Among the many debates surrounding Nvidia’s DLSS 5 announcement is one about artist autonomy and creative freedom. Effectively, the question is ‘do these tools hinder or contribute to artistic direction?’, and developers are pretty mixed on that one, to put it lightly. Where the likes of Bethesda boss Todd Howard and Capcom executive Jun Takeuchi seem to be in support of it, many developers are anxious, disgusted, or even blindsided by it.
According to Insider Gaming, a Ubisoft developer said, “We found out at the same time as the public”.
It’s not clear who this developer is, which department they work in, or how widespread that secrecy is at Ubisoft, but Assassin’s Creed Shadows was one of the games used to showcase DLSS 5 during its reveal earlier this week.
As well as Ubisoft, developers at Capcom reportedly told Insider Gaming they were shocked by the announcement, as Capcom had historically been “anti-AI”. Resident Evil Requiem’s shot of Grace Ashcroft is among the most highly criticised from the DLSS 5 reveal, with our own Tyler Wilde arguing it ‘clearly overwrites game characters with AI beauty standards.’
Jensen Huang has said devs have ‘artistic control’ and Bethesda argued the same, though with mega corporations getting access to these tools, it begs the question ‘who really gets to decide if developers use DLSS 5?’
A company as large as Ubisoft couldn’t possibly tell all its artists, designers, and producers of the DLSS 5 announcement without a lot of paperwork and likely NDAs to go with it. So, would it check whether individual developers are comfortable with generative AI tools like DLSS 5 before implementation for the public?
Still, it’s worth noting that DLSS 5 won’t launch until later this year, and the demo shown this week likely won’t be the final product. DLSS 5 seems to offer the ability to toggle and customise the strength of its AI generation to some degree, and that’s before noting that generative AI imagery has vastly improved over the last few years in terms of technical quality.
Generative AI has been criticised not only for its quality but for its ethics, and that’s a debate sitting near the core of this announcement. There are concerns about both the work models used to train and how their output is used. If executives believe there’s more money to be made in generative AI assets than handmade ones, what’s to stop them from employing fewer real artists?
DLSS 5 is not intended to add new textures, but the underlying philosophy of making existing textures more photorealistic is a concern for many developers. At the very least, the devs might have taken the news better if they knew ahead of time.
