After criticism from players six months ago for allegedly using generative AI in Fortnite, Epic Games has decided to just…openly 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:
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 “GenMedia” and writes a text prompt: “Clean up the rendering on this Fortnite character. Don’t change the design, just the rendering.” They press the button and…uh, whoa, okay. The drawing immediately looks significantly…shinier, 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’t 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?
This happens again later in the video when the AI image generator and editor Nano Banana is used on an in-progress building, “prompting for clean PBR render shots and adjusting the perspective.” 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.
“All 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’s high-quality standards.”
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’m absolutely willing to believe that’s true. I think it’s naive to refuse to admit that using generative AI cannot “save time,” 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.
But I also don’t think that matters. Because what they’re doing here is saving time by introducing a bunch of potential, random “mistakes” into every single piece of art they use this on, sometimes multiple times. What they’re 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 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’s coming a year after players forced a generative AI Darth Vader 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’t 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 “skip ahead in the timeline,” whatever that means.
Or maybe none of that matters. Maybe we’re content with touches of generative AI here and there if it “helps” developers. We shouldn’t refuse the conveniences of new technology, right? Maybe this is good for the artists. Sure. But this is coming just three months after Epic games laid off 1,000 people because its leadership couldn’t keep an eye on their own balance sheet. What that tells me, in aggregate, is that Epic Games needs fewer artists to make new content for the game faster, which inevitably is going to mean tighter deadlines and more mistakes. I am not naive enough to think that Epic Games, having laid off this many folks, is going to use generative AI to give the artists that remain more generous deadlines that will allow them to reach their creative potential or fully realize their original ideas or whatever. Epic Games is concerned, first and foremost, with making money. If its leadership thinks they have a tool in hand that will allow fewer people to spit out art that’s good enough faster, they will use it.
My apologies to the Silly Sandwich and the Yarn Barn. I would have loved to see the versions of these that emerged without the dubious “help” of generative AI.
