In an interview with Sky News the other day,High On Lifecreator Justin Roiland revealed that developer Squanch Games used the AI art generation tool Midjourney AI to create some art for the wonderfully weird sci-fi shooter. This prompted a lot of news stories that framed the very concept of AI art as ‘controversial’ (those don’t includeour own less emotive news take on the matter), before thinly veiling their disdain for Roiland using it in the game.
To be clear, the AI-generated art in question accounts for an infinitesimally small amount of the art in High on Life–specifically for “finishing touches” for various in-world movie posters and other small bits. Roiland says he used Midjourney because “it makes the world feel like a strange alternate universe of our world."
It sounds innocuous enough, so why all the hate?
The widespread stance against AI art varies. Some argue that it takes work away from actual artists, which is essentially the ‘anti-automation’ argument–this idea that automation and using technology for tasks once carried out by humans takes jobs away from humans (apart from those humans creating and maintaining those systems of automation). Of course, with railways we can probably accept the idea of automated doors, ticket barriers, and (one day) trains, but with the innately human medium of ‘art,’ it does sound a little dystopian.
But it’s a bit of an odd argument to level against a game that’s employed dozens of artists, and whose creator Roiland is indeed an artist himself. High on Life has literallycreatedjobs for artists, so to accuse the game of being somehow anti-artist is akin to having a go at Hidetaka Miyazaki for using procedural generation to place approximately 80% of the trees and vegetation throughout The Lands Between instead of employing a team to place them by hand.
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You can always argue for the value of the ‘human touch’ with this stuff, but it’s for the developer to allocate their resources as they see fit; both Elden Ring and High on Life are games with distinct artistic visions that have been brought to life by huge teams of artists, so are we really going to criticise them for using a bit of automation to ease up the schedules and resources on big projects like these? A case could even be made that increasing automation in game development can help reduce that ever-present bugbear of crunch. Creating those posters via Midjourney saved hours upon hours of work.
The more weighty argument is around copyright, and the fact that Midjourney’s algorithm trains itself on millions of existing images around the world, picking up on artistic styles, iconic imagery, and existing works of art. So the argument goes that AI art tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and others are monetising existing images and work by charging a subscription fee. In addition, people who create art using these tools (by entering prompts) can then technically monetise that AI-generated art, even though it’ssort-ofbased on an algorithmic stew of existing work.
There are definitely valid questions around what copyright means in relation to AI-generated art. Sooner rather than later this stuff may go to court, and some legal boundaries may be set around it. Some people, likeDead by Daylight lead character artist Eric Bourdages, have implored their followers on Twitter to use some very convincing AI-generated images of heavily IP-protected characters like Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, Pikachu, and Batman, then sell them on mugs and t-shirts to see if they can avoid a copyright strike from companies like Disney, DC, and Nintendo. Until now, it seems no one’s taken him up on the offer, and I’m yet to read about any copyright-related legal action relating to these AI tools.
As someone who’s dabbled in Midjourney himself, I certainly appreciate the ability to create images spewed straight from my subconscious. The vast majority of art, writing, content,whatever, is derivative of something else. That’s how you end up with artistic movements, video game genres, first-person shooters,whatever. New Hollywood movies may have seemed new to Hollywood in the 70s, but they grew out of French New Wave movies in the 60s, then later we see so many of those stylistic elements mashed up in Tarantino movies. Everything is derivative, it’s just on us as individuals to find our own voice or identity in our chosen form of creative expression while still being inspired by what preceded us.
As with everything, there’s a spectrum here, and it can be hard to define where an existing piece of work ends and another begins. Instances where monetised images are clearly plagiarising rather than simply ‘taking inspiration from’ existing work should face legal action, and I’ve no doubt we’ll see that happen with AI-generated art in time. To simply condemn the very existence of AI art, which lets me, say, render Super Mario as a Silent Hill monster then print it out on my wall, seems a little draconian.
In the case of High on Life, I simply don’t see the harc, and the rhetoric around it seems a bit insincere. Many of the sites (no, not gonna name names–it’s all a couple of clicks away) taking this critical stance of High on Life’s smidgen of AI art have also recently created content, news, or image-heavy features that in some way celebrate the weird shit that these AI art generators come up with. By doing so, they themselves have both monetised these images via traffic to their site, as well as promoted the AI art generator in question, so what evenistheir stance?
The fact is that AI art is kind of creepy, it’s kind of troubling, it’s kind of cool, and we like messing around with it, so how about we reserve judgment for now, and perhaps not chastise the creator of a game that–love it or hate it–showcases a unique artistic vision brought about by a huge team of artists. Through the very existence of High on Life, Justin Roiland is putting food on artists’ plates, not stealing it from them. There’s room for a future where AI art and automation at large and human-made art can coexist–especially in gaming–so let’s not be so quick to dismiss it.
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