“The Alters,” the latest game from 11 Bit Studios, creators of “Frostpunk” and “This War of Mine,” has been getting a lot of attention. But a new conversation has started. Players recently noticed some odd text in the game. It seems certain parts might have been created by artificial intelligence.
The text in question showed up in the game’s in-base log messages. Also, some short films within the game, made by Chris & Jack, had subtitles that looked like AI translations. Specifically, the Brazilian Portuguese subtitles seemed to be AI-generated. The most obvious clues were phrases like “Sure” or “Of course!” left over from AI prompts. These were not removed by the development team. Plus, the game’s store pages never mentioned using AI-generated content.
11 Bit Studios quickly addressed the situation. They confirmed they did use AI, but mostly for temporary content during development. This was often used as placeholder text. However, they admitted some AI-generated content accidentally made it into the final game. They stated this was not their intention.
Regarding the short film subtitles, the team explained these films were added very late in the development cycle. The original creators, Chris & Jack, didn’t provide subtitles for all the languages the game supports. With very little time left before release, 11 Bit Studios needed to translate these quickly. They couldn’t hire translation partners fast enough. So, they used AI to help with translations to meet the deadline.
The studio wanted to put this into perspective. They said the AI-translated subtitles make up a tiny part of the game. It’s about 10,000 words out of 3.4 million words across all languages. That’s roughly 0.3% of the total text. They considered releasing the game with only English subtitles for the short films. But they felt this would make the experience worse for players in other languages. In hindsight, they admitted using AI was a mistake. They also wish they had told players about it from the start.
11 Bit Studios stressed their commitment to human-made content. They plan to update the game soon to remove all AI-generated placeholder text. They also intended to hire a translation team for the short film subtitles all along. This work is now underway. A hotfix will be released later to correct these translations.
We’ve seen a wide range of accusations regarding the use of AI-generated content in The Alters, and we feel it’s important to clarify our approach and give you more context. AI-generated assets were used strictly as temporary WIPs during the development process and in a very… pic.twitter.com/Me9oyABOrZ
— The Alters | OUT NOW 🐑 (@altersgame) June 30, 2025
“The Alters” is currently available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store. It is also part of the Xbox Game Pass service.