Epic Releases Fortnite Video That's Trying To Launder The Company's Use Of AI In The Art Pipeline, But Artists I Spoke To Simply Aren't Having It

I got an email from a friend yesterday with the subject line "check this shit out", and I can confirm he was absolutely correct about the "shit" part.

The body of the email was simply a link to a video titled "A Look At Epic’s Art Concepting Process". While the title may suggest it's a look at Epic's art concepting process, the fact it's being hosted by a VFX guy and technical artist, working at a company helmed by Tim Sweeney, might give you a tease as to what its true purpose is:

If you don’t want to watch all six minutes of this, what basically happens is that a couple of artists attempt to walk you through the creative process of getting something into Fortnite, from an initial sketch through to a finished asset/piece of art. While slightly informative in that it does at least show the outline of the process, it’s also riddled with instances where the work of others, and the shortfalls of AI tech being used, are what I will generously call “glossed over”.

This video is really just Epic trying to launder its use of AI in its asset pipeline, and doing a very poor job of it at that. This video, scripted and cleared for release as it is, is obviously supposed to allay people's fears, get out ahead of any "discovery" or criticism; as we saw just yesterday, the presence of this junk in a video game is increasingly becoming a huge "no thank you" from the audience.

But it fails miserably! A guy saying "oh, we draw a character, but then I press a button and the machine draws loads more of the same character, only this time with heaps of mistakes we need to edit out" does not make me think that art is being created here, it makes me think this is truly some god-awful shit I am looking at.

That, however, is just the opinion of me, a guy who might very much be into video game art, but who is not a video game artist. So I put a call out yesterday for people who are video game artists to share their thoughts, and their thoughts range from damning to very funny:

I see absolutely no reason to use the AI in this process. All it does is add the mushy “painter of light” effect and stuff you have to paint out. Just weird.

The worst part is despite the promises of "speeding up the process" it takes longer to do everything! Fixing issues, trying to get a prompt just right, not to mention the frankly insane copyright & ethical implications.

It's very telling that if you go and look at the agenda for UnrealFest, which is this week, I counted 15 (!!!!) AI talks.

Experienced devs openly admitting they're hacks that use generative AI in their workflows cured my impostor syndrome.

I would've been heart-broken if any other studio was caught doing this. Not the company known for crunching its staff on top of a CEO who is very openly pro-AI and pretty much uploading a propaganda piece on how actual Gen AI is good.

I just think it’s really telling that they’re having a VFX guy and a tech artist representing and discussing the process an entirely different discipline uses.

Isn’t part of the appeal of the artistic process the struggle of finding the solution? The rush of discovering something that works and having that eureka moment? AI can have its uses, but to have every solution involve some kind of AI is foolish. Who asked for this? Why does everything need to be done faster?

I think this is a good example of an obvious use case that I could see from a mile away that companies would embrace.

I think it's interesting that the video is largely trying to hold on to how much they care about artist intent in the non-AI sections, while at the same time, if these companies could save money replacing the need for those human steps? I think they would.

I think that is explicitly the goal of these AI projects, to make them do the things we do, more efficiently. It's what they (imo naively) call a "better" model.

It's a certain entitlement to fidelity, and a disregard for human touch. "We decided to not have humanity involved in this step", and just like that they've stripped away the sense of wonder many of us used to see in art, especially in highly composite art like video games, where I've always loved exploring all the corners people cared about and put love and craftsmanship into.

It's a hollowing out of humanity in art, for the sake of efficiency.

Writing a shit little AI prompt not only removes the personal aspect a drawing has — as in, a drawing being the result of someone’s cumulated skills, past failed drawings, years of practice etc — it’s also completely incompatible with, for a lack of better term, visual language that’s often difficult to describe using words.

I would see these tools useful for Fortnite, a game that constantly swallows the charm of other franchises’ characters and spits out its bones to use as meat puppets sold for money. Its soullessness was already prevalent, why not fully commit to it and cut out any artists’ soul to be imprinted in a character design?

Being a concept artist has been my dream since a kid, and this is not it! All this garbage is slowly killing my passion for the work… just adding my voice to the rest of the artists I guess?

Those are some of the messages I received from video game artists, but I think it might help to also show what the top comments under the YouTube video are, in the order in which they appear, if only to illustrate that people's resistance to this has spread well beyond the industry and sicko websites like this:

Prompt: "don't change the design, just the rendering"

AI: changes the design and rendering

Apparently it decided to change the clip on the bag to a skull for reasons, added another pouch on the right side and changed the color of her left hand.

>ai hallucinates

>artist needs to fix the error

lmao

This does not help people. It helps reduce staff, overload with work the remaining employees and flood the market with slop. Anything created easily and in large quantity is low quality. Only a few CEOs benefit from this.