Owlcat says everything in its new Expanse RPG 'will definitely 100 percent be human-made,' but also that generative AI will be used for 'vision coordination' and 'inspiration'

It's only Saturday afternoon, so there's still time for you to be at your most disappointed this week. CRPG magnate Owlcat recently reiterated that its upcoming action RPG, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, is making use of generative AI in its development—though the studio is trying to assure players it's not a big deal.

As PR manager Katharina Popp told Eurogamer, "We don't use it to create any assets that will be in the game … We use it a lot for prototyping, trying things out, placeholders. They will all be replaced at the end." She continued that "it's basically for being able to iterate faster. But we don't use it to write, we don't use AI voice actors, so everything that will be in the final version will definitely 100 percent be human made."

This is in line with what the studio shared in a post on X two years ago when user anafigreen shared a screenshot of a job listing for a concept artist at Owlcat which listed "concept generation using AI" as an example work task. The studio replied saying that "AI will be used exclusively for additional work with concepts and speeding up some internal processes," and not for final versions of art. Examples it gave were "creative search, inspiration, or vision coordination before starting conceptualization itself."

It's not clear how "inspiration" and "creative search" are different from or necessarily predate conceptualization—these are all wordy ways to describe someone having an idea—and I'm not entirely sure why AI is necessary to develop concepts for a game with both a TV series and nine novels to pull from. But Popp's note about prototypes and placeholders seems to be the go-to defense for AI in games right now.

When players spotted AI-generated art in Crimson Desert, developer Pearl Abyss said any such assets were prototypes intended to be replaced. Anno 117: Pax Romana and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 gave similar explanations when they encountered similar controversies. CRPG all-star Larian partially swore off generative AI after sharing that it used the technology in "the very early ideation stages" of development.

Players on social media are not happy. Bluesky user tickdowntozero replied to a thread about the Eurogamer article saying, "You can't have 100% human made AND use Gen AI. Made it easy to ignore this game though." "Oh man this response pissed people off the last 47 times developers used it but maybe if we use it completely unchanged it'll work for us," User Dylan Macri said in a quote repost of the story.

"Makes me sad that as a creative that AI prototyping will be a norm," said Reddit user Cold-Engineering-960. "It's just an expedited way to get inspiration from things, but it feels dirty, even if you remove the trained on stolen art part."