The appearance of AI in art is nothing new, hell, Mr. Movies himself Steven Spielberg literally made A.I. Artificial Intelligence near the start of the millenia. But that was the Cool AI, where robots could be people, too, if we let them. Now what we have is the Donkey Bollocks AI that produces garbage facsimiles of things we know and actually like. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering AI, and I really need you to bear with me here, within our art, as that’s exactly what the team behind Pragmata did (without touching the stuff).

You’ll have likely seen the action shooter’s take on New York amongst its various trailers. It’s a messed up, distorted New York, there’s many things not quite right with it, similarly to how AI-generated images can’t get certain details right, and that’s exactly the point. “For Pragmata, we set the premise as ‘a fake New York generated by AI,'” director Cho Yonghee said in a recent interview with 4Gamer (translations by Automaton) about the game’s New York section. “When familiar locations appear, players can relate more easily. On top of that, to make it clear that this isn’t the real New York, we wanted something slightly distorted.”

Producer Naoto Oyama also explained how the “unique appeal” of the setting comes from its odd errors like cars and busses stuck in the floor. But he also made sure to note the human element: “Although the premise is that it is generated by AI, actually, our human developers painstakingly worked to incorporate mechanisms that express this AI-like uncanny feel.”

In an industry where those at the top of the food chain talk about the inevitability of AI, it’s nice to see at least some developers recognising how uncomfortable its results are. Yes, I do have to slightly ignore that this is a Capcom game we’re talking about here, a studio whose other characters were recently yassified through Nvidia’s nightmarish DLSS5. Still! We do need more devs to consider how we talk about AI in games without touching the digital embodiment of losing at chess to a dog itself, and it makes me all the more curious about Pragmata.

Pragmata is due out next month, on April 17th.