Future? No Thanks! has been updated. These are the changes:
– The toilet is now voiced by a human pretending to be a robot.
– The automatic translator in the hair salon is now voiced by a human pretending to be a robot.
– The various gigs give you a bit more money, possibly preventing some situations of soft-locking players from achieving all the quests.
The voices were recorded earlier this year but I decided to not use them because I thought the actual uncanny text-to-speech was funnier in that context. Alas, the new generation of text-to-speech counts as user-facing AI-generated content and that keeps creating all sorts of annoyances and bad optics.
In my opinion the game is worse now, but only, like, 0.001% worse.
Personal update
So this Tuesday I went to see You Can See Everything (terrific movie), and by the time I got out of the theater I had become… The Elizabeth Holmes of Indie Games!
Somebody from Bluesky (the Twitter/X clone) dragged me due to a post disclosing what I foolishly thought a minor use of generative-AI in Future? No Thanks!
I gave versions of that statement multiple times before, whenever asked by festivals and events. Steam doesn’t require disclosure of generative AI for things like code assistance so many people assume their favorite indie games don’t use AI at all just because the developers stay mum.
Not me, I’m a good boy and I wanted a page I could link to that explains that NO, this is not a vibecoded slop game but YES, I did ask chatGPT to fix a broken shader and a few things like that.
More foolishly, I added a paragraph that sounded like I was trying to exculpate myself by poo-pooing on all the colleagues that advocate for an AI-free life.
Look, it was not a good post. Defeatist, hastily written. I thought nobody would read it.
Anyway, slow news day, everybody fucking hates AI, the whole scene piled on.
I was the Main Character. I was Discourse. Why didn’t I confess my AI sins before? Why don’t I consider programming an art form? How dare I make a communist game with the master’s tools? Would I eat a sandwich if it had ONLY A LITTLE POOP in it? Am I satirizing the puppy killing machine by KILLING PUPPIES?
Along with some elaborate mocking I also got a lot of straight-up insults. More insults than that time at the height of GamerGate when Adam Baldwin unleashed his half million followers on me. That’s my beautiful community!
Sure, Bluesky needs to import some proper AI villains from X, but you know you did something wrong when you become the strawman argument for all the positions you disagree on.
At the very least I owe you all a game without AI-generated voices. That’s what the update is about.
If you bought Future? No Thanks! (I know you didn’t) and still feel betrayed, please email me your Paypal or Venmo and I’ll send your money back.
Here’s a big list game developers that completely reject generative AI. Big props to them. Give them a follow. SteamFest is drowning in actual slop, help them stand out. And I hate to break it to you, but you should probably assume that all the studios that have not made a public statement against all generative AI are using it for coding in some capacity. I’m guessing this episode isn’t going to encourage more voluntary disclosures.
As for me, I drank from the chalice of blood. Nothing will ever redeem me and my cursed little game. Still, I had already determined that AI-assisted programming is bad for me, and my next project will be completely hand-coded. I might write more about this soon.