Quick patch notes update (we have so many patches, we can make a stuffie) to keep us transparently honest and ya'll in the loop:
Several streamers loved Seth's theme, a hard-hitting metal tune that Cero chose as a placeholder for Nozomu School Daze's demo. One streamer even headbanged to it!
Alright, you go girl!
We have a composer working on original music, but people seemed to love the placeholders. So we figured, hey, why not use the original music AND placeholder music in the final game?
But to our horror, we found out Seth's theme, found on Pixabay and covered by their non-royalty license agreement, was AI-generated!
This was NOT disclosed to us when we downloaded it, but the AI taint was obvious in retrospect to our background artist after a close listen.
It took Ian Watson, a popular variety streamer, pointing out that YouTube rejected his earning potential for the video of his NSD demo stream for us to catch the slime of AI.
Ewwww.
As first-time developers, a lot of the indie dev landscape is new to us. We claimed not to use AI in our work, and we stand by that. Seth's theme has been patched/replaced by music we bought from Itchio.
We did our due diligence on the other songs, and we strongly suspect those are human-made.
We are deeply sorry to Ian, our other wonderful streamers, and our fans who liked the Seth theme.
We deeply regret the harm we may have caused, and hope y'all stay safe out there. <3
-Cass & the MIS team