Steam game is changing its original art to avoid AI accusations

The developers of a transportation management sim want to avoid any possible negative association from generative AI

The internet savvy among us would like to think we're discerning enough to know when something isn't real. We'll point out the telltale signs of generative artificial intelligence, like visual irregularities and impossible perfection. Realistically, though, generative AI has turned internet scrolling into a perpetual, awful game of spot the differences. And as one upcoming Steam game proves, we're not nearly as good enough at this game as we believe.

Transfort Fever 3 is a tycoon sim game where players build critical infrastructure for cities. Players are tasked with creating transportation routes for both people and industry, but optimization is not the only consideration. As your transport empire grows, so does the complexity of your services.

"The whole world, including buildings, people, and cars, follow designs and trends through time," the game description reads. "Rewrite transportation history and run steam trains and jets side by side as you progress through the 20th century and beyond."

Much of the game is from a top-down perspective that makes vehicles and roads easy to parse, but Transport Fever 3 also has actual characters in it. These fully-voiced characters give players tasks and add a much-needed touch of humanity to a game that is otherwise obsessively concerned with things. You can also watch humans go about their day inside the cities, where they make ample use of all the vehicles that you make possible.

Right now, Transport Fever 3 is still in beta and doesn't have a specific release date beyond 2026. Developer Urban Games recently held an event where press and influencers got a first-hand look at the game's campaign, and the reaction to what people saw was extremely off-putting. One PC Gamer reporter says that he looked at the glossy, uncanny characters in the game with "revulsion."

Urban Games maintains that their game only features handcrafted art, but the studio has still taken player feedback to heart.

"In the last beta test, where we have shown the campaign for the very first time, we have been made aware by some players that the character models we are currently using for the conversations in the campaign itself, that they look a bit AI," Urban Games publishing manager Nico Heini told PC Gamer. And so, Urban Games is promising that it will rework the art in the game to avoid any potential negative association, even though the studio says it doesn't use the controversial tech.

"This is something that is very important to us that this gets addressed, because we don't want any results of AI in our game at all," Heini said.

AI has become a hot-button topic in the world of video games, especially as publishers express an interest in leveraging the technology for their products. But as "AI slop" takes over the internet — and new video game releases — player sentiment around titles which feature the technology has curdled. For some, it's a matter of quality and maintaining the spirit of creativity. For others, AI usage and its impact on the environment is more of a moral conundrum. And seemingly no one is happy about the fact widespread AI usage is driving up the prices of nearly everything.

Some game studios have already explored generative AI tech only to find it lacking. In other cases, the backlash to AI-generated content has been so overt, some gaming studios have scrapped or rethought projects that revolved around the technology. In at least one instance, a game developer dropped AI art only after his girlfriend convinced him it was a bad idea.

In the case of Transport Fever 3, which is still currently in development, changes to the final product were probably going to happen no matter what. Early footage shows that the management sim has some stiff animations or appears to lack polish characteristic of shipped games. But it's wild to know that the stigma and concern around AI has become so pronounced, we are now at the point where games have to change the way they look... just in case.