When you boot up Fourteen days Now, if you start digging through the game’s vast amount of user-created content, you’ll quickly notice a strange pattern: many user-created maps and modes feature AI-generated artwork of tall men, often shirtless, smiling and with food in hand. Some of these images also contain crude, racist depictions of people. And yet thousands of players Fourteen days’s platforms play these modes and Epic seems unaware of the situation or taking action to remove the offensive images flooding the game.
Fourteen days’S The popular battle royale mode launched in 2017 and became a huge success for Epic Games within a few months. Seven years later, Fourteen days is much more than a battle royale. The game now includes other games such as: Fortnite Festival, Rocket race, And Lego Fourteen days. It also includes a powerful content creator that allows players to create new maps and games Fourteen days alone or with friends. People can also use UEFNA Fourteen days-focused version of Epic’s Unreal Engine to create new content for the game. In many ways, and this is part of Epic’s plan, Fourteen days is no longer primarily a battle royale game. Instead, it has become a free-to-play video game platform, attracting millions of players across console, PC and cloud streaming.
As a platform Fourteen days provides developers everywhere a free way to create and distribute content to millions of players will be paid if one of these creations makes a breakthrough. But this easy access to a large audience hungry for new content has inevitably led to this Fourteen days They become overcrowded with copycats and clones who look for the latest trend and exploit it, thus filling the platform with garbage.
Fourteen days is full of terrible AI-generated art
The biggest trend lately is using AI-generated images of sometimes racist caricatures of tall, shirtless men to squeeze money out of Epic’s shooter. I used both official ones Fourteen days Website and Third Party Sites Fourteen days.GG to browse thousands of user-created maps. I was able to document over 120 instances of AI-generated images of tall men and women promoting user-created cards.
As you scroll through user-generated content, you’ll quickly discover dozens of maps with names like “ARAB ZONEWARS,” “Niger ZoneWars,” “Nigerian Zonewars,” “AFRICA ZONEWARS,” and “CHINA Zonewars.” IIt’s shockingly easy to find images with Middle Eastern men holding bombs, black men eating fried chickenAnd Mexican men wear sombreros and eat tacos.
While most of these maps only have a few players active, others can become very popular. In fact, it’s the user-created game that likely helped spark this trend:Zone wars in Jamaica– reached over 35,000 active players on January 5th. In some context, this would roughly fit the category Top 40 on SteamDB At the time of writing this article, the above games were like Tekken 8, Stardew ValleyAnd Red Dead Redemption II.
The Jamaica Zonewars thumbnail showed an AI-generated image of a large, shirtless black man in green, yellow, red and black. And as this game became popular, other developers seem to have decided to copy the formula.
Since Jamaica Zonewars launched on December 30th, a flood of imitators have followed. While many have expanded into other countries, Jamaica is still a popular topic Fourteen days’s platform. You can find almost 100 of these copycats in Epic’s Battle Royale. Some add extras like fried chicken, grass and monkeys.
Players complain about Epic’s lack of moderation
Things have has gotten so bad that you can now regularly Find players on Reddit And elsewhere openly questions why Epic allows this type of content to be flooded Fourteen days‘s creative maps and modes.
Most players believe that Epic has a small or no moderation team. Others suggest that since some of these creations are doing so well on the platform, Epic may be inclined to let these things live on and attract more players and money.
Update: January 30, 2024, 4:35 p.m. ET: Epic subsequently sent this statement My city published this article:
Discriminatory content, regardless of how it is created, has no place in Fortnite and is a violation of our island Creator Rules. Creators who violate these guidelines may face punitive measures, including permanent account and monetization bans.
Our human moderation team reviews all content before publishing, and we actively update our island creator rules and moderation training programs to minimize the number of cards that violate players. We encourage players to do this report any islands they see that may violate our rules.
Many of the islands mentioned have already been removed and the creators have taken action. We have already has addressed content violations on more than 100 islands that use this similar thumbnail format and will continue to do so.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has claimed in the past that the company sees itself on “both sides” of the issue AI generated art Conversation, tell PC gamer in March 2023:
“We are creatives ourselves. We have many artists in the family. We are also a tool company. We support many game developers. Some of them will use AI, some of them will hate AI, and we want to be a trusted neutral intermediary that doesn’t get in the way of industry development, but also doesn’t go out and suck up everyone’s art data.”
It’s impossible to say for sure whether all AI-generated art is there Fourteen days was created with stolen, “siphoned off” data. But it’s very likely that these creators aren’t training their own AI tools on their own craft to create these often racist images. And putting aside the issues with AI imagery and generation, it’s concerning that Epic doesn’t seem concerned about its platform filling up with such horrible, offensive art.
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