When The Lord of the Rings: Gollum first released, it was such a bad game that the developers put out an apology letter on the game’s official Twitter. Now, the team has revealed that the Gollum apology was written entirely by AI without any input from the devs themselves.
This news comes from a recent interview conducted by Game Two. @Knoebelbroet on Twitter was the first to point it out in a tweet you can see below:
My favorit part. This nonpology from Nacon was written with ChatGPT. pic.twitter.com/N0ZtX2I6WZ
— Knoebel (@Knoebelbroet) October 7, 2023
Knoebel originally received this information from Game Two Episode #307, which was posted over on Game Two’s official YouTube channel. In that video, Game Two confirms that the letter did not originate from Daedalic in a statement from the team itself. The statement has been translated from German to English below:
The post was posted on the game’s official Twitter account, which is not maintained by us but by Nacon. Accordingly, Nacon wrote this article and Daedalic did not see it beforehand, so we cannot say anything about the exact history. The typo is obviously just that, a typo – and not a “secret message” as some people suspect.
Game Two also received word from two anonymous sources that the entire apology was even written by ChatGPT, an AI chat bot designed to generate text based on a prompt. The apology was clearly never double-checked, so this corroborates the anonymous source’s claims.
You can watch the entire Game Two episode below. We recommend watching the whole thing, as it’s a very interesting deep dive into the game’s journey:
In this day and age, AI is unavoidable. It’s permeated every kind of content, including text, imagery, audio, and even video. That being said, when you’re planning to put out an apology for something, say, a game that didn’t live up to expectations, you should probably take the time to sit down and write it out with a team by hand. It should also come from the team who made the game itself and not from a publisher with minimal involvement.
If you just can’t get enough of the trainwreck that is The Lord of the Rings Gollum, you can check out our review here (spoiler alert: we didn’t love it). Otherwise, you can read about the game’s unfortunate consequences for developer Daedalic.
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I doubt the apology would have been anymore meaningful if written by an actual person rather than a.i capable of generating human-like text.