Neowiz Wants an AI Artist for Lies of P 2 — And the Internet Is Losing Its Mind
So Lies of P dropped and absolutely cooked. We're talking Souls-like banger with a Pinocchio twist that made grown adults cry over puppet existentialism. Naturally, the entire internet has been camped out like it's Black Friday, waiting for even a crumb of news about a sequel.
What we did not expect? A job listing that lit up Reddit faster than a gas leak in a candle factory.
Neowiz — the Korean studio behind the first game — posted a new position. The title? "AI Creator." Or, depending on your translation vibe, "AI Artist." Either way, the internet heard those words and collectively lost what little remained of its cool.
Let's break down exactly what happened, why people are frothing, and whether this is actually the doom-and-gloom scenario it looks like on first glance.
The Job Listing That Started a War
Here's the deal. Someone at Neowiz went to LinkedIn — or wherever Korean studios post listings these days — and dropped a role that reads like a pitch deck from a Silicon Valley AI startup that just got $50 million in Series B funding.
The listing specifically calls for an "AI creator" or "AI artist." Not a "texture artist." Not a "concept designer." An AI person. Someone whose entire job description revolves around making machines do the creative heavy lifting.
And look, to be fair, job titles in the games industry have always been a little chaotic. "Ninja" was an actual job title at one point. But this one? This one carries weight.
Because what follows in the description is not vague or hand-wavy. Neowiz is explicit. They want someone who will use generative AI to produce textures, create assets, and — this is the part that made people clutch their pearls — leverage popular models like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to craft "concept drafts" for both characters and environments.
They also want this person to train "unique AI models" to help shape the project's visual identity.
Read that again. Train AI models. For the visual identity of Lies of P 2.
🔥 Are you kidding me right now? 🔥
What the Listing Actually Says
Let's zoom in on the specifics, because the devil is absolutely in this detail:
- Use generative AI to produce textures and game assets based on existing work
- Leverage Stable Diffusion and Midjourney for concept art drafts (characters, environments)
- Train proprietary AI models tailored to the project's visual style
- Optimize AI workflows across "every applicable field" of development
This is not a "we're exploring AI tools" kind of listing. This is a "we're building an AI assembly line and we need someone to run it" kind of listing. The language is decisive. The expectations are baked in. There is zero ambiguity if you know how to read a job post.
And that ambiguity — or lack thereof — is exactly why Reddit threads about this are already hitting four figures of comments.
Why Gamers Are Losing It Over This
Okay, context matters here. The games industry has been in a slow-burn civil war over AI for the better part of two years now, and this listing just threw a Molotov cocktail into an already smoldering room.
The core fear is simple: studios are going to use generative AI to replace human artists. Not assist them. Replace them. Take the work of real, breathing, coffee-dependent concept artists and feed it into a model that spits out "good enough" assets at a fraction of the cost and time.
And when you look at the job description — "create assets based on the existing work of others" — that phrase should give anyone who's ever worked in art or design a full-body shudder.
Because that's the part nobody wants to say out loud. Generative AI doesn't create from nothing. It learns from existing work. It ingests the labor of thousands of artists, scrapes their portfolios, trains on their style, and then spits out a passable imitation that a suit in a boardroom calls "efficient."
It's the digital equivalent of photocopying someone's homework and writing "inspired by" at the top.
But here's where it gets messy. Because the truth — the uncomfortable, nuance-free truth — is that these kinds of positions are steadily becoming the norm. Not in some dystopian future. Right now. Today. In job listings at studios you love.
The Slippery Slope Nobody Can Agree On
Here's the debate in a nutshell, and it's about as resolvable as a climate argument at Thanksgiving:
Team One: If AI-generated assets show up in a shipped game, that's a problem. We've seen examples. Players notice. Artists notice. The backlash is inevitable and deserved.
Team Two: Using AI tools to speed up concept drafts, texture production, or workflow optimization? That's just… a tool. Photoshop didn't kill art. 3D modeling didn't kill art. Why is this different?
Team Three: There is no Team Three. Team Three is just Team One on their third espresso, frantically waving their hands and saying "but it's a slippery slope, bro."
And honestly? They're all a little bit right. The line between "AI as a tool" and "AI as a replacement" is thin, blurry, and getting thinner every quarter as models get better and compute gets cheaper.
Neowiz isn't hiding what they want. The listing is transparent about the intent. That's either admirable honesty or reckless confidence, depending on which side of this fence you're sitting on.
Let’s Talk About What “Generative AI” Actually Means (For Grandma and Everyone Else)
All right, let's slow down for a second and make sure everybody's on the same page, because I know half of you just skimmed "Stable Diffusion" and nodded like you knew what was up.
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence trained on massive datasets — in this case, images, artwork, textures, concept designs, and god knows what else. The model learns patterns. Colors that go together. How light hits a stone wall. How a character's silhouette communicates emotion.
Then you give it a prompt. Something like "dark Victorian gothic knight, rusted armor, fog, dramatic lighting." And the model generates an image that matches that description. Fast. Like, embarrassingly fast.
Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are two of the most popular models for this. Stable Diffusion is open-source, meaning anyone can run it on their own hardware. Midjourney is a paid service that runs through Discord and produces stunning results with minimal effort.
The problem? Both of these models were trained on datasets that include artwork from real artists. A LOT of real artists. Without their consent, without compensation, without credit. That's the engine under the hood. That's the part that makes ethical watchdogs foam at the mouth.
Now, when a studio says they want to use these tools to "create assets based on existing work," they're essentially saying: "We want to use a machine that learned from other people's art to make our art." The circle isn't just closing. It's swallowing its own tail.
Is it legal? Technically murky. Is it ethical? That depends entirely on who you ask. Is it happening everywhere? Oh, sweetheart. Oh yes.
The Bigger Picture: AI-Assisted Development Is Here Whether You Like It or Not
Let's zoom out for a second, because the Neowiz listing isn't an anomaly. It's a data point in a trend that is accelerating at a pace that would make a Tesla CEO jealous.
Across the industry, studios of every size are experimenting with — or fully committing to — AI-assisted pipelines. Ubisoft has been open about using AI for NPC animation. Square Enix has discussed AI tools for environment design. Smaller indies are running Stable Diffusion on their lunch breaks to prototype faster.
The logic is painfully corporate: if AI increases productivity, streamlines workflow, and ultimately makes more money, then the company will make the call. Every. Single. Time.
That's not malice. That's capitalism doing what capitalism does. The outrage is real, but the surprise is performative. This was always going to happen. The only question was how fast and how openly.
Neowiz chose openness. Whether that's bravery or tone-deafness is still being decided in the comments sections of every gaming outlet on the internet.
What This Means for Lies of P Fans Specifically
Here's where it gets personal for the Lies of P crowd. The first game was a visual masterpiece. The puppet-world aesthetic, the crumbling Belle Époque architecture, the horrifyingly beautiful enemy designs — all of it was handcrafted with an obsessive level of detail that made it stand out in a crowded genre.
If the sequel leans heavily on AI-generated assets, there's a very real risk that the visual soul of the franchise gets diluted. Not because AI can't produce good images — it absolutely can — but because "good" and "soulful" are not the same thing.
You can spot AI art the way you can spot CGI in a movie that was supposed to be practical. Something's off. The textures are too clean. The lighting is too perfect. The imperfections that make hand-crafted art human? Gone.
And for a game that's literally about a puppet questioning whether he has a soul? The irony writes itself.
So, What’s the Play Here?
If you care about this — and based on the fact that you're still reading, you clearly do — here's what you can actually do with this information:
- 🔍 Go read the listing yourself. Source: neowiz.com, via reddit.com. Don't take my word for it. Go look. Read every word.
- 💬 Join the conversation. Reddit is already going nuclear on this one. Voice your opinion, but maybe don't start a civil war in the comments.
- 🛡️ Support human artists. If you're a dev, hire real concept artists. If you're a player, notice when AI assets show up in shipped games and say something.
- 🤖 Learn the tools yourself. Hate AI? Cool. Understand it first. The people who refuse to learn how these models work are the same people who'll get blindsided when their studio adopts them.
- 🔐 Enable 2FA on all your accounts. Unrelated but I'm slipping this in because I'm a cybersecurity blogger and I can't help myself.
- 🎮 Keep an eye on Lies of P 2. If Neowiz is this transparent about AI integration now, imagine what the final product will look like. Stay loud. Stay curious. Stay skeptical.
Final Verdict: The Bottom Line
Neowiz drew a line in the sand with that job listing, and whether they meant to or not, they forced a conversation the industry has been desperately trying to avoid. AI in game development isn't coming. It's here. It's in the pipelines, it's in the job postings, and it's in the concept art drafts being generated by algorithms that learned from artists who never got a seat at the table.
The question was never "will studios use AI?" The question is "what do we lose when they do?"
For Lies of P 2, the answer could be nothing — or it could be the very thing that made the first game special. The hand. The craft. The humanity baked into every rusted gear and stitched seam.
So here's what I want you to do. Drop a comment. Tell me what you think. Are you fine with AI-assisted development if it means faster releases? Or does this listing make you want to uninstall everything and go live in a cabin?
And for the love of all that is holy, enable two-factor authentication on everything you own. The robots are coming for your games and your passwords.
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