'I f**king hate gen AI art,' Hooded Horse chief says: 'If we're publishing the game, no f**king AI assets'

Different game companies approach generative AI in different ways. Some, like Electronic Arts, embrace it; others, like Larian, take a more measured, cautious approach. And then there's Hooded Horse, the publisher of games like Endless Legend 2, Cataclismo, and the breakout hit Manor Lords, whose CEO Tim Bender recently told Kotaku, "I fucking hate gen AI art."

"It has made my life more difficult in many ways…suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn't," Bender said. "It is now written into our contracts if we're publishing the game, 'no fucking AI assets'."

Banning AI art is easier said than done, as some studios—Larian and Sandfall Interactive, to name a couple high-profile examples—have taken to using gen AI in pre-production, ostensibly to help speed things along. To help counter that, Bender says he urges developers to not use generative AI anywhere, even just for placeholders.

"Some people will have this thought, like they would never want to let it in the game, but they'll think, 'It can be a placeholder in this prototype build'," he said. "But if that gets done, of course, there's a chance that that slips through, because it only takes one of those slipping through in some build and not getting replaced or something.

"Because of that, we're constantly having to watch and deal with it and try to prevent it from slipping in, because it’s cancerous."

As unlikely as that sounds, it has happened, and more than once. Ubisoft had to quickly make changes to Anno 117 after "placeholder" art mistakenly made it to the live version of the game, and in a much higher-profile case Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, one of the biggest games of 2025, lost two wins in the Indie Game Awards after it too was found to have launched with "placeholder" gen AI art still in place.