Silent Hill: Ascension started late last month, promising an entirely new experience in the Silent Hill universe. But following accusations of using AI, the CEO of Genvid has defended the title.
Several fans have noted a similarity to AI-written dialogue, with X (formerly Twitter) user VoidBurger posting that she absolutely believes that Silent Hill Ascension is “written by A.I and (I) cannot be convinced otherwise”. This reaction is in response to a scene in which a man appears only to exposit some seemingly meaningless information on berries and his love for jam, before leaving the game entirely.
Jacob Navok, CEO of GenVid (who are producing the series), claims that every line of dialogue in the game is written by a real person, however. In a post on X, Navok claims that every line of dialogue in Silent Hill: Ascension was “written by real people”, stating that “across our 100,000+ words, zero are authored by LLMs [Learning Language Models] or AI, and all are from dedicated work of a talented team.”
Indeed, according to an article at launch from Vulture, Navok actually scrapped the AI that Genvid had planned to use for both animation and writing. As Vulture puts it, one scene showed a “character getting up, taking something from a fridge, sitting down, and repeating the whole thing five nightmarish times.” Navok reportedly saw this process and decided to pull all use of AI from the project.
This is the first installment in the Silent Hill series since 2014’s PT and marks the first of several projects Konami has planned for the series. Chief among these is a remake of Silent Hill 2, developed by Bloober Team, who also developed the Layers of Fear series.
Elsewhere in gaming, the popular television series Taskmaster is getting a fully voice-acted VR game.
