AI Stardew Valley Mods Make Me Sad
watch there be an AI overview on this video
INFO:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water/
https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-06-18/artificial-intelligence-openai-media-manager-apple
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/23/tech/social-media-ai-data-opt-out
ASSETS:
Stock footage: Pexels
Stardew portraits of me and Tabby: https://jazzybee.itch.io/sdvcharactercreator
Silly graphics: https://makesweet.com/my/heart-locket#
Silly text: https://cooltext.com/
ME:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maybesalem/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/maybesalemacnh
Join Thee Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZcjxmF-vJhIfkyp6OFtjDA/join
Throne: https://throne.me/maybesalem
38 Comments
Great video, i have nothing to add just wanted to show support. Have a great holiday season everyone!
Not even Stardew is safe from AI 😭
in retaliation i will make a new mod where i am connected to your computer and i write the dialogue for every stardew character in real time to make infinite dialogue.
In the beginning I thought it didn't sound so bad, but you managed to convince me. I've always known AI in general is not very ethical in terms of where it gets the data, the real artists and jobs it is replacing and also the environment. But afterall, it's everywhere and part of our "new reality" so there's very little we can actually do about it. Besides that, the mod didn't seem like a big deal, in fact it seemed very appealing on the surface. But if you think about it, Stardew Valley is a game about finding human connection, reuniting a town, bringing people together. It would be insulting to ruin that message and also the hard work to make the characters as unique and intentional as the creator did.
Wholly agree that even "bad" art will hold far more value than AI art ever can. The idea that it won't matter if we can't tell the difference shows a total unwillingness to engage in the culture that makes us human.
Having a conversation with your favourite npc sounds like something that will get unhealthy very quickly :/
"it's time to start maladaptive daydreaming" 💀
… not wrong tho
on the other hand, this mod is on point if you're going the Jojamart route
Amazing video! Also agree that there are hundreds of dialogue mods that can beat AI anyday, without the harm AI causes.
omg didnt know it was happening at all, thanks for adressing the issue , its so sad to see that a game where everything has an intention is turning into dating with slop simulator
Man, that's so depressing. Part of the appeal to me is that this massive game is made mostly by one person. Eric Barone/ConcernedApe's care is everywhere in this game, including in the dialogue lines. I'm fine with limited NPC lines – I'd rather read what he had to write than have an endless flow of predictive text shoveled at me.
As the saying goes: If nobody spent time to write the script why should I spend my time to read it?
Writing and reading is a form of human connection. When you take out the human of the equation it looses its value entirely. Even microwave instruction manual are written by humans for other humans to understand.
Aside from that putting AI into Stardew is a very JojaMart move.
Also you were right…there is an AI overview on the video because ofc there is…this is the land of google after all.😵💫
I'm so sorry, but as a therapist, "It's time to start maladaptive daydreaming, babe" killed me LMAO, you were so missed, Salem. Come through with the knowledge. AI is absolutely a plague.
Ummm… You really shouldn't start talking about something you clearly have no idea about without research. I agree AI is a plague much like cryptocurrency was 5 years ago, but when data centers use water, its not coming in and then going out…. Thats incredibly wasteful and expensive. Its the same thing as your computer with water cooling just on a much bigger scale with AC built in to chill the water. Its a closed loop and only a tiny fraction of what you would find in say a small pond. The only thing data centers consume is power, which power plants use water but thats also in a closed loop. Almost anything that uses water to cool stuff is in a closed loop and water isnt simply poored out as waste water simply because its warm.
To play devils advocate, If i bake my own pie it will be far better than a store bought one made in an industrial bakery.
Does that mean the store bought pie has no value?
Does that mean everyone should bake their own pies to reduce the environmental impact of industrial bakeries?
AI is still in its infancy at the moment, look how far it's come in 3 years as was pointed out in the video.
I agree that the AI is trying to keep the conversation going and needs to sometimes have Jodi say, "I'm sorry, I must go, Kent wants me to bake him a pie tonight, but I'm just going to buy one from Pierre, Kent will never know the difference" and then any repeated attempts at conversation are just met with a "no, really, I must go" followed by the eventual loss of hearts if the player persists.
AI wasn't designed to mimic a character who is busy, AI has all the time in the world, but give it another 3 years and AI characters in video games will be common place.
we should all get used to it!
Not that I disagree with your reasoning, but the problem with just using their demo reel is that almost certainly they're cherry-picking the responses, so the real ones are definitely going to be worse. Further, I don't think the demo reflects how people are actually USING this mod.
The posts on this mod's page suggest to me that the primary thing people are actually using this for is not "to add more dialogue to the game", but to turn their romanced NPC into a chatbot girlfriend/boyfriend. That's it. I don't think people are actually talking to random NPCs just to flesh out the town. This is actually the fundamental problem with AI in these sorts of roles, even if you got rid of the environmental and IP things. This is being used by lonely people who don't care if it's slop, as long as it pretends to be their romantic partner.
Particularly, the reason nobody doing this can just go find a roleplaying partner OR a real girlfriend/boyfriend is that the thing they're getting from their AI partner is constant, immediate responses without any kind of expectations in return. Humans can't be that for anybody–they can't compete. You should not be able to log in and have Haley or Sebastian talk to you like you're really dating them, infinitely, on demand. It's not just questionable ethically; it's potentially life-ruining.
So yeah, even if you're not against this for the usual AI content reasons, whoever reads this, I'm begging you to not use this or any similar mod or app that offers real-time pretend relationships.
I will take 100 Abigail with rack mods over AI generated ones
I can see this mod being a peek to the future of many future games. A lot will like, a lot will hate. Welcome to the future, leave your data on the door to train the AI.
"I would probably sound livelier if I was AI" damn… I mean, true 😭😭 but please stay dead inside, the tone of your voice is my comfort zone. Thanks.
Ah, btw, I missed your vids! I'm so happy the algorithm showed me this video, idk why it stopped. It should know better.
Omg, Gemini actually made an automatic summary of this video. This counterattack is sassy af
Do you actually sound like that? Weird cadence.
I love your videos, but there is no manmade climate crisis.
I would employ you to read the ClimateGate release by Wikileaks, showing how the IPCC data is completely falsified.
Imagine how bad these falsified reports are now with trash AI?!
I'm glad I don't use any mods on this game. 😅
I'm OK with talking to them once a day. I like the game as it is, even things that are redundant.
idk ive been using the dialogue mod and its really fun ! its a bit inconsistent but still fun. It makes me wanna develop friendships with everyone whereas before id only befriend ppl that I liked.
this is one of my favorite videos you’ve done it’s so important thank you for making it!!!!
the ai water problem is actually not that bad. most places have more than enough water and the data centers are actually providing funding to municipal water supplies which makes infra better and water cheaper. as for data centers in the desert, those are bad but so is living in the desert at all. the power problems are huge, as is the rampant plaigiarism, so AI is still evil, its just not evil in the specific way of guzzling all the water
My opinion on the mod was somewhere in the neighbourhood of 'infinite dialogue would be nice but it's probably not as good as the actual dialogue, and it's not great for the environment either probably' but like, abstractly. People are commenting on the 'if you need more it's time to start maladaptive daydreaming' quip, but you're not entirely wrong, and the last minute or so of the video really resonated somehow? 'You do not need a machine to enjoy life for you, it won't feel anything', you can't just say stuff like that without a warning, I got shivers.
"watch there be an AI overview on this video"
welp….
Generative AI is a great filler, imo. But it has to be used as filler: minimum ammounts as needed sandwitched in between man-made quality content just to fix small gaps that were left over. Trying to replace everything with filler makes the game as good as filler.
Even if the plagiarism and the massive environmental impacts were solved today, and we had perfectly ethically trained, environmentally friendly LLMs, they are still being operated by those ghoulish techbros. They put money and clout above everything else…even over the very life of the user.
Adam Raine, Zane Shamblin, Amaurie Lacey, Joshua Enneking, Joe Ceccanti. Just a handful of cases…that we know of.
everything ai is bad (it isnt)
Anti-AI stuff makes me want to write about robot artists.
Thanks!
I didn't actually know AI was making mods… Wow..
Here's my question. I was watching the Alexander Avilla video about this topic (AI Wars) where he mentions a music video by the artist Cuckoo using AI generation. They hired an artist name Paul Flores who they hired to hand draw over 60 images to train a specific LLM model on just his art and used it to generate a bunch of assets that animators came in and animated those assets. So I'm a writer and something that I thought up was if a writer or a collection of writers could come together and do what the mod does but only scraping data from those artists(who would get credit and links to their own content) would this then be less of an issue? Now of course the energy and water stuff is still a huge issue that needs to be fixed, but there are ways to do that and some companies do. Like using waste(grey water) as a cooling solution…
Just curious what people think about that. I guess the other problem is even if this does work and is all totally ethically above board… its still gonna lead to some pretty bad mental health outcomes I think… I could see people getting sucked into their little Stardew Valley world where their loving wife Abigail talks to them and says she loves them every day… we are already seeing major problems with that and that seems very hard to fix considering that's a huge issue with our broader society…
I am so fucking tired of ai
Just a sort of vent: I love to download dialogue mods. They're one of my favourites, since if you get a few of different ones from different creators, you can rarely if ever have repeats.
One day I wasn't paying attention really and downloaded a mod that had new letters the villagers would send you. My first time playing with it, I could immediately tell it was AI and uninstalled. The two letters I got sounded exactly the same and so bland and clinical compared to the multitude of hand-typed mods by real humans I've played with over the years. I immediately uninstalled.
It's such a shame because some of these mods do have typos, or are arguably ooc (depending on who you ask) but I love them and have kept them in my game for years. Sure the letters mod didn't but it was so sterile it took me out of the game. Anyone who thinks using it will "sound better" than if they had to do it by hand is simply in correct in my opinion.
Dang, I wanted an Maru AI 😂