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Comment by CorvusCrypto | Hacker News Reader

I think you're right in the scenario there was no human involvement in design. my guess which may be naive is that the tool use will be mixed. You may see gen AI used more for placeholder assets for example. I also think the landscape is shifting to the point codegen is acceptable in those circles.

If there is mixed usage of AI and human design then like the article said those components generated likely aren't copyrightable but the specific way you cobbled them together could be and that wouldn't need much change it seems. I'd like to follow the revenue anyway, last article I read was from about 6 months ago that steam AI-gen declarations accounted for almost 700million in revenue but it was unclear then to what extent ai tools were used (https://www.gamesradar.com/games/steam-games-that-openly-use...)

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> You may see gen AI used more for placeholder assets for example.

Is it worth the risk, though? AI-generated content has become good enough that it isn't always immediately obvious that it is AI-generated. This means some poorly-paid QA tester isn't guaranteed to flag it, so it might very well end up slipping into the final release - as has already happened multiple times now.

Need a placeholder four-headed dog? Grab a dog model from any random library, cut off its head, add four Blender Cubes on stalks, and you're done. Less than five minutes of work and it will stand out as "obviously a placeholder" during QA.

Hmm regarding quality i get mixed signals from this and other comments. To be honest i don't say you're wrong about that risk being real but it's clear reading the other person's comments on quality being actually poor with assets that there is some assessment in both quality and usage that I don't fully understand. The placeholder use is indeed based on my reading of studios own accounts, but if you say it is problematic, I can't argue that as I have no other experience here and tbh if a game is fun I'd take the dog with no head and cubes too.

I would say the quality is usually too poor to ship, but good enough that it can slip through unnoticed.

It's like a web developer using their own photo as a placeholder for the CEO on an "About Us" page: seems like a fun little in-joke, until it accidentally ships and you get an angry phone call from your boss's boss. It's better to do the boring thing and play it save by using a big red cross with "REPLACE ME" on it so you'll definitely catch it during the final review.

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