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
AI this, AI that - you can't go anywhere without something trying to force AI on you. Usually a company trying to get you to buy into what they've wasted billions on. So indie devs have begun fighting back with their No Gen AI Seal.
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).
Good shit. A carefully thought out handcrafted experience will always be better than interactive slop.
Doesn't mean much without validation
I'm quickly going to create an AI named "No Gen".
Reminds me of the 70s when suddenly everything was "Eco-Friendly".
I remember an old song "I'll go green when they go green and they'll go green but not really green more like aquamarine" and it appears to no longer exist on the internet.
Another song I can't find is about a guy who tells the story of all his past lives and in each he was a whore and someday he'll be a whore again.
Really wish songs would stop disappearing.
The first one is "Go Green" by Mitch Benn
found it in 2 minutes just by googling the lyrics in your comment, specifically this search:
"go green when they go green"We’ll go green when you go green
You’ll go green when he goes green
We’ll get as far as aquamarine or so
But we’re still gonna call it greenbut I couldn't find the second one
Yours is the most captivating comment in this entire thread.
I have to admit neither one of those rings a bell.
Lmao. The “organic” labeling has made it to electronics.
Certified Artisanally Hand-Crafter Code
just as meaningless too!
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.
People want pieces of art made by actual humans. Not garbage from the confident statistics black box.
It’s all virtue signaling. If it’s good, nobody will be able to notice anyway and they’ll want it regardless. The only reason people shit on AI currently is because expert humans are still far better than it.
We’re just at that awkward point in time where AI is better than the random joe but worse than experts.
One of my favourite games used procedural generation to create game "art", "assets", and "maps".
That could conceivably be called (or enhanced by) ML today, which could conceivably be called AI today.
But even in modern games, I'm not opposed to mindful usage of AI in games. I don't understand why you're trying to speak for everyone (by saying "people") when you're talking to someone who doesn't share your view.
This is like those stupid "non-GMO" stickers. Yes, GMOs are being abused by Monsanto (and probably other corporations like them). No, that doesn't mean that GMOs are bad in all cases.
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.
Indie studio teams are pretty small so its possible, I personally hate that the word copilot ever even appears and never ever autogen code, but moreso I'm sure the stamp refers to art, texture, and sound.
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
If you learned to code with AI then you didnt learn to code.
Same vibes as "if you learned to draw with an iPad then you didn't actually learn to draw".
Or in my case, I'm old enough to remember "computer art isn't real animation/art" and also the criticism assist Photoshop.
And there's plenty of people who criticized Andy Warhol too before then.
Go back in history and you can read about criticisms of using typewriters over hand writing as well.
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.
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.
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".
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.
To be fair to the people protesting this isn't what they're objecting to. They don't like tools which were built on theft, which all the major LLMs were. That's the core issue, along with the fear that artists will be devalued and replaced because of them.
There are many reasons that people dislike gen AI; you can't be sure that it's because they dislike how it's built on theft. Here are three different unrelated reasons to dislike gen AI:
- it puts people out of work;
- it's built on theft;
- it produces "slop" in large quantities
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.