My personal opinions on AI and AI usage in software development have fluctuated in the past year, especially as I've used it more in my professional work. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in the tools that I use, I struggle to identify a hard line on what "Made with AI (tm)" actually means. If I'm using it for refactoring work as basically a glorified "find-and-replace" or to help me track down the cause of tricky bugs through trace files, does that make my work "made with AI"? (I think "yes it does" and would follow up with "but does it matter?") If I send an agent to complete a JIRA ticket on a system that I designed, read the diff, and approve the changes - does that invalidate my prior design and development work? (I think "no".) If I use a website builder, a 3rd party library, or one more abstraction layer past what is currently acceptable, should that change how others or I feel about that project? I'm not really sure, but since I work on business software I don't think my customers really care about how the sausage is made; they're mostly looking for results.
I do, however, see a massive difference between "AI as tools" and "AI as creative director". I agree with the mindset of "I want to hear stories from humans" and "I want to experience creative expression from humans". But some of the current discussion feels like the arguments we had back in the day of whether Photoshop/digital media/video games were "real art" or not. If a human has creative vision and uses a robot stir-er to mix their paints, I don't think that should invalidate their painting. We can still judge it, though.
If you are willing to own the fuckups that (invariably) happen, then you get to own the good things that come out (as in, said I made it with X). But only if you take full responsibility, for both good and bad.
Can't blame someone else and take credit for the work when convenient.
For me, the dividing line is this question: Do you know what's going on?
You see people brag about how "they" "made" something, with neither the qualifications nor the vision to motivate me to care. If I wanted vibecoded slop, I could just cut out the middle man, like everybody else with a Claude subscription.
But this stuff really does shine when competent people such as myself - an expert, gentleman, scholar, etc. - use it for things like exploring a new topic, rubberducking design ideas, diagnosing problems, and sometimes go the extra mile.
Software projects are full of incidental, boring stuff, and it makes a meaningful difference to be able to say to Claude things like "please compare the performance of these 5 different approaches, and show me your notes". But just like a colleague, it has no clue what your actual intentions are unless you tell it, and you can't communicate those intentions if you don't know them yourself - and crucially, you can't know them if you don't have the expertise to know what you actually want.
This doesn't feel like cheating at all, and I don't relate to the choir of disillusioned programmers who feel demotivated by the introduction of LLMs in their workflow. I mean, maybe their work wasn't all that interesting to begin with? I don't know. I get that it sucks to feel replaceable.
I've worked on a couple vibe coded pet projects now. I wouldn't say that I "wrote" them but I would say that I "designed" them and might even say that I "made" them as it took quite a few back-and-forth passes before I was happy with the results. But to your point, one one of those projects I don't fully know "what's going on". Even though I could open the source and grok the code after a brief inspection that's not really the point of that exercise.
On a different note, AI tools have been great at combating corporate bureaucracy! If the Big Man says that all modules need unit tests with 80% code coverage, you can give the agent that task and then move on to more interesting hard-thinks.
Many technical people, especially those who lean more middle-management minded, have said things like “do you know what’s going on in your car while you’re driving?”
IMO, this is a wrong way of looking at things if the job is software engineer.
We aren’t the end user who is driving. They don’t need to know how the car works. It takes them to and from work or their kid’s sports event.
The engineer does need to know how the car works. Sure, there are specializations so someone working on one part of the car might not know how another part works. But, they know how these things work together at least at a high level.
I’m noticing that without proper planning and architecture, these AIs go off the rails and introduce horrific complexities that are hard to diagnose and even harder to fix.
For some small app that nobody cares about besides me, I don’t really care about the internals much. I can have the agent churn and do fixes and updates.
For something larger that will have end users who rely on the software to work, I don’t think having the agents burning millions of tokens and many minutes on each task is a good way to work.
The strength of AI is that it can work across many files, reading and writing magnitudes faster than any human. Their weakness is that they need direction, otherwise the result is chaos.
I’ve tried various approaches and honestly, I’m back to spending time up front planning the system and doing a little bit of mixed (manual and AI assisted) coding to set the foundation.
A few days or even a week or two of focused writing concise documentation, with enough foundational code that shows how the system is architected, yields tremendous results down the road. Even the AI benefits from it because it knows exactly where, what, and how to change. Every system is unique, that last 10% that separates it from the generic recipe is what matters.
I am not saying that humans were perfect or that I’m some god-tier engineer. I know my limits, and as an AI enthusiast I have also realized where these tools have consistently fallen short. Unfortunately, we must realize that no system is perfect, and humans need to do boring work like planning and proper guardrails because chaos is easy.
I agree that the question we need to grapple with for the foreseeable future is "Do you understand this code?". If you write it by hand you (very probably) understand it, but if you let the LLM write it then you understand it less. If you let the LLM take over for too long, some inflection point is crossed where you understand a minority of the code base; that's when you notice the water around you is boiling, and your entire industry is fanning the flames.
I don't want to doommax: AI is great, but if we allow ourselves to lose understanding of what our code is doing then we're not doing engineering anymore, we're just doing summoning spells hoping the complexity demon spirit doesn't kill us as a result.
This article hooked me when it mentioned Big Wall, because Big Walk is easily one of the best games I’ve played in years.
It sounds like this author’s argument is “AI in games sucks for lots of reason but mostly because it robs people of jobs.” I don’t disagree with that in theory but the real question is whether House House would have actually hired another human.
My guess is that they would’ve either delayed it more, or not known about the bugs and released it. They are purposefully small and bringing on even a freelancer introduces a lot of complexity and room for error. So too does AI but ultimately you control the output. You don’t have to worry about it being late, or it having a bad day.
If the end result of using AI is an artful, beautiful game like Big Wall, I’m all for it.
In my opinion the metric shouldn’t be whether AI was used, it should be whether the end result is *good*. I realize that’s subjective but I think we can objectively say Big Walk is a wonderful, artful game. When AI is used and the output is bad - as was the case, say, with those Coca Cola or McDonalds ads - that’s when we should question it.
When it’s being used for artwork or writing - I also think that’s a valid argument against it because it is, as we all know, utilizing artwork and writing without consent.
Is that true for code? Maybe some code but we would all say, I think, it’s much looser around code than creative outputs like artwork and writing.
It sounds like House House used AI like a tool the same way they did whatever engines or coding tools they used.
> It sounds like this author’s argument is “AI in games sucks for lots of reason but mostly because it robs people of jobs.”
I am very interested in discussing and reading about the impact of AI on the job market.
However, I think that topic deserves a separate discussion focused only on the broader economic story. When articles start blending every possible anti-AI angle into one generic critique it gets hard to separate the real difficulties from authors who don’t like the fact that the world is changing.
A common story I’m noticing is that established figures with comfortable positions are terrified of AI, while the newer, younger, less experienced entrants are more excited about what it can do for them. It makes sense: If you spent your career grinding your way up a skill and experience ladder you are naturally going to be resistant to anything that threatens your position in the hierarchy of the world. Having hard-earned skills and a history of having done the hard work was a moar for your career and reputation.
Now a lot, but not all, of those old skills is 80% achievable by a kid with a $20 Claude plan. That moat you spent an entire career building became a lot less valuable for maintaining your position, and it happened suddenly over a couple years.
That’s why it’s difficult to interpret articles like this. It’s hard to separate out the valid critiques from the author’s own rationalization for their dislike of AI disruption.
It also makes sense that young people don't know the value of their labour, or how much they are going to be squeezed once a machine can do 99% of their work in 1% of the time, to an acceptable level of quality.
Someone has to teach the younger generation marxist theory and labor history. I guess that’s our value add since the companies will intentionally handicap that in LLMs
AI is here and it trivializes what used to be hard.
Developing software used to require feats of skill and endurance, and we're used to judging software based on that. Now it doesn't.
We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input. Whether what was made is unique, interesting, creative, not whether it took a lot of time or knowledge.
I was trained as an animator at one point. The process was to do the storyboards, layout, key drawings, map out the timings, slug out the dialog, and then send it off to a company in Korea that would in-between and produce the final product.
That Korean studio has been replaced by a machine. Fiscally, that is unpleasant for those animators, but they're really talented and now they can also hire such a machine to implement their ideas if they want to.
Disney was doing this in 1930. In-betweeners and the ink-and-paint girls were the machine. Nasa was doing it in the late 40's. Women were the computers.
Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human. As you say, all that matters is the output, not the input.
And if you want to do a project where you think the input is what will impress somebody, because you manually assembled 50k bottlecaps, that's still an available form. Sometimes that works and people care a little more because it was done directly.
All of this sort of already happened, dozens of times. Socks, knives, screws, engines, a million different things that used to be about mastery and are now about understanding.
Understanding is hard. Making that the requirement leaves a bunch of people behind. We're going to have to figure out how to support them, we can't keep having a society that depends on the moral value of work when work is unavailable, but as you say, there is no going back.
This exchange is missing something. Remember the bridge comparison? There are like 7 bridge designs total, and we're always building the same ones. But software is very different per use case, and outsourcing software is more similar to outsourcing blueprint design, not building.
We never had a situation where we could outsource unique problem solving at all levels.
You say "Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human." but you can have LLM produce design at all levels. I can't think of anything LLM cannot replace humans with, except maybe physical labor, which requires good robotics precision, that we haven't perfected yet.
The main part that's missing however, is that the nature of linguistics (and the core to LLMs' success) is that LLMs are wiring together useful concepts that humans spent thousands of years polishing and relating to one another in speech.
Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.
And if you think about how human thinking and consciousness is often attributed to language in the first place (not clear if we even would be conscious without language), a lot of human is being delegated.
I'm not sure what to do about it, but I find your kind of explanation incredibly reductive.
> Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.
That is very interesting and well worded, I use Agents all day so I kind of wish to an extent that they would be almighty, and maybe they will be. But using them so much there is clearly a gap, they actually became worse at writing.
I think, unfortunately to some, LLMS are like perfect operators, great at math and coding, executing on whatever you want, but they do lack some "pseudo creative" ability we might not have a word for. Fable 5.1 genuinely writes poorly. Correctly, but poorly. And as you said, writing codes human thought, well maybe not all of it.
It's literally and intentionally reductive, so I'm good with that, because these processes are reductive.
Have you ever read "Stranger in a Strange Land"?
The character of Jubal Harshaw is instructive. He's become very rich because he can just unhook his brain and produce a tear-jerking and profitable story in a few seconds as he lounges around his pool.
He gives his secretaries the gist of the story, they fill it out, they arrange for somebody to make the film.
The point of the character is that what he's doing takes no emotional effort or insight. He's writing Hallmark movies. Everybody who's working for him adds nothing to it.
And we have Hallmark/Lifetime movies already. People were making them for decades before the LLMs came along.
But if you could send an LLM back to 1950 and train it on the pre-existing literature, you couldn't have it generate The Shining, A Scanner Darkly, Piranesi, Perdido Street Station, The April Witch, or Starship Troopers.
-none of the research indicates a mechanism by which you can create a selfhood that gets banged around by time and has feelings about itself, but admittedly, that might change
-even if you could do such a thing, you can't then put the robot in a human body and let it nurse and get potty trained and sent to pre-school and bullied and wonder about its mortality as it starts to think about what its career might be, etc etc etc
We were already making slop, because we already had a big production machine that transforms any input into a "movie" or "a television show", and a lot of the inputs were garbage.
The movie "A Talking Cat?" exists and predates AI by about ten years.
The point is that we were already delegating this stuff to human beings who didn't care about it and weren't bringing their humanity to it. Nothing changes on that side of things except that they don't have jobs to show up to.
So, at least for now, this isn't very different from the previous way of doing things, except that it's cheap enough that some people are spending a few thousand dollars to say "make me a story about a sad orphan" and the machine rips off Charles Dickens and Horatio Alger to make a thing nobody wants to watch without paying a bunch of key grips and best boys and caterers.
Maybe we could go forward to economics that don't deliver a mallet to the head of the person on the bottom every time we go forward? Could some of that forward energy be used to put foam on the mallet?
I don't think what you're proposing is feasible (unless I'm misunderstanding it?). We can lessen the blow and are already doing it through various welfare programs. But we cannot have creation without destruction.
This isn't ideological Milton Friedman free markets rahrah. I just can't imagine the alternative in practice: what if mainframe operators decided to opposed destruction, which would prevent mini and personal computers from becoming a reality?
There are 10,000 miles between what we do and a credible attempt at dampening the blow. Our social programs suck donkey balls and our politics won't even begin to talk about pulling levers to match aggregate supply of labor to aggregate demand for labor.
Right. IGF could have a no-AI policy, and they would immediately sacrifice their position as the leading group for what they do. They become an artisanal/historical group like the Amish are in furniture-making. There is still demand there, but it is a different niche.
> Developing software used to require feats of skill and endurance, and we're used to judging software based on that. Now it doesn't.
This has really emphasized the difference between developing software and building a business.
Developers everywhere are now doing side projects and developing software that would have taken 10 person-years in 2022. They’re discovering the hard way that software alone does not create a business product that customers might pay for.
Developing software is cheap now, but creating a business remains hard. All of the attempts I’ve seen to use AI to develop and grow a business have only turned real customers away.
> We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input.
This has been the case for far longer than AI has been a consideration. We all know that counting lines of code isn't a mark of quality, and yet we venerate those that put in all the hours to get something done.
I would say you need to go a step farther than that. The output needs to be impactful. Increased MAU (or GH stars, downloads, etc.), lowered support load, lower ops costs, whatever it might be.
It still requires skill and endurance to produce anything good. Has anyone here played different versions of Factorio all the way back to before oil, or Minecraft back to before hunger? Massive changes over their lifetime that you couldn't get in any way other than blind guessing (unlikely to succeed) or long-term feedback loops.
Respectfully, no. Technology is for art, and art is a technology. There's no meaningful way to draw a hard distinction between the two. In Ancient Greek, τέχνη (techne) means "art" or "skill", and that's where we get the word.
I assume you might associate technology with a more utilitarian perspective, but that's just not descriptive of what humans actually do.
Whatever technology becomes the next revolution (hoping it's not sticks and stones) will be used by humans (hoping they exist) to make art as well.
I don't understand. Is your position that creative work cannot be done with a computer? Or that creative work with a computer is a misuse? Looking around, it seems like technology and art get fused all the time, but I'm curious to understand where you're coming from.
There's space for a lot of things, doesn't mean much about the value of those things. In my experience spaces defined by dislike of something tend to not be very nice or productive spaces (largely independent of the qualities of the thing they dislike).
Would you define everyone involved as "disliking" new technology? Or would you define them as having a "like" for old technology? I think the same question could be considered for communities which continue to enjoy hand programming.
Nothing wrong with liking old technology. This is not the same thing as disliking new technology, and the vibe of the former will be quite different to the latter. Same with enjoying writing stuff by hand, in whatever language or for whatever platform you prefer. But again that is quite different from a space that is defined by being populated by people who 'despise AI'.
(when I say "value" I'm not talking about making money. Retro hardware generally does not make any money, but it is obviously valuable to those who enjoy it. Someone who hates modern technology might prefer to work with that, but that's not a requirement nor the focus of the community. If instead you have a community which is defined by hating modern technology, what I'm saying is that that is probably more harmful to the people within it than helpful. These kinds of spaces can become _very_ bad for the mental health of those within them.)
It has provided a decent amount of value to me. I don't think I'm alone in this. Whether it's overall worth what has been invested in it is one question, but I think it's very odd to assert that there has never been any upside to modern LLMs (let alone 'AI' as a whole, which should not be conflated).
LLMs made my job less time consuming and less stressful, but it has provided me zero value in terms of fulfillment above the basic shelter and safety needs. I think it has its uses in post scarcity and allowing me to focus on more important things, but I am of the opinion AI does not do any important things (for me). Whether it's software, most of which is B2B crap that will be gone a decade from now, or video games, most of which don't innovate or chase trends, or writing. AI has zero impact on me and doesn't provoke my mind or engage me on a higher level.
Like for example yeah frontier labs are stomping into venerable domains with no respect for their history or culture, and spending billions of dollars crushing worker power. Both projects the tech industry has been deeply invested in for over a decade and I don't remember anything like this backlash to it then so maybe the attitudes aren't the problem exactly?
There are also people conscientiously using LLMs to improve their stances on security and accessibility that would otherwise be outside their budget.
I can think of some other attitudes too. What were you thinking of?
I'd argue that the public has been souring on those attitudes as well, but also have been locked into various social media ecosystems through network effects. Now, the same (or similar) people have come out demanding hundreds of billions of dollars to upend humanity, while displaying all the same attitudes, but emboldened by their previous financial successes. Unsurprisingly, people don't like this.
Does IGF want to reward human achievement or recognize the best indie games? Both are viable paths. Chess tournaments reward human achievements, for example. But I agree with the OP that it's unfair to not be clear on their criteria.
No matter which IGF chooses, I believe awards will ultimately bifurcate: some other contest will emerge for the other side.
I don't think that's bad, nor do I think allowing AI means "not giving a shit."
I tried to finish reading this blog post, but couldn’t. Refreshingly, not because it was LLM-written, but because the author is clearly experiencing a visceral feeling toward AI-development, but they are incapable on breaking it down logically. Pure emotions. Not useful dialogue. Try again.
It was just long-winded and buried, but the author's position was essentially humanist... AI is taking the jobs.
"Why couldnt they hire a specialist for a few days"
Which is question that I think is willfully ignored by the pro-ai crowd.
AI is useful. It helps people go faster at a lot of things. It's also been trained on a scale of copyright violation that exceeds all modern measures of capacity.
The implications of this are willfully ignored by those who stand to profit from it.
It is simply unethical, unfair, and devoid of empathy for society to simply "march forward" and leave behind the millions of people it spent the last 60 years demanding more of.
These problem needs to be resolved before we can morally and socially embrace AI.
It's not willfully ignored. You might not like the answer, but the position is very clear.
> It is simply unethical, unfair, and devoid of empathy for society to simply "march forward" and leave behind the millions of people it spent the last 60 years demanding more of.
We disagree. This is a luddite point that I spent my whole life disagreeing.
I think it's unethical for society to intentionally block a technology that increases productivity to protect the interests of a smaller class of professionals. I believed that when it was happening to blue-collar workers, and I'll keep believing it when it's me.
> I think it's unethical for society to intentionally block a technology that increases productivity to protect the interests of a smaller class of professionals.
Ten years ago, did you believe in "copyright violation"? Did you really?
It's fine to dislike AI, it's fine to even dislike AI and not be able to articulate a reason, but I'm tired of hackers suddenly becoming the biggest defenders of IP.
I think the answer to "Why couldn't they hire a specialist for a few days" is because that might not have worked. If a Unity engineer couldn't help, it's hard to imagine that paying an unknown person to help would do more.
Plus, the idea that instead of solving the problem with the solve-your-problem button, the idea that the correct answer should be "just throw a bunch of money at it and hope that works" is so silly.
regarding having to declare AI code: it's pretty much impossible to determine whether 3rd party code (i.e. libraries, frameworks, etc) use AI - and they don't have to declare it either. so either you ban 3rd party code completely - which would probably the end of the whole thing, because writing everything from scratch would probably not be achievable for any game developer with the some exceptions.
if they don't ban AI code in 3rd party code, you could just circumvent the whole thing by outsourcing a few developers to be part-time 3rd party in name only and let them do the AI development, which would be against the spirit but not against the law.
As a consumer of games, I honestly don’t care much about how the game is made. AI vs non-AI is pure inside baseball. I just want to play good games, and I think the market will settle discussions of quality in the same way it always has.
In the end there will be "software writers" and "software designers." Same difference as "jumper knitter" and "jumper designer." One is a delightful craft, the other is a profession.
It's great to have a competition in software writing.
> In the end there will be "software writers" and "software designers."
We already have a distinction between people who define and design software and people who implement it. Product owners, UX designers, business analysts, solution architects etc
I'm saying that the "implementation" step will look very different or disappear altogether. Defining the software in specs, tests or through diagrams will be the primary language for these designers. Not TypeScript or C#. The writing part will evaporate.
That might overlap with some existing role, for sure.
My main point is that hand written (or even hand reviewed) code will be a curiosity. Like a hand knitted jumper. Only viable in markets as a niche/specialized product.
I'm not sure I trust those of my colleagues trained in UX to cohesively encapsulate and de-couple code modules. I certainly can't trust Claude/GPT to.
Then again, I'm not sure it's necessary; so many highly productive programmers seem to dispense with much of that, too. Maybe, in this age of frameworks and libraries, all the patterns are adequately baked in and I needn't worry about refactoring or software design. Hard habit to shake, though.
I don't disagree that AI in gamedev is ethically dubious in the context of developing something that leans more artistic versus interactive, but the entire premise of an article like this is that you're supposed to spill the beans and tell us the dubious opinions.
I don't disagree that AI used to develop artistic assets should be grounds for an entry to be barred from the IGF. I think the code portion, however, requires some specificity.
To me, it's not ok if the code that powers gameplay or artistic rendering of assets is AI generated. That kind of code carries human intent and is part of the art of game development: the dev wants a player to encounter a certain kind of experience.
There's no point or meaning if there's no developer dictating the experience by hand, if you're prompting this you might as well just admit you're trying to make a gimmicky asset flip "object simulator" to make a quick buck.
On the other hand, I think it's ok to use it as a tool and as tooling: trivial tests at all levels should absolutely be automated, figuring out engine quirks or getting second opinions on architecture with AI assistance is fine, figuring out your build and deployment pipelines.
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Another point that I want to mention: there's a strange form of writing prevalent among both software devs and those in the art space that's stilted; a mishmosh of Tumblr rantposting and slashdot/IRC snark and sarcasm, signaling that they've the mental maturity of a junior in American high school. It's all about emotion (this sucks!) rather than addressing the root of a problem.
This type of person is extremely difficult to deal with as they're the same type of person who encounters a brownfield codebase and immediately spends their time afterward whinging about how "the codebase must be burned and rewritten"; they must be micromanaged lest you set them off.
The author mentions freelancers and such, and how there's a lot of "lip service about how [they're] 'all in this together'" but frankly what I see in the case of House House is a team who wants to keep things within the team.
Regardless of their size, House House is a team on a timeline and budget, why should they be subjected to scrambling budget and conducting an interview process for someone who may or may not be a "brownfield rager"?
The deliberate conflating of AI code and AI assets as equivalent in "AI declarations" is bad.
The author here however goes further, and claims their argument against AI code is so strong, that they'd lose brain cells by actually making the argument, so we just have to accept that as fact.
They then go on to suggest that using AI for bug fixing is terrible, and hints that people should feel ashamed for enjoying a game that has gone through that process.
I'm neutral when it comes to others having ethical objections to any LLM use, but the author's claim that House House could have just hired an independent dev to find/fix the bug that they and Unity had both unsuccessfully searched for is downright absurd. Throwing someone, even a professional, into an unfamiliar codebase and asking them to take several days to diagnose a bug when you're late in the development/release cycle is not a recipe for success.
Your comment doesn't really say how you believe AI code and AI assets differ, but I assume you find AI code more palatable than AI assets. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think that's a common opinion that I see nowadays.
I think the issue I see with that stance is that frontier models can now perform asset generation via deterministic code. This is different than the 3D diffusion models of yesteryear. Is that manner of AI asset generation (which is really just through code generation) worse than other AI code in a project (i.e. resolving this bug)? If so, why? (I do not have good answers myself)
I think AI is useful and fine for non-creative work. I don't see programming as an especially creative work. It's about translating as best we can, the design into execution.
There is a little more creativity the further up the architecture and design you go, but the lower level you go, the less creative it is. Indeed for decades we have handed off the mechanical conversion into machine code to deterministic compilers.
Programming is certainly a skilled practice, but it isn't especially creative. Given the same problem, many programmers would produce a similar output.
This is very different to creative work, where the same requirements can lead to vastly different results. The range of art that could be described, as "Draw me the night's sky" is immense.
Generating assets, be that genAI, or procGen, takes away from the creative, and doubly so if you don't have much of a filter on the output and just accept what is given.
Look at procGen: the worlds of No Man's Sky have no soul to them. Compare that to the much lower and less detailed lands of Azeroth, which had so much soul that we're still recreating and enjoying them 20+ years later.
Generative AI can trick us into thinking there is a soul and that something creative has happened when it hasn't. Programming has no such deception.
If you're working with generation but then hand-filtering a million results back down to a hand-picked few, then there is a creative process once again, a curation that is itself an artistic process, so these things aren't absolute, there are always grey areas all over.
Tbh I think it's entirely based in the perception of the relative privilege of artists and programmers. Programming is viewed as a high-paying, easy to get job, so replacing their labor is less objectionable than replacing the labor of artists, which generally have lower-paying jobs and have to work relatively harder to get them.
I do think there is at least one compelling argument here which is for the competition having an actual rule or having judges declare their positions ahead of time, would help creators decide whether or not to enter.
I'd be pissed if I entered a contest (and asking for a refund if I paid to enter as this criteria was not disclosed) thinking that I was allowed to make the best game I could make regardless of tech used, only to find out that my max possible score was 66% because shadow judges were biased against me.
It feels like the old reddit moderator meme where the rules are made up and the points don't matter because all it takes is one salty mod.
Normies have no taste anymore so I don't get what's the big deal around AI, they don't care and they don't deserve better. If you aren't immediately turned off by something like Big Walk at first glance then... just enjoy it I guess but don't ask too many questions.
I think I agree with you, but the effort to "judge it like any low-effort crap" is now beyond anything I can muster. I think when people say "ban" the often mean filter with such an aggressive heuristic that I never see it, which IS one way to judge...
My personal opinions on AI and AI usage in software development have fluctuated in the past year, especially as I've used it more in my professional work. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in the tools that I use, I struggle to identify a hard line on what "Made with AI (tm)" actually means. If I'm using it for refactoring work as basically a glorified "find-and-replace" or to help me track down the cause of tricky bugs through trace files, does that make my work "made with AI"? (I think "yes it does" and would follow up with "but does it matter?") If I send an agent to complete a JIRA ticket on a system that I designed, read the diff, and approve the changes - does that invalidate my prior design and development work? (I think "no".) If I use a website builder, a 3rd party library, or one more abstraction layer past what is currently acceptable, should that change how others or I feel about that project? I'm not really sure, but since I work on business software I don't think my customers really care about how the sausage is made; they're mostly looking for results.
I do, however, see a massive difference between "AI as tools" and "AI as creative director". I agree with the mindset of "I want to hear stories from humans" and "I want to experience creative expression from humans". But some of the current discussion feels like the arguments we had back in the day of whether Photoshop/digital media/video games were "real art" or not. If a human has creative vision and uses a robot stir-er to mix their paints, I don't think that should invalidate their painting. We can still judge it, though.
If you are willing to own the fuckups that (invariably) happen, then you get to own the good things that come out (as in, said I made it with X). But only if you take full responsibility, for both good and bad.
Can't blame someone else and take credit for the work when convenient.
Kind of reminds me of "this product is required to state that it may cause cancer in the state of California".
For me, the dividing line is this question: Do you know what's going on?
You see people brag about how "they" "made" something, with neither the qualifications nor the vision to motivate me to care. If I wanted vibecoded slop, I could just cut out the middle man, like everybody else with a Claude subscription.
But this stuff really does shine when competent people such as myself - an expert, gentleman, scholar, etc. - use it for things like exploring a new topic, rubberducking design ideas, diagnosing problems, and sometimes go the extra mile.
Software projects are full of incidental, boring stuff, and it makes a meaningful difference to be able to say to Claude things like "please compare the performance of these 5 different approaches, and show me your notes". But just like a colleague, it has no clue what your actual intentions are unless you tell it, and you can't communicate those intentions if you don't know them yourself - and crucially, you can't know them if you don't have the expertise to know what you actually want.
This doesn't feel like cheating at all, and I don't relate to the choir of disillusioned programmers who feel demotivated by the introduction of LLMs in their workflow. I mean, maybe their work wasn't all that interesting to begin with? I don't know. I get that it sucks to feel replaceable.
[delayed]
[delayed]
I've worked on a couple vibe coded pet projects now. I wouldn't say that I "wrote" them but I would say that I "designed" them and might even say that I "made" them as it took quite a few back-and-forth passes before I was happy with the results. But to your point, one one of those projects I don't fully know "what's going on". Even though I could open the source and grok the code after a brief inspection that's not really the point of that exercise.
On a different note, AI tools have been great at combating corporate bureaucracy! If the Big Man says that all modules need unit tests with 80% code coverage, you can give the agent that task and then move on to more interesting hard-thinks.
Many technical people, especially those who lean more middle-management minded, have said things like “do you know what’s going on in your car while you’re driving?”
IMO, this is a wrong way of looking at things if the job is software engineer.
We aren’t the end user who is driving. They don’t need to know how the car works. It takes them to and from work or their kid’s sports event.
The engineer does need to know how the car works. Sure, there are specializations so someone working on one part of the car might not know how another part works. But, they know how these things work together at least at a high level.
I’m noticing that without proper planning and architecture, these AIs go off the rails and introduce horrific complexities that are hard to diagnose and even harder to fix.
For some small app that nobody cares about besides me, I don’t really care about the internals much. I can have the agent churn and do fixes and updates.
For something larger that will have end users who rely on the software to work, I don’t think having the agents burning millions of tokens and many minutes on each task is a good way to work.
The strength of AI is that it can work across many files, reading and writing magnitudes faster than any human. Their weakness is that they need direction, otherwise the result is chaos.
I’ve tried various approaches and honestly, I’m back to spending time up front planning the system and doing a little bit of mixed (manual and AI assisted) coding to set the foundation.
A few days or even a week or two of focused writing concise documentation, with enough foundational code that shows how the system is architected, yields tremendous results down the road. Even the AI benefits from it because it knows exactly where, what, and how to change. Every system is unique, that last 10% that separates it from the generic recipe is what matters.
I am not saying that humans were perfect or that I’m some god-tier engineer. I know my limits, and as an AI enthusiast I have also realized where these tools have consistently fallen short. Unfortunately, we must realize that no system is perfect, and humans need to do boring work like planning and proper guardrails because chaos is easy.
Sorry for the long write up/rant.
>For me, the dividing line is this question: Do you know what's going on?
Not a question a customer can give a clear answer to.
I agree that the question we need to grapple with for the foreseeable future is "Do you understand this code?". If you write it by hand you (very probably) understand it, but if you let the LLM write it then you understand it less. If you let the LLM take over for too long, some inflection point is crossed where you understand a minority of the code base; that's when you notice the water around you is boiling, and your entire industry is fanning the flames.
I don't want to doommax: AI is great, but if we allow ourselves to lose understanding of what our code is doing then we're not doing engineering anymore, we're just doing summoning spells hoping the complexity demon spirit doesn't kill us as a result.
This article hooked me when it mentioned Big Wall, because Big Walk is easily one of the best games I’ve played in years.
It sounds like this author’s argument is “AI in games sucks for lots of reason but mostly because it robs people of jobs.” I don’t disagree with that in theory but the real question is whether House House would have actually hired another human.
My guess is that they would’ve either delayed it more, or not known about the bugs and released it. They are purposefully small and bringing on even a freelancer introduces a lot of complexity and room for error. So too does AI but ultimately you control the output. You don’t have to worry about it being late, or it having a bad day.
If the end result of using AI is an artful, beautiful game like Big Wall, I’m all for it.
In my opinion the metric shouldn’t be whether AI was used, it should be whether the end result is *good*. I realize that’s subjective but I think we can objectively say Big Walk is a wonderful, artful game. When AI is used and the output is bad - as was the case, say, with those Coca Cola or McDonalds ads - that’s when we should question it.
When it’s being used for artwork or writing - I also think that’s a valid argument against it because it is, as we all know, utilizing artwork and writing without consent.
Is that true for code? Maybe some code but we would all say, I think, it’s much looser around code than creative outputs like artwork and writing.
It sounds like House House used AI like a tool the same way they did whatever engines or coding tools they used.
The metric should be quality.
> It sounds like this author’s argument is “AI in games sucks for lots of reason but mostly because it robs people of jobs.”
I am very interested in discussing and reading about the impact of AI on the job market.
However, I think that topic deserves a separate discussion focused only on the broader economic story. When articles start blending every possible anti-AI angle into one generic critique it gets hard to separate the real difficulties from authors who don’t like the fact that the world is changing.
A common story I’m noticing is that established figures with comfortable positions are terrified of AI, while the newer, younger, less experienced entrants are more excited about what it can do for them. It makes sense: If you spent your career grinding your way up a skill and experience ladder you are naturally going to be resistant to anything that threatens your position in the hierarchy of the world. Having hard-earned skills and a history of having done the hard work was a moar for your career and reputation.
Now a lot, but not all, of those old skills is 80% achievable by a kid with a $20 Claude plan. That moat you spent an entire career building became a lot less valuable for maintaining your position, and it happened suddenly over a couple years.
That’s why it’s difficult to interpret articles like this. It’s hard to separate out the valid critiques from the author’s own rationalization for their dislike of AI disruption.
It also makes sense that young people don't know the value of their labour, or how much they are going to be squeezed once a machine can do 99% of their work in 1% of the time, to an acceptable level of quality.
> once a machine can do 99% of their work in 1% of the time
For young people, “their work” is what they can learn to do for a career in the current market.
They’re not like mid and late career folk who are upset that the work environment of the past has irreversibly changed.
They are pragmatic about learning to do what the current job environment needs, not nostalgic for an older job market they didn’t experience.
Someone has to teach the younger generation marxist theory and labor history. I guess that’s our value add since the companies will intentionally handicap that in LLMs
Eventually we'll get over having this discussion.
AI is here and it trivializes what used to be hard. Developing software used to require feats of skill and endurance, and we're used to judging software based on that. Now it doesn't.
We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input. Whether what was made is unique, interesting, creative, not whether it took a lot of time or knowledge.
There is no going back, only forward.
This is perfectly expressed.
I was trained as an animator at one point. The process was to do the storyboards, layout, key drawings, map out the timings, slug out the dialog, and then send it off to a company in Korea that would in-between and produce the final product.
That Korean studio has been replaced by a machine. Fiscally, that is unpleasant for those animators, but they're really talented and now they can also hire such a machine to implement their ideas if they want to.
Disney was doing this in 1930. In-betweeners and the ink-and-paint girls were the machine. Nasa was doing it in the late 40's. Women were the computers.
Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human. As you say, all that matters is the output, not the input.
And if you want to do a project where you think the input is what will impress somebody, because you manually assembled 50k bottlecaps, that's still an available form. Sometimes that works and people care a little more because it was done directly.
All of this sort of already happened, dozens of times. Socks, knives, screws, engines, a million different things that used to be about mastery and are now about understanding.
Understanding is hard. Making that the requirement leaves a bunch of people behind. We're going to have to figure out how to support them, we can't keep having a society that depends on the moral value of work when work is unavailable, but as you say, there is no going back.
This exchange is missing something. Remember the bridge comparison? There are like 7 bridge designs total, and we're always building the same ones. But software is very different per use case, and outsourcing software is more similar to outsourcing blueprint design, not building.
We never had a situation where we could outsource unique problem solving at all levels.
You say "Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human." but you can have LLM produce design at all levels. I can't think of anything LLM cannot replace humans with, except maybe physical labor, which requires good robotics precision, that we haven't perfected yet.
The main part that's missing however, is that the nature of linguistics (and the core to LLMs' success) is that LLMs are wiring together useful concepts that humans spent thousands of years polishing and relating to one another in speech.
Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.
And if you think about how human thinking and consciousness is often attributed to language in the first place (not clear if we even would be conscious without language), a lot of human is being delegated.
I'm not sure what to do about it, but I find your kind of explanation incredibly reductive.
> Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.
That is very interesting and well worded, I use Agents all day so I kind of wish to an extent that they would be almighty, and maybe they will be. But using them so much there is clearly a gap, they actually became worse at writing.
I think, unfortunately to some, LLMS are like perfect operators, great at math and coding, executing on whatever you want, but they do lack some "pseudo creative" ability we might not have a word for. Fable 5.1 genuinely writes poorly. Correctly, but poorly. And as you said, writing codes human thought, well maybe not all of it.
It's literally and intentionally reductive, so I'm good with that, because these processes are reductive.
Have you ever read "Stranger in a Strange Land"?
The character of Jubal Harshaw is instructive. He's become very rich because he can just unhook his brain and produce a tear-jerking and profitable story in a few seconds as he lounges around his pool.
He gives his secretaries the gist of the story, they fill it out, they arrange for somebody to make the film.
The point of the character is that what he's doing takes no emotional effort or insight. He's writing Hallmark movies. Everybody who's working for him adds nothing to it.
And we have Hallmark/Lifetime movies already. People were making them for decades before the LLMs came along.
But if you could send an LLM back to 1950 and train it on the pre-existing literature, you couldn't have it generate The Shining, A Scanner Darkly, Piranesi, Perdido Street Station, The April Witch, or Starship Troopers.
-none of the research indicates a mechanism by which you can create a selfhood that gets banged around by time and has feelings about itself, but admittedly, that might change
-even if you could do such a thing, you can't then put the robot in a human body and let it nurse and get potty trained and sent to pre-school and bullied and wonder about its mortality as it starts to think about what its career might be, etc etc etc
We were already making slop, because we already had a big production machine that transforms any input into a "movie" or "a television show", and a lot of the inputs were garbage.
The movie "A Talking Cat?" exists and predates AI by about ten years.
The point is that we were already delegating this stuff to human beings who didn't care about it and weren't bringing their humanity to it. Nothing changes on that side of things except that they don't have jobs to show up to.
So, at least for now, this isn't very different from the previous way of doing things, except that it's cheap enough that some people are spending a few thousand dollars to say "make me a story about a sad orphan" and the machine rips off Charles Dickens and Horatio Alger to make a thing nobody wants to watch without paying a bunch of key grips and best boys and caterers.
Maybe we could go forward to economics that don't deliver a mallet to the head of the person on the bottom every time we go forward? Could some of that forward energy be used to put foam on the mallet?
I don't think what you're proposing is feasible (unless I'm misunderstanding it?). We can lessen the blow and are already doing it through various welfare programs. But we cannot have creation without destruction.
This isn't ideological Milton Friedman free markets rahrah. I just can't imagine the alternative in practice: what if mainframe operators decided to opposed destruction, which would prevent mini and personal computers from becoming a reality?
There are 10,000 miles between what we do and a credible attempt at dampening the blow. Our social programs suck donkey balls and our politics won't even begin to talk about pulling levers to match aggregate supply of labor to aggregate demand for labor.
>We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input
why? you skipped over justifying this statement. especially in an artistic context.
what other choice do we have?
Right. IGF could have a no-AI policy, and they would immediately sacrifice their position as the leading group for what they do. They become an artisanal/historical group like the Amish are in furniture-making. There is still demand there, but it is a different niche.
> Developing software used to require feats of skill and endurance, and we're used to judging software based on that. Now it doesn't.
This has really emphasized the difference between developing software and building a business.
Developers everywhere are now doing side projects and developing software that would have taken 10 person-years in 2022. They’re discovering the hard way that software alone does not create a business product that customers might pay for.
Developing software is cheap now, but creating a business remains hard. All of the attempts I’ve seen to use AI to develop and grow a business have only turned real customers away.
> unique, interesting, creative, ...
These still require skill and endurance to do well.
Vibe-coded projects always are clear as such, no matter how slick they look.
> We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input.
This has been the case for far longer than AI has been a consideration. We all know that counting lines of code isn't a mark of quality, and yet we venerate those that put in all the hours to get something done.
I would say you need to go a step farther than that. The output needs to be impactful. Increased MAU (or GH stars, downloads, etc.), lowered support load, lower ops costs, whatever it might be.
It still requires skill and endurance to produce anything good. Has anyone here played different versions of Factorio all the way back to before oil, or Minecraft back to before hunger? Massive changes over their lifetime that you couldn't get in any way other than blind guessing (unlikely to succeed) or long-term feedback loops.
Writing code by hand will remain as a way to emphasize programming-as-craft, attention to details and deep understanding.
Similar to all other crafts after industrial revolution. This of course will only be viable for a small and niche portion of software market.
Yes with a caveat:
> Whether what was made is unique, interesting, creative
Not this.
That is not what technology is for.
If you want unique, interesting and creative - you can have it anytime, just like our ancestors living in a cave or a jungle.
Technology is for something else. You can scratch your head with a hammer - that is not what a hammer is for.
Respectfully, no. Technology is for art, and art is a technology. There's no meaningful way to draw a hard distinction between the two. In Ancient Greek, τέχνη (techne) means "art" or "skill", and that's where we get the word.
I assume you might associate technology with a more utilitarian perspective, but that's just not descriptive of what humans actually do.
Whatever technology becomes the next revolution (hoping it's not sticks and stones) will be used by humans (hoping they exist) to make art as well.
I don't understand. Is your position that creative work cannot be done with a computer? Or that creative work with a computer is a misuse? Looking around, it seems like technology and art get fused all the time, but I'm curious to understand where you're coming from.
...not whether it took a lot of time or knowledge.
I think this will always be the front line of competition.
Who has unique knowledge (dare I add taste?!), and is willing/able to give a project the most focus and time?
not everything has to be the same, and there is always space for communities of people who despise ai and the attitude which comes with it
There's space for a lot of things, doesn't mean much about the value of those things. In my experience spaces defined by dislike of something tend to not be very nice or productive spaces (largely independent of the qualities of the thing they dislike).
How much "value" does this community provide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW-Hp8-DAB0
Would you define everyone involved as "disliking" new technology? Or would you define them as having a "like" for old technology? I think the same question could be considered for communities which continue to enjoy hand programming.
Nothing wrong with liking old technology. This is not the same thing as disliking new technology, and the vibe of the former will be quite different to the latter. Same with enjoying writing stuff by hand, in whatever language or for whatever platform you prefer. But again that is quite different from a space that is defined by being populated by people who 'despise AI'.
(when I say "value" I'm not talking about making money. Retro hardware generally does not make any money, but it is obviously valuable to those who enjoy it. Someone who hates modern technology might prefer to work with that, but that's not a requirement nor the focus of the community. If instead you have a community which is defined by hating modern technology, what I'm saying is that that is probably more harmful to the people within it than helpful. These kinds of spaces can become _very_ bad for the mental health of those within them.)
All this talk about value and AI has provided exactly 0 so far :\
It has provided a decent amount of value to me. I don't think I'm alone in this. Whether it's overall worth what has been invested in it is one question, but I think it's very odd to assert that there has never been any upside to modern LLMs (let alone 'AI' as a whole, which should not be conflated).
LLMs made my job less time consuming and less stressful, but it has provided me zero value in terms of fulfillment above the basic shelter and safety needs. I think it has its uses in post scarcity and allowing me to focus on more important things, but I am of the opinion AI does not do any important things (for me). Whether it's software, most of which is B2B crap that will be gone a decade from now, or video games, most of which don't innovate or chase trends, or writing. AI has zero impact on me and doesn't provoke my mind or engage me on a higher level.
What "attitude that comes with it" though?
Like for example yeah frontier labs are stomping into venerable domains with no respect for their history or culture, and spending billions of dollars crushing worker power. Both projects the tech industry has been deeply invested in for over a decade and I don't remember anything like this backlash to it then so maybe the attitudes aren't the problem exactly?
There are also people conscientiously using LLMs to improve their stances on security and accessibility that would otherwise be outside their budget.
I can think of some other attitudes too. What were you thinking of?
I'd argue that the public has been souring on those attitudes as well, but also have been locked into various social media ecosystems through network effects. Now, the same (or similar) people have come out demanding hundreds of billions of dollars to upend humanity, while displaying all the same attitudes, but emboldened by their previous financial successes. Unsurprisingly, people don't like this.
Does IGF want to reward human achievement or recognize the best indie games? Both are viable paths. Chess tournaments reward human achievements, for example. But I agree with the OP that it's unfair to not be clear on their criteria.
No matter which IGF chooses, I believe awards will ultimately bifurcate: some other contest will emerge for the other side.
I don't think that's bad, nor do I think allowing AI means "not giving a shit."
I tried to finish reading this blog post, but couldn’t. Refreshingly, not because it was LLM-written, but because the author is clearly experiencing a visceral feeling toward AI-development, but they are incapable on breaking it down logically. Pure emotions. Not useful dialogue. Try again.
It was just long-winded and buried, but the author's position was essentially humanist... AI is taking the jobs.
"Why couldnt they hire a specialist for a few days"
Which is question that I think is willfully ignored by the pro-ai crowd.
AI is useful. It helps people go faster at a lot of things. It's also been trained on a scale of copyright violation that exceeds all modern measures of capacity.
The implications of this are willfully ignored by those who stand to profit from it.
It is simply unethical, unfair, and devoid of empathy for society to simply "march forward" and leave behind the millions of people it spent the last 60 years demanding more of.
These problem needs to be resolved before we can morally and socially embrace AI.
It's not willfully ignored. You might not like the answer, but the position is very clear.
> It is simply unethical, unfair, and devoid of empathy for society to simply "march forward" and leave behind the millions of people it spent the last 60 years demanding more of.
We disagree. This is a luddite point that I spent my whole life disagreeing.
I think it's unethical for society to intentionally block a technology that increases productivity to protect the interests of a smaller class of professionals. I believed that when it was happening to blue-collar workers, and I'll keep believing it when it's me.
> I think it's unethical for society to intentionally block a technology that increases productivity to protect the interests of a smaller class of professionals.
And that's how we all wound up with Whispering Earrings. https://croissanthology.com/earring
Maybe you genuinely want one -- I don't think many people do.
Death of the author and all, but Scott Alexander has long insisted that the Whispering Earring is not about dangerous technology: https://web.archive.org/web/20121007235422/http://squid314.l...
Great short story! Thanks.
Ten years ago, did you believe in "copyright violation"? Did you really?
It's fine to dislike AI, it's fine to even dislike AI and not be able to articulate a reason, but I'm tired of hackers suddenly becoming the biggest defenders of IP.
> It's also been trained on a scale of copyright violation that exceeds all modern measures of capacity.
Good, hopefully we can ditch copyright entirely and move on forever. I thought that's what everybody wanted?
I think the answer to "Why couldn't they hire a specialist for a few days" is because that might not have worked. If a Unity engineer couldn't help, it's hard to imagine that paying an unknown person to help would do more.
Plus, the idea that instead of solving the problem with the solve-your-problem button, the idea that the correct answer should be "just throw a bunch of money at it and hope that works" is so silly.
The smug tone of 'ai is bad for obvious reasons that i will not elaborate on' is much worse than AI slop
regarding having to declare AI code: it's pretty much impossible to determine whether 3rd party code (i.e. libraries, frameworks, etc) use AI - and they don't have to declare it either. so either you ban 3rd party code completely - which would probably the end of the whole thing, because writing everything from scratch would probably not be achievable for any game developer with the some exceptions.
if they don't ban AI code in 3rd party code, you could just circumvent the whole thing by outsourcing a few developers to be part-time 3rd party in name only and let them do the AI development, which would be against the spirit but not against the law.
what do you think of the part of the article that discusses doing that?
As a consumer of games, I honestly don’t care much about how the game is made. AI vs non-AI is pure inside baseball. I just want to play good games, and I think the market will settle discussions of quality in the same way it always has.
In the end there will be "software writers" and "software designers." Same difference as "jumper knitter" and "jumper designer." One is a delightful craft, the other is a profession.
It's great to have a competition in software writing.
> In the end there will be "software writers" and "software designers."
We already have a distinction between people who define and design software and people who implement it. Product owners, UX designers, business analysts, solution architects etc
Perhaps you can expand?
I'm saying that the "implementation" step will look very different or disappear altogether. Defining the software in specs, tests or through diagrams will be the primary language for these designers. Not TypeScript or C#. The writing part will evaporate.
That might overlap with some existing role, for sure.
My main point is that hand written (or even hand reviewed) code will be a curiosity. Like a hand knitted jumper. Only viable in markets as a niche/specialized product.
Is there a better way to write specs and tests than a language like Typescript?
Also, you vastly underestimate the number of manual steps in consumer goods today.
I'm not sure I trust those of my colleagues trained in UX to cohesively encapsulate and de-couple code modules. I certainly can't trust Claude/GPT to.
Then again, I'm not sure it's necessary; so many highly productive programmers seem to dispense with much of that, too. Maybe, in this age of frameworks and libraries, all the patterns are adequately baked in and I needn't worry about refactoring or software design. Hard habit to shake, though.
I don't disagree that AI in gamedev is ethically dubious in the context of developing something that leans more artistic versus interactive, but the entire premise of an article like this is that you're supposed to spill the beans and tell us the dubious opinions.
I don't disagree that AI used to develop artistic assets should be grounds for an entry to be barred from the IGF. I think the code portion, however, requires some specificity.
To me, it's not ok if the code that powers gameplay or artistic rendering of assets is AI generated. That kind of code carries human intent and is part of the art of game development: the dev wants a player to encounter a certain kind of experience.
There's no point or meaning if there's no developer dictating the experience by hand, if you're prompting this you might as well just admit you're trying to make a gimmicky asset flip "object simulator" to make a quick buck.
On the other hand, I think it's ok to use it as a tool and as tooling: trivial tests at all levels should absolutely be automated, figuring out engine quirks or getting second opinions on architecture with AI assistance is fine, figuring out your build and deployment pipelines.
---
Another point that I want to mention: there's a strange form of writing prevalent among both software devs and those in the art space that's stilted; a mishmosh of Tumblr rantposting and slashdot/IRC snark and sarcasm, signaling that they've the mental maturity of a junior in American high school. It's all about emotion (this sucks!) rather than addressing the root of a problem.
This type of person is extremely difficult to deal with as they're the same type of person who encounters a brownfield codebase and immediately spends their time afterward whinging about how "the codebase must be burned and rewritten"; they must be micromanaged lest you set them off.
The author mentions freelancers and such, and how there's a lot of "lip service about how [they're] 'all in this together'" but frankly what I see in the case of House House is a team who wants to keep things within the team.
Regardless of their size, House House is a team on a timeline and budget, why should they be subjected to scrambling budget and conducting an interview process for someone who may or may not be a "brownfield rager"?
The deliberate conflating of AI code and AI assets as equivalent in "AI declarations" is bad.
The author here however goes further, and claims their argument against AI code is so strong, that they'd lose brain cells by actually making the argument, so we just have to accept that as fact.
They then go on to suggest that using AI for bug fixing is terrible, and hints that people should feel ashamed for enjoying a game that has gone through that process.
I'm neutral when it comes to others having ethical objections to any LLM use, but the author's claim that House House could have just hired an independent dev to find/fix the bug that they and Unity had both unsuccessfully searched for is downright absurd. Throwing someone, even a professional, into an unfamiliar codebase and asking them to take several days to diagnose a bug when you're late in the development/release cycle is not a recipe for success.
Your comment doesn't really say how you believe AI code and AI assets differ, but I assume you find AI code more palatable than AI assets. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think that's a common opinion that I see nowadays.
I think the issue I see with that stance is that frontier models can now perform asset generation via deterministic code. This is different than the 3D diffusion models of yesteryear. Is that manner of AI asset generation (which is really just through code generation) worse than other AI code in a project (i.e. resolving this bug)? If so, why? (I do not have good answers myself)
I think AI is useful and fine for non-creative work. I don't see programming as an especially creative work. It's about translating as best we can, the design into execution.
There is a little more creativity the further up the architecture and design you go, but the lower level you go, the less creative it is. Indeed for decades we have handed off the mechanical conversion into machine code to deterministic compilers.
Programming is certainly a skilled practice, but it isn't especially creative. Given the same problem, many programmers would produce a similar output.
This is very different to creative work, where the same requirements can lead to vastly different results. The range of art that could be described, as "Draw me the night's sky" is immense.
Generating assets, be that genAI, or procGen, takes away from the creative, and doubly so if you don't have much of a filter on the output and just accept what is given.
Look at procGen: the worlds of No Man's Sky have no soul to them. Compare that to the much lower and less detailed lands of Azeroth, which had so much soul that we're still recreating and enjoying them 20+ years later.
Generative AI can trick us into thinking there is a soul and that something creative has happened when it hasn't. Programming has no such deception.
If you're working with generation but then hand-filtering a million results back down to a hand-picked few, then there is a creative process once again, a curation that is itself an artistic process, so these things aren't absolute, there are always grey areas all over.
Tbh I think it's entirely based in the perception of the relative privilege of artists and programmers. Programming is viewed as a high-paying, easy to get job, so replacing their labor is less objectionable than replacing the labor of artists, which generally have lower-paying jobs and have to work relatively harder to get them.
I do think there is at least one compelling argument here which is for the competition having an actual rule or having judges declare their positions ahead of time, would help creators decide whether or not to enter.
I'd be pissed if I entered a contest (and asking for a refund if I paid to enter as this criteria was not disclosed) thinking that I was allowed to make the best game I could make regardless of tech used, only to find out that my max possible score was 66% because shadow judges were biased against me.
It feels like the old reddit moderator meme where the rules are made up and the points don't matter because all it takes is one salty mod.
Normies have no taste anymore so I don't get what's the big deal around AI, they don't care and they don't deserve better. If you aren't immediately turned off by something like Big Walk at first glance then... just enjoy it I guess but don't ask too many questions.
I contend that we are both Amish. I just believe in one fewer technological revolution than you do.
It's not just "giving a shit" though that's part of it.
The fact is, the more I know about a topic the less capable LLMs appear to me.
The less I know about a topic, the more capable LLMs appear.
At the end of the day, save for very specific tasks, there's still a lot of hype.
On mobile the text is so large I feel like I’m giving my thumb a workout to scroll
Banning AI is stupid and settled science - ban gravity, debt, the sun, electricity.
Ban slop.
Or better yet, don't "ban" anything - judge it like any low-effort crap.
I think I agree with you, but the effort to "judge it like any low-effort crap" is now beyond anything I can muster. I think when people say "ban" the often mean filter with such an aggressive heuristic that I never see it, which IS one way to judge...
It’s fine to ban if everyone involved wants to.
IMO just make categories for AI use and not. The hard part is that people will cheat.
It would be kind of like having a traditional woodworking contest and people show up with stuff made with power tools and cnc routers.
>settled science