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.

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That Korean studio has been replaced by a machine.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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