LET’S TALK PR4 IDEAS 💡🤔

[Camer the Dragon]

Personally, I'm not too hot on PR4 using AI for it's art. Questionable ethics around using it aside, the AI Jiggmin is using produces art that doesn't match the artstyle of Platform Racing and/or seem out of place at times. (see the Mine block, early Happy/Sad blocks. Push block, Time/Clock block, and the Alien Egg(s).)

Jiggmin can be a great artist. According to PR4's commit notes, the early PR4 background (before the 12-21-2024 "hayyy" commit) was a rough draft, and it was absolutely gorgeous, so Jiggmin is definitely capable of making incredible graphics. Because AI is such a very controversial topic, using AI can turn alot of people away from playing PR4, which is something I absolutely don't want to happen, especially after PR4 being in developement hell for so long. I already have one friend who said if PR4 is going to use AI, they won't play it.

Also, Steam, the platform Jiggmin is aiming to release PR4 on, has a policy where games that are made with AI must not infringe copyrighted material or generate illegal content (All AI art in PR4 are pre-generated, so we don't have to worry about that last one). This could get really murky to work with at certain points with how the copyright law is currently.

Obviously PR4 is still in a very early state, so it is possible Jiggmin is using AI assets as placeholders. I just wanted to get this off my chest.

For the style consistency I think it depends if this is to be mainly like Pr2, or just a new thing (Pr3 had an extremely different artstyle to Pr1/Pr2 so it wouldn't be the first time it changed)
I do agree though that using AI generated images is quite controversial, so not using them would turn less people away from the game in the longrun and I'd rather them just be placeholders so that the game can get built and in a good state (final art coming after core gameplay is a good design principle either way)