This thread is depressing. I am always sad to find out how widespread AI usage is still even. You can live your life with so little AI usage and should. Programmers have put so many industries in these tiny, fragile little bubbles.
I’m a musician and it ruined music for me because a lot of musicians are also “just using a little to alleviate the crunch” or whatever. It’s all manufactured consent to fund companies that were all jockeying for Trump money the last two years.
But now it supports the Trump military AND it’s ruined the market for digital artists.
the difference with programming is that it’s an evolution of existing tools there rather than something new. the image/video/audio generators are much worse from that aspect.
At least with EDM which is my favorite music to make it is all pretty downstream from each other if you know what I mean.
Software developments lead to new soft synth developments. I quit using FL studio because now you can just have it write melodies, parts, mix and master, I don’t use any of that stuff but FL is in my meta tags now and it becomes impossible to prove. I was trying to record all of my sessions to validate my work but I’m too broke and homeless for that. It’s all just not worth it anymore.
I could just make songs for myself and that is fun but I can do that on any DAW so why not one where I can share my work with confidence it’s made from reading, conversations and practice? Right now I use KORG on the switch and while it’s a bit slower I can make awesome songs on it. And the people I usually share my work with are happy to hear I’m not using AI supporting companies.
If it makes you feel any better, AI usage will plummet when those companies start charging more than it costs them to deliver it.
Not really, it’ll just mean everyone will be using Alibaba, z.ai and Deepseek models.
The laws of economics apply no matter which model it is. Right now, the costs to the end user are highly subsidized.
“Don’t worry guys, the plagiarism machine currently burning the planet was only used sparingly”
imo, if llm usage is so slight or well thought that one couldnt detect it, i think at that point it could be ok. But if the llm used belongs to those big companies that are burning down the planet, then no amount is excusable. Its a tool, and if you can use it well enough it doesnt make the end product shitty then its good enough. Though even there the line is a line in water during storm. Whether llm usage is ok also comes to artistic integrity and that definitely cant be relied on when said artist can be fired for not doing as told. So better to err on the side of not using llm at all than risk it rotting something really important that cant be repaired.
The primary use case for House House’s use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code. If you’re technically-minded, and curious, here’s an example. We needed to cull shadow casters by distance from the camera, but Unity URP only allows culling shadow casters by distance in camera forwards, so shadow casters behind the player were being rendered at an infinite distance. This made our game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. We researched the problem extensively, and we looked at the URP code ourselves, but we couldn’t find a way. Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasn’t possible. Finally, we posed the question to an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix, and while we had to modify the suggestion extensively, it worked. This fix represented about 10 lines of code inside URP.
asking a LLM for a fix that added about ten lines of code after heavily modifying the LLM output is exactly how AI should be used. They exhausted all other options and still had to tinker with the LLM code to make it work. if that’s not real coding, idk what real coding is anymore
for those that don’t approve of this, why? just curious, no hate 🙂
If that’s the extent of their AI use then that’s fine I mean that’s basically just googling stuff on steroids. That’s all I ever use AI for.
This is why I find Valves AI disclosure tag to be slightly problematic, I don’t think it really drills down enough to define what “AI used in this game” means, so then it’s up to the individual developer to make a value judgment and not everyone will agree with where they particularly draw the line. We need a line in the sand that everyone can agree upon or at least everyone understands.
On a side note, how on Earth does unity not have the ability to cull shadows that are outside of the view frostrum, that’s unbelievably stupid. I’m pretty sure City Skylines 2 has a similar issue.
I’m not sure if I’m reading it correctly, but how I understood it was that you could cull anything not in an single camera’s view, or you can not cull shadows at all if you are using multiple cameras. House House wanted to cull everything outside of a given distance for all cameras regardless of direction. Again, I’m not 100% I understood the problem either, but that’s how I interpreted it.
Its a heresy, Adeptus Lemmingus forbids the abominable intelligence.
FOR THE OMNISSIAH
In this case, this AI usage in on the Unity team. House House is paying for Unity support, and got no help (wouldn’t be surprised if the help itself was also AI, but a different model), then had to rely on LLMs. It’s a systemic issue: game developers are relying on a small number of game engine vendors, that can push for enshittifying pretty easily without much repercussion.
game developers are relying on a small number of game engine vendors
That’s why open source solutions are so important, but obviously they take time to reach maturity.
There’s a good thing about open source solutions: you can just fork them and fix the issues. Something is unavailable in the default renderer? Slightly adjust the current one.
Well, luckily the two big bad commercial engines, while not open source, are at least source-available, though it requires you to actually ask them for the source access, which might be a bit of an ordeal. You can just point an LLM at the codebase to help you debug this kind of weird shit.
It’s never about their use case. Its about how ai steals everything in order to provide any answer at all, and how destructive even providing that answer ends up being.
This might seem reasonable on its face, but who did the LLM company steal the answer from without accreditation? Who’s neighbourhood is being ruined by the data centre?
It’s that ultimately there is no ethical use of LLMs
Speaking as a software engineer, code sits in a weird spot in terms of copyright. The exact code as written can be protected by copyright. But the mechanics of it cannot. Furthermore, code that performs a task that is so generic or even necessary for the mechanism it serves also cannot be protected. I can’t copyright a for-loop that iterates through an array, for example. Nor can I copyright the use of libraries built and freely published by others. Boiler plate code and importance tools are never protected.
There are so many libraries of tools, and fully, freely available code as open source, so much raw code content and understanding in forums and textbooks that, honestly, the only real protection any code has is the actual source code as written for commercial products. And you simply do not need those examples for training. And that is if you can even get direct access to those things. They’re not exposed to the public by design.
I would imagine that little, if any, actually copywritten code was ever used in training LLMs. That isn’t to say that there isn’t an element of use without credit to sources and individuals. But really that problem existed well before LLMs and, again, is morally grey when it comes to matters of mechanics.
Code is a unique beast. It is essentially mechanical. It works or it doesn’t. It is a quantitative measure, not a qualitative one like music, art, film, etc. You can train LLMs not just on code examples, but on concrete outcomes, pass-fail requirement conditions. And it is made of a finite set of operations, like math. It is only in its patterns of these operations that actual meaning and work is derived. LLMs can find such patterns iteratively without copying someone else’s work.
But even for code it has used, to me, coding has always felt collaborative. How many thousands of memes have been made about programmers googling everything in their work. It’s true. Coding has always been community-driven and open-source by default, at least in my academic and professional life, and so training LLMs on this data also feels less offensive to me. And I say that as an engineer who both uses Claude as a tool in my work now, and one who is likely to be laid off in the next year, in part because of this. But I blame corporate greed and lack of integrity for that, not the fact that this tool exists. I have other problems with AI coders, and AI in general, not the least of which is just about every aspect and consequence of these data centers, as you said. But not because of “theft” of freely available code.
It’s that ultimately there is no ethical use of LLMs
I agree that they’re trained unethically, but “no ethical use” is gross overreach
Google search is using AI at this point, but prior to that should summarize popular results when it wasn’t just pointing at SEO’ed crap or various stack-overflow/EE/Quora articles.
AI for a similar purpose - finding and collating publicly available information - seems ok to me. I’m more interested in the various solutions I’ve contributed online being available and useful to somebody than attrition.
But if course the models themselves are built on a lot more than that, unfortunately. Still, AI doing basic search and analysis to provide suggestions versus actually writing the core software seems like a good evolution of “search” functionality
Well id argue local llms + don’t support the people making them is probably fine, so long as you’re not letting it do web searches constantly so you aren’t ddosing the internet.
They absolutely do. Just because you took the plagiarism machine offline after it stole everything and then destroyed ecosystems and neighborhoods to produce the resulting dataset doesn’t mean it’s any better than the fascist empowering online ones. It’s exactly the same. Being ever so slightly better because you’re using your own power from the power company instead of someone else isn’t worth the destruction caused to get to a point where your offline sycophant machine can sometimes confidently not lie to you.
I’d say that would depend on the dataset used to create them.
What constitutes an ethically acquired data set? I’m just not sure how you could definitively say that any particular data set did not include some stolen content. You would have to gather it yourself which is utterly impractical for anything other than very niche AI.
Just off the dome an ethically acquired data set would be one where the data providers have knowledge that their data will be used for training a model and consent. When I did a deepfake project for a class back in 2019 that looked like me asking my buddies “hey can you sit and read this article on deepfakes in front of a camera so I can try swapping your faces?”
In a commercial setting there are a couple ideas:
- Train on your own past work. This has the added benefit of ensuring the model will be better at approximating your own style.
- Stock image sources but for data. Gettysburg has a ton of images, and while they weren’t originally gathered for image generating model training they could start a new collection where they expressly get that consent. If it comes out that there are stolen images in that dataset, Gettysburg is the one liable and should likely need to provide compensation for any training already performed then remove that data from the set they sell.
Frankly niche models is probably where the technology should have gone in the first place. Why invest trillions of dollars into making general purpose models that are kinda mediocre at everything when you could build a smaller, more focused model that only does what you actually care about maybe pretty well.
Seems like you get it just fine.
There are endless threads to discuss in this, but two really seem lost in this debate:
-
The distinction between vibecoding, and lower levels of LLM tool usage.
-
How widespread the latter already is in software development.
Basically, if you’re a dev coding for money… you’re already interacting with text models, somehow. You have been. Everyone reading this post is using code touched by them, up and down the stack.
Hence I don’t think people realize how impractical the “purist anti AI” stance really is. It’s like asking devs to avoid anything touched by Microsoft or Facebook: a good idea on the surface, but how on Earth would you actually do it?
I think what gamers really hate is higher levels of vibecoding and tool usage to make slop. As they should. As well as support for authoritarian entities backing them. But this just isn’t a practical debate without discussing where to draw the line, rather than an absolutist “LLMs or no LLMs” take, as the latter is going to catch basically every dev on the planet.
You have been. Everyone reading this post is using code touched by them, up and down the stack.
This is obvious from the new bugs in everything after every update
Very odd bugs too. Ones that make no sense and would never be made by a person.
I was working as a programmer up until 2020 when I lost my job due to covid and then subsequently switched industries.
There have been things like textual code autocomplete since at least 2015 so if you’re take is everything’s bad now because automation tools then you have to look back over a decade to really make that determination.
I remember doing TDD using auto generated testing around 2017-2018 time, I know for a fact that Facebook did a huge code rewrite around that time to make use of things like CSS pre-compilers (which I gather are basically redundant now because CSS has been updated to be actually useful).
You can just not use it personally?
I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking, as this article is discussing the purchase/praise of games developed with LLMs/diffusion, not personal use.
In the modern internet and tech, get away from AI entirely, period. It’s being shoved in our faces everywhere, it’s copilot on your Windows 11 machine, it’s being used to develop Linux distros, most numbers you call for support force you through AI bots first.
But that’s the point that is an unreasonable stance. Unless you go and live in the woods or something you’re going to be interacting with AI produced code, so what we need to do is stop automatically having the knee jerk reaction of “AI bad” and instead have an actual productive nuance discussion about where we want to draw the line.
This is the internet. Everyone has been clicker trained to go 100 percent all in or all out choose sides burn the neutrals.
-
As a developer, I really think the reactionary response to AI is muddying the waters. Their stated use-case seems perfectly reasonable, as their options were “shit optimization with even the unity devs clueless” or fixing the bug. AI makes a great tool for some applications. No, it should not be used to vibecode entire apps alone, but it does have the power to search and aggregate sources far, far better than humans can. It will likely take some tweaking afterwards, because their output must not be trusted, but using AI as a research tool for solving esoteric dev problems seems perfectly reasonable to me. I would much prefer we not punish the people that are fully disclosing their (very limited) use, when many of the competitors simply aren’t disclosing.
This is exactly why barely anyone discloses AI use anymore. I use AI sometimes, my colleagues use AI sometimes, everyone I know in the software industry uses Claude in some capacity. But we don’t talk about it in public because it’s become so toxic that you might as well replace a simple AI disclosure with “please witch hunt me and call months of my work vibecoded slop even if it clearly isn’t”
Most people are over AI being used in code but some people aren’t ready for it yet. I give it two years until it’s basically normalized.
The reactionary types tend not to be developers, they tend to be people who don’t really know anything about programming or 3D modelling, or how much annoying boilerplate code you have to type just to get a rectangle on the screen.
Discussion of this topic requires technically minded people, not vague feelings.
There are inherent problems with Ai, which makes any use of them regardless of what it is, problematic. Not everyone cares about the problems. Things like not respecting the license of training data, and other ethical reasons like Ai companies being responsible for the RAM and graphics cards shortage / price hikes.
If you ignore these problems, then we can have a talk about responsible usage and not doing slop. Regardless of what you think about Ai usage, I hope you at least understand and respect the opinion of those people too. Because its grounded with (good) reasons.
I would much prefer we not punish the people that are fully disclosing their (very limited) use, when many of the competitors simply aren’t disclosing.
They did not disclose the Ai usage on the Steam page.
The Steam AI disclosure requirement only applies to certain uses fwiw
Oh, absolutely. However, I also recognize that we live in an era where it’s impossible to have completely ethical consumption, and I suspect many of those most vocal against any AI use are generally being more selective towards this one topic. I personally don’t begrudge the (disclosed) use of the tech for applications where it is genuinely the best option available. The issues around training data and environmental concerns (even ignoring the effects of the economic bubble) are real and valid.
For the record, I do not use AI or support AI use, but I recognize that things are shifting and it will likely become a permanent tool. Hopefully the ethical issues will be ironed out before it’s too entrenched. I suspect once regulation is in place and the bubble pops, what survives will be much more sane.
also recognize that we live in an era where it’s impossible to have completely ethical consumption
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do our best to strive towards that goal. And speaking up when you see something so incredibly unethical take over everything is like the least people can do.
I personally believe it is impossible to have no ethical issues with Ai. Despite this fact, I experiment with local Ai chat tools. I used it when coding offline, to lookup ask some questions I would have asked a real user in example code snippets if it finds any issues I couldn’t see. Or how something is achieved usually, when I’m new to some stuff. That’s basically the extend of my usage in projects so far. Even if I wanted to slop more, I couldn’t, because my hardware is weak for this task (still don’t want to).
I like it for extracting text from images and translate it, generally speaking translation with Ai is much better, I play games where I know Ai was used to create it. As you see, I’m not completely against it.
But this is me personally, and I still have these ethical thoughts and it feels dirty.
Agree. I have been tinkering with local solutions, but nothing quite fits my use case. I have messed around with the latest DeepSeek model, and it seems quite powerful. Lower training cost and energy footprint is a plus, but still is fed by the same scraped content. I suspect the ability to write syntactically correct code and expand pseudocode will be the most useful feature of AI that persists post-bubble.
Not all LLM trainers are so caustic to the world. A few use open datasets for the vast majority of their training, like Nvidia’s Nemotron series or a few Olmo derivates.
Many LLms are also trained on shoestring budgets, with a relatively negligible environmental impact.
But are also other huge ethical concerns, like entities behind them supporting censorship, fascism and such. The erosion of the world’s mental aptitude from how it’s presented. Security, labor, hacking and spamming, and so on.
…This is the thing with discussing “AI.”
It can be as nuanced as things get, but few care. Most seem to want things in simple absolutist terms, and they aren’t interested in any nuance, especially the gamers on either side of this debate.
There is also the legal thing to solve too, if the generated code or art can be licensed at all (assuming it does not violate any intellectual property that exists already). Because our laws grant copyright to humans only, not to animals or machines. Does the human get the copyright to anything it prompts to generate?
There are so many layers of issues. I agree with your reply entirely. I also thought about mentioning those few exceptions, but the reality is that most companies creating games use these paid proprietary online models, because they are probably the best.
That just exposes how flawed the copyright system is, TBH. Licensed code (and even art) was already shakey to me, even when human made.
It is true that most are using Claude or ChatGPT, sadly. But I think it’s because they are the “default” and popular rather than for any particular performance reason, as is the case across tech.
It’s actually similar to how most professionals use Photoshop and can’t get away from it. There is one thing about Ai models, its like a web search engine that you can theoretically switch anytime. Because theses are just web interfaces and that’s a good thing. If ChatGPT goes crazy, people will instantly use something different.
Developers House House told Aftermath via email that “LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs”, and that they “estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage”.
Meh, if that were enough to exclude a game from GotY awards, you’d end up with a very short list of mostly unknown games, half of which probably did use LLMs for those sorts of tasks and are just lying about it.
And honestly, if AI-debugging can replace having to spend days of horrible crunchtime fixing those bugs, I’m all for it! That’s what AI should do, making people’s lives easier and not replacing their creativity.
I personally know indie devs who released successful games who again know other successful indie devs and all of them vibe code. Virtually every studio uses LLMs these days and most studios have been using it since last year. Most of them are not upfront about it either.
It’s like people are hearing the “everyone is doing it” refrain for the first time in their lives.
What a bad reason to justify anything.
“Everyone who says they hate AI is actually using it and embarrassed” is THE biggest cope I’ve ever read.
I guess so, but I’m not sure where you’ve read it because I sure haven’t written it.
That’s complete bullshit lmao you heavily implied it. You’re such a tool.
Nah, I didn’t imply anything of the sort. First up, I was never talking about “people who say they hate AI”, but game developers. Second, I never said or implied that they would be “embarassed”. They don’t disclose it because there’s no benefit to disclosing it, as should be very apparent here.
Let me spell it out as clear as possible: The vast majority of commercial game developers use AI in some ways. Most don’t vibecode, but using it for the kinds of things that House House did is ubiquitous. Modern development tools like Visual Studio use it in ways where you might not even realise that an LLM is behind it.
You don’t have to take my word for it: Look at the sites that were essential resources to get help with bugs before LLMs were around, like StackOverflow. Its usage has declined by over 99% since 2020. Unless you know of another place where people now ask all their development questions, I think we can both take a pretty educated guess of where they went.
Oh no, you misunderstood their comment. They said they never wrote it. Because they got an LLM to do it.
“Difficult technical challenges and bugs” is what I find AI is the worst at in my experience.
Except that’s covered in the article. It was able to provide some semblance of a solution and then they were able to hammer that into an actual solution. So the assistance provided by the AI, while not absolute, was demonstrably useful.
I’d recommend reading the article.
Considering their games have never used online multiplayer before, I’m guessing the bugs were to do with netcode, which is infamously tricky to get right, requires a huge amount of boilerplate and exception handling, but is mostly a solved problem; while being so tedious to debug and implement it causes programmers souls to leave their body. I think those are the kind of tasks LLMs are most suited for, actually
I think the example cases they’ve provided are pretty good example of where an LLM can actually be useful. For example, if you need to find and fix a bug in third-party code, it can be an absolute pain, as just getting a basic understanding of an unknown codebase by yourself could take days or weeks. An LLM can analyze the code in seconds and if not fix the bug, at the very least point out locations where to look for it. It’s not necessarily about telling the LLM to overcome the technical challenge by itself, but it can definitely assist in it.
You conveniently dropped “to help work through” here, so now it implies they let AI do the work.
Honestly this ordeal is actually bigger than people think. because it stems from the IGF written statement from 19 of their 50 or so jurors.
IGF has a decision to make here and it isn’t a easy one. They need to either choose whether the jurors are allowed to hold that opinion, which marks them as a pure bias source which is not good for a jury that is meant to decide the final choice on your listings; say “yea that’s fine” and basically throw out any form of credibility that IGF has in it’s voting process like how TGA has been for years, or just not put 19 of their jurors on any category that contains a game that has AI in it (which isn’t super difficult as a category only has 7-10 jurors)
Personally I think that IGF is in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type situation here cause either one of them is going to screw their publicity.
Why can’t they just come up with an actual definition of what constitutes too much AI use.
The problem here is they put out a statement without thinking about it, if they want to have a blanket ban on AI that’s their prerogative, but they really really should think about it before saying that. Alternatively they need to have a bit of a think about what they do and do not want to allow, and then right quite detailed documentation so everyone knows what’s up.
this sounds like they used it as a search engine rather than as an assistant. it’s one of those weird gray areas that come up with how integrated it is now. like, if you try to find something with a search engine and you get the “ai result” thing, is that “ai use”? the tokens were used anyway, and you read it even if you then click a link.
i hope the otherwise great reception of big walk can help a bit with the debate here.
Sometimes it’s so funny to see you all type “well it’s a grey area” and then stretch it this way and that. But ofc, Gregory, all other areas of life are black or white, are they? Or just the ones you don’t understand?
Just here me out. What if all the whine and opinions and explanations all point toward a grey area because the entire thing is grey, because it’s a technology we “found” rather than created. There’s a reason most machine learning research is trying to understand what the actual fuck the thing is doing.
Yeah, it’s a search engine sometimes to you. Technically all image generations are too. They just search color patterns instead. If you make it talk to itself, suddenly it becomes a programmer. It’s a field that is just completely not possible to draw any borders or lines across, because we don’t understand what the fuck it’s doing
Everyone keeps trying to mansplain the process or the architecture, or algorithms involved, as if that explains it to them. But they are mistaken. It eludes all of humanity still. We have no clue whatsoever what makes it “search” (in your view) or “infer” or “predict” or “model” answers if we set it up to do so. If you can find out, i urge you to reach out to the researchers. We could all sleep a lot better if we could understand it and prevent sociopathic psychotic behaviors.
Coding with agents if you were a programmer before is a harrowing but also empowering, it’s just impossible to not use the ability to slow through boring parts of the work or scan massive amounts of data. It is just useful as fuck if you already knew what you were doing. If you didn’t, it’s just dangerous. But using it to code is not even close to using it for writing or other art. And that shit is the exact same technology.
Tldr: We don’t understand it. It’s no wonder we can’t say where the line goes because of that.
This is riddled with logical fallacies and none of these arguments hold. You should be ashamed.
Everyone keeps trying to mansplain the process or the architecture, or algorithms involved
Because you’re making assumptions about how it works and those assumptions are wrong. I’m sorry if you find that offensive but you need to be educated before you can make an informed decision you seem to be unhappy with this.
Coding with agents if you were a programmer before is a harrowing but also empowering
So you do know how to code, which makes your prior incredulousness of the process kind of hard to comprehend.
it’s a compression algorithm, my guy. we don’t know why 7z picks the numbers it does for its tables either, but we damn well know how.
They don’t have an Ai disclosure on the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1478500/Big_Walk/ Isn’t this against Steams rules?
Edit: I don’t understand why people downvote a question. At the time I couldn’t find the rules searching the web, as no news article linked to it. So I asked here…
Why does this look like an asset flip? The character models themselves are just a bunch of basic shapes stuck together and the environment looks like it must’ve been off an asset store.
This from the studio that brought us untitled goose game, a beautifully styled game?
I think you only require disclosure if you include AI generated assets. So AI generated models, sound, music. But if you basically just googling stuff it’s fine. I can’t see how you could enforce any other interpretation.
Generated code needs to be disclosed too, not just assets. And they have some form of generated code. And this is giving them the benefit of doubt, as in, there is nothing else than what they explain. I think they should have disclosed what they explained.
No, as per the article, the way they used AI does not require disclosure on the Steam page.
Where can I find the rules for Ai disclosure on Steam? I couldn’t find it.
It seems to mostly be in the developer portal, but here’s the news post about it.
This is the news from 2024, which I found too. I was looking for the actual rules a developer has to agree to. And the users need to know too, because we can report. Any news article talking about this has no link. It’s frustrating.
Quite frankly, I don’t think it’s on us. The devs have their forms to fill out, and they’ve disclosed this publicly of their own choice. If Valve found that usage to be in violation of their own policies, they’ve already got repercussions for this in place that House House would not want to be subject to.
Other developer information is online available for everyone too. So this is usually how Valve operates. I think I found it: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsurvey The part about the Ai disclosure is exactly the same as in the news article. I was just wondering if there is more to it. So its only about generative content then.
I’ve just started to ignore those “AI slop” parrots. There’s nothing you can say to them to change their minds similar to how a religious person believes their religion is the correct one.
Except the pro-sloppers are more akin to the religious nuts.
Horseshoe theory proven right, yet again.
How so?
Vehemently pro AI: You’re an idiot/luddite/snailcat if you don’t use AI for everything
Vehemently anti-AI: You’re an idiot/thief/anti-art if you use AI at all in any capacity
Nuanced middle ground hated by both: Some AI use is OK, vibing a whole game probably isn’t.
Mhm. Cann you succinctly explain what you think horseshoe theory is? Otherwise this just reads as enlightened centrism tbh.
Only an extremist would think that non-extreme position is centralism. You’re already arguing from a position of bad faith. You refuse to accept the possibility that any use of AI can be ethical. Now that’s your choice, but you can’t really expect that to become the majority viewpoint.
Murdering children is always bad!
Murdering children is always good!
Me, an enlightened centrist: well those are extremist positions and argued in bad faith. Clearly murdering children is sometimes good, actually.
enlightened centrism tbh.
Is an extremist dogwhistle.
That’s the most enlightened centrist comment I’ve ever read.
No it isn’t, and that’s fascist as fuck to say. Fuck you
Ok so you can’t explain what you mean.
Is an extremist dogwhistle.
From the pov of an enlightened centrist, I am sure it is.
If you read the article it’s far from AI slop. There is an important nuanced discussion that we are not having and automatically calling all AI slop is not helpful.
hooray, insane witch hunts and even more insane mental gymnastics galore!
(Big Walk is awesome and you should play it)
Big walk might be the first must play group game to come out of the friend slop category. It was such an elevated experience by the end I was thrilled. The very last scene almost got me to cry and we were just logging off. Crazy.
No amount of this game could be made with AI that would be ultimately upsetting to me unless they were personally responsible for a meaningful billing to the worst LLM companies.
Here’s the statement from IGF jurors that’s related to this. (The link is likely a repost; I don’t think the person is affiliated with IGF.) This hardline, purist stance removes all nuance over when AI. The question shouldn’t be if AI should be used at all. It should be more about how it is used. Adopting this stance doesn’t mean developers are going to be suddenly honest. Some devs will be even without this stance, but many others will take time to hide or disguise their AI use. The part about coding especially bothers me, because AI can be very useful for debugging, but to them, based on this statement, any use of AI is the same as vibe coding a whole game.
It sounds fine. “Any AI use harms the environment and community creation. So we’ve decided to vote against it”
I’d challenge the AI purists by asking where they draw the line. What if your developer uses AI to create every single texture and mesh? What if the entire codebase was built with AI assistance? What if the developer used AI to fix one single gremlin of a bug? What if they create all of their regression tests with AI? What if the developer needed one single refresher on some basic C code syntax and got an AI summary from Google - where AI never touched the code? What if one of their imported python modules that is only called once has a developer who created one single unit test with AI?
Are all of these really equally heinous?
I’m fine with AI for things that it had already been used for in the past but hadn’t been called AI like code suggestions or randomization of existing textures for existence for blades of grass for example.
What I don’t like is asset generation of AI music, AI voice work, and AI art.
I draw the line at using it personally. I can’t control everyone else using it but I’ll gladly prioritize the work of someone who put the sweat in over one that simply prompted a model.
To me the AI use has become tantamount to endorsing and accepting the problems it is creating. Once we solve the problems it has created, I’ll feel fine using it again.
When it comes to the harms of these systems, that has a lot more to do with how these companies allow use of these tools…
The real harm is in these tools being pushed as learning tools, medical advice, companionship, etc. That they can even give medical advice seems like something Doctor’s Unions should be suing over, I can’t do it so why can the AI’s? Using these in learning situations is demonstrably doing the opposite, inducing cognitive offloading and dependency. The companionship thing is probably the most dangerous facet, it’s causing genuine psychosis in some people and honestly I feel that is by design.
None of this has to be for these tools to be used for coding. They represent a regulatory failure (complicity?) to constrain the dangerous uses.
Whereas I work with a small studio (<10 ppl) as the only programmer, asking Claude for bug hunting in regex’s and shader code has saved my behind a few times.
I’d argue there is a responsible way to use these tools. Letting an agent run amok in my project folder is a hard no; I ask about specific issues, providing generalized code, and insert and test the code by hand to ensure reliability. The amount of code inserted by an AI is zero, but the code written by AI would be <1% of my codebase.
I might use the tools for coding but I advocate locally to keep them out of schools, and support all efforts to limit the harms. You can use a tool for a useful purpose (hammer for a nail), while still restricting that tool’s usage (wielding a hammer to threaten people). So I disagree that using these tools is tantamount endorsing them for all purposes.
Frankly I’ve never paid any of them a dime, so I’m actually driving up their costs and hastening the decline 🤷
Nah, too many friends of mine have been fired because of “AI”. It’s the mothern cathedral, what the powerful are using to make us dependent on them. I can argue than even when you didn’t pay them a dime, you still gave them training material for the next model; furthering their goals ever so slightly.
I’m taking a stance that looks harsh on the outset, but it’s basically the only one that doesn’t further the massive theft of our body of work onto the hands of 5 oligarchs.
While I wouldn’t consider myself an AI purist I do have different views when it comes to using AI for coding compared to using it for art or music.
I feel that expecting a game to be completely AI free when it comes to coding is pretty much an impossible task. Now matter how much you try at some point a developer will have to use a tool or library or whatever that were developed with the use of AI. Expecting them to audit everything they use would mean spending more time on that than coding the actual game or spending time developing non-AI alternatives. The genie is out of the bottle for coding and there’s no putting it back.
Now when it comes to art, music and music I personally am less accepting. AI has been trained on the art of millions of people around the world without their permission or offering them any compensation. That is unacceptable to me. It also feels very weird that people are trying to replace art with something generated by a machine, it feels soulless, each piece of human art no matter how simple has some meaning to the artist. AI just mashes it together with no rhyme or reason.
Now some people are going to say that I’m a hypocrite and coding AI has also been trained on the code of millions of people without them getting compensation or asking for approval. While that is true I think that for coding it’s different just for the simple fact that at the end of the day it’s just a set of instructions. There is code that could be considered art? I would say there definitely is but the vast majority of it is just telling the computer to do a thing in just slightly different ways. This is just how I see it and no doubt people are going to disagree.
I feel that expecting a game to be completely AI free when it comes to coding is pretty much an impossible task.
It’s so wild to see people making claims like this… People have been making video games for like 50 fucking years without AI. People can (and do) still make games without AI.
Don’t be absurd. Don’t project your own personal shortcomings onto everyone else in the world.
While I agree with the main message, I’ll be one to say you are a hypocrite. Code doesn’t have to be art for the use without consent to be wrong. Arguing that way is the same as when people say that using AI to generate images is fine because they have the idea but not the skills to execute it.
Either way you are diminishing someone’s else work because you find this tool useful to achieve the results you want.
I have a lot of serious ethical concerns about AI and vibe coding. But I do recognize that there are legitimate use cases when used as a tool and not a crutch. And this one really don’t seem like the end of the world here.
My concern is that the takeaway from an incident like this is that next time, devs are just going to lie and not tell anyone they used AI. They didn’t have to say anything and no one would have ever known, but they’re being raked through the coals for responsible disclosure.
If I was a developer, I’d just lie.
They lie anyways and don’t disclose anyways because it isn’t viewed positively as a whole.
Food companies don’t want to disclose all the ingredients they use and calories per serving, but are required to by law. That’s the direction things need to be headed.
If I was a developer, I’d just lie.
So it sounds like your “serious ethical concerns” aren’t quite so serious after all.
I think you are willfully misinterpreting me. AI is a nuanced issue, but I don’t have a problem with this type of use case. And these developers did the ethical thing in disclosing, but they’re in trouble for doing so.
My point is that excessive witch hunting gives developers strong incentive to white lie.
