Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse is taking a rare stance against generative AI (gen AI) despite more companies embracing the tech.
The indie publisher has made a name for themselves with mostly strategy-based games like the wildly popular Manor Lords, and only launched back in 2019.
Their rise in popularity as a publisher has run parallel to the rise in gen AI, which Hooded Horse is now actively refusing to work with.
“I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender said in an interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.’”
Bender likened the popularity of gen AI as tiresome, “If I sound frustrated, it’s because, like, honestly, all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult.”
Elsewhere in the discussion Bender said they tell developers to not use gen AI at all during production, because “placeholders” could be overlooked and left in the final product.
Though it won numerous awards, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had some award wins taken back over the fact that it used gen AI during its game development. This concern has led to Hooded Horse refusing any creators that use the tech at all.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process,” Bender said. “Because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?
“Like some people will have this thought, like they would never want to let it in the game, but they’ll think, ‘It can be a placeholder in this prototype build.’ But if that gets done, of course, there’s a chance that that slips through, because it only takes one of those slipping through in some build and not getting replaced or something.”
By its nature, generative AI has become more used in the creative process with some companies. Hooded Horse apparently ran into gen AI being left in games, and got tired of dealing with it.
“Because of that, we’re constantly having to watch and deal with it and try to prevent it from slipping in, because it’s cancerous,” Bender said.
Manor Lords is available now on PC (via Steam) as an early access title. It’s also planned for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S sometime in the future.
