Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages
Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages
They cannot possibly assure customers that remote devs aren't using copilots to help them code.
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.
You can prevent that issue by coding in the newest version of godot
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.
Procedural generation is generative, but it ain't AI. It especially has nothing in common with the exploitative practices of genAI training.
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.
Procgen is not genAI. It's not even machine learning.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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, seriously. This is literally the first human feedback I’ve had on the project and you’ve given me a bunch of stuff to work on and some sense of ‘at least not the wrong direction.’ So thanks again this really helped.
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.
And it looks a lot like the ol Nintendo seal of approval (or whatever they call it).
It's a good move until generated AI becomes undistinguishable
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?
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.
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.