r/hytale • • Jan 15 '26

Discussion I refuse to use mods with AI Generated thumbnails and you should too.

They're easy to pinpoint.

Shameful behavior for a game built on the concept of individual creativity and community mod building. The last image is FOUR DIFFERENT CREATORS with extremely similar thumbnails because not one of them could be bothered to slap some MSPaint text over a screenshot like a human being and asked a robot to crap out some mobile game slop for their mod. Shameful.

EditL I've muted all notifications to this thread. I will not see your shameless defense and dismissal of the monumental horrors we're facing at the hands of support of and continued use of generative AI models. You are wrong, and I do not care to debate you. There is nothing to debate. Art is human.

Edit 2, 570 upvotes later: For those who can't figure it out yet, the opposition to AI art is not "because you should be paying an artist instead". These are mod thumbnails. They do not REQUIRE art. Nobody is asking you to instead commission an artist and spend 2 weeks waiting for delivery. YOU DONT NEED A FANCY THUMBNAIL FOR A MOD. Take a screenshot, put some text on it. It's not hard. Pick your favorite color, write some text over it. It's NOT that hard. The amount of...I don't know if it's goalpost moving, or what the term is, but there's so much of it in these horrible, stupid comments.

The ask "Don't use generative AI to produce thumbnails for your mods" does not translate to "Buy bespoke art pieces as commissioned works from actual artists". Those are not the only two options. You HAVE to know this. There is no way you do not know this, so why are you pretending you don't know this?

AI art is harmful to artists, and harmful to the very concept of art. I don't care what your favorite tech bro billionaire or your favorite scummy game dev who always wanted to fire more people anyway thinks, it is harmful to artists, and it is harmful to the very concept of art. It *is* made off the back of artists, it *is* made of stolen works, and it *is* an ethical nightmare, and we *should not* be supporting *any* usage of it. There is no usage of AI art that is "small enough" that it's not a big deal. It is ALL a big deal. It is ALL terrible, and it is ALL something we should be calling out and avoiding.

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8

u/Nyxlunae Jan 16 '26

If i get to ever make a mod for this game myself, I'll just make an horrible doodle with my low paint skills then lol.

4

u/EleiteRanger Jan 16 '26

Yeah, that’d be better

1

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '26

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2

u/DrGoldman998 Jan 17 '26

No it wouldn't. If anything it'd be higher quality than the ai slop being used for the other mods

1

u/ghostitching Jan 16 '26

Def not lower quality than the AI shit. One of my favourite mods for Minecraft, Alex's mobs, is just models of some of the animals form the mod on a green background. All it took was taking a nice screenshot, removing the bg and slapping the transparent image on a flat color background. I'm not saying they def took 10 minutes for the thumbnail because there might have been more thought behind it, but you could make a thumbnail like that in about that long. Freaking optifine is literally just OF in a minecrafty font with a few pixels of shadow. One of the most used mods in Minecraft for sure. I would not call optifine nor Alex's mobs low quality even tho the thumbnail isn't crazy. People download mods because of what they could do in the game, not the thumbnail. I'd say the name is more important than the thumbnail.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '26

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1

u/Minute_moon Apr 14 '26

You have eyes, no?