- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
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And it looks a lot like the ol Nintendo seal of approval (or whatever they call it).
Good shit. A carefully thought out handcrafted experience will always be better than interactive slop.
Reminds me of the 70s when suddenly everything was “Eco-Friendly”.
I remember an old song “I’ll go green when they go green and they’ll go green but not really green more like aquamarine” and it appears to no longer exist on the internet.
Another song I can’t find is about a guy who tells the story of all his past lives and in each he was a whore and someday he’ll be a whore again.
Really wish songs would stop disappearing.
The first one is “Go Green” by Mitch Benn
found it in 2 minutes just by googling the lyrics in your comment, specifically this search:
"go green when they go green"We’ll go green when you go green
You’ll go green when he goes green
We’ll get as far as aquamarine or so
But we’re still gonna call it greenbut I couldn’t find the second one
Nice, I swear it never works when I try searching it.
to be fair, I may have gotten a bit lucky with the exact search, any other section of the lyrics would most likely not find it
Yours is the most captivating comment in this entire thread.
I have to admit neither one of those rings a bell.
Lmao. The “organic” labeling has made it to electronics.
Certified Artisanally Hand-Crafter Code
just as meaningless too!
Not sure how to interpret this. The use of any tool can be for good or bad.
If the quality of the game is increased by the use of AI, I’m all for it. If it’s used to generate a generic mess, it’s probably not going to be interesting enough for me to notice it’s existence.
If they mean that they don’t use AI to generate art and voice over, I guess it can be good for a medium to large game. But if using AI means it gets made at all, that’s better no?
As a dev and foremost artist, I can see using AI to uprez images or to generate random slop you can use to find interesting shapes and as inspiration. As I learn programming, AI is very useful in finding mistakes. Instead of spending days and bothering people or engaging with the assholes at stackoverflow, you can just ask deepseek what is the issue and it will say you misspelled length.
I’d argue that even if gen-AI art is indistinguishable from human art, human art is better. E.g. when examining a painting you might be wondering what the artist was thinking of, what was going on in their life at the time, what they were trying to convey, what techniques they used and why. For AI art, the answer is simply it’s statistically similar to art the model has been trained on.
But, yeah, stuff like game textures usually aren’t that deep (and I don’t think they’re typically crafted by hand by artists passionate about the texture).
I am for the most part angry that people are being put out of work by AI; I actually find AI-generated content interesting sometimes, for example AI Frank Sinatra singing W.A.P. is pretty funny. This label is helpful to me so that I know I’m supporting humans monetarily.
People want pieces of art made by actual humans. Not garbage from the confident statistics black box.
What if they use it as part of the art tho?
Like a horror game that uses an AI to just slightly tweak an image of the paintings in a haunted building continuously everytime you look past them to look just 1% creepier?
Would the feature in that horror game Zort where you sometimes use the player respon item and it respons an NPC that will use clips of what a specific dead player has said while playing count as AI use? If so, that’s a pretty good use of AI in horror games in my opinion.
AI SLOP! SAD!
That’s an interesting enough idea in theory, so here’s my take on it, in case you want one.
Yes, it sounds magical, but:
- AI sucks at make it more X. It doesn’t understand scary, so you’ll get worse crops of the training data, not meaningful changes.
- It’s prohibitively expensive and unfeasible for the majority of consumer hardware.
- Even if it gets a thousand times cheaper and better at its job, is GenAI really the best way to do this?
- Is it the only one? Are alternatives also built on exploitation? If they aren’t, I think you should reconsider.
•Ok, I know the researching ability of people has decreased greatly over the years, but using “knowyourmeme” as a source? Really?
• You can now run optimized open source diffusion models on an iPhone, and it’s been possible for years. I use that as an example because yes, there’s models that can easily run on an Nvidia 1060 these days. Those models are more than enough to handle incremental changes to an image in-game
• Already has for awhile as demonstrated by it being able to run on an iPhone, but yes, it’s probably the best way to get an uncanny valley effect in certain paintings in a horror game, as the alternatives would be:
- spending many hours manually making hundreds of incremental changes to all the paintings yourself (and the will be a limit to how much they warp, and this assumes you have even better art skills)
- hiring someone to do what I just mentioned (assumes you have a decent amount of money) and is still limited of course.
• I’ll call an open source model exploitation the day someone can accurately generate an exact work it was trained on not within 1, but at least within 10 generations. I have looked into this myself, unlike seemingly most people on the internet. Last I checked, the closest was a 90 something % similarity image after using an algorithm that modified the prompt over time after thousands of generations. I can find this research paper myself if you want, but there may be newer research out there.
You can now run optimized open source diffusion models on an iPhone, and it’s been possible for years.
Games aren’t background processes. Even today, triple-A titles still sometimes come out as unoptimized hot garbage. Do you genuinely think it’s easy to pile a diffusion model on top with negligible effect? Also, will you pack an entire model into your game just for one instance?
I use that as an example because yes, there’s models that can easily run on an Nvidia 1060 these days. Those models are more than enough to handle incremental changes to an image in-game
Look at the share of people using an 1050 or lower card. Or let’s talk about the AMD and Intel issues. These people aren’t an insignificant portion. Hell, nearly 15% don’t even have 16GB of ram.
it’s probably the best way to get an uncanny valley effect in … a horror game, as the alternatives would be:
- spending many hours manually making hundreds of incremental changes
- hiring someone to do what I just mentioned
What are you talking about? You’re satisfied with a diffusion model’s output, but won’t be with any other method except excruciating manual labor? Your standards are all over the place—or rather, you don’t have any. And let’s keep it real: most won’t give a shit if your game can show them 10 or 100 slightly worse versions of the same image.
Procedural generation has been a thing for decades. Indie devs have been making do with nearly nonexistent art skills and less sophisticated tech for just as long. I feel like you don’t actually care about the problem space, you just want to shove AI into the solution.
I’ll call an open source model exploitation the day someone can accurately generate an exact work it was trained on not within 1, but at least within 10 generations.
Are you referring to the OSAID? The infamously broken definition that exists to serve companies? You don’t understand what exploitation here means. “Can it regurgitate exact training input” is not the only question to ask, and not the bar. Knowing your work was used without consent to train computers to replace people’s livelihoods is extremely violating. Talk to artists.
I know the researching ability of people has decreased greatly over the years, but using “knowyourmeme” as a source? Really?
I tried to use an accessible and easily understandable example. Fuck off. Go do your own “research”, open those beloved diffusion models, make your scary, then scarier images and try asking people what they think of the results. Do it a hundred times, since that’s your only excuse as to why you need AI. No cherry-picking, you won’t be able to choose what your rube goldberg painting will look like on other people’s PCs.
Honest question: are things like trees, rocks, logs in a huge world like a modern RPG all placed by hand, or does it use AI to fill it out?
Not AI but certainly a semirandom function. Then they go through and manually clean it up by hand.
Ah, so this kind of tool is allowable, but not another? Pretty hypocritical thinking there.
A tools is a tool, any tool can be abused.
Most games (pre-ai at least) would use a brush for this and manually tweak the result if it ended up weird.
E.g. if you were building a desert landscape you might use a rock brush to randomly sprinkle the boulder assets around the area. Then the bush brush to sprinkle some dry bushes.
Very rare for someone to spend the time to individually place something like a rock or a tree, unless it is designed to be used in gameplay or a cutscene (e.g. a climable tree to get into a building through a window).
That’s only for open world maps, many games where the placement of rocks and trees is something that’s subject to miniscule changes for balance reasons.
It’s all virtue signaling. If it’s good, nobody will be able to notice anyway and they’ll want it regardless. The only reason people shit on AI currently is because expert humans are still far better than it.
We’re just at that awkward point in time where AI is better than the random joe but worse than experts.
The only reason people shit on AI currently is because expert humans are still far better than it.
Not it’s not! There are a whole bunch of reasons why people dislike the current AI-wave, from artist exploitation, to energy consumption, to making horrible shitty people and companies richer while trying to obviate people’s jobs!
You’re so far off, it’s insane. That’s like saying people only hate slavery because the slaves can’t match craftsmen yet. Just wait a bit until they finish training the slaves, just a few more whippings, then everyone will surely shut up.
I agree that those are reasons people give for their reasoning, but if history has shown anything, we know people change their minds when it becomes most convenient to use a technology.
Human ethics is highly dependent on convenience, unfortunately.
It sounds like you gave up and expect everyone else to do the same.
One of my favourite games used procedural generation to create game “art”, “assets”, and “maps”.
That could conceivably be called (or enhanced by) ML today, which could conceivably be called AI today.
But even in modern games, I’m not opposed to mindful usage of AI in games. I don’t understand why you’re trying to speak for everyone (by saying “people”) when you’re talking to someone who doesn’t share your view.
This is like those stupid “non-GMO” stickers. Yes, GMOs are being abused by Monsanto (and probably other corporations like them). No, that doesn’t mean that GMOs are bad in all cases.
I think the sort of generative AI referred to is something that trains on data to approximate results, which consumes vast amounts more power.
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Ah, so this kind of tool is allowable, but not another?
Yes.
Pretty hypocritical thinking there.
Not even.
Different tools with different costs and different outcomes.
Different tools with different costs and different outcomes.
Both have replaced human labor, why are bringing up costs? No one’s mentioned that, gotta use fallacies to justify the hypocrisy? The outcomes the same. Use less human labor to make art.
But sure justify one while decrying the other, hypocrite.
I never said I cared about labor, I only care about outcomes. You’re the inconsistent one.
Humans are confident statistical black boxes. Art doesnt have to be made by a human to be aspiring.
Art has to be made by people. It’s literally not art otherwise.
So, if a machine makes the ‘art’, its not art? So photographs are not art. The hubble telescope,or any space probe for that matter, doesnt produce art.
Art is something that provoke emotions and expression in its observers and not produced naturally. Machines are built by people and require non-random inputs to produce something thefore anything those machines produce is art.
Photography is absolutely art. Humans put a lot of thought and intent into what and how they photograph and how they process and exhibit the photos.
I’d say that some stuff like JWST images definitely count as art, and some such imagery is far more technical and research focused than purely emotional. Maybe some visually boring but scientifically significant images aren’t artistic to laypeople. Nuance here is totally fine.
I vehemently disagree that all machine output is art.
Then you better give up spellcheck and autocorrect.
LLMs shouldn’t be used for spellcheck that would just be a massive waste of power.
What do you think grammarly is dude? Glorified spell and auto check, which people already utilize everyday. But of course new tools are looked down upon, the hypocrisy of people is amazing to see. It comes in cycles, people hated spell check, got used to it and now it’s prominent in every life, autocorrect, same thing is happening.
And now the same is happening again. If they want to claim no ai, no spellcheck, no auto correct, and no grammarly for emails. Everyone already uses “AI” everyday. But theirs is acceptable… okay…
Right but to detect close-enough spellings and word orders, using a curated index or catalogue of accepted examples, is one thing.
To train layers of algorithms in layers of machines on massive datasets to come up with close enoughs would be that but many times over the costs.
You would be a moron to use llms for spellchecking.
To clarify to you, not all programs are equal. Its not all different methods to do the same thing at the same cost.
A tool is a tool dude. Why are you trying to justify one over the other?
Ok but why do you think it’s okay to use a wrecking ball for a task that requires a chisel? You’re creating low quality high cost work just because it’s fast and easy.
That’s not art, that’s a tool. Tools can be made better through a confident statistics box.
Tools can be used in the making of art.
They cannot possibly assure customers that remote devs aren’t using copilots to help them code.
You can prevent that issue by coding in the newest version of godot
Generative AI is a technology that can create pictures, movies, audio (music or voice action) and writing using artificial intelligence
By their definition of Gen AI, it’s unclear to me if the label says anything about code. I’m not sure I would consider it “writing.”
This might be a little off-topic, but I’ve noticed what seems to be a trend of anti-AI discourse ignoring programmers. Protect artists, writers, animators, actors, voice-actors… programmers, who? No idea if it’s because they’re partly to blame, or people are simply unaware code is also stolen by AI companies—still waiting on that GitHub Copilot lawsuit—but the end result appears to be a general lack of care about GenAI in coding.
I think it’s because most programmers use and appreciate the tool. This might change once programmers start to blame gen AI for not having a job anymore.
And programmers retain complete control of the output - it’s just a bit of text that you can adapt as needed. Same as looking up snippets from Stack Overflow. Programmers are used to finding some snippet, checking if it actually works, and then adapting it to the rest of their code, so if doesn’t feel like introducing media that you didn’t create, but like a faster version of what everyone was already doing.
I noticed a bad trend with my colleagues who use copilot, chatgpt etc. They not only use it to write code, but also trust it with generally poor design decisions.
Another thing is that those people also hate working on existing code, claiming it is communicated and offering to write their (which also ends up complicated) version of it. I suspect it’s because copilot doesn’t help as much when code is more mature.
There remains a significant enclave that rejects it, but yeah, it’s definitely smaller than equivalent groups in other mentioned professions. Hopefully things won’t get that far. I think the tech is amazing, but it’s an immense shame that so many of my/our peers don’t give a flying fuck about ethics.
There remains a significant enclave that rejects it, but yeah, it’s definitely smaller than equivalent groups in other mentioned professions.
Reporting in.
I think the tech is amazing, but it’s an immense shame that so many of my/our peers don’t give a flying fuck about ethics.
Yup. Very much agreed here. There are some uses that are acceptable but it’s a but hard to say that any are ethical due to the ethically bankrupt foundations of its training data.
Indie studio teams are pretty small so its possible, I personally hate that the word copilot ever even appears and never ever autogen code, but moreso I’m sure the stamp refers to art, texture, and sound.
This feels discouraging as someone who struggled with learning programming for a very long time and only with the aid of copilot have I finally crossed the hurdles I was facing and felt like I was actually learning and progressing again.
Yes I’m still interacting with and manually adjusting and even writing sections of code. But a lot of what copilot does for me is interpret my natural language understanding of how I want to manipulate the data and translating it into actual code which I then work with and combine with the rest of the project.
But I’ve stopped looking to join any game jams because it seems even when they don’t have an explicit ban against all AI, the sentiment I get is that people feel like it’s cheating and look down on someone in my situation. I get that submitting ai slop whole sale is just garbage. But it feels like putting these blanket ‘no ai content’ stamps and badges on things excludes a lot of people.
Edit:
Is this slop? https://lemjukes.itch.io/ascii-farmer-alpha https://github.com/LemJukes/ASCII-Farmer
Like I know it isn’t good code but I’m entirely self taught and it seems to work(and more importantly I mostly understand how it works) so what’s the fucking difference? How am I supposed to learn without iterating? If anyone human wants to look at my code and tell me why it’s shit, that’d actually be really helpful and I’d genuinely be thankful.
*except whoever actually said that in the comment reply’s. I blocked you so I won’t see any more from you anyways and also piss off.
I understand where you’re coming from. AI can be a learning tool to help fill in some gaps in knowledge, however the moment you don’t understand what it’s doing and just copy and paste the code, it no longer become a tool but instead a crutch. Instead of copying and pasting code you can take the time to look into why it’s doing what it’s doing. For Godot in particular they have really good documentation and there’s plenty of resources to learn. GD script is a pretty easy language to learn on a surface level. You should do some research into game design patterns and basic programming concepts.
I did take a look at your code and while you do have your main.gd organized, having a large monolith like that with 1100+ lines of code that has multiple responsibilities is certainly a choice. Typically you want your scripts to handle specific responsibilities, that way each script and each object that contains that script has a single responsibility. This helps with efficiency and debugging since you have smaller scripts running and if something breaks you know what broke without everything else falling apart. You employed that partly with your save manager and notification manager etc. But you could certainly pare down your main script. Also considering how much it’s handling I’m curious as to what the structure of your game looks like. Godot likes to have nested objects but based off your code yours doesn’t seem to be conducive to that. Also there appears to be some needless abstractions with your variable storage.
Anyways I think taking the time to research and learn some basic programming principles and game design patterns would go a long way to help you. Coding can be difficult and seem like a black box when you first get started, and AI can seem like a way to pierce through that, but if you don’t learn why it’s recommending the code it is then you’ll never really understand what your own game is doing and that’s not helpful to you or your players.
Thank you
If you learned to code with AI then you didnt learn to code.
If you learned math with a calculator you didn’t learn math.
Firstly, a calculator doesn’t have a double digit percent chance of bullshitting you with made up information.
If you’ve ever taken a calculus course you likely were not allowed to use a calculator that has the ability to solve your problems for you and you likely had to show all of your math on paper, so yes. That statement is correct.
Same vibes as “if you learned to draw with an iPad then you didn’t actually learn to draw”.
Or in my case, I’m old enough to remember “computer art isn’t real animation/art” and also the criticism assist Photoshop.
And there’s plenty of people who criticized Andy Warhol too before then.
Go back in history and you can read about criticisms of using typewriters over hand writing as well.
As an artist who is learning to code its different. It is night and day wether you have access to undo and HSV adjust but still must nail color, composition, values, proportion, perspective etc. Especially when a ton of shortcuts are also available to trad artists who can just paint over a projection. Only thing besides saving tons of money and making it easier to do your daily practise, digital art will also give you is more noob traps like brushes and then the lack of confidence from the reliance on undo and other tools like that. I transferred to traditional oil paints just fine cause the fundamentals are the one that separates the trash from the okay and above.
It is night and day when you ask ai how to make a multiplication table vs apply what you have learned previously to learn the logic behind making it yourself. Using AI wrong in programming means you don’t learn the fundamentals aka you don’t learn to program. Comparing using AI to learn to program with learning to paint on ipad is wrong. Comparing using AI to learn to program with using AI to make art for you is more apt.
You’re right, my bad. I should have worded that reply better.
I meant it as a tool to help you code etc it’s useful, especially if you know some coding. It can help you to say finish a game by coding mechanics you don’t quite know how to make work which you can then fix up yourself with the desired parameters etc.
If it helps with finishing your idea of a game (especially if it’s something like the first game you’ve ever made), it’s useful in order to learn some of the workflow involved in making a game.
None of your examples are even close to a comparison with AI which steals from people to generate approximate nonsense while costing massive amounts of electricity.
Have you ever looked at the file size of something like Stable Diffusion?
Considering the data it’s trained on, do you think it’s;
A) 3 Petabytes B) 500 Terabytes C) 900 Gigabytes D) 100 Gigabytes
Second, what’s the electrical cost of generating a single image using Flux vs 3 minutes of Balder’s Gate, or similar on max settings?
Surely you must have some idea on these numbers and aren’t just parroting things you don’t understand.
What a fucking curveball joke of a question, you take a nearly impossible to quantify comparison and ask if its equivalent?
A high scenario electricity consumption figure of around 27 TWh, and a low scenario figure of 14.7 TWh
North American gaming market is about 7% of the global total
then that gives us a very very rough figure of about 210-285 TWh per annum of global electricity used by gamers.
AI:
The rapid growth of AI and the investments into the underlying AI infrastructure have significantly intensified the power demands of data centers. Globally, data centers consumed an estimated 240–340 TWh of electricity in 2022—approximately 1% to 1.3% of global electricity use, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). In the early 2010s, data center energy footprints grew at a relatively moderate pace, thanks to efficiency gains and the shift toward hyperscale facilities, which are more efficient than smaller server rooms.
That stable growth pattern has given way to explosive demand. The IEA projects that global data center electricity consumption could double between 2022 and 2026. Similarly, IDC forecasts that surging AI workloads will drive a massive increase in data center capacity and power usage, with global electricity consumption from data centers projected to double to 857 TWh between 2023 and 2028. Purpose-built AI nfrastructure is at the core of this growth, with IDC estimating that AI data center capacity will expand at a 40.5% CAGR through 2027.
Lets just say we’re at the halfway point and its 600 TWh per anum compared to 285 for gamers.
So more than fucking double, yeah.
And to reiterate, people generate thousands of frames in a session of gaming, vs a handful of images or maybe some emails in a session of AI.
But we’re not comparing the global energy use of LLMs, diffusion engines, other specialized AI (like protein foldings) etc to ONLY the American gaming market.
The conversation was specifically about image generative AI. You can stop moving the goalposts and building a strawman now, and while at it answer the first question too.
Apparently you can only read 2 of 3 lines, that estimate was a global projection of gaming cost IF the globe followed similar trends to the USA (because thats the only available data) so the real global cost estimate for gaming might be far far lower.
The USA alone spent 27 on gaming, not 285.
Grumpy fucks sure love pullin that ladder up behind ‘em.
I like to use AI autocomplete when programming not because it solves problems for me (it fucking sucks at that if you’re not a beginner), but because it’s good at literally just guessing what I want to do next so I don’t have to type it out. If I do something to the X coordinate, I probably want to do the same/similar thing to the Y and Z coordinates and AI’s really good at picking up that sort of thing.
FWIW I agree with you. The people who say they don’t support these tools come across as purists or virtue signallers.
I would agree with not having AI art* or music and sounds. In games I’ve played with it in, it sounds so out of place.
However support to make coding more accessible with the use of a tool shouldn’t be frowned upon. I wonder if people felt the same way when C was released, and they thought everyone should be an assembly programmer.
The irony is that most programmers were just googling and getting answers from stackoverflow, now they don’t even need to Google.
*unless the aim is procedurally generated games i guess, but if they’re using assets I get not using AI generated ones.
The irony is that most programmers were just googling and getting answers from stackoverflow, now they don’t even need to Google.
That’s the thing, though, doing that still requires you to read the answer, understand it, and apply it to the thing you’re doing, because the answer probably isn’t tailored to your exact task. Doing this work is how you develop an understanding of what’s going on in your language, your libraries, and your own code. An experienced developer has built up those mental muscles, and can probably get away with letting an AI do the tedious stuff, but more novice developers will be depriving themselves of learning what they’re actually doing if they let the AI handle the easy things, and they’ll be helpless to figure out the things that the AI can’t do.
Going from assembly to C does put the programmer at some distance from the reality of the computer, and I’d argue that if you haven’t at least dipped into some assembly and at least understand the basics of what’s actually going on down there, your computer science education is incomplete. But once you have that understanding, it’s okay to let the computer handle the tedium for you and only dip down to that level if necessary. Or learning sorting algorithms, versus just using your standard library’s
sort()function, same thing. AI falls into that category too, I’d argue, but it’s so attractive that I worry it’s treating important learning as tedium and helping people skip it.I’m all for making programming simpler, for lowering barriers and increasing accessibility, but there’s a risk there too. Obviously wheelchairs are good things, but using one simply “because it’s easier” and not because you need to will cause your legs to atrophy, or never develop strength in the first place, and I’m worried there’s a similar thing going on with AI in programming. “I don’t want to have to think about this” isn’t a healthy attitude to have, a program is basically a collection of crystallized thoughts and ideas, thinking it through is a critical part of the process.
I know you’re replying to a reply here, but do people think I mean just putting in a prompt and then running the output and calling that something I made?
I’ve spent years trying to teach myself how to code but always inevitably would lose track of some part or get stuck on some bug or issue I alone couldn’t get past. I went to theatre school for chrissakes and I just wanna make games and silly little projects. I don’t have any friends in this field and pestering random people in discords or on stack overflow can be really annoying for those people.
So why is using an ai assistant I can berate with as many terse questions I want to iterate code that’d I’d normally spend hours struggling just to remember and string together, such a big stick people are putting up their butts?
I’ll acknowledge that there’s definitely an element of “well I had to do it the hard way, you should too” at work with some people, and I don’t want to make that argument. Code is also not nearly as bad as something like image generation, where it’s literally just typing a thing and getting a not-very-good image back that’s ready to go; I’m sure if you’re making playable games, you’re putting in more work than that because it’s just not possible to type some words and get a game out of it. You’ll have to use your brain to get it right. And if you’re happy with the results you get and the work you’re doing, I’m definitely not going to tell you you’re doing it wrong.
(If you’re trying to make a career of software engineering or have a desire to understand it at a deeper level, I’d argue that relying heavily on AI might be more of a hindrance to those goals than you know, but if those aren’t your goals, who cares? Have fun with it.)
What I’m talking about is a bigger picture thing than you and your games; it’s the industry as a whole. Much like algorithmic timelines have had the effect of turning the internet from something you actively explored into something you passively let wash over you, I’m worried that AI is creating a “do the thinking for me” button that’s going to be too tempting for people to use responsibly, and will result in too much code becoming a bunch of half-baked AI slop cobbled together by people who don’t understand what they’re really doing. There’s already enough cargo culting around software, and AI will just make it more opaque and mysterious if overused and over-relied on. But that’s a bigger picture thing; just like I’m not above laying back and letting TikTok wash over me sometimes, I’m glad you’re doing things you like with the assistance you get. I just don’t want that to become the only way things happen either.
thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’m in the first boat of just wanting to make games and other small, self driven projects. I think its mostly the feeling of being excluded from participating in things like game jams and the larger game development community because I use a specific tool.
In an effort to clarify what i think is an example of something like a middle ground between no AI code gen period and as you put it “do the thinking for me” let me see if i can put it in similar terms. Instead of “do it for me” its very much so a back and forth of “i want this behavior when these conditions are met for this function and expect these types of outcomes.” Copilot then generates code referencing the rest of the codebase as reference and i then usually manually copy and paste chunks over to the working files and then compile & run from there for testing.
I definitely agree that over reliance on tools as a means of masking a real understanding of a subject is a genuine problem. And I too hope it doesnt end up having the same kind of effect algorithmic social media has had on society as a whole. But i think i do have hope that it will enable a subset of people like me who struggle with the wrote memorization aspects of computer programming but still desires the thrill of putting some pieces together and watching it work.
Yeah, totally fair. I’ll note that you’re kind of describing the typical software development process of a customer talking to the developer and developing requirements collaboratively with them, then the developer coming back with a demo, the customer refining by going “oh, that won’t work, it needs to do it this way” or “that reminds me, it also needs to do this”, and so on. But you’re closer to playing the role of the customer in this scenario, and acting like more of an editor or manager on the development side. The organizers of a game jam could make a reasonable argument that doing it this way is akin to signing up for the game jam, coming up with an idea, then having your friend who isn’t signed up for the game jam implement it for you, when the point is to do it all in person, quickly, in a fun and energetic environment. The people doing a game jam like coding, that’s the fun part for them, so someone signing up and skipping all that stuff does have a little bit of a “why are you even here then” aspect to it. Of course it depends on the degree the AI is being used, how much editorial control or tweaking you’re doing, it’s a legitimate debate and I don’t think you’re wrong to want to participate.
But like, I do like coding, I just have an incredibly hard time thinking in any language other than English because my brain is essentially defective.
Writing code entirely manually inevitably ends with me incredibly frustrated for hours because despite thinking I’ve done something correctly, and even knowing ‘no, I know this is how it’s supposed to work so why isn’t it?’ All because I’ve made a couple of typographical errors that I’m too stupid to parse out from a debugger.
And because I don’t have any friends with even a passing interest I don’t have anyone to turn to for advice there. Nor do I work in the field or went to school for it. My only human options are on the internet but replies often take hours and you have to sift through nine people calling you stupid before finding someone being nice let alone actually helping.
The people who say they don’t support these tools come across as purists or virtue signallers.
It is now “purist” to protest against the usage of tools that by and large steal from the work of countless unpaid, uncredited, unconsenting artists, writers, and programmers. It is virtue signaling to say I don’t support OpenAI or their shitty capital chasing pig-brethren. It’s fucking “organic labelling” to want to support like-minded people instead of big tech.
Y’all are ridiculous. The more of this I see, the more radicalized I get. Cool tech, yes, I admit! But wow, you just want to sweep all those pesky little ethical issues aside because… it makes you more productive? Shit, it’s like you’re competing with Altman on the unlikeability ranking.
Back in the day, people hated Intellisense/auto-complete.
And back in the older day, people hated IDEs for coding.
And back in the even older day, people hated computers for games.
There’ll always be people who hate new technology, especially if it makes something easier that they used to have to do “the hard way”.
this is stupid, there’s SO many indie games using procedural generation which is fucking generative AI. It’s in a shitload of them, from speulunky to Darkest Dungeon 2.
Procgen is not genAI. It’s not even machine learning.
To be fair to the people protesting this isn’t what they’re objecting to. They don’t like tools which were built on theft, which all the major LLMs were. That’s the core issue, along with the fear that artists will be devalued and replaced because of them.
There are many reasons that people dislike gen AI; you can’t be sure that it’s because they dislike how it’s built on theft. Here are three different unrelated reasons to dislike gen AI:
- it puts people out of work;
- it’s built on theft;
- it produces “slop” in large quantities
Procedural generation is generative, but it ain’t AI. It especially has nothing in common with the exploitative practices of genAI training.
“AI” is just very advanced procedural generation. There’s been games that used image diffusion in the past too, just in a far smaller and limited scale (such as a single creature, like the pokemon with the spinning eyes
To me, what makes the difference is whether or not it’s trained on other people’s shit. The distinction between AI and an algorithm is pretty arbitrary, but I wouldn’t consider, for example, procedural generation via the wave function collapse algorithm to have the same moral implications as selling something using what most people would call AI-generated content.
And if you train an open source model yourself so it can generate content specifically on work you’ve created? Or are you against certain Linux devices too?
I don’t have a problem with games creating their own models trained only on things they created. I believe charging money for anything using assets generated by a model trained on data they didn’t have the rights to should be illegal. If a model is trained on data that they do own the the rights to, but didn’t create, that’s a weird gray area where I think it shouldn’t be illegal to sell its results, but you should have to disclose that you used it.
It makes decisions.
It generates content.
By this logic, literally any code is genAI.
Has a branch statement? It makes decisions. Displays something on the screen, even by stdout? Generated content.
It doesn’t make decisions, but neither does Gen AI. Not sure if you’re doubly wrong or half right.
But it’s not Gen AI.
As I touched on previously, those aren’t the qualities that make people opposed to AI. But have fun arguing dictionary definitions.
Ah but remember that AI no longer means the what it has meant since the dawn of computing, it now means “I don’t understand the algorithm, therefore it’s AI”.
Hell, AI used to mean mundane things like A* pathfinding, which is in like, every game ever.
I’m really tired of the shift in what AI means.
Pathfinding can be AI, but not generative AI.
Right, I’m just saying that this has happened before to the definitions of AI.
I remember we used to refer to enemy logic as AI. The 4 Pac-Man ghosts each had different “AI”. The AI of the enemies in this FPS sucks. This kind of stuff, lol
