Some video game players recently criticized the cover art on a new video game for being generated with artificial intelligence (AI). Yet the cover art for Little Droid, which also featured in the game’s launch trailer on YouTube, was not concocted by AI. It was, the developers claim, carefully designed by a human artist.

Surprised by the attacks on “AI slop,” the studio Stamina Zero posted a video showing earlier versions of the artist’s handiwork. But while some accepted this evidence, others remained skeptical.

In addition, several players felt that even if the Little Droid cover art was human made, it nonetheless resembled AI-generated work.

However, some art is deliberately designed to have the futuristic glossy appearance associated with image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion.

It’s becoming increasingly easy for images, videos or audio made with AI to be deceptively passed off as authentic or human made. The twist in cases like Little Droid is that what is human or “real” may be incorrectly perceived as machine generated—resulting in misplaced backlash.

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