Patrice Désilets has doubled down on promises to remove all AI-generated assets from 1666: Amsterdam and stop using them altogether, with the developer apologizing for the slip and providing reassurance that it won't happen again.
"We live in a world full of AI. Let's be honest, just between ourselves," Désilets says. "But there were some [aspects] that we didn't retouch enough in the pipeline, and since then, we made sure that there will not be any use of AI anywhere in the game."
The controversy came when eagle-eyed players spotted some AI-generated paintings in Panache Digital's short free demo on Steam following the witchy action-adventure's grand reveal at Summer Game Fest. But the Assassin's Creed creator reassures journalists at a recent hands-on preview event for the new game that "it won't be in the final product," and that as soon as the gen AI artwork assets were spotted, Désilets instructed his illustrator to "ensure that everything was free of charge." Now, all the paintings are "real ones," he confirms.
According to Désilets, the team's use of AI tools had happened in its earlier development stages. "I can ask AI to give me 75 different variations of one thing. I cannot have 75 different illustrators come up with variations in three seconds. This is the world in which we're living, and we're this small team building [the game]," he says. "Eventually we didn't even realize it was AI anymore because we were used to seeing it.
"I'm really sorry about that. But being honest, we were doing it two, three years ago, all by ourselves. And when we shipped [the demo], there was some slip. That will not be the case anymore."
1666 Amsterdam is launching into Early Access on August 25, when it will be available to download and play on PC via Steam.
