The ubiquity of generative AI is a hard pill to swallow, but even harder is figuring out what’s AI and isn’t. It’s easier than ever now to reach for that low-hanging fruit of critique in saying that something looks like an AI spat it out, especially now that games are claiming they were, in fact, spat out entirely by AI. Positive Concept Games, the developer of SNES-esque RPG Shrine’s Legacy, found that out the hard way, as it shared in a post on X last Wednesday.
Please don’t do this.We poured years of our lives into this game and only worked with real human artists on everything: From the writing to the coding, all work was done by human hands. We do not endorse generative AI and will never use it. pic.twitter.com/3L7NKVX1L8December 10, 2025
The dev shared a Steam review of the game that calls it “AI slop,” claims the “story is dogshit mixed with catshit,” and reiterates that the game was “made in CHAT GPT.” The developer caption reads: “Please don’t do this. We poured years of our lives into this game and only worked with real human artists on everything … We do not endorse generative AI and will never use it.”
But that’s just one belligerent review, right? Well, a peek at the game’s Steam page reviews that other reviews are scrutinizing the accusation more closely. One other review shares an image of an old X post from the developer where it’s seen using an AI tool for an April Fool’s joke (though the associated art isn’t in-game, and the punchline of the joke is the use of AI).
Another review claims “I did not purchase the game with the intention of playing it, but rather to understand the controversy and look for myself,” and picks apart various perceived inconsistencies—slight abnormalities in character art, a vibe of sorts that the story “felt” AI generated—to which the developer responded “You are almost certainly an alt account of the original person who accused us of AI.”
Positive Concept Games maintains that AI was not used in any part of the development process, and as long as we’re going off vibes, I don’t see any of the uncanny hallmarks of AI art in Shrine’s Legacy’s trailer and screenshots.
But that’s sort of the problem with all this—AI disclosure has been met with an “ask forgiveness, not permission” approach even from huge studios like Ubisoft, and because AI is both ubiquitous and sometimes hard to spot, accusations like these can get a lot of oxygen without much in the way of evidence.
A study from Microsoft estimates that people can only correctly guess whether something was AI-generated 62% of the time—which is at least more accurate than AI-generated search results, at least according to a study covered by Ars Technica. But it still gives all the back and forth a disquieting nebulosity. It’s easy to call something out for AI use, but harder to definitively fend off such an accusation. If you want to see for yourself, Shrine’s Legacy is available to buy on Steam.
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