Penned by Justin Roiland of Rick and Morty fame, High on Life is a wacky first-person shooter that, as it turns out, leverages artwork and voice acting created by an AI. Since its launch, the game has revealed itself to be fairly divisive in more ways than one, with its specific brand of humor being one of the more common points of contention for most players.

High on Life banks virtually everything on the notion that the player will end up enjoying Roiland's gimmicky takes, with its gameplay systems being tamer and more by-the-numbers than it might appear at a glance. With the dust settling and High on Life receiving generally high critical acclaim thanks to plenty of solid reviews, Roiland has revealed that some of its art may have been generated on the fly.

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GameRant's review of High on Life describes the title as a "consistently entertaining game from start to finish," though it comes with its fair share of technical difficulties and perhaps a slightly disappointing reliance on classic FPS gameplay tropes. What is surprising is that some of the game's artwork was generated by an AI. In a recent interview with Sky News, Justin Roiland stated that the developers used the Midjourney AI to generate certain pieces of art from written text prompts. The game's community noticed that something of the type was happening with High on Life's various movie posters, for example, though Roiland claimed that most of the game art was handmade by artists.

Roiland claims that using Midjourney "makes the world feel like a strange alternate universe," which helps explain the game's unique visual style and atmosphere. Even more curious, though, is the fact that an AI was used to prototype certain character voices. While Roiland didn't specify which voices may have been handled using AI, he mentioned that one minor role made its way into the final product. High on Life has amazing enemy dialogue, so it'd be interesting if it turned out that AI created one of them.

Roiland also said that eventually "all you will need to be is somebody with some big ideas" to develop a game, which doesn't sound impossible given the recent developments in this area. Setting aside High on Life's game-breaking bugs, one could make the argument that Roiland has delivered yet another successful project, and from the looks of it, it's the first mainstream game to have openly used machine learning algorithms for some of its content.

Considering Roiland's interview, it's a bit of a shame that machine learning wasn't used to improve High on Life's disappointing lack of enemy variety. It's possible, however, that developer Squanch Games didn't want to rely on AI technology too much, as much of the world is still rather skeptical towards content that's been generated in such a manner.

High on Life is available now on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S

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Source: Sky News