I was a bit surprised that they spent a full fifteen minutes recapping the Legacy of the Sith story so far - I have no doubt that's useful to some, but probably not to that many among your hardcore audience that come to watch you live on Twitch. Whenever I glanced at chat people were complaining that they were bored and wanted to move on, and I had to remind myself to not pay too much attention to chat because it always contains a lot of negativity, sadly.
Also, what they told us about Galactic Threads was pretty much the exact same stuff they told us about it a year ago when it was originally meant to launch. Really, the most exciting bit of genuinely new news to me was a note that they'd be updating the large ceiling hooks in strongholds to work like large floor hooks, meaning they'll also contain a three by three grid of small hooks. This is great because the devs gave us a bunch of new small ceiling decorations this season which look really nice but were hard to place in an effective way due to the lack of small ceiling hooks available in almost every single stronghold. Either way, 7.8 still looks exciting to me and I'm very much looking forward to it.
One slightly sad piece of news for German and French players was that the voice work for 7.8 still isn't ready in their languages, so they'll only be able to play the new story in English for now. I wonder why Broadsword couldn't get that done while the English voice actors were on strike - the German and French ones weren't, as far as I'm aware! Either way, I guess it's up to these players to choose whether they want to play through the new story in English or wait even longer.
(Side note: Sometimes I wonder whether a future project for me, once I hit legacy level 50 on all servers, could be something like playing through the class stories in German. I bet hearing all those player characters and familiar NPCs talk in completely different voices would be wild. But I'm getting sidetracked...)
Anyway, I'm not going to go into much more detail about things like new Cartel Market additions and so on. As usual you can find full, detailed breakdowns elsewhere:
I just want to talk about two more things that came out of this livestream. First off, Papa Keith appeared at the end of the stream, and as he so often does, casually dropped a hint about something yet to come that would hype players up. Specifically he said that in his producer's letter for the game's anniversary, he'll be giving us a roadmap for what's coming in the new year, and that they'll be "wrapping up Legacy of the Sith". That's kind of like... telling us that they are working on an 8.0 expansion without telling us that they're working on an 8.0 expansion.
EEEEEEEEEE!
I'm trying not to get too excited just yet because it hasn't been stated explicitly at this point, but it's hard not to be hopeful. I still stand by everything I wrote about the prospect of a new expansion a little over a year ago, but man, would I ever love for a good expac launch to make the game feel exciting and invigorated again. I'm looking forward to learning more.
Now, for something completely different - at the end of the stream, they showed off the new loading screen/key art for patch 7.8:
My reaction to that was something along the lines of "Nice. Lana and Shae's faces look a bit weird though. Oh well." And then I moved on, because a character looking slightly off on the art of a SWTOR loading screen is a pretty common thing. I remember when Legacy of the Sith's key art was first revealed, one of my guildies commented that Lana looked like Adam Driver in a wig, which made me go "oof" but I could also see what he meant!
When I checked social media for chatter about Wednesday's dev stream, I was surprised to see a few comments that accused the new key art of being AI generated. Warning: I'm going to go into way more detail than this probably deserves, but it's a subject that interests me and I kind of fell down a rabbit hole, so you've been warned.
As a certified AI hater my reaction was of course to be shocked and want to find out more. From what I've seen of the SWTOR devs they've always struck me as very pro human creativity and anti AI art, but who knows what's going on behind closed doors when there's money to be saved? I tried to look for more information on where this whole idea came from, but couldn't find more than the same three people or so repeating that it was "obviously" AI, no explanation needed, which was of course not helpful.
Finally Tacogoats, a SWTOR player I follow on Bluesky, shared a link to a tumbler post of his in which he attempted to break down the evidence he saw for the art piece being artificially generated. And for all the details he circled... I did not find it convincing at all. The comments seemed to either be flat out wrong (no, Anri is not missing her index finger; it's right there), issues that I couldn't make out at all, or even if I could kind of see what it was that was bothering him, I still didn't see how these things were in any way evidence of AI involvement. So what if the one knuckle on Malgus' hand has a slightly odd edge? Cause human artists never create the slightest imperfections when drawing hands? I was expecting some kind of "gotcha" like a line from something in the foreground merging into a different line in the background, like you can often get with AI art since it doesn't actually have any concept of three dimensionality. However, there was nothing of the sort.
In fact, the more I looked, the more I became convinced that this couldn't be AI. AI image generators are very good at conjuring up things for which they have lots of references. They can easily create a photorealistic image of a non-existing human because their training data contains millions of photos of humans! What they are not good at is creating very specific details for which they don't have (enough) references. And let's be real, random SWTOR NPCs are not something for which any AI is going to have lots to work with.
I remember when I encountered the very first image generator I'd ever seen - a few years ago now - I tried to get it to generate images of Darth Malgus and Satele Shan and it failed utterly. I think Malgus was a black blur with angry eyes so it clearly had some vague reference for him, but Satele pretty much just resulted in random noise. Obviously things have progressed somewhat since then, but it's not like the internet suddenly got flooded with millions of screenshots or art of all these SWTOR characters that wasn't there before.
I actually got curious enough to dust off my OpenAI login and ask ChatGPT to generate me a "painterly" image of Lana Beniko (since she's one of the characters on the key art). I'll be honest, the result was actually better than I expected. It clearly had enough material to deduce that Lana's a white, slightly angry-looking woman with mid-length blonde hair and a side parting. I also asked it to generate an action shot in which she'd have her lightsaber out and again - it wasn't totally terrible in my opinion.
But two things stood out to me: that it was actually very good at giving her an attractive face (even if it doesn't look exactly like Lana does in game) - which is something to think about when the first thing anyone mentioned being slightly "off" about the key art were the faces - and the fact that the AI had absolutely no clue what sort of armour she wears, dressing her in a generic black combat suit with matching pauldrons and a cloak.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that ChatGPT might not be the best image generator and that my prompting was extremely low effort - I'm sure someone could prod an AI into producing something better, but anywhere close to the sort of detail we actually see in the key art? That seems incredibly unlikely to me, not with where we're at right now. And all that's just talking about a single character, never mind five of them in a balanced composition. In a way, going down this rabbit hole has actually increased my appreciation for this new loading screen.
I can't blame people for being paranoid and suspicious. Corporations trying to cut costs by replacing real artists' jobs with an inferior AI-generated product is a real thing. But so is people being overly paranoid and thinking that everything is AI when it actually isn't. As a creative person myself (even if my hobby is writing, not drawing or painting), someone accusing my stuff of sounding/looking like AI would actually be more hurtful to me than just saying that they think it's terrible. We're not doing the art community a favour by immediately accusing things of being "AI slop" as soon as we don't like something.
Bonus AI laugh: I also asked ChatGPT to generate me an image of Shae Vizla and that one was a lot less charming. It clearly had enough of a clue to give me a red-headed Mandalorian, but what the fuck is that armour? Why is the "blaster" I asked for in the prompt just a plain old 20th century gun? And why is there another random Mandalorian's helmet attached to her thigh?!
"I wonder why Broadsword couldn't get that done while the English voice actors were on strike - the German and French ones weren't, as far as I'm aware!"
ReplyDeleteI was wondering that same thing. Anyway, the generated images of Lana look pretty good, IMO. Shae isn't terrible, I guess. Not old enough, but the mando thigh helmet is hilarious.
I think it may be because those are dubs and so the german/french VA's base their performances on the english VA performances maybe?
DeleteCould be! It's probably something process-related like that.
DeleteShae's AI doppelgänger is fascinating. I'm willing to bet that it's assessed that Shae is a Mandalorian and from the Old Republic, so has created a blend of Cassus Fett (or other such Neo-Crusader Mandalorians) and 'modern-day' Mandalorians. I'm just curious what the heck she's looking at to the side while aiming elsewhere with her... concerningly accurate depiction of a modern pistol.
ReplyDeleteI don't really have a lot to say about the new key art - on the whole I think it's okay, and I really like the colours, they just seem to 'pop' nicely, but Arn's face... oh, Arn. What have they done to you?
This might not apply to Broadsword because of them not being exactly rolling in money but in general I would expect game companies to train their own generative AIs on their own in-house assets rather than farm them out to the big names. When that really gets going, at least everything will look consistent.
ReplyDeleteWhat's definitely going to happen for a while is lots and lots of mis-attribution as people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about claim to be able to tell the provenance of any picture they do or don't like. I'm old enough to remember when the term of abuse thrown at artists was "airbrush". Anyone using the tool was automatically deemed a hack and people were always arguing over whether something had or had not been "airbrushed".
I did think about the possibilities of a custom AI model trained on the right imagery... but that's effort again, so does somewhat go against the idea of using AI for quick savings unless you're producing a sufficiently large volume of promotional art that it will pay off in the long run. For a small MMO that doesn't really do a lot in that area (getting a new loading screen once every six months is about exciting as it gets) that just seemed like an unlikely direction.
DeleteI don't think this image is AI, but I think the reaction to it will be something that will become more common as AI generated slop becomes more and more common. People will start to accuse anything and everything of either being AI or figure out if something is AI or not.
DeleteI'm one of the ones that doesn't think the image is AI. The stylistic differences are well within what I've seen artists do within normal work. I just think that there's such a backlash against AI among the art community on social media that some people have started using "AI slop" as a putdown for anything they don't like.
ReplyDeleteEven well-funded companies, such as Blizzard, can have noticeable variation in how they depict their existing characters. Lady Liadrin in the Midnight trailer being a recent example. People need to cool down about the AI accusations as it is becoming just another internet witch hunt.
As far as the voice actors go, I wonder if it is a contract or monetary issue. The Swtor devs might have had enough money for one set and need to wait for more for the others? Or it could be that the devs only had enough time to do one set of voice recordings and just couldn't get to the others before they wanted to release more story content. It has been a drought.
Lana's not looking too great in that new loading screen. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not AI becuase of that.
ReplyDeleteAlright, I feel like I need to weigh in on this - and because I agree with you saying the individual on Tumblr was wrong. It is likely NOT AI generated. It IS just not great art, but it's not genuinely horrible art either.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, as a person that actually has a bachelor's degree in Fine Art from an accredited University, I'm sick to heck of people (not you) like the individual on Tumblr and in other posts such as Bsky or X, storming in and criticizing a ton of stuff about art when they've not actually sat down and had an advanced education or at least the equivalent of adv edu in art ABOUT AI art.
Like everyone sees that it messes up fingers, eyes, patterns, and fine details, but guess what? So do humans! In fact eyes and HANDS, especially HANDS, are often among the hardest things for artists TO actually master.
Plus, I have no doubt in my head, that the person who wrote the article on tumblr has no practical experience with digital art. They criticize things that aren't actually -wrong- based on the style of art, and seem ignorant of how the composition's dramatic backlighting on the foreground figures is meant to be independent of the representation of Malgus. He's not literally standing behind them, it would make him like 12 feet tall given his proportions compared to theirs AND the overlap that indicates depth of field/distance, and we all know he's only a measly *7* feet tall (jokes)....
Honestly if you want a break-down I can do a real break down. The TL;DR version - key elements of their armor are actually on-model down to the Lana's belt which is one of a kind in SWTOR. An AI won't match that and it absolutely screws up detailed line-work by taking away or adding extra lines to symmetrical or mostly symmetrical attire.
Other facets of the image that lean toward human generator: The faces look alike and the hair treatment is similar. Yes, this is a KNOWN problem for even some professional artists depending on what they draw more of (since not all art is about drawing different human faces) --- same face syndrome.
ReplyDeleteA lot of people have issues giving characters similar faces when they draw/paint etc. Also, consciences decision to treat the hair similarly - if you look at the way it's given movement, it's shading, detail, application technique, lighting, etc -- it's universally stylized across all characters in the same methodology. This may or may not be possible with AI, but AI just *loves* to give hair extra locks in places they shouldn't be, or disconnected from the rest of the hair.
As for the dramatic backlighting, notice how Lana has very little? That's not just because of where Malgus is. The artist is making a conscientious decision to use the dramatic yellow-orange backlighting to control where the viewer looks first. Because - if Shae didn't have that dramatic backlight on her left side of her body that angles toward Malgus, guess what the second brightest/biggest contrast in the image is? -- The red light saber.
In most Western-based art or art done for a society that reads from left to right, you absolutely want to make sure your audience doesn't start on the *very* right of the art piece. You want to pull it toward the left, because we have spent our lifetimes training our eyes to travel from left to right, so we do it automatically to the point you don't need to emphasize the right half as much to get our eyes to go there.
And if you look at this piece, you can absolutely tell the artist is trying to make sure your eyes have something *engaging* on the left so that when they go right, they will get pulled back to the center of the image.
It's something we -absolutely- study at length in art school. The ability to make the eye go round and round on the page, using lighting, composition, shapes, etc -- so we control its movement (as we control the horizontal and the vertical // jokes// )...
I can also go into more detail about how the artist selectively backed off details in the rocks to help reduce contrast, control composition, direction etc. If it was AI it would have done everything universally in the same style or otherwise not been so intentionally selective.
Did the artist use AI for inspiration, or parts of the image? Maybe, but not for the entire image.
Sorry about all of the ranting. I do get frustrated that so many people on the internet think their an AI art expert without having any real training in how to paint digitally, and even some artists that do, tend to screw it up.
ReplyDeleteJust because a person can use ChatGPT or MidJourney doesn't mean they've mastered actual writing (including grammar) and digital art. /sighs/
I -hate- to bring up my degree, because it's not something I was able to turn into a career. My neurospicy and art-careers do not mix at all, and I learned that the hard way. It's actually been a sticking point in my life, so I really got personally motivated to step in on this, because some people were outright calling for the boycott of Broadsword/EA over the art, and that was absolutely ridiculous. This is not the piece of art one should have the AI war over.
Though I'm also the artist that's livid that AI art bots are paywalled for those of us that are disabled, because AIs in their own way are absolutely an accessibility tool that can help provide someone who's disabled and has difficulty writing/doing art on their own a method by which they can add that to their lives (and this also means for jobs or their own personal needs/wishes)
Don't apologise, that was a very insightful series of comments! I do hate that we're in this place right now, where people are understandably suspicious, but I also have a lot of respect for artists and I'd rather be a fool (by mistaking something for a human creation that isn't) than a jerk (accusing something of being AI that isn't). I appreciate the more detailed breakdown of what points towards this being a human creation.
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