Ai in Your Finnish Winter Wonderland

It was a surprise unlike any other that shot through the quagmire that is the week between Christmas and New Years. There may not have been a better time for the call to return to the Finnish countryside to come through, but now the landscape looked a little bit different. The short Summer season of northern Scandinavia has been replaced with a healthy blanket of snow and ice.

My Summer Car and My Winter Car are among the most special video games made in recent times while existing adjacent to the racing and driving game space. A virtual time capsule to rural Finland in the mid to late 1990s, the games are brilliant in immersing players into a culture and reality of life that they didn't live themselves. They're one part life simulator and sandbox, one part living museum in ways only possible in the world of video games. A part of the beauty of such a direct sequel is that you can see and understand how communities change over time; with the fictional region of Alivieska growing and having new places to visit and interact with in the four years that passed between My Summer Car and My Winter Car.

There is a certain charm and joy that feels natural in the games and worlds created by Johannes Rojola, known online as Toplessgun, because they were fully created just by him and his partner Kaarina. The games look like they were made in the early 2000s: everything you see and interact with is a little chunky and wooden but brilliantly grounded in reality. There is an imperfect, and truly human way that things can interact with each other and things can, and will, go wrong in a pair of games that pride themselves in having that option to be played with a single life and no continues. Everything being made by Johannes meant that everything, regardless of quality and his skill level in certain facets, was made with heart and soul and it all came together to make something truly special that will stand the test of time. Well, almost everything; and that's a problem.

In 2021, an Ai Generated content disclosure was added to My Summer Car's Steam page denoting that, as a part of the game's ongoing development, that paintings that were ai generated had been added to the main house. Though the images that could be generated at this time were rudimentary, there were already alarm bells ringing among those who follow developments in the tech industry who could see where the technology was going and what it would be used for. Generative Ai and Large Language Models create those pictures, text, code, and more recently videos and music using large swaths of human-created works that were never consented to be used for such products. Simply put, they were stolen and nothing then created is then truly art or worthy of merit. With all it taking now for anyone to put in a descriptor prompt into a program and press OK to create such a work, there's now a way to skip paying artists, musicians, writers and programmers to make such work and instead let a computer using large swaths of electricity and water to do it for them. It's a labor crisis in spaces that are notoriously under-organized when it's already become increasingly difficult for those who work in the arts or programming to naturally make ends meet or for those who want to try and enter them at all.

In the following years, those who create and steward these Large Language Models have increased the quality of what those programs generate exponentially to where those pictures, videos and music mirror reality to a scary extent and is being used for the worst means imaginable. Users on X, The Everything App are using it's integrated Grok Ai service to create non-consented, sexually explicit images of women and children at the rate of one image per minute. By extension Sora, owned by OpenAi and funded by Palestinian Genocide-supporting Microsoft, could be used to generate videos that can further blackmail individuals when it isn't used to create political disinformation; which has been prevalent in the wake of the United States kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

But we have to get back to video games, and back to Finland.

With games that are built by just one person like My Summer Car, My Winter Car, or the upcoming Grand Pro Circuit there is a particular beauty of everything made being touched solely by their pair of hands. Not every aspect of the game is going to have the same level of quality as the other, and there will be some things that the person is better at than others when it comes to making a video game. Perhaps the way they create UVW texture maps for vehicles makes their life easier for when it's time to actually make those textures, while they then perhaps can't get sound effects to exist and echo out into the world without the balance being a little off. But through all that, it's all their work and their doing. If we as humans were put on this Earth to create things, as Syd discussed in her video talking about replacing Ai, then a video game where one person did everything might be the most human expression of the virtual world that can exist and can be seen as art in it's truest form. Using Generative Ai takes away from that human element which makes such a video game truly special and tarnishes that expression.

A computer can never be spiteful or horny.

Therefore a computer must never make art.

Toplessgun using Generative Ai in this regard within My Winter Car for music, textures and videos is especially disappointing. Using such technology as a shortcut as to not make art himself takes away so much from what makes his games special. The charm of such games being wholly made by one person fades with the fact that theses assets that are used were generated off of stolen, original works. If it's such an issue to where it takes too long to make original music or videos that play within the game, why not then pay musicians and video editors to make their own art to compliment the art that's being created? With the cult following and appeal that My Summer Car has to this day, there is little doubt to me that incredibly talented people would have leaped at the chance to work on the sequel. That is a part of the beauty of art: the fact that it can be infinitely collaborated by people from all walks of life to build and grow what is already beautiful to make it more so. Generative Ai takes that away, and what is left is a hollow simulacrum where the only ones that benefit are the very few who directly profit from people using the programs or consuming it's creations.

There is a reason that any use of Generative Ai of this nature gets met with major pushback across media, and increasingly so within video games. Incredibly talented people across multiple industries are being forcibly put on the sidelines to save a couple dollars, and replaced by computer programs that does their job but merely at a good enough level. That job that is merely good enough leaves a sour taste with none of it being truly made by human hands, and instead used stolen work that the original creator will never be fairly compensated while not being as good as it could be. This is before we get to the issues of it's more commonplace usages of spreading disinformation, insincere content creation, and the outright terrifying subjugation of women and children.

When it comes to one person developing an entire game, it's expected for it to be flawed: to have flaws is to be human in the best way. To see Toplessgun use Generative Ai at all in two of the most iconic games built in this way is damning and shameful. It sets a terrible example for those who follow in his footsteps in wanting to make their own games, but is also a reminder that you can take your own path and do things in a better way. A more human way.

For now, skip My Winter Car until that course gets corrected. A toggle that disables ai music simply isn't enough, that music shouldn't be in the game to begin with.