this was so fun, thank you
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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AI or not it looks god awful
Unrelated to the topic, but
led by a strictly limited physical collector’s release created with game preservation at its heart
This sentence is so funny. How is a limited edition made for people who want to pay extra and have shiny object on their shelves working towards game preservation in any form? It's so funny when they try to play "here, have more disposable plastic and pay 50 extra bucks for it! I swear you're ALSO doing it for a good cause!"
I'm sorry, I don't believe them one bit
All images I've seen of their art looks like slop
were produced through a human-led process
How the fuck does anyone describe an artist generating game artwork as "human-led process"? You know what this rather sounds like? A "human" prompting image generation.
"Human-led process" really does sound like some marketing doublespeak bullshit. Like technically correct but doesn't answer the question.
No generative AI was used in the creation of the artwork. Every stage began with the authentic original James Pond graphic and was completed using traditional digital illustration, 3D rendering and manual artistic refinement.
Maybe I'm picking words apart here, but they very carefully didn't say gen-A.I. was not used at all. They only said it wasn't used to create the final product. So the described process is:
- original graphic
- vague middle stage
- finished off manually
I wouldn't be surprised if they did something like use A.I. to create the design, and then essentially traced over it.
I'm not sure whether that's actually better or not, but I'm inclined to believe them if they say that the final step was made by hand at least.
...manual artistic refinement.
Manual in comparison to what? The preceding Gen AI steps? I suspect we have an admission by omission here.
That does kind of sound like a good use of AI.
Maybe it was a human director leading a pack of ostriches doing the game. You never know.
Wow they really are stressing the phrase beginning / began with human artwork a lot in these statements. Suspiciously so.
I feel like they did a shit job tryinf to defend themselves if this is the best example of steps taken:
Like, For Real, this is worthless. Show the messy work files, the unfinished sketches, isolate the layers in the 2D mockup to show lineart and color independent of each other, a gif of the 3D wireframes rotating.
This image they posted won't convince anybody. It will vindicate critics.
Yeah, I really don't want to falsely accuse anyone but... the human 3d-artist forgot to model one of the horns? That redraw has a very, let's say, familiar style as well.
That can easily be explained! You see… uhm… uh…
frantically hammers fingers on keyboard to ask CheatGPT for advice.
Says “process” in the title unlike the others, body is missing inside, flame jets are missing as well.
Body, flame jets and electric textures can be explained as they're not part of the 3d model but effects applied to it in-engine.
The missing horn though screams AI and I have a hard time imagining a human artist forgetting one of the horns when making the 3d model and submitting the work as completed
I'll play devil's advocate and say there are non-AI render processes that can miss a horn (e.g. working from a clay model and scanned, for instance). Hell, even a lazy wand picker in Photoshop can lose a horn! I'll even say that the very-AI looking 2D illustration can simply be a byproduct of a lack of creativity and the fact this is clearly shovelware. I lived through the Wii era, I can attest that shovelware can look this bad without AI, lol.
HOWEVER, it sure as hell looks like AI generated artwork and they could do a lot better defending their process. The irony is ... I don't really think the trailer is AI? It's... honestly too unpolished and weird to be? Every effect used is something I'm certain I could do myself, lol.
i... these are literally all ai. like why would the render be missing a horn?
I'm gonna interject and say you generally model things one half at a time and then mirror for symmetrical objects.
Sure, but you wouldn't just render one horn and add the other one in photoshop. That makes no sense at all. You would duplicate the horn before rendering it.
Notice that the milk-bottle-arm in the original somehow ended up as a mega man arm in the end. Like how could a real artist miss that
yeah but you generally also have a hierarchy of submodels so that mirroring a group mirrors everything in that group.
Yeah that's definitely AI. At least there's no doubt now.
100% AI slop. These people must think we were born yesterday.
The theory on The Other Site is what I also agree with: They took #1, fed it into an AI 3D modeler to get #4, fed that image into a 2D style AI model to get #2, and then went back to #4 and used AI in-painting and lazy Photoshop to remove some elements to get #3.
oh yeah that makes sense, the little bubble window is literally just painted over.
As well as the weird dark blob where a detail is added in the "final" result. Why would the blob be there? Unless they started with the "final" result and painted it over to get to the "previous" step.
That and the mangled udders clearly scream AI to me. The original clearly has 4 rockets intended to look like udders. But because of the perspective two of them seem to overlap. So the AI just combined them into one, with a sort of double output? This makes no sense, that's not how rockets work and that's not how udders look. It is exactly how AI works tho.
You are 100% correct. 3 obviously was generated from 1, and 2 is just the most blatant 2D genAI image generated from that.
How is this not AI?! The redraw absolutely smacks of that style, not to mention the cannon arm is obviously meant to imitate a milk can which the redraw mangles. The rockets are supposed to be udders but the two we can see most clearly don't match in construction and the other two seems to sprout off of another one. These errors carry over to the full render. The udders are a pixelated mangle of perspective in the original, but this point is absolutely missed.
Above the leg is also a weird split. You can see in the original this is a weird artifact of pixel shading, but it's been rendered into an actual split in the material in the redraw and renders. This is a valid design choice I guess, but to me it's an indication of how the AI misinterpreted intent and someone reviewing it didn't catch or care about it.
This is pathetic. They could have just ai generated fake sketches but they didn't even have the brain power to think of that.
I really hate these ai which hunts. Like if an artist says it's not ai and it's just a doubt then I believe but.
But in this case like come onnnnnn. Unless you're very painstakingly trying to mimic the ai generated lewk at every stage, complete with slopsign tells (and then why??) then I'm not buying it one bit.
Sure... I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt, to some degree.
Unfortunately however, we do now exist in a zero trust world where you can't always naively believe what you see to be authentic and legitimate... If I was going to commission or hire an artist to do some paid work today, I would need to at least see some kind of "proof of work".
Because of the ethical implications of generative AI, people have every reason and right to be suspicious and critical of work that looks like it could be generated by AI. People who use AI understand this too, but sadly many of them choose the path of fraudulence and lying instead of reflecting on themselves.
When people make something like this, which to me is so obviously AI slop, and then is bold enough to try to deny it, it just adds insult to injury, frankly. "You can fool some people sometime, but you can't fool all the people all the time." These dudes want to pee on our legs and tell us it's raining...
It's a hellscape, I've decided to retreat to Dead or Alive wAIfu's from the early 2000's due to concerns about the appeal of novel secret agent sexy fish.
First they came for the women of insta with filters and I did not speak out, now they are coming for the sexy fish I will make my stand.
Everyone draws the line somewhere.