- Dev insisting it would have been infeasible to remake their game by actually paying people to do work so they used AI instead
- Polygon completely uncritically talking about how great it looks and sounds
abso fucking lutely not
The thing that strikes me here is that they directly acknowledge they can't afford to remake this game to the same quality they had in 1996... but they want to do it anyway? Why does it need a remake in that case?
For the sprites, Revolution produced “a few hundred” by hand and took them to the University of York, where an AI research team used them to train a GAN (generative adversarial network). The result “wasn’t quite good enough,” Cecil says, but a tip from a Nvidia engineer about how to use AI to interpolate frames in between hand-drawn key frames prompted a breakthrough.
“Instead of taking an hour to do each one, it takes between 5 and 10 minutes to do each one,” Cecil says. “We’re training the model on our own sprites… What we’ve really focused on is the outlines and the detail in the body, because there’s no way that the hands and the head are going to [look right]. So we have to manually draw their hands and faces.” The hands and head are pasted on after, with animators taking care to flesh out facial expressions that the original art didn’t have enough detail to resolve.
You know how I've said several times that there are legitimate uses for AI, including AI used by artists to allow them to do things they couldn't before? That's what this is. This isn't some techbro throwing Broken Sword into Midjourney. This is artists using AI to help them create art. That's what we want to see when it comes to AI.
I am reminded of this video: