A Valve artist has defended AI disclosures on storefronts like Steam, saying they only scare those with “low effort” products.
A Valve artist has defended AI disclosures on storefronts like Steam, saying they only scare those with “low effort” products.
I don’t think using AI to help make a videogame is in any way nefarious or misuse, especially for smaller developers who wouldn’t have the resources to make the game they had in mind otherwise. They don’t deserve to get review bombed or have nasty messages left on all their social media by organized discord groups just because of that, and it’s understandable they’d be worried about it.
Frankly devs are more likely to get review bombed about ai usage if they tried to hide it. If they’re up front about it then that’s on the users going in to be aware of. Many people don’t like gen ai use at all, but they really hate it when they find out after the fact that it’s been used after thinking otherwise.
I think it is nefarious to use AI and developers who use it should be ashamed. No one is organizing hate campaigns, AI literally is so disliked people will rally against it organically.
Indie gamedev existed for years before AI. You can just sit down and make a game. And if you don’t care enough to actually work on it, why would people even spend their money on “your” product?
Because these people do not understand the concept of craft nor care about the process of creating, they are soulless goons looking to grift people. It’s not their fault that society is so fucked that it’s necessary to trick and rob people so they can eat…
Yeah, they don’t understand that the process of learning, of making mistakes and hitting dead-ends as you create your work of art is fucking important! Failures can lead to unexpected changes to your initial idea, and they might improve your work or at least make it iconic (the classic example of the fog in Silent Hill that was added to offset a technical limitation). You can’t have that if the entire process of creating a piece is automated.
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Yeah it’s crazy how people who don’t like a tool don’t use it
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Even today, people value photos differently than paintings, at least in part due to the amount of effort that goes into each.
There’s no reasonable argument to preventing people from having the information up front to make the same sort of value decision about a game.
You’re free to use AI, just declare it. The purchasing public is free to decide if that changes how much they’re willing to pay for your game.
We aren’t entitled to your time, but you aren’t entitle to sales. If your use of AI is losing you sales, you’re perfectly free to decide to stop or keep using it.
Games bring together a lot of different mediums and require a diverse set of skills. So for instance someone might be great at drawing, and have a great idea for a game that uses their art, but they have a hard time with coding, and use AI to simplify that part of it for them in a way that’s more flexible than some other more restrictive solution like RPG Maker, which might make it closer to their vision for the kind of game they wanted to make. I think such a game could be worth playing, assuming the person making it cares about what they are making and puts their own work into it.
Or, like in the past, people figure out solutions to the limitations and make something new. The fog in silent Hill is an example.
I’d rather pay for a game that looks shittier and handmade than ai garbage.
I’d rather pay for neither.
That’s kinda fallacious as an argument. AI cannot create good code, it CAN be used to create code, but requires.expert to fix the tons of mistakes and simply bad coding solutions it comes up with. If you don’t have the skills it’s better to use a tool made to help you with that with its limitations (rpg maker in your example) rather than use a tool made to aid already expert users (that even they say it actually creates more work for them lol). I write code myself and LLMs simply suck at coding. They can create “art” but it’s all the same and you can spot it on their steam page when they do. Honestly, I’m not even angry at them for thinking the same way as you do: it’s just that those coding solutions are advertised as such, and people are simply ignoring the expert in the field that tell them they can’t actually do that. If you try that road you will either create something that doesn’t work or something that will put its users at risk (by creating trojan backdoors in theor system or sharing sensitive information) and that’s something I can’t simply condone.
You’re kind of right, in that it’s not a total solution right now and you probably won’t be able to vibe code a whole game (except a really simple one maybe) with no knowledge. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t lower the skill floor for someone. I’m assuming the person in my scenario would be also using an engine like Unity or Godot, maybe asking the AI to walk them through how to do what they want, write simple scripts and explain/suggest syntax. That shouldn’t have too much risk of generating inadvertent backdoors, and I think LLMs are pretty good at explaining basic code. Game engines already enforce the basic design structure, which will make it easier to avoid big unfixable mistakes and do everything in small pieces a LLM is less likely to fuck up.
The same is true with using it for art; you’re right that a lot of AI art on Steam is obvious and looks the same, but really good AI assisted art isn’t. The amount of skill and effort required for that is not zero, but is less than it might be otherwise. There are probably a lot of games out there where you just can’t tell, and because there’s so much fear of backlash it just isn’t disclosed.
No, it DOES. In fact, it RAISES the skill floor.
How is a dev supposed to be able to find an error in the code if they don’t know how to code?
As a programmer, most of your time isn’t actually spent writing code. It’s mostly spent debugging. An amateur programmer relying on AI is minimizing a task that takes a minority of their time while maximizing a task that takes the majority of their time.
For amateur programmers, AI isn’t an asset, it’s a liability.
I don’t know a single self-respecting artist who would use AI though. Artists are literally the most harmed people by the LLMs lol.
Other than that, I agree with what @spawn7586@lemmy.world said - if you don’t know how to code, LLMs will generate the most unplayable game in existence.
And some people even outsource their defense of AI slop to AI.
I promise you, none of what I write here is AI, I’m against doing that
I will never believe you, since you’ve spent this entire thread defending AI slop.
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Strongly disagree. You’re basically saying smaller developers shouldn’t be punished for theft just because they can’t afford to pay artists.
Ai use, as the article outlined, is based on cultural laundering and IP theft.
So yeah, if you can’t make a game without stealing art, don’t make a game. And if you make a game with stolen art, you absolutely deserve to be review bombed.
And before you say ai generated art isn’t theft, the models are absolutely trained on stolen art
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Respectfully, fuck right off.
Indie games compete all the time, they make millions. Games are an artform. Any developers using AI are in it for a quick buck and people dont want to reward that versus traditional hardwork.
Indies have been wildly successful for decades before AI has even existed, so dont suddenly pretend its a crutch they need now. And you are down right disrespecting any legitimate artists by defending AI use. It’s disgusting.
It’s the AAA devs that are going to use AI to pump out more garbage, not the honest indie developers.
Downloading isn’t stealing, and in this case the law doesn’t agree with you either, nor does Steam; games developed with AI are legal and allowed. You’re entitled to your opinion about the ethics of it, and I think it’s fine if people want to only buy games without AI, but this is an incredibly petty way to rationalize organized harassment against people with no ill intent trying to realize their dreams. The only reason anyone goes after them is because they are softer targets than any of the billionaires and corporations doing actually questionable things with the technology.
Plagiarism is.
And let’s be perfectly clear: we’ve heard from megacorporations for decades now that downloading is theft. But suddenly it isn’t now that they benefit from it? Fuck that. When Lars Ulrich himself emerges from his greasy crust and admits that downloading isn’t theft, then maybe - maybe we can talk about AI scraping everyone’s hard work not being theft. Until then, you have the entire public domain to use, just like everyone else. If you don’t think that’s enough, then maybe the megacorps shouldn’t have spent most of a century robbing humanity of a robust public domain.
Downloading isn’t stealing??? Are you delusional? It is in this case. Just because the law doesn’t recognise it is irrelevant, I’m not talking about legality, I’m talking about the ethics of ripping off small, underpaid artists.
Download a game, or a movie, or an album without the required license. That’s piracy.
If I download a Disney movie, and use clips of it in my game, how do you think a court case would go?
Or if I download idk, a Taylor Swift album and use that in my game without a license, do you think the law would agree with me or Taylor Swift?
And my only excuse is “I couldn’t afford to make my own music so I used yours”?
Using ai is no different. You’re taking someone else’s work, not paying for it, and using it in your training model without permission.
Just because they may have no ill intent is irrelevant, it only speaks to their ignorance on the matter.
“I’m sorry officer I didn’t mean to speed, I had no ill intent”. Ok, you’re still getting a ticket. Ignorance is no excuse.
You’re talking about your supposed right to enforce your idea of ethics on people who don’t agree with you, in a situation where there is no universal consensus, there is no law backing you up, and all supposed harms are abstract, indirect, and essentially a dispute about market competition.
It matters because it’s one clear reason why the people harassing them are assholes. Pretty different from a situation where someone has violated an established law very closely linked to putting people at risk of direct physical harm and that law is being enforced.
Uh yeah man there’s some people who are actually ok with having the brain worms inserted into other people’s ears? Sure it kills them and it’s being used for genocide but there’s no law against brain worms and since there’s like, a handful of people ok with it and it’s not 100% universally condoned ethically and it’s not illegal everywhere then how could you possibly be so mean to impose your morality on other people?!
That’s what you sound like.
“Oh hey billionaires are making Earth destroying computers that are killing jobs and stealing art and music and saying humans are better off without doing the one thing that we’ve always regarded as fundamental for humanity, but some idiots like instant gratification so they are ok with it, so no one should be saying anything bad about the earth destroying theft machines”
“illegal = unethical” is a fascist take
The harms are real, but it’s also about control over your creations that you own, would you want your creations stolen, copied, mashed up with other stolen creations and the occational public domain thing, and extruded as slop?
Or a better question, do you want the right for your creations not to be used like this? Surely it would be good if you could specify AI policies in licenses and they were legally enforceable?
Plenty of smaller developers don’t use AI too and we can simply disagree on whether replacing people with ai just so you can make your video game is misuse.
Like is that really even an excuse? I don’t think it’s ok to harass people but if you want to use ai it seems you should accept the social consequences of review bombing given many people do in fact validly see its use as harmful.
Especially when other small developers don’t use it to make games
Well to be fair for quite a few people it’s either them and AI creates a game, or no AI and no game. Though if it were me, I’d use AI art, put it in early access and use the money on art commissions to eventually replace it. Then again, in this situation I wouldn’t be agaisnt an AI disclaimer.
There’s been so much art and so many game produced every year before ChatGPT became big. If not using AI meant that we’ll only get slightly more indie games each year instead several times more indie games each year, I think we’ll manage without.
There’s already more art available than any human could consume in their lifetime. We don’t have to push out slop to keep people entertained
True, honestly I’m no game dev, but I’d assume it would be hard to get anything “custom” for free. A lot of people don’t wanna have to spend much on a game that might just not work out. To be fair in this sotuation you could also just use free assets and replace them later. I’m just not a fan of the lemmy “black and white” AI is evil approach.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s some spaces for AI (LLM’s), but they are significantly more limited than what people are led to believe.
For example, Tom Scott made a video where he fed in a list of his previous video titles into ChatGPT and asked it to generate >100 new video titles. While a lot of them contained halucinated facts that obviously wouldn’t work, he ended up with about 10 that could have been interesting videos had he decided to make them, and others led him to do research that gave him more ideas for videos. But it only kickstarted the creatice process.
Another example is modding, particularly Skyrim. Over the past couple of years there’s been a number of dialogue expansion mods coming out to add depths to characters with their original voices without janky voice splicing. While some people like to bemoan the use of AI in these cases and argue that people should use real voice actors, they are conveniently ignoring that very were very few mods filling this niche before ElevenLabs and the ones that did redo voices tended to be controversial (like Serana Dialogue Addon). But much of this problem is driven by the fact that modding is (supposed to be) free and most decent voice actors want to be paid for their work.
But in terms of commercial ventures, there’s little reason why AI should be involved. AI actively makes coding harder due to errors. You don’t need AI generated placeholder assets, as traditionally you would use boxes and things poorly drawn in MS Paint. Hell, it’s better to use crappy placeholder assets because that forces the dev to make the gameplay actually fun, since the assets aren’t skewing the playtesters’ opinions to be better than they should. And we had decent search for awhile, AI didn’t make it significantly better than it was 5 years ago.
And with regards to not being willing to spend money, there’s the old saying of “you have to spend money to make money”. It’s an investment, and if you’re not willing to invest, you don’t deserve to make money off the venture. Same philosophy of how employers that are unwilling to pay their employees a living wage should go out of business
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Lol you don’t sound like someone who could make a game worth playing anyway
Fucking stop right there. Don’t presume what I think. You have no idea what my stance is on purchased assets because I haven’t said anything on that topic.
You clearly are unable to make an argument without resorting to a strawman.
Go ahead, Elon. I doubt you’re going to sell many copies of your game with that attitude. Especially if Valve bans you from their store for deliberately lying about your game not having AI
You dont need to be good at art to make a video game that looks good. You can also find art assets online
I have had a harder time making up for not being good at making music, but there are songs online you can use for free
There are tools to make it easier to code, but im not sure how good those are since i have never used them and i already know how to code
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I have not had this experience and i have seen many 3d games use premade assets without problems
Even without them, you can make a good look good without being a skilled artist
Skill issue (literally).
Have you never heard of this thing called Fiverr? Or contract work in general? If you don’t have a particular set of skills, normally you just hire someone that already has them
These people must have genuinely been dropped on their heads multiple times. How do they think anything got done before the “AI” boom? Its mind boggling ahahahha