UPDATE: 2025/07/01 21:01 EST BY RHIANNON BEVAN
The developer has clarified how and where AI was used in development. In a social media post, 11 Bit admits that AI-generated text can be found in a background texture, but this was only supposed to be a placeholder. Furthermore, it says that AI was only used to translate the in-game movies, as 11 Bit did not have enough time to get it through its localisers. It says that both of these examples will be removed from the game in an update.
The Alters has seemingly been caught using generative AI, and it’s because a few obvious mistakes were left in. In at least two different points in the game, it looks like the response to whatever prompt the devs used to generate text for the game was just copied and pasted over, exposing that not all of the text in-game was written by a human.
Examples that appear to show generative AI being used in The Alters are being found and shared online. One example suggests that 11 Bit Studios relied on it quite heavily, too, as one of the AI bot comments that was left behind shows that it was used to translate the game into Brazilian Portuguese.
The Alters Players Find AI Chat Bot Responses Left In-Game
The instance of AI being used to translate the game was spotted by Hector De Paola, co-founder and editor of the gaming site Overloadr. The image shows some of the text from the Portuguese translation, which reads as follows when translated back into English: “Sure! The text translated to Brazilian Portuguese is: Every conversation two people can have, right?”
That reads a whole lot like a response you’d get on ChatGPT when you’ve asked it to generate something for you. In other words, there’s a chance that 11 Bit didn’t hire a translator/localiser as you typically would in game development.
There also appears to be an example of AI being used to generate text from scratch, or at least AI being used to make edits to text that someone else had written. This was spotted in a line of text that appears on a screen, with one of the sentences reading: “Sure, here’s a revised version focusing purely on scientific and astronomical data.”
there’s more damning evidence in-game, even, but it’s all background stuff that you have to go out of your way for there’s text crawls where you can still see the AI prompt responses before it produces a bunch of science jargon wild that they’ve dodged disclosures all things considered
— D (@vysetron.pixeldie.com) 2025-06-23T17:18:23.720Z
As well as this, some players believe that some of the art used in-game is AI-generated.
11 Bit Studios has not commented on this backlash at the time of writing, and there is no warning on the Steam page that generative AI is used in The Alters. TheGamer has reached out for comment.
The Alters
- Released
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June 13, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Use of Drugs and Alcohol, Violence
- Developer(s)
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11 Bit Studios
- Publisher(s)
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11 Bit Studios
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5