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As his Kickstarter passes $1.3 million, publisher defends Terraforming Mars’ generative AI art: ‘It’s too powerful a technology’
15.09.2023 - 15:31 / polygon.com / Ai
On Aug. 1 crowdfunding giant Kickstarter announced its new policy on generative artificial intelligence, which required creators to disclose its use in the description of their campaigns beginning Aug. 29. But one of the first tabletop teams to admit to using the controversial technology isn’t a bootstrapped start-up. Instead, it’s Indie Game Studios’ imprint Stronghold Games, the United States-based licensor of the wildly popular Terraforming Mars. The strategy game is an international bestseller that has sold more than 1.5 million copies in at least 16 languages, ranks among the best board games in the world, and is currently being shopped around Hollywood for a movie or TV deal.
The More Terraforming Mars! campaign comprises a host of potential expansions and upgrades to the original game. And as of Thursday evening, Stronghold Games has raised more than 12,000% of what it originally asked for, clearing $1.3 million. The decision to use generative AI in the production of these expansions has sparked outrage among competitors and customers alike, but there’s clearly plenty of demand nonetheless. Delivery of rewards is expected by July 2024.
Generative AI is controversial for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that these computational algorithms are trained on the work of real-world writers and artists. Without a large body of reference material — often gleaned from publicly available sources like web pages, books, and individual works of art — they can’t function. But developers of these types of software have been varied in their approach to ethical norms, including but not limited to novel interpretations of copyright law and the use of under-paid artists and students to perform as mechanical Turks. United States legislators are currently considering the issue, with a series of private and public hearings underway.
Regardless of that controversy, Indie Game Studios president Travis Worthington says his four-person company — and the game’s Swedish creators, family-owned FryxGames — are all-in on the technology. We’ve included a transcript of our interview below. It’s been lightly edited for clarity, and to stay on topic.
Polygon: How many international partners does FryxGames have in the distribution of this product? Any idea?
Travis Worthington: I’d say probably at least 30.
It’s translated into about 16 different languages, but there are more partners than that, obviously.
Yeah, it’s more than 16 languages, for sure. I mean, it’s in languages that have [only] a million speakers, so I’m sure it’s well more than that.
According to the recent Deadline story from November, the game has sold over 1.5 million copies internationally. Is that about right?
I have no idea internationally.
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