Tobold's Blog
Saturday, September 27, 2025
 
Genericness

Playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is interesting because you are always confronted with new, unexpected, and original pieces of content. That can be confusing, as you have very little in terms of a frame of reference; but ultimately it is a lot more fun than more generic content.

AI generated content by definition is generic, it has been created as an amalgam of stuff that already existed before. So besides the issue of potential theft, and hallucinations, there is the far deeper underlying issue of AI content feeling soulless. The bigger the training models get, and the "better" the "safety features" get, the more generic the results will be.

But that doesn't mean that human creators get a free pass. If you play first Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and then something like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, you would be shocked how generic and trite the dialogue in Veilguard feels. Maybe it wasn't made by AI, but it clearly was written by committee, and then double-checked by a second committee for political correctness. The result is as soulless as any AI slop, and doesn't sound like anything real humans would actually say. The dialogue in Clair Obscur feels real, especially if you speak enough French to understand all the swear words.

So maybe we shouldn't concentrate so much on whether content was created by AI or human, but rather look at it's genericness: Soulless content is bad content, regardless who created it.

Comments:
Also, it's a mistake to assume future content will be either AI or Human. Much of it will be a hybrid. In dialog specifically, it's very likely that a human will have used AI at some point in the process and then tuned it afterwards, possibly through multiple iterations. After a while it's going to seem fatuous to make a distinction.
 
I played Clair Obscur in French, even though I don't speak the language, because it felt more genuine to me. I guess they had a star English cast, though. It had the same rococo flair as the games from Spiders, and that really demanded the French language.

I also played Veilguard. They could have definitely leaned more into the "army of rejects" aspect, and I think it would have dovetailed better with Inquisition. Clunkiness aside, I did enjoy myself. I'd just come off of Star Wars Outlaws when I played Veilguard, and I very much enjoyed myself more in that game.

Clair Obscur was just a dream, but I was a little upset by the end that the game didn't continue in the "real" world once they pulled aside the curtain and explained everything.
 
It seems obvious to us, but I've found that there are so many people who actually can't tell that AI art is soulless. They don't notice the vapid expressions in the eyes, the sort of generic unpurposed posture the people hold themselves in, the lack of holistic impact of the background, the bland camera angle. Especially younger people, and people who rarely view art, can't seem to tell. I'm afraid that this will extend to dialogue, too. Again, the difference seems obvious to us, but other people's cognition can be calibrated in a completely different way.

I think that big publishers dream of a world in which they can dominate content creation with the best AI models, don't have to hire any creators, and the public has had their sensibilities adjusted so they just buy works from whichever AI model is the most state-of-the-art, justifying the AI race.
 
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