Shaded Spectrum is a videogame asset publisher ran and maintained by me, Danny Sutcliffe. This publisher was originally created for me to test various things, such as the effectiveness of different thumbnails/marketing, if it is profitable to be a small start-up publisher with minimal social media presence, as a platform to upload some art that I commissioned from a friend of mine, and later as an outlet for my self-hosted image generating "AI" for the specific application of videogame development.
People often critique the "quality" of AI output, for example the literacy of an AI language model or the clarity of a generated image, however most overlook the consequences of the usage of AI in real-world applications, especially those applications within fields that have always historically required vast amounts of creative human input (think arts, literature, and in this case videogame art). While one can certainly critique the visual quality of the assets that were generated throughout this project, notably how at a distance (and perhaps use in a videogame that lacks realistic visual clarity) the graphics seem almost "too good to be true for AI" lifelike, however upon inspecting closer you'll see graniness and a lifeless repetition in the texture's pattern (often also morphed and distorted in ways which make no real-world sense), this combined with the fact that the AI system lacks a range of what it can produce (as interestingly it would always create very similar textures depending on the material of the texture, e.g. wooden planks, no matter how detailed the prompt was) makes it so that any product that utilises these AI generated textures, such as a videogame, will have this strange feeling of being bland yet also like something is "off" with the environment, something artificial and inaccurate.
People's ignorance to that consequence will undoubtedly cause a rise of media that has this feeling, a feeling that CGI graphics gave people when they were first introduced (especially when created with a low budget), sometimes described as the "uncanny valley" (although that can also be used to describe things that are supposed to look real but have some artificial element that gives off a creepy feeling). I think a good term of this ignorance (and the effect it will cause) is "Artificial Ignorance", as not only is it literal ignorance of the consequences of artificiality, but it is also an ignorance that is an entirely artificial construct of these AI systems that we're developing (being that the ignorance is only there because we wish to believe that these systems are good, that they are the future, therefore the ignorance is artificial and not rooted in most people's true beliefs).
For two main reasons, firstly, because I cannot advertise that "these products were made with AI, and that's a bad thing" on the Unity Asset Store without the assets being delisted or not-approved, and secondly, because then nobody would buy or interact with the products which would remove the point of why I published them, to see if game developers would really care about if the assets they're buying are created by human artists or not so long as the price for the assets is lower.
To say that it was a newly created publisher profile, has minimal social media presence, and essentially no marketing, I would say it exceeded my expectations in terms of sales. It performed well enough for it to pay per hour spent generating the textures, cleaning them up, and publishing them etc, the same as what my current main income source does, which I argue made it even more worthwhile. The textures are still selling interestingly enough, making it a fairly nice passive income source.
Unfortunately however I have to report that the AI textures massively out-sold the human created textures, made by my friend. This is concering as it shows what I mentioned earlier, that there are game developers who do not care if the textures were created by humans or not, just so much as the price per texture (or for the pack) is lower. I have however paid my friend for his work, so I'm technically in a loss from that pack, but oh well. Also interestingly, the free demo pack I released worked well to both show that people were interested in AI products (as it got a significant amount of downloads/"sales") and I do believe that it worked in driving traffic (and potentially sales) to my paid packs as the views/sales rates of the paid packs increased in paralell to how the free pack was performing after the free pack was released.
I'm keeping my friend's assets up because they are human created. Regarding the AI assets, I'm keeping them up for three majour reasons, firstly, because people have already purchased them it would be wrong of me to remove them from the store entirely (although I don't believe it would remove their license to download/use the assets if they had purchased them prior to the removal), secondly, because I believe that it still has time to prove more things about game developer's interests in AI technologies (although I am yet to implement tests for this), and lastly, because as I mentioned previously it's simply a decent passive income source, I gotta eat too.
If you did, thanks. And I'm sorry if you've only just stumbled across this site after buying the asset(s). I do however believe that the amount of developers who are going to buy these assets, and then come to this site and be bothered by it however is thankfully minimal, if you are however a developer who has now read this after buying the asset(s), feel free to refund lol (although it was made clear to you before buying the assets that they were made with AI), unless you bought the assets made by my friend.
Created by Danny Sutcliffe in 2024 | Contact me via email: danny@sutcliffe.xyz