A website focused on covering adventure games, Adventure Game Hotspot, , wrote an article about Echoes of Somewhere. The piece is very interesting as it includes reactions to the game from the adventure game developer community.

https://adventuregamehotspot.com/2023/07/21/echoes-of-somewhere-how-a-solo-developers-game-takes-center-stage-in-the-ai-controversy/

I am very happy that the Adventure Game hotspot article writer did not simply cover the game as is. But went way deeper and showed the project to other developers and asked for their opinions. I think this is an aspect to this experiment I am conducting I could not have achieved myself nowhere near as well! Additional explorations of the topic like this are a really important and welcome addition to my research project!

I think [the ubiquity of AI] is bound to happen in all areas – and frankly for areas like art and the more expensive parts of game development, it makes good production sense,” he admits. “If gamers want truly human-created art, they will have to pay much much more for the games they play, which – even with all of today’s tech – are way too costly to make.

Robert Holmes, producer and composer of the Gabriel Knight series
AI-generated concept art for Gabriel Knight from the Adventure Game Hotspot article
AI-generated concept art for Gabriel Knight. (Images provided by Robert Holmes)

Rather than worry about whether AI will replace all art (it won’t), we should be worried about the overall ecosystems of the arts.… AI will be able to work at inhuman speed and scale, and arguably already does. Those who argue that artists just need to adapt fail to consider that the AI can potentially adapt even faster, making adaptation at inhuman scale or speed an impossibility without burnout.

Bruce Brenneise, Magic: The GatheringDungeons & Dragons and Numenera

I’m glad [Kemppainen] won’t be charging for the game, as charging for it would also be unethical, When we made The Silver Lining, we always knew it was going to be released for free and not something we could make money from. We’ve always been careful to keep its development separate from any commercial work. And this is a game where every piece of art, every line of writing, all the programming, and so forth, came from our team – even screens and characters that were recreations from official King’s Quest games.

Katie Hallahan, a writer and designer at Phoenix Online Studios

As you have found your way here in my blog, you for sure are interested in this article, give it a read at Adventure Game Hotspot.

The tone of people interviewed for the article is mostly critical towards the use of AI tech and some of them do not seem to fully understand how AI tools work, but I believe discussion like around this topic this is still very interesting, as long as everyone is polite. Without embarking on this experiment and learning about these tools in practice, I could easily see myself being critical towards AI as well.

But generative AI services do exist and they are not going anywhere soon. if the currently available AI tools are deemed unethical or infringing on artists’ copyright, these will be cleaned up and and released in a state that is legal to use in no time. Only focusing on the ethicality of AI tools I think suppresses the real conversation we should be having: how are these tools going to change the industry and how to survive the transition as an artist. How to supercharge your productivity so you will not be left behind.

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