Neverness to Everness developers respond to AI allegations with minimalist post

Yesterday, we looked at the AI allegations against Hotta Studio in relation to the newly released Neverness to Everness. Check it out for the full coverage, but to recap, AI appeared, fans, creators, and one of the voice actors all came out against it and boycotted the game and developer. At the time, Hotta hadn’t commented on the story, but that was yesterday; news moves fast.

Although a “comment” feels a bit too charitable a word for what the team did. They put out a TwiX message saying, “AI-assisted tools were used only on a small number of background and environmental assets”, and not characters or story. They also said they are looking into the AI videos.

So, a broad strokes response. They haven’t addressed all of the specific allegations outside of the videos. Instead, they admit they used AI on what they dub “background” things, which I am still not a fan of. That's still a background artist losing out to AI, and one AI image is the equivalent of one smartphone charge, which, all added together, isn't great.

Now, where does that leave us? Well, that's down to the individual at this point. AI is sadly becoming prevalent in game development, whether we like it or not. And if you check out the comments on NTE's post, you see responses from all corners. Supporting Hotta because “everyone does”, people saying they won’t play until it's all stripped out, and then morons just insulting people because they don’t have the ability to make their own decision and defend it intelligently. It takes all kinds, crazy world.

We must say, Hotta coming forward with any comment is big for them, especially if they are removing assets. They didn’t have to; plenty of people would have played anyway. You can download Neverness to Everness and check out the alleged AI materials yourself from the App Store and Google Play.