I'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can become a crutch that hurts rather than helps.
I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a remarkable difference between AI being used for the software engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop count as Gen AI? How could it not?
In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a somewhat painstaking creative process.
I like AI to figure out complex issue or something I would just find on stackoverflow. It's great for doing boiler plate crap that I don't want to do anyways. But when you need it to do something that it hasn't found in a git repo, it struggles.
I've been keeping an eye out on AI disclosures on Steam (https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...). While it's unsurprising that devs are using it, what was surprising was the number of games that disclose it. I believe, as of November, it's up to 8% of the while library. The biggest game to disclose AI use right now is Stellaris (with many many millions in sales), though having initially launched many years ago, their GenAI usage is in product updates.
The “they’re just jelly that we can do better than they with AI” camp really needs to spend more time hanging around artisans in general, instead of flouncing into comment sections and evangelizing the AI-booster groupthink.
Artists and creators are, broadly, incredibly pissed that their output was used to train these models without compensation or consent by trillion-dollar megacorps and VC-funded startups. That is, and remains, the core grievance. People who already make a pittance by devoting themselves to the creation of art are now forced out of art entirely because programmers just couldn’t be bothered to - GASP - have an original thought and commission someone else to execute it for them.
A distant, but still important, secondary concern is the quality of the slop itself (or lack thereof). Anyone who engages with art sufficiently can see the “seams” in generative content, even in state of the art models: perspectives lack consistency across key frames, anatomy isn’t grounded in reality or bends in ways befitting of a horror movie, geometry and materials that do not “graft” together due to a lack of negative space. These models are garbage because they don’t recognize core artistic concepts, only haphazardly reassemble pieces by prompt.
I challenge the AI crowd to actually go to an art faire, or commission a custom piece of your idea. Have something you had to contribute more than a simple prompt, to. Identify styles you like and artists that work within them. Take the chance to make more human connections and bond over shared creativity.
The artists will thank you, and you’re likely to enjoy the resultant output far more.
Hi, I have interacted with a lot of artists, and spent more on commissioning art than is probably financially sensible, as well as playing around with models for writing and image generation and I have a few thoughts on this.
I think, on the whole, the distaste for AI is primarily about a threat to the value of the artist's work. Importantly, I think the idea that this was done by training on their collective work is a bit of a sting on top but it is not the primary reason for the objection. Especially importantly, I think copyright is 100% not a good way to try to mend this issue, because it will primarily enable the parasitic centralization that already plagues the art business, as well as allow for further moat-building by tho ones creating these models (Adobe having already demonstrated this). In my view, a world where the big tech companies have models that only they are legally allowed to train is the worst possible outcome from this tech. I think addressing this either needs to involve some kind of blanket compensation from the big companies (with the important proviso that even their entire valuation spread amongst all the artists in their training set is a relative pittance), or through a general push against AI generation entirely, but from the perspective of the importance of supporting the artists as opposed to leaning on copyright claims which the AI industry can happily navigate if they must.
With regards to quality, Sturgeon's law applies doubly here. The vast majority of AI generated stuff you see will be slop, because it's so easy to make. It is possible to make very good stuff with AI with more effort, but this requires at a minimum some taste and willingness to put thought into what you want to get out of it, and better also some artistic talent. To me the best is when someone engages with it as a tool to achieve a vision as opposed to a perfunctory 'I need to fill some space with something' stock-image type thing (something which humans had already been doing, but were a bit more limited on because of expense and it's hard for someone doing art to not care at least a little bit about making something good even if it's utterly soulless corporate clip-art).
I'll also say it's not universal amongst artists. I know of multiple who are OK with it, and starting to incorporate it into their work. But it's also a somewhat dicey position to take publicly in those circles at the moment, so they're not very visible on the whole. (I suspect this is often dependent on why they got into art: in general the ones who are OK with or actively like AI are the ones who got into art because they wanted to see more art of the kind that they make (insert 'oh boy, two cakes!' meme here). The ones who got into art because they enjoy the process of making the art generally don't like it, though they're not always utterly virulently against it, and the ones who got into art for the status it affords them absolutely hate it. Though of course these are somewhat oversimplified categories)
Slop is slop because it's slop. Sounds tautological, but AI is orthogonal to the problem. Before AI, there were and are Unity/Unreal "asset store piles" which grab a bunch of (mostly free) assets from the engine's store and slap them into a game. Nothing looks coherent or cohesive. AI has made that a lot more easy and customizable, of course, but the end result is the same: a bunch of disparate elements coming together incohesively, making for a poor player experience.
In the end it's about taste. People with poor taste will make bad games, whether they use AI or not. AI has certainly accelerated the rate at which bad games can be made, however.
Personally I'd rather play an indie game made by one person who uses GenAI to help build out their coherent, unique, and personal vision, rather than an entirely handmade yet another soulless Roguelite Deckbuilder, 2d pixel art platformer, or extraction shooter.
> Because the tool threatens to put the majority of them out of business and jobs.
Unfortunately technology has done this for centuries now, and everyone may as well quit whining get used to it, because it's not going to change. The market can "stay irrational" longer than they can afford to complain.
I feel it is more like a restaurant advertising cooking from basic ingredients instead of heating ultra processed prefabs. With power tools you do not limit your creative options.
To be fair I think if there is any kinda okay use of GenAI is being able to get some images and such without needing the money to hire an artist.
Maybe that allows for way more niche games.
In other words: It's the whole package. If I get something unique, and the dev used some "AI" for translation or to make some avatar image for a character I am happy this game is allowed to exist.
If I see a AAA studio putting out the hundredth iteration of the same old game, of some franchise that used to be good and interesting in the 90s and then doesn't even bring actually new art to the table it's a huge disappointment.
But here we are. EA cannot even manage to fix their basic bugs (like players running into nets or a new kickoff for less than a second) after a dozen of new expensive releases.
Non-indie games have largely been a complete farce for decades now.
Also AI could also generate some code to enable the artists to make their own unique games. There will be loads of creative types out there who can unlock some neat concepts with AI support
I've been working with a partner on a game and we decided that AI assets are acceptable to use for targeted scenarios like localization and accessibility (text-to-text, text-to-speech).
The red line is AI cannot be the prime generator of content. For example, the text that is to be localized must be authored by a human. Using ChatGPT to generate scripts from a brief prompt and then feeding that into another AI tool is an example of strictly prohibited use.
You can have an actual human redo the translations or voice lines without much frustration (i.e., if we actually make any money). Anything further than that gets a lot more invasive in terms of rework.
I can understand people who are upset about AI being used to generate artwork or more "creative" tasks that lean into other people's work, but using this to paint AI as "bad" as a whole is simplistic.
There are a million things AI can do that wouldn't fall into this category (repetitive, time-consuming work) that technically wouldn't make the product "AI free."
It's about as smart as hearing a phone was used to plan a bank heist, therefore we need "phone free" communication.
I doubt it's anywhere near million. Non-zero? Sure.
But even for those scenario where "AI" helps, I still believe there exists other alternatives that doesn't consume unreasonable amount of energy and are not megacorp controlled blackbox. Usually it's just better tooling, and/or a change in the process.
The reason why "AI" is simply bad is way beyond malicious abuse of these stochastic models, thus the analogy of banning phone doesn't actually work.
On the creative side, I feel like punk act like this, fighting back against all these throat-shoving and gaslighting, is pretty artistic.
Many years ago I was watching a video of some sculpture being done. I was quite unimpressed with the art itself.
Then the video zoomed out, and I saw that the guy had spent like 2 years making it out of individual toothpicks.
Suddenly I was amazed, right?
With AI it's kinda the opposite process, right? You see something, it's impressive, maybe you even like it personally, and then you realize orders of magnitude less effort went into it than it looks like "should" have, based on the result.
So we seem to have here the "direct experience" of the art itself, and then a "narrative layer" which obscures that. And we seem to value the latter more highly.
A related example is those pages selling "handcrafted" leather bags and they have an life story about Grandma Williams and suddenly the bag is worth a billion times more to the buyer.
This is called marketing and pushing a brand. It's nothing new.
It could even be faked. There was a clothing brand who said their stuff was all hand made, artisanal, only to be found out they sent their stuff to China to make. Now the Chinese workers are ranting about getting credit for their quality work.
It's why I think it's a sign of maturity to be able to get past all the narratives and spin to a product, all the while living less materialistically.
It's all second and third order effects. You'd then be less impressed if you found the zoom out toothpick video was itself just made with AI. And even less impressed if you zoom out further, and discover your entire feed is just different AI toothpick sculpture videos, because that's what went viral yesterday so now everybody has prompted one overnight.
There are about 250k games on Steam and over 125M users. What happens when full sloppification means there's 250M games on Steam? You scroll forever without reaching a game that more than a few other humans have played. But you can't distinguish it from the thousands of other similar games. Choice is a fatigue all of its own.
One game per player eh? At that point we won't need Steam, you'll just put on your thinking hat and the computer will synthesize exactly what you're in the mood for.
(Well, maybe Steam itself will do that — VALVE's been researching brain computer interface entertainment for years :)
Much if the value of art is that it links you to everyone else who views it, which is fundamentally diluted by any process that makes art faster than it can be observed. This stays true no matter how high the quality of the fast art making process climbs. Making a sculpture out of toothpicks on the other hand preserves this value by synthesizing the needed scarcity via proof of work, and would do so even if it added nothing aesthetically.
I've noticed this, too, and have likened it to haircuts: If you gave yourself a haircut, you don't say so, because it inevitably opens the door to a level of scrutiny and criticism that it wouldn't otherwise.
People are just going to lie about using AI and honestly that's fine. An even older idiom is that you don't want to see how the sausage gets made. Not if you enjoy sausage.
I think it's so interesting that people want to know something is created by AI to not consume it. Personally I don't care if something is made by AI or not. If I like it I like it. If not, then I don't. At this point at least I don't like bad usage of AI. But there has been some absolutely bangers of content created by AI. My previous background was AI generated for example.
A huge amount of music now is “copy and pasting samples” in FL studio or GarageBand and that is considered 100% human so I would say the line is very clear. The line is at “did it matter that you did this, or would any layperson in your stead have been able to make pretty much exactly the same thing (qualitatively judged)?”
A very, very weak sales pitch. I've seen more things start prominently displaying that they're "AI-free" recently, and it has only driven me away as opposed to being more interested because do you just not stand out enough to the point where you have to say that in order for people to care? Or is it because you're stuck-up? I'm not sure anymore.
A very, very weak sales pitch. I've seen more things start prominently displaying that they're "handmade" recently, and it has only driven me away as opposed to being more interested because do you just not stand out enough to the point where you have to say that in order for people to care? Or is it because you're stuck-up? I'm not sure anymore.
Genuine question (this is more about code than art): Since some indies brag about having no "assistance" whatsoever, is it still AI-free if you ever asked an LLM for help with a tricky programming problem, and incorporated that knowledge into your game's code? What if you just used a search engine and your eyes glanced over an AI-generated answer? Or you unknowingly benefited from an AI-written post or StackOverflow answer? I mean, is it really possible to code without any AI assistance any more? Also what about using third-party assets, that are likely to have a fly in the ointment somewhere (maybe at least a tiny bit of the asset creator's code involved asking Claude for help, or they tangentially benefited from a Google summary).
As much as I dislike the taste of AI slop, it seems to me like AI has so thoroughly permeated the internet at this point that a truly AI-free game is impossible unless you are a programming genius and/or independently funded to a point where you can hire domain experts for everything, such that you could make the game fully offline without even going on the internet at all. I actually find it hard to believe that anyone could code a game above a minimal level of complexity without searching problems online and using at least a tiny bit of AI-generated/summarized info, even unintentionally.
Most of the gamers I know who are not in the tech space are very against AI, especially if it is being used for stuff that is more on the art side. Anything that displaces "game industry workers" is viewed as a bad thing.
I personally don't mind AI use to write code, and while I haven't seen AI art that conveys much in me, I'm open to the idea that it could be used in interesting ways.
They are against AI code now as well. AI anything is toxic to the general pop, which is why some companies are asking not to be forced to reveal their use of it.
The real issue is that people's livelihoods are being automated. This can be fixed with sensible policies and things like universal healthcare and universal basic income.
There are some additional policies I'd like involving AI automation gains compensating workers losing their jobs to AI, and laws making all AI open-source due to their nature of being trained on public data.
With those policies, it wouldn't hurt so much to lose your job to AI. I would think there would be leas hostility at that point.
I must say it is all very confusing to me. If someone likes a game, why does the origin of assets matter? It is the same thing I see with crypto. It is just code and data. People putting value on it doesn't change what it is. Yet now there are all these regulations because enough people assigned enough value so the code suddenly becomes regulated.
AI is just code and data. It doesn't make sense how offended people are by it. No one is being for to use AI. Sure, it is changing how our society functions, but this isn't the fault of AI, it is the fault of bad systems. We have bad economic systems, bad political systems, bad leaders across the board, and bad distribution of ownership. AI isn't causing these problems, it is just amplifying them.
53 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 90.4 ms ] threadI'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can become a crutch that hurts rather than helps.
I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a remarkable difference between AI being used for the software engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop count as Gen AI? How could it not?
In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a somewhat painstaking creative process.
But that said, I absolutely expected a high rate because I assumed game devs would be forced to use it by management, just as I am.
Artists and creators are, broadly, incredibly pissed that their output was used to train these models without compensation or consent by trillion-dollar megacorps and VC-funded startups. That is, and remains, the core grievance. People who already make a pittance by devoting themselves to the creation of art are now forced out of art entirely because programmers just couldn’t be bothered to - GASP - have an original thought and commission someone else to execute it for them.
A distant, but still important, secondary concern is the quality of the slop itself (or lack thereof). Anyone who engages with art sufficiently can see the “seams” in generative content, even in state of the art models: perspectives lack consistency across key frames, anatomy isn’t grounded in reality or bends in ways befitting of a horror movie, geometry and materials that do not “graft” together due to a lack of negative space. These models are garbage because they don’t recognize core artistic concepts, only haphazardly reassemble pieces by prompt.
I challenge the AI crowd to actually go to an art faire, or commission a custom piece of your idea. Have something you had to contribute more than a simple prompt, to. Identify styles you like and artists that work within them. Take the chance to make more human connections and bond over shared creativity.
The artists will thank you, and you’re likely to enjoy the resultant output far more.
I think, on the whole, the distaste for AI is primarily about a threat to the value of the artist's work. Importantly, I think the idea that this was done by training on their collective work is a bit of a sting on top but it is not the primary reason for the objection. Especially importantly, I think copyright is 100% not a good way to try to mend this issue, because it will primarily enable the parasitic centralization that already plagues the art business, as well as allow for further moat-building by tho ones creating these models (Adobe having already demonstrated this). In my view, a world where the big tech companies have models that only they are legally allowed to train is the worst possible outcome from this tech. I think addressing this either needs to involve some kind of blanket compensation from the big companies (with the important proviso that even their entire valuation spread amongst all the artists in their training set is a relative pittance), or through a general push against AI generation entirely, but from the perspective of the importance of supporting the artists as opposed to leaning on copyright claims which the AI industry can happily navigate if they must.
With regards to quality, Sturgeon's law applies doubly here. The vast majority of AI generated stuff you see will be slop, because it's so easy to make. It is possible to make very good stuff with AI with more effort, but this requires at a minimum some taste and willingness to put thought into what you want to get out of it, and better also some artistic talent. To me the best is when someone engages with it as a tool to achieve a vision as opposed to a perfunctory 'I need to fill some space with something' stock-image type thing (something which humans had already been doing, but were a bit more limited on because of expense and it's hard for someone doing art to not care at least a little bit about making something good even if it's utterly soulless corporate clip-art).
I'll also say it's not universal amongst artists. I know of multiple who are OK with it, and starting to incorporate it into their work. But it's also a somewhat dicey position to take publicly in those circles at the moment, so they're not very visible on the whole. (I suspect this is often dependent on why they got into art: in general the ones who are OK with or actively like AI are the ones who got into art because they wanted to see more art of the kind that they make (insert 'oh boy, two cakes!' meme here). The ones who got into art because they enjoy the process of making the art generally don't like it, though they're not always utterly virulently against it, and the ones who got into art for the status it affords them absolutely hate it. Though of course these are somewhat oversimplified categories)
Slop is slop because it's slop. Sounds tautological, but AI is orthogonal to the problem. Before AI, there were and are Unity/Unreal "asset store piles" which grab a bunch of (mostly free) assets from the engine's store and slap them into a game. Nothing looks coherent or cohesive. AI has made that a lot more easy and customizable, of course, but the end result is the same: a bunch of disparate elements coming together incohesively, making for a poor player experience.
In the end it's about taste. People with poor taste will make bad games, whether they use AI or not. AI has certainly accelerated the rate at which bad games can be made, however.
Personally I'd rather play an indie game made by one person who uses GenAI to help build out their coherent, unique, and personal vision, rather than an entirely handmade yet another soulless Roguelite Deckbuilder, 2d pixel art platformer, or extraction shooter.
It's like a carpenter saying they're power tool free.
You have an amazing tool to speed up your work why wouldn't you use it?
The rest of their arguments, however illogical, all stem from this core of the fear of losing their livelihood.
Unfortunately technology has done this for centuries now, and everyone may as well quit whining get used to it, because it's not going to change. The market can "stay irrational" longer than they can afford to complain.
Maybe that allows for way more niche games.
In other words: It's the whole package. If I get something unique, and the dev used some "AI" for translation or to make some avatar image for a character I am happy this game is allowed to exist.
If I see a AAA studio putting out the hundredth iteration of the same old game, of some franchise that used to be good and interesting in the 90s and then doesn't even bring actually new art to the table it's a huge disappointment.
But here we are. EA cannot even manage to fix their basic bugs (like players running into nets or a new kickoff for less than a second) after a dozen of new expensive releases.
Non-indie games have largely been a complete farce for decades now.
The red line is AI cannot be the prime generator of content. For example, the text that is to be localized must be authored by a human. Using ChatGPT to generate scripts from a brief prompt and then feeding that into another AI tool is an example of strictly prohibited use.
You can have an actual human redo the translations or voice lines without much frustration (i.e., if we actually make any money). Anything further than that gets a lot more invasive in terms of rework.
There are a million things AI can do that wouldn't fall into this category (repetitive, time-consuming work) that technically wouldn't make the product "AI free."
It's about as smart as hearing a phone was used to plan a bank heist, therefore we need "phone free" communication.
But even for those scenario where "AI" helps, I still believe there exists other alternatives that doesn't consume unreasonable amount of energy and are not megacorp controlled blackbox. Usually it's just better tooling, and/or a change in the process.
The reason why "AI" is simply bad is way beyond malicious abuse of these stochastic models, thus the analogy of banning phone doesn't actually work.
On the creative side, I feel like punk act like this, fighting back against all these throat-shoving and gaslighting, is pretty artistic.
Then the video zoomed out, and I saw that the guy had spent like 2 years making it out of individual toothpicks.
Suddenly I was amazed, right?
With AI it's kinda the opposite process, right? You see something, it's impressive, maybe you even like it personally, and then you realize orders of magnitude less effort went into it than it looks like "should" have, based on the result.
So we seem to have here the "direct experience" of the art itself, and then a "narrative layer" which obscures that. And we seem to value the latter more highly.
A related example is those pages selling "handcrafted" leather bags and they have an life story about Grandma Williams and suddenly the bag is worth a billion times more to the buyer.
It could even be faked. There was a clothing brand who said their stuff was all hand made, artisanal, only to be found out they sent their stuff to China to make. Now the Chinese workers are ranting about getting credit for their quality work.
It's why I think it's a sign of maturity to be able to get past all the narratives and spin to a product, all the while living less materialistically.
There are about 250k games on Steam and over 125M users. What happens when full sloppification means there's 250M games on Steam? You scroll forever without reaching a game that more than a few other humans have played. But you can't distinguish it from the thousands of other similar games. Choice is a fatigue all of its own.
(Well, maybe Steam itself will do that — VALVE's been researching brain computer interface entertainment for years :)
People are just going to lie about using AI and honestly that's fine. An even older idiom is that you don't want to see how the sausage gets made. Not if you enjoy sausage.
Like fairtrade... this code was produced without exploiting enslaved human knowledge ;)
As much as I dislike the taste of AI slop, it seems to me like AI has so thoroughly permeated the internet at this point that a truly AI-free game is impossible unless you are a programming genius and/or independently funded to a point where you can hire domain experts for everything, such that you could make the game fully offline without even going on the internet at all. I actually find it hard to believe that anyone could code a game above a minimal level of complexity without searching problems online and using at least a tiny bit of AI-generated/summarized info, even unintentionally.
I personally don't mind AI use to write code, and while I haven't seen AI art that conveys much in me, I'm open to the idea that it could be used in interesting ways.
The real issue is that people's livelihoods are being automated. This can be fixed with sensible policies and things like universal healthcare and universal basic income.
There are some additional policies I'd like involving AI automation gains compensating workers losing their jobs to AI, and laws making all AI open-source due to their nature of being trained on public data.
With those policies, it wouldn't hurt so much to lose your job to AI. I would think there would be leas hostility at that point.
I must say it is all very confusing to me. If someone likes a game, why does the origin of assets matter? It is the same thing I see with crypto. It is just code and data. People putting value on it doesn't change what it is. Yet now there are all these regulations because enough people assigned enough value so the code suddenly becomes regulated.
AI is just code and data. It doesn't make sense how offended people are by it. No one is being for to use AI. Sure, it is changing how our society functions, but this isn't the fault of AI, it is the fault of bad systems. We have bad economic systems, bad political systems, bad leaders across the board, and bad distribution of ownership. AI isn't causing these problems, it is just amplifying them.