I removed generative AI-inspired art from the game because AI turned out to be bad for the world.

Back in July 2022, I played a bit with then fresh image generator DALL-E 2. I used generated images for the cute animals that show up in Stars of the Screen. Back then it was fun — the tool was very raw and the results were mostly random… but it was definitely fascinating to play with.

Since then, the generative AI hype exploded and turned into something I find dangerous in many ways. I can recommend articles and books written by Baldur Bjarnason that match my position. I don’t think there’s no use for generative AI, but the current use is careless and devastating for many — from laid off artists to deported academics. I can recommend reading Automating Inequality for a thorough look on this kind of irresponsible use of tech — it was published way before the current hype but only becomes more timely.

Playdate’s maker Panic recently added AI disclosures in its store for Playdate games and since I don’t want my game to suggest that using generative models in the current situation is a good decision, I removed the art created with a help from DALL-E 2 from the game. With that, I removed the mention of DALL-E 2 from the game’s credits.

⬆ Some of the old animal animation based on DALL-E output.

I drew new animals that should be cute in new ways and perhaps a bit more varied (the old ones were mostly based on shapes and animals). I’ll probably iterate on their designs a bit for a while. (I’ve been very slowly working on adding scoreboards to the Catalog version of the game, so perhaps there’ll be another update — but I don’t have any timeline for that.)

⬆ Some of the new animal animations.

Note: For a moment, there was a bugged download. I left in some helper code that I used for GIF recording (you can see overlapping text in the Starfield level). A fixed build is now available for download. I’m sorryyy very much about that! I hope you’ll like the game still!

Note 2: I added the images to the devlog.