Genvid Technologies, one of the developers and publishers behind Silent Hill Ascension, has denied using AI to write the game’s script and dialogue.
Silent Hill Ascension is the first new Silent Hill project in over a decade, though rather than a traditional video game, it’s an episodic choose-your-own-adventure where viewers can vote on how the story plays out and other decisions. It’s also really, really bad according to fans.
Accusations of the game making use of AI generators for the writing appear to originate from a Twitter thread by VoidBurger on Nov. 25, who said “I am more and more convinced this was written by AI with each new “episode.” The blandness in the writing is uniquely robotic feeling. I’d be shocked if a human wrote this boring s**t.”
In particular, they highlight a character they dub the Berry Man as proof of AI writing since he “pops in, declares he’s berry hunting, says he’s seen weird s**t and does not expound on it, provides no information, leaves for more berries.”
While not a direct response to the tweets in question, a statement by Genvid CEO Jacob Navok clearly aims to dispute such accusations: “Every word in Ascension was written by real people, many of whom have long-running careers in writing including Telltale titles, Pixar titles, God of War Ragnarök, Resident Evil Village, and more. Across our 100,000+ words, zero are authored by LLMs or AI, and all are from dedicated work of a talented team.”
In a follow-up tweet, Navok admitted Genvid performed experiments with AI in 2021 to see if it could be used to improve animation or cinematic production pipelines. However, from the sound of things, the results proved fruitless, with Navok saying “the results weren’t different than the animation you get in that Twitch Seinfeld show, which is to say, not great.”
Navok added mentions of all of the human animators, writers, and designers who worked on Ascension, and reiterated none of the 2021 AI experiments ended in work appearing in the game. “Suggesting otherwise,” Navok said, “is just a veiled insult to talented humans who have worked hard to create something they are proud of.”
