this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. (quanticfoundry.com)
submitted 22 hours ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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In a recent survey, we explored gamers’ attitudes towards the use of Gen AI in video games and whether those attitudes varied by demographics and gaming motivations. The overwhelmingly negative attitude stood out compared to other surveys we’ve run over the past decade.

In an optional survey (N=1,799) we ran from October through December 2025 alongside the Gamer Motivation Profile, we invited gamers to answer additional questions after they had looked at their profile results. Some of these questions were specifically about attitudes towards Gen AI in video games.

Overall, the attitude towards the use of Gen AI in video games is very negative. 85% of respondents have a below-neutral attitude towards the use of Gen AI in video games, with a highly-skewed 63% who selected the most negative response option.

Such a highly-skewed negative response is rare in the many years we’ve conducted survey research among gamers. As a point of comparison, in 2024 Q2-Q4, we collected survey data on attitudes towards a variety of game features. The chart below shows the % negative (i.e., below neutral) responses for each mentioned feature. In that survey, 79% had a negative attitude towards blockchain-based games. This helps anchor where the attitude towards Gen AI currently sits. We’ll come back to the “AI-generated quests/dialogue” feature later in this blog post since we break down the specific AI use in another survey question.

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[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

We had been chatting about these Gen AI survey findings and wondered out loud how it would be a good use of Gen AI if [eu5] asked you about your experiences with other specific 4X/Grand Strategy titles and dynamically generated a short tailored guide and tutorial for the new mechanics based on your existing knowledge

This is a terrible use for genAI. There's like 4 major 4X games out there that payers have likely played, and it shouldn't take that long to curate a tutorial for each. And you really don't want the bullshitting machine telling your player about mechanics.

The GenAI hype is so bad that even an article saying that over 80% of people hate it has to squeak in some shilling.

[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 1 points 1 hour ago

Proper multi-level tooltips can do far more to teach the user in 4X and grand strategy games than a chatbot can. It's pretty much how I learned to play AoW4.

[–] mrmaplebar@fedia.io 32 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

We were told that games were "art", and that this new "creative" medium that we grew up with really mattered. Many of us (gamers and gamedevs alike) happily agreed...

But where is the artistry in outsourcing your assets to the big tech slop machine? What is creative about outsourcing your design, code and storytelling to an LLM?

Is it easy? Sure... Quick? Maybe... Cheap? For now, while big tech is happy to prop it up with other people's money.

But it's not cool and it's not "art". Like every piss filtered Studio Ghibli knockoff, there's no artistry or creativity in it whatsoever. (They know that too, which is why companies are trying to hide or understate their use of AI.)

I just hope that they aren't naively expecting people to pay full price, or even at all, for AI slop games.

[–] titanicx@lemmy.zip 3 points 8 hours ago

It's not cheap. McDonald's said that their recent AI flop commercial cost more to produce then if it was made by human interaction.

[–] reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net 7 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Exactly. If we thought the companies would fold in AI thoughtfully as one tool of many for game creators to consider when implementing their vision I doubt people would be negative. As it stands we trust companies to continue doing what they’re doing: forcing workers to incorporate AI into their workflow because they’re rich friends at google/meta/openAI really really need the technology to succeed to make back anything on their investment even though the profit step still reads ??? in their master plan anyway.

[–] mrmaplebar@fedia.io 7 points 19 hours ago

To be perfectly honest, I'd still be against it as long as it is trained on the stolen work of regular people.

Not only is it devoid of artistry and creativity, generative AI as it is today is cultural exploitation and plagiarism on an unprecedented industrial scale. It's incredibly unethical on top of being slop.

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

Funnily enough, the Arc Raiders team "did it right" like this. They paid artists and made special models to pre-generate some voice clips, none of it is used at runtime, and people were still upset!

The well is beyond poisoned at this point.

[–] nullpotential@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 8 hours ago

That's still not "right". Just because some voice actors foolishly agreed to it. I don't want to hear pregenerated voices I want to hear performances.

[–] etchinghillside@reddthat.com 2 points 15 hours ago

Regardless of AI – capitalism doesn’t care if it’s “art”.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I think we, as a society, need to do a better job separating out the real issue. The real issue isn't AI. The issue is laziness. It's the "slop" part, not the "AI" part.

This is just CGI arguments all over again. People fucking hated CGI back in the 90s and 2000s. They hated how it was a crutch for VFX, hated how people wouldn't bother hiring an animal to put into a simple scene, but they'd spend $10K to make a CGI sheep for a few seconds. Practical effects were suddenly novel. People praised Mad Max: Fury Road for its practical effects, but completely ignored the fact that Fury Road very much had CGI effects throughout.

And that's the secret: people stopped talking about CGI when it became invisible. If you can't tell it's CGI, then CGI has done its job. If you can't tell it's AI, then AI has done its job.

But, quite often, you can tell it's AI, because lazy hacks pretend it's supposed to replace things that it's not made for. They spend five minutes trying to generate something, and call it "good enough". The creative art/video models are getting there, but they aren't there yet. It still requires a ton of work to get certain styles out of the uncanny valley, and inpainting isn't perfect. Voice models are okay, and better than the old TTS ones, but they don't know how to act out a scene well enough. 3D modeling might get somewhere, but it shouldn't be used for primary characters.

This hype train needs to crash into a brick wall, so that we can use it in a more reserved manner. Some companies are quietly doing so, but that's not what pushes the headlines.

[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

No, laziness is good. Laziness begets engineering.

The issue is that “generative AI” (which is neither generative nor intelligence) is built upon the stolen works of countless artists.

The issue is that it consumes massive amounts of resources and energy to produce mediocre results at best.

The issue is that it threatens the livelihood of whole segments of society, especially the ones who contribute the most to human culture.

The issue is that it's not sustainable. Once it runs out of new content to plagiarize it will be unable to produce anything new. It can't replace what it's destroying.

The issue is that it's so vastly inefficient that the data centres needed to sustain it are becoming a major contributor to global warming.

The issue is that its bubble is causing massive price increases in consumer computer parts.

The issue is that when it pops it'll take the rest of the economy with it.

The issue is that it's a gateway drug. It's being sold at a loss to destroy the human competition, and will inevitably increase massively in price once it's become a necessary part of everyone's process.

The issue is that it's being forced everywhere regardless of its uselessness for the task, replacing technologies that were actually useful and making everything less useable and more inefficient.

The issue is that it's making everything less reliable, and will inevitably cause massive damage and loss of life.

The issue is that LLM use has been demonstrated to cause brain damage, yet they elude regulation and the companies selling them have yet to face consequences.

The issue is that all of this makes it an existential threat to humanity, and a significant contributor to the ones we were already facing.

The issue is that, once you've taken into account all the pros and cons, doing everything possible to ensure it ceases to exist as soon as possible in any way, shape, or form, together with the companies selling it and the CEOs responsible for them and any politicians and investors enabling them, becomes an evident moral and ethical imperative.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

If looking at a picture is stealing, then I'm doing so every day when I browse a web page or Google Image Search.

Energy needs are a concern, but it was never a new problem. Our energy needs have been ramping up ever since we learned how to make electricity.

The ones who "contribute to human culture" are the 1% who are lucky enough to make a career out of making art or making music or whatever other creative talent they had. The problem is oversaturation, not AI. AI makes the problem worse, but so does the Internet and every other technological leap we've seen.

"Once it runs out of new content to plagiarize it will be unable to produce anything new." Sounds like humans in a nutshell. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Creativity itself is not sustainable at the rate we consume it. Every new thing is drilled into the ground, and beaten into a bloody pulp, until we find the next new thing. This is not a new problem.

Capitalism is the enemy of humanity. Capitalists wield AI as a weapon, and we treat it as a scapegoat. We think that we can just get rid of AI, and then the enemy is gone. But, AI isn't going away, and the same enemy we've always had still exists.

Use it to your advantage. Use local models. Support open source LLMs. The biggest failure of rich capitalist assholes is sheer, absolute overconfidence and an inability to relate to the people they are trying to fleece.

[–] Gabadabs@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 17 hours ago

I get your overall point, but I do think that the issue isn't laziness, the issue is the use of AI. I think it's a problem when AI is used whether the result looks good or not, because of the nature of how those AI models are trained, the environmental impact of their data centers, among other issues. For example, the current ram shortage is a direct result of these data centers. Overall, we're also talking about people's jobs. And as much as I'm offer degrowth and reducing the amount of work that people do, I also think it's important that artists who are typically always underpaid anyways, are able to keep their paying jobs. I've seen so many programming positions reduced to minimum wage AI prompt writer positions, and that same shit is happening to real artists that have rent to pay and kids to raise... We already have tools to make these jobs more efficient, but the last thing video games really need is more cost cutting measures.

[–] Texas_Hangover@lemmy.radio 16 points 21 hours ago (5 children)

When this AI bullshit first started I thought "finally, real conversations with NPC's."

Do we even have that? Or is it all bullshit?

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 7 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

There are mods that implement it, don't know about games. Skyrim has an AI driven follower mod and STALKER Anomaly has the TALKER mod.

[–] Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

There's a game called suck up, that also has this. I've read mixed results on it, but the idea seemed unique at least

[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 1 points 2 hours ago

I watched a streamer play it. It seemed more about laughing at nonsense the AI came up with rather than genuine attempts at realistic conversation.

[–] Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip 4 points 20 hours ago

From my understanding that game Where Winds Meet game has something like that.

[–] optissima@lemmy.ml 3 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

I don't know a single game where it's been implemented yet, which is unreal.

[–] lemmeLurk@lemmy.zip 11 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Because it's difficult to fit to a world. You need a pretty good GPU of which a lot of the memory will be take up by the LLM running locally. That means you basically can not use it while also having other fancy graphics at the same time. So you would basically have a not so demanding looking game with high GPU requirements.

Also it's quite difficult to steer the NPCs to be consistent. In my free time I'm working on a small project right now to have a game centered around llm NPCs, but it's a lot of work to steer them to be consistent with the world you place them in. Because they always go with a "yes and" approach, so it's easy to end up in a situation where they make up things that contradict the reality of the game.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I'm actually also working on a project using LLMs to talk to NPCs. Though this one doesn't use local models but online models called through a proxy using API keys, which lets you use much larger and better models.

But yeah it's been interesting digging deep into the exact and precise construction of the prompts to get the NPCs talking and behaving exactly like you want them, and be as real and lifelike as possible.

[–] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I've also experimented with this. In my experience, getting the NPCs to behave the way you want with just a prompt is hard and inconsistent, and quickly falls apart when the conversation gets longer.

I've gotten much better results by starting from a small model and fine-tuning it on lore-accurate conversations (you can use your conversations with larger models as training materials for that). In theory you can improve it further with RLHF, but I haven't tried that myself yet.

The downside of this is of course that you're limited to open-weight models for which you have enough compute resources available to fine-tune them. If you don't have a good GPU then the free Google Collab sessions can give you access to a GPU with 15GB of VRAM. The free version has a daily limit on GPU time though so set up your training code to regularly save checkpoints so that you can continue the training on another day if you run out. Using LoRa instead of doing a full fine-tune can also reduce the memory and computational resources required for the fine-tune (or in other words, allows you to use a larger and better model with your available resources).

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 points 3 hours ago

Well, what I'm working on is a mod for STALKER Anomaly, and most large models already seem to have good enough awareness of the STALKER games setting. I can imagine it's a much bigger challenge if you're making your own game set in your own unique world. I still need to have some minor game information inserted into the prompt, but only like a paragraph detailing some important game mechanics.

Getting longer term interactions to work right is actually what I've been working on the last few weeks, implementing a long-term memory for game characters using LLM calls to condense raw events into summaries that can be fed back into future prompts to retain context. The basics of this system was actually already in place created by the original mod author, I just expanded it into a true full on hierarchical memory system with long- and mid-term memories.

But it turns out creating and refining the LLM prompts for memory management is harder than implementing the memory function itself!

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

There are some, none of them are very big. The bigggest I can think of is Darth Vader from Fortnite and players immediately got it to swear and say slurs.

https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-of-genai-games-on-steam

[–] winety@lemmy.zip 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Recently when browsing through Steam, I stumbled on Whispers from the Star in which you help a LLM-driven character. It looks interesting and it has positive reviews on Steam but I haven't played it yet myself.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 0 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

The fact that Clair Obscure Expedition 33 was well received as the best game of the year, and found out there was some use of Ai afterwards... tanked it reputation. But the results speak for themselves. This game does not look like Ai slop. This means, companies are motivated to hide this fact even more.

[–] Hegar@fedia.io 17 points 20 hours ago

My understanding is they only generated some textures, which everyone noticed and complained about, so they had to patch in human-created textures to replace them.

They also lost a goty award because they lied about having never used ai.

I don't think either of those situations would encourage hidden use of ai.

[–] Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip 6 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

From what I remember people knew about the AI thing for a long time, but forgave it cause it was replaced immediately after release. I think what makes people upset at Lairion now is that they're trying to dance around the AI problem instead of discussing it directly. They come up with tons of excuses whenever asked instead of just strongly sticking to their choice. It's like whenever any big company gets called out for doing something stupid. They just do bad PR nonsense instead of saying what they actually mean.

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)
[–] ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

AI has a lot of problems beyond how it looks. I was going to play COE33 but I'm no longer interested.

[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Because they used, and then removed, placeholder AO generated textures in some unspecified location?

I hate to break it to you buddy but for the last 2 years every piece of software you've used, including this one, has had the dev experiment with AI tools.

[–] ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

It wasn't some unspecified location. There are images of the AI textures. Why should anyone believe they were placeholder textures as opposed to crap that they thought nobody would notice?

I'm not against the use of AI, so why you would assume that I do not know. I expect transparency on its use. The developers clearly were not transparent if it ever got to the point where they won an award despite a hard anti-AI rule.

[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

They removed the AI content less than a week after release. By unspecified I mean it wasn't a deliberate "this is the AI section".

The awards were given 4 days ago, 6 months after release (more?). So the judgement is not on the game as it stands or even as it was submitted.

The awards don't matter, I'm just genuinely baffled by this person depriving themselves of joy because of some virtue signalling that relies entirely on just not being aware of AI being used everywhere else.

Following the publication of this article, Sandfall Interactive wishes to provide the following clarifications.

The studio states that it was in contact with El País on April 25 - three months prior to this publication. During these exchanges, Sandfall Interactive indicated that it had used a limited number of pre-existing assets, notably 3D assets sourced from the Unreal Engine Marketplace. None of these assets were created using artificial intelligence. Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative Al-created assets in the game. When the first Al tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process.

[–] ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

"Virtue signalling" really? This is some AI bro bullshit. Like clockwork, everyone who is exposed for using art theft slop comes out and claims that they didn't use it. And if they did, they only barely used it. So that makes it okay, apparently. That's on you if you just blindly believe the oopsie from the developers.

just not being aware of AI being used everywhere else.

Talking completely out your arse there, and ignoring what I just said in my previous comment.

[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Yes, absolutely it is virtue signalling. You are taking an utterly meaningless stance for which the only upside for anyone is you think you maintain some kind of honour despite consuming "theft slop" unknowingly every day, even as you read this sentence, and the only downside for anyone is that you don't get to experience a game that you otherwise would enjoy used to have, even if deliberately and knowingly, used to have some AI textures.

You're the one who ignored what I said, which is why I'm essentially just having to repeat myself. If you take such hardline stance that any use at all is "theft slop", you might as well go offline. It's in the code that made the app you're using. It's in the code running your OS. It's in music you listen to. It's in the movies you watch.

Absolutely push back on theft - deliberate misrepresentation of someone's work or style as orignal. Absolutely push back on slop. Just because it took a minute to generate something doesn't mean you don't then check it before productionising it. But taking this weird religious stance where something literally is tainted from previously having used AI, that is just for you. You've got about 30,000 days on this earth, man. Probably a good chunk of that is gone already. Spend a few hours of it playing an interesting, original game which does more to demonstrate the value of real creativity and originality than any little personal protest you indulge yourself in.