After criticism from players six months ago for allegedly using generative AI in Fortnite, Epic Games has decided to just\u2026openly admit it via a video demonstrating the various generative AI tools its developers are apparently using in Unreal Engine to make buildings, characters, skins, and who knows what else:<\/p>\n
The video starts with an artist drawing a character, first as a loose sketch, and then spending time coloring and refining it. Okay, so far so good. Looks cool. Then, for some reason, the artist moves into a tool called \u201cGenMedia\u201d and writes a text prompt: \u201cClean up the rendering on this Fortnite character. Don\u2019t change the design, just the rendering.\u201d They press the button and\u2026uh, whoa, okay. The drawing immediately looks significantly\u2026shinier, and gains a bunch of new details that the voiceover admits were not desirable, like a skeleton decoration on a belt pouch, a whole second belt pouch added on the side, a glove that wasn\u2019t there before, and some goofy stuff with the collar. The artist then has to spend time fixing all the stuff that the AI screwed up, leading one to ask, why did we use AI for this to begin with?<\/p>\n
This happens again later in the video when the AI image generator and editor Nano Banana is used on an in-progress building, \u201cprompting for clean PBR<\/a> render shots and adjusting the perspective.\u201d The result seems fine at a glance, but the longer you look at it the more discrepancies you see in things like the shape of the central sign tower and some weird additions and removals around the windows, again leaving the artist to have to manually fix it. Then they do it again later in the process.<\/p>\n \u201cAll along the way there are continual reviews before anything makes it into our games, and artists are careful to respect originality, track provenance of their work, and make sure the finished product meets Epic\u2019s high-quality standards.\u201d<\/p>\n To me, that sounds tedious and unnecessary. Just adding work. But I am not an artist. If an actual artist says that doing all this still saves time, that cleaning up all these pieces manually would take longer than identifying and fixing what generative AI screwed up, I\u2019m absolutely willing to believe that\u2019s true. I think it\u2019s naive to refuse to admit that using generative AI cannot \u201csave time,\u201d at least in the sense that it can help people arrive at what someone at the top considers a finished product in a shorter span of time.<\/p>\n But I also don\u2019t think that matters. Because what they\u2019re doing here is saving time by introducing a bunch of potential, random \u201cmistakes\u201d into every single piece of art they use this on, sometimes multiple times. What they\u2019re doing is taking their own, original work, and passing it through an environment-destroying machine that spits out unoriginality. How long will it take for someone to miss an AI-generated error, and for that error to make it into the game? Perhaps this has already happened: this video is coming out six months after Fortnite was accused of using generative AI<\/a> to make some in-game signage in which fans found a number of strange mistakes, like a person with just nine toes and a clock with weird numbers. It\u2019s coming a year after players forced a generative AI Darth Vader<\/a> to say a lot of things that were neither Disney-friendly nor acceptable in a T for Teen game. And, propensity for errors aside, that doesn\u2019t even get into the loss of process, the loss of the actual work and creativity of making art brought about by the generative AI tools allowing artists to just \u201cskip ahead in the timeline,\u201d whatever that means.<\/p>\n