{"id":360092,"date":"2026-01-09T02:44:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T02:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/360092\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T02:44:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T02:44:08","slug":"i-fking-hate-gen-ai-art-hooded-horse-chief-says-if-were-publishing-the-game-no-fking-ai-assets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/360092\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I f**king hate gen AI art,’ Hooded Horse chief says: ‘If we’re publishing the game, no f**king AI assets’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Different game companies approach generative AI in different ways. Some, like Electronic Arts<\/a>, embrace it; others, like Larian<\/a>, take a more measured, cautious approach. And then there’s Hooded Horse, the publisher of games like Endless Legend 2<\/a>, Cataclismo<\/a>, and the breakout hit Manor Lords<\/a>, whose CEO Tim Bender recently told Kotaku<\/a>, “I fucking hate gen AI art.”<\/p>\n

“It has made my life more difficult in many ways\u2026suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender said. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets’.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Banning AI art is easier said than done, as some studios\u2014Larian and Sandfall Interactive, to name a couple high-profile examples\u2014have taken to using gen AI in pre-production, ostensibly to help speed things along. To help counter that, Bender says he urges developers to not use generative AI anywhere, even just for placeholders.<\/p>\n

Related articles<\/p>\n

“Some people will have this thought, like they would never want to let it in the game, but they’ll think, ‘It can be a placeholder in this prototype build’,” he said. “But if that gets done, of course, there’s a chance that that slips through, because it only takes one of those slipping through in some build and not getting replaced or something.<\/p>\n

“Because of that, we’re constantly having to watch and deal with it and try to prevent it from slipping in, because it\u2019s cancerous.”<\/p>\n

As unlikely as that sounds, it has happened, and more than once. Ubisoft<\/a> had to quickly make changes to Anno 117 after “placeholder” art mistakenly made it to the live version of the game<\/a>, and in a much higher-profile case Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, one of the biggest games of 2025, lost two wins in the Indie Game Awards<\/a> after it too was found to have launched with “placeholder” gen AI art still in place.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Different game companies approach generative AI in different ways. Some, like Electronic Arts, embrace it; others, like Larian,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-360092","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}