AI assisted or poor artwork on Steam’s ‘PvP Fest’?
It’s harder and harder to tell
Today started Steam‘s PvP Fest sale, which is cleverly being set during the upcoming Valentine’s Day and instead pushes couples to become fighters instead of lovers this year, as usual with all new sales it also brought a new banner artwork which has me asking questions.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post talking about the now CD Projekt-free GOG, admitting to have used completely generated AI art for their New Year Sale, which came as a huge disappointment to fans of the storefront as many feel is flies in the face of the ethos that GOG stands for, and also disappointing fans of human made artistry as it’s becoming much more common for companies to just rely on AI to do something dirty and cheap, with almost a quarter of the ad time during the Super Bowl using or selling AI to the public.
Valve have typically been ones to buck the expected trend for large corporations that love making money, when Web3 NFT games were a hot thing they banned them outright from their storefront, and even recently clarified their wording about use of AI in games when publishing a game after the previous iteration was deemed too vague as initially highlighted by Epic Games‘ CEO Tim Sweeney, but I was surprised to see what looked like a very wonky controller in the artwork for the latest Steam Sale, which has made my worry wheels turn.
At a first glance the artwork looks fine, a bit on the more boring side for what Valve have typically done for their sales in my opinion, having previously commissioned artists to create some beautiful artwork for them, but ultimately it gets the job done. This is where the issue of AI comes into play, as it’s made the public become more alert of art and makes them dive into it much more than they ever have before, I know that this has happened to me as my eyes immediately want to look at the hands, which are a common fail point for AI, but in this case it’s the controller in the hands of the man on the left side that caught my attention, and where I noticed what I thought to be some weirdness.
Diving deeper into the controller itself it looks pretty messed up in my opinion, on what would be the controllers left side (our right), typically where a d-pad and analog stick would sit, you have what looks to be a d-pad or face buttons next to an analog stick which is good, but the d-pad/face buttons look to be above the analog stick and they look uncomfortably close together. Then, on what would be the right side of the controller (our left) the analog stick is now up at the top of the controller in line with the left side’s d-pad/face buttons, while there doesn’t seem to be face buttons represented either. There also looks to be a big cut out circle in the middle of the controller just between the L2/R2 buttons, making it look awkwardly thin in the middle. One other thing that caught my eye was how high up the thumbnail on the left hand is (our right), which looks quite unnatural when you compare both thumbs.
While this hasn’t been confirmed or denied by Valve yet I have reached out to them to see if I can get an answer, and will update this post accordingly to their response, however Valve are known for their elusiveness so I may not receive a response at all.
I look at the artwork, specifically the controller and I feel I can only decide that it’s at least partially AI and then been cleaned up by a human, purely because of just how unnatural the controller looks. At the same time though I do want to be aware that I have seen numerous times now people deciding something is AI only for it to be found that it’s not used at all. It’s happened within the Fortnite community with some of their sprays and music included in the Chapter 7 music pass, it also recently happened within the Halo community while trying to celebrate said community. Only for the artists to come forward and confirm that no AI was used in creating their art. This often results in a tricky situation, as it could just be bad art, but at the same time companies are becoming ever so sneaky in trying to hide that they’re using AI art, some more brazen than others obviously, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a controller that has the layout show in the art, alongside the question is raised of wouldn’t it have made more sense to use the upcoming Steam Controller (or even the original one) instead of this weird wonky looking knock off? The person on the right hand side is using a Steam Deck to play, so it would have fit in pretty well.
This just goes to highlight just how difficult it has become to know whether AI is being used to generate art, and with the rapid rate of improvement and it being instead pulled as a tool to assist instead of replace it’s only going to become more difficult to know if something has used AI generated art at some point in the process.
