Recently, we’ve been getting lots of negative reviews claiming that our game uses AI-generated content. We’ve been responding, clarifying, and explaining this wherever possible – but these claims have grown to a point where we feel the need to address it clearly in one place. So let’s state this as plainly as we can:
Our assets are either created by our artists or come from legally purchased sources (such as the Unity Asset Store and stock photo libraries). This is a completely standard practice in game development, especially for smaller teams. When selecting external assets, we select them under the assumption that they are not AI-generated and we do our best to verify them.
That said, we also want to be honest. We do our best to verify them, but nowadays distinguishing AI from human-made art can be hard. There is always a small chance that something could slip through unintentionally. And that’s exactly why we are open to investigating any concerns.
The best way to do that is via our Discord, directly to our Community Manager. We will investigate it, and if there is any real indication that something might be AI-generated, we will replace it. We do not want AI-generated content in our game.
However, it’s important to highlight something. Many of the assets most frequently accused of being AI – such as the pizzeria logo, paintings shown in community updates, the cleaning lady, or even the voices – have already been thoroughly investigated and proven not to be AI. In many cases, they were either created entirely by our artists or come from sources that predate the rise of generative AI.
This is why we ask you to keep in mind that intuition can be misleading.
We have absolutely no problem with people raising concerns. Please, report anything that looks suspicious to you, we genuinely appreciate that. But what is exhausting and frustrating is seeing negative reviews that confidently claim we are lying, or that something is “100% AI” or “AI slop” or “It’s not rocket science to tell that this is AI”, without any evidence . Even when we provide clear explanations. It’s especially disheartening when, for example, we have credited voice actors, refer directly to them (hey, you can probably easily hire them yourselves!), and still see claims that all voices are AI-generated. It spreads disinformation.
This situation is deeply unfair to our artists, who are the ones most affected by these accusations. These are real people who work hard to create the assets you see in the game. At this point, it feels like the backlash against AI is starting to turn into backlash against actual artists.
They frequently mislabel real, human-made artwork as AI-generated. This shouldn’t be surprising, as AI models are trained on human-created works, so naturally, similarities exist.
Lastly, we want to explain a technique that is often misunderstood — photobashing. Photobashing is a well-established artistic technique that involves combining and manipulating photographs to create a final image. It has been used long before AI existed. In fact, photomontage as a concept dates back as far as the 1850s. Digital photobashing has been widely used in games, films, and concept art for nearly 30 years.
For example, the frequently mentioned image of Kovalsky with his family is not AI-generated. It was created by one of our artists using photobashing. This technique helps us achieve the semi-realistic visual style present in the game.
Unfortunately, because AI has been trained on human artwork, it often mimics similar visual characteristics, which makes distinguishing between the two even harder. So no, intuition based accusations aren't always right.
We do not use AI-generated content (and we don't want to)
Some assets are bought and we do our best to verify them
We verify all reports and take them seriously
We are open to replacing any suspicious (bought) assets if there are enough proofs of an AI use
It is worth contacting us first to verify the asset before raising the alarm, as it may be misleading for others