- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
You must log in or register to comment.
It’s a good move until generated AI becomes undistinguishable
And it looks a lot like the ol Nintendo seal of approval (or whatever they call it).
Not sure how to interpret this. The use of any tool can be for good or bad.
If the quality of the game is increased by the use of AI, I’m all for it. If it’s used to generate a generic mess, it’s probably not going to be interesting enough for me to notice it’s existence.
If they mean that they don’t use AI to generate art and voice over, I guess it can be good for a medium to large game. But if using AI means it gets made at all, that’s better no?
As a dev and foremost artist, I can see using AI to uprez images or to generate random slop you can use to find interesting shapes and as inspiration. As I learn programming, AI is very useful in finding mistakes. Instead of spending days and bothering people or engaging with the assholes at stackoverflow, you can just ask deepseek what is the issue and it will say you misspelled length.
I’d argue that even if gen-AI art is indistinguishable from human art, human art is better. E.g. when examining a painting you might be wondering what the artist was thinking of, what was going on in their life at the time, what they were trying to convey, what techniques they used and why. For AI art, the answer is simply it’s statistically similar to art the model has been trained on.
But, yeah, stuff like game textures usually aren’t that deep (and I don’t think they’re typically crafted by hand by artists passionate about the texture).
Are GEN_AI bookshelves a slippery slope or slopp that artists want to avoid?
I am for the most part angry that people are being put out of work by AI; I actually find AI-generated content interesting sometimes, for example AI Frank Sinatra singing W.A.P. is pretty funny. This label is helpful to me so that I know I’m supporting humans monetarily.
They cannot possibly assure customers that remote devs aren’t using copilots to help them code.
You can prevent that issue by coding in the newest version of godot
Generative AI is a technology that can create pictures, movies, audio (music or voice action) and writing using artificial intelligence
By their definition of Gen AI, it’s unclear to me if the label says anything about code. I’m not sure I would consider it “writing.”
This might be a little off-topic, but I’ve noticed what seems to be a trend of anti-AI discourse ignoring programmers. Protect artists, writers, animators, actors, voice-actors… programmers, who? No idea if it’s because they’re partly to blame, or people are simply unaware code is also stolen by AI companies—still waiting on that GitHub Copilot lawsuit—but the end result appears to be a general lack of care about GenAI in coding.
I think it’s because most programmers use and appreciate the tool. This might change once programmers start to blame gen AI for not having a job anymore.
And programmers retain complete control of the output - it’s just a bit of text that you can adapt as needed. Same as looking up snippets from Stack Overflow. Programmers are used to finding some snippet, checking if it actually works, and then adapting it to the rest of their code, so if doesn’t feel like introducing media that you didn’t create, but like a faster version of what everyone was already doing.
I noticed a bad trend with my colleagues who use copilot, chatgpt etc. They not only use it to write code, but also trust it with generally poor design decisions.
Another thing is that those people also hate working on existing code, claiming it is communicated and offering to write their (which also ends up complicated) version of it. I suspect it’s because copilot doesn’t help as much when code is more mature.
There remains a significant enclave that rejects it, but yeah, it’s definitely smaller than equivalent groups in other mentioned professions. Hopefully things won’t get that far. I think the tech is amazing, but it’s an immense shame that so many of my/our peers don’t give a flying fuck about ethics.
There remains a significant enclave that rejects it, but yeah, it’s definitely smaller than equivalent groups in other mentioned professions.
Reporting in.
I think the tech is amazing, but it’s an immense shame that so many of my/our peers don’t give a flying fuck about ethics.
Yup. Very much agreed here. There are some uses that are acceptable but it’s a but hard to say that any are ethical due to the ethically bankrupt foundations of its training data.
this is stupid, there’s SO many indie games using procedural generation which is fucking generative AI. It’s in a shitload of them, from speulunky to Darkest Dungeon 2.
Procgen is not genAI. It’s not even machine learning.
Procedural generation is generative, but it ain’t AI. It especially has nothing in common with the exploitative practices of genAI training.
It makes decisions.
It generates content.
By this logic, literally any code is genAI.
Has a branch statement? It makes decisions. Displays something on the screen, even by stdout? Generated content.
It doesn’t make decisions, but neither does Gen AI. Not sure if you’re doubly wrong or half right.
But it’s not Gen AI.
As I touched on previously, those aren’t the qualities that make people opposed to AI. But have fun arguing dictionary definitions.
“AI” is just very advanced procedural generation. There’s been games that used image diffusion in the past too, just in a far smaller and limited scale (such as a single creature, like the pokemon with the spinning eyes
To me, what makes the difference is whether or not it’s trained on other people’s shit. The distinction between AI and an algorithm is pretty arbitrary, but I wouldn’t consider, for example, procedural generation via the wave function collapse algorithm to have the same moral implications as selling something using what most people would call AI-generated content.
And if you train an open source model yourself so it can generate content specifically on work you’ve created? Or are you against certain Linux devices too?
I don’t have a problem with games creating their own models trained only on things they created. I believe charging money for anything using assets generated by a model trained on data they didn’t have the rights to should be illegal. If a model is trained on data that they do own the the rights to, but didn’t create, that’s a weird gray area where I think it shouldn’t be illegal to sell its results, but you should have to disclose that you used it.
Ah but remember that AI no longer means the what it has meant since the dawn of computing, it now means “I don’t understand the algorithm, therefore it’s AI”.
Hell, AI used to mean mundane things like A* pathfinding, which is in like, every game ever.
I’m really tired of the shift in what AI means.
Pathfinding can be AI, but not generative AI.
Right, I’m just saying that this has happened before to the definitions of AI.
I remember we used to refer to enemy logic as AI. The 4 Pac-Man ghosts each had different “AI”. The AI of the enemies in this FPS sucks. This kind of stuff, lol
This feels discouraging as someone who struggled with learning programming for a very long time and only with the aid of copilot have I finally crossed the hurdles I was facing and felt like I was actually learning and progressing again.
Yes I’m still interacting with and manually adjusting and even writing sections of code. But a lot of what copilot does for me is interpret my natural language understanding of how I want to manipulate the data and translating it into actual code which I then work with and combine with the rest of the project.
But I’ve stopped looking to join any game jams because it seems even when they don’t have an explicit ban against all AI, the sentiment I get is that people feel like it’s cheating and look down on someone in my situation. I get that submitting ai slop whole sale is just garbage. But it feels like putting these blanket ‘no ai content’ stamps and badges on things excludes a lot of people.
Edit:
Is this slop? https://lemjukes.itch.io/ascii-farmer-alpha https://github.com/LemJukes/ASCII-Farmer
Like I know it isn’t good code but I’m entirely self taught and it seems to work(and more importantly I mostly understand how it works) so what’s the fucking difference? How am I supposed to learn without iterating? If anyone human wants to look at my code and tell me why it’s shit, that’d actually be really helpful and I’d genuinely be thankful.
*except whoever actually said that in the comment reply’s. I blocked you so I won’t see any more from you anyways and also piss off.
I understand where you’re coming from. AI can be a learning tool to help fill in some gaps in knowledge, however the moment you don’t understand what it’s doing and just copy and paste the code, it no longer become a tool but instead a crutch. Instead of copying and pasting code you can take the time to look into why it’s doing what it’s doing. For Godot in particular they have really good documentation and there’s plenty of resources to learn. GD script is a pretty easy language to learn on a surface level. You should do some research into game design patterns and basic programming concepts.
I did take a look at your code and while you do have your main.gd organized, having a large monolith like that with 1100+ lines of code that has multiple responsibilities is certainly a choice. Typically you want your scripts to handle specific responsibilities, that way each script and each object that contains that script has a single responsibility. This helps with efficiency and debugging since you have smaller scripts running and if something breaks you know what broke without everything else falling apart. You employed that partly with your save manager and notification manager etc. But you could certainly pare down your main script. Also considering how much it’s handling I’m curious as to what the structure of your game looks like. Godot likes to have nested objects but based off your code yours doesn’t seem to be conducive to that. Also there appears to be some needless abstractions with your variable storage.
Anyways I think taking the time to research and learn some basic programming principles and game design patterns would go a long way to help you. Coding can be difficult and seem like a black box when you first get started, and AI can seem like a way to pierce through that, but if you don’t learn why it’s recommending the code it is then you’ll never really understand what your own game is doing and that’s not helpful to you or your players.
Thank you
Back in the day, people hated Intellisense/auto-complete.
And back in the older day, people hated IDEs for coding.
And back in the even older day, people hated computers for games.
There’ll always be people who hate new technology, especially if it makes something easier that they used to have to do “the hard way”.
FWIW I agree with you. The people who say they don’t support these tools come across as purists or virtue signallers.
I would agree with not having AI art* or music and sounds. In games I’ve played with it in, it sounds so out of place.
However support to make coding more accessible with the use of a tool shouldn’t be frowned upon. I wonder if people felt the same way when C was released, and they thought everyone should be an assembly programmer.
The irony is that most programmers were just googling and getting answers from stackoverflow, now they don’t even need to Google.
*unless the aim is procedurally generated games i guess, but if they’re using assets I get not using AI generated ones.
The people who say they don’t support these tools come across as purists or virtue signallers.
It is now “purist” to protest against the usage of tools that by and large steal from the work of countless unpaid, uncredited, unconsenting artists, writers, and programmers. It is virtue signaling to say I don’t support OpenAI or their shitty capital chasing pig-brethren. It’s fucking “organic labelling” to want to support like-minded people instead of big tech.
Y’all are ridiculous. The more of this I see, the more radicalized I get. Cool tech, yes, I admit! But wow, you just want to sweep all those pesky little ethical issues aside because… it makes you more productive? Shit, it’s like you’re competing with Altman on the unlikeability ranking.
The irony is that most programmers were just googling and getting answers from stackoverflow, now they don’t even need to Google.
That’s the thing, though, doing that still requires you to read the answer, understand it, and apply it to the thing you’re doing, because the answer probably isn’t tailored to your exact task. Doing this work is how you develop an understanding of what’s going on in your language, your libraries, and your own code. An experienced developer has built up those mental muscles, and can probably get away with letting an AI do the tedious stuff, but more novice developers will be depriving themselves of learning what they’re actually doing if they let the AI handle the easy things, and they’ll be helpless to figure out the things that the AI can’t do.
Going from assembly to C does put the programmer at some distance from the reality of the computer, and I’d argue that if you haven’t at least dipped into some assembly and at least understand the basics of what’s actually going on down there, your computer science education is incomplete. But once you have that understanding, it’s okay to let the computer handle the tedium for you and only dip down to that level if necessary. Or learning sorting algorithms, versus just using your standard library’s
sort()function, same thing. AI falls into that category too, I’d argue, but it’s so attractive that I worry it’s treating important learning as tedium and helping people skip it.I’m all for making programming simpler, for lowering barriers and increasing accessibility, but there’s a risk there too. Obviously wheelchairs are good things, but using one simply “because it’s easier” and not because you need to will cause your legs to atrophy, or never develop strength in the first place, and I’m worried there’s a similar thing going on with AI in programming. “I don’t want to have to think about this” isn’t a healthy attitude to have, a program is basically a collection of crystallized thoughts and ideas, thinking it through is a critical part of the process.
I know you’re replying to a reply here, but do people think I mean just putting in a prompt and then running the output and calling that something I made?
I’ve spent years trying to teach myself how to code but always inevitably would lose track of some part or get stuck on some bug or issue I alone couldn’t get past. I went to theatre school for chrissakes and I just wanna make games and silly little projects. I don’t have any friends in this field and pestering random people in discords or on stack overflow can be really annoying for those people.
So why is using an ai assistant I can berate with as many terse questions I want to iterate code that’d I’d normally spend hours struggling just to remember and string together, such a big stick people are putting up their butts?
I’ll acknowledge that there’s definitely an element of “well I had to do it the hard way, you should too” at work with some people, and I don’t want to make that argument. Code is also not nearly as bad as something like image generation, where it’s literally just typing a thing and getting a not-very-good image back that’s ready to go; I’m sure if you’re making playable games, you’re putting in more work than that because it’s just not possible to type some words and get a game out of it. You’ll have to use your brain to get it right. And if you’re happy with the results you get and the work you’re doing, I’m definitely not going to tell you you’re doing it wrong.
(If you’re trying to make a career of software engineering or have a desire to understand it at a deeper level, I’d argue that relying heavily on AI might be more of a hindrance to those goals than you know, but if those aren’t your goals, who cares? Have fun with it.)
What I’m talking about is a bigger picture thing than you and your games; it’s the industry as a whole. Much like algorithmic timelines have had the effect of turning the internet from something you actively explored into something you passively let wash over you, I’m worried that AI is creating a “do the thinking for me” button that’s going to be too tempting for people to use responsibly, and will result in too much code becoming a bunch of half-baked AI slop cobbled together by people who don’t understand what they’re really doing. There’s already enough cargo culting around software, and AI will just make it more opaque and mysterious if overused and over-relied on. But that’s a bigger picture thing; just like I’m not above laying back and letting TikTok wash over me sometimes, I’m glad you’re doing things you like with the assistance you get. I just don’t want that to become the only way things happen either.
thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’m in the first boat of just wanting to make games and other small, self driven projects. I think its mostly the feeling of being excluded from participating in things like game jams and the larger game development community because I use a specific tool.
In an effort to clarify what i think is an example of something like a middle ground between no AI code gen period and as you put it “do the thinking for me” let me see if i can put it in similar terms. Instead of “do it for me” its very much so a back and forth of “i want this behavior when these conditions are met for this function and expect these types of outcomes.” Copilot then generates code referencing the rest of the codebase as reference and i then usually manually copy and paste chunks over to the working files and then compile & run from there for testing.
I definitely agree that over reliance on tools as a means of masking a real understanding of a subject is a genuine problem. And I too hope it doesnt end up having the same kind of effect algorithmic social media has had on society as a whole. But i think i do have hope that it will enable a subset of people like me who struggle with the wrote memorization aspects of computer programming but still desires the thrill of putting some pieces together and watching it work.
Yeah, totally fair. I’ll note that you’re kind of describing the typical software development process of a customer talking to the developer and developing requirements collaboratively with them, then the developer coming back with a demo, the customer refining by going “oh, that won’t work, it needs to do it this way” or “that reminds me, it also needs to do this”, and so on. But you’re closer to playing the role of the customer in this scenario, and acting like more of an editor or manager on the development side. The organizers of a game jam could make a reasonable argument that doing it this way is akin to signing up for the game jam, coming up with an idea, then having your friend who isn’t signed up for the game jam implement it for you, when the point is to do it all in person, quickly, in a fun and energetic environment. The people doing a game jam like coding, that’s the fun part for them, so someone signing up and skipping all that stuff does have a little bit of a “why are you even here then” aspect to it. Of course it depends on the degree the AI is being used, how much editorial control or tweaking you’re doing, it’s a legitimate debate and I don’t think you’re wrong to want to participate.
But like, I do like coding, I just have an incredibly hard time thinking in any language other than English because my brain is essentially defective.
Writing code entirely manually inevitably ends with me incredibly frustrated for hours because despite thinking I’ve done something correctly, and even knowing ‘no, I know this is how it’s supposed to work so why isn’t it?’ All because I’ve made a couple of typographical errors that I’m too stupid to parse out from a debugger.
And because I don’t have any friends with even a passing interest I don’t have anyone to turn to for advice there. Nor do I work in the field or went to school for it. My only human options are on the internet but replies often take hours and you have to sift through nine people calling you stupid before finding someone being nice let alone actually helping.
I like to use AI autocomplete when programming not because it solves problems for me (it fucking sucks at that if you’re not a beginner), but because it’s good at literally just guessing what I want to do next so I don’t have to type it out. If I do something to the X coordinate, I probably want to do the same/similar thing to the Y and Z coordinates and AI’s really good at picking up that sort of thing.
