In a statement, 11-Bit Studios confirms that an instance of AI-generated text appears in The Alters due to an “internal oversight”
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/11-bit-studios-acknowledges-the-use-of-ai-generated-text-in-the-alters
In a statement, 11-Bit Studios confirms that an instance of AI-generated text appears in The Alters due to an “internal oversight”
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/11-bit-studios-acknowledges-the-use-of-ai-generated-text-in-the-alters
Just so we’re clear, the first pass of localization of every game you’ve played in the past decade has been machine-generated.
Which is not to say the final product was, people would then go over the whole text database and change it as needed, but it’s been frequent practice for a while for things like subtitles and translations to start from a machine generated first draft, not just in videogames but in media in general. People are turning around 24h localization for TV in some places, it’s pretty nuts.
Machine generated voices are also very standard as placeholders. I’m… kinda surprised nobody has slipped up on that post-AI panic, although I guess historically nobody noticed when you didn’t clean up a machine-translated subtitle, but people got good at ensuring all your VO lines got VOd because you definitely notice those.
As with a lot of the rest of the AI panic, I’m confused about the boundaries here. I mean, Google Translate has used machine learning for a long time, as have most machine translation engines. The robot voices that were used as placeholders up until a few years ago would probably be fine if one slipped up, but newer games often use very natural-sounding placeholders, so if one of those slips I imagine it’d be a bit of drama.
I guess I don’t know what “AI generated” means anymore.
I haven’t bumped into the offending text in the game (yet), but I’m playing it in English, so I guess I wouldn’t have anyway? Neither the article nor the disclosure are very clear.
That said, the game is pretty good, if anybody cares.
Diablo 4 had this recently, where an obviously Microsoft Sam like robot voice made it through, and a few people lost their minds.
I don’t know about that, it’s super noticeable when that happens, it’s just that it mostly affects languages other than English, so it did not get noticed by Western media unless there is a review bombing campaign after a particularly atrocious localization
As a non-native English speaker, let me tell you, terrible localization was very much a thing that happened well before machine translation, so that by itself (and more subtle typos or one-off errors) was definitely not enough to infer that someone had forgotten to fix a machine-translated line once.
You can definitely tell when something has been machine-translated and not fixed, but the real challenge is lack of context. This leads to nonsensical localization even today, whether it’s human or automated, especially in crowdsourced localizations, which are frequent in open source software. I contribute to some on occassion and maaaan, do I wish well intentioned people in that space would stop contributing to projects they don’t use/lines they haven’t seen in situ.
The text in the screenshot in the reddit post they link is in English
I hadn’t clicked through to the Reddit thing (for obvious reasons). The example in the article proper is in a Portuguese subtitle, but now that you pointed me at it and I did check the Reddit thread… well, that text is not legible in game unless you really try, so yeah, I hadn’t read it. I’m guessing that’s the only English instance?