[HN Gopher] Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being ...
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Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being 'AI free'
Author : 01-_-
Score : 159 points
Date : 2025-11-26 13:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| khoury wrote:
| The "hand made" era of software
| b3lvedere wrote:
| We of the hand crafted software guild (HCSG) vow to not use too
| much tools and automation.
|
| Sure, you may use a compiler to magically transform your source
| code into real executable software or use some Adobe product to
| transform your ugly concept drawing into something amazing, but
| we draw the vague limit at outsourcing too much to automation
| at AI generated or curated content.
|
| One can only respect the trade if one works extremely hard,
| drew blood and shedded tears and sweat from one's very
| overworked body. AI is just creepy and has no soul. Did the
| great artists, developers and programmers copy paste a lot of
| each others work and call it a day? We think not!
|
| Here we do not re-invent the wheel or copy someone else's
| wheel. You will be obligated to design, develop, program and
| come up with your own wheel, even if you have a copy of the
| best wheel possible for your program.
|
| We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches so
| the high quality of software is always preserved. Your parents
| and great-parents will be proud and shed nostalgic tears when
| using your software. Everything should be as it was and
| everything should be traditionally awesome.
|
| /s
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| > We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches
| so the high quality of software is always preserved
|
| I see the `\s` but this part at least is literally what we
| need to do!
| b3lvedere wrote:
| You do realize you can copy digital stuff as much as you
| want? :)
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Is that fact meant to be hidden or put aside here? I am
| not sure I see that.
| walt_grata wrote:
| I'll be more inclined to believe the hype when we start
| measuring accuracy and predictability like SLOs and holding
| the companies accountable for bad results.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Artisanal!
|
| I remember when artisanal Doritos came out. That felt like the
| end of that.
| kleiba wrote:
| And this when "Handmade Hero" was abandoned over two years ago,
| after not really getting anywhere over the course of 9 years.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Haven't you kept up with the social media status, and the
| conferences that came out of it?
| Johanx64 wrote:
| For what it's worth it spawned a lot of quality software as a
| side effect. And served as an educational platform for a lot
| of programmers that felt that there's something wrong with
| modern day software and python/javascript low quality garbage
| they did at their day-to-day job, but couldn't quite put
| their finger on it.
|
| Turns out you can both fail, and yet succeed in 10 different
| ways at the same time.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| What do you mean by "not really getting anywhere"? The point
| was to show and document the process, not to ship a
| commercial game.
|
| And the context is that it was 2hrs a week for 9 years, not 9
| years of full-time dev.
| kleiba wrote:
| The process was absolutely to ship a commercial game, which
| Casey re-iterated at the beginning of every single episode.
| Also, people could spend $15 to "pre-order" the game.
| sweetheart wrote:
| https://archive.ph/20251125055632/https://www.theverge.com/e...
|
| I'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift
| from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and
| starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested
| in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a
| living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other
| indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is
| when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the
| project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is
| antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can
| become a crutch that hurts rather than helps.
|
| I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling
| compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a
| remarkable difference between AI being used for the software
| engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal
| preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I
| can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or
| where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop
| count as Gen AI? How could it not?
|
| In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to
| knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a
| somewhat painstaking creative process.
| thedangler wrote:
| I like AI to figure out complex issue or something I would just
| find on stackoverflow. It's great for doing boiler plate crap
| that I don't want to do anyways. But when you need it to do
| something that it hasn't found in a git repo, it struggles.
| dejobaan wrote:
| I've been keeping an eye out on AI disclosures on Steam
| (https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-
| number-o...). While it's unsurprising that devs are using it,
| what was surprising was the number of games that disclose it. I
| believe, as of November, it's up to 8% of the while library. The
| biggest game to disclose AI use right now is Stellaris (with many
| many millions in sales), though having initially launched many
| years ago, their GenAI usage is in product updates.
| watwut wrote:
| Maybe it is a good strategy. Haters will more likely to steer
| clear instead of raging in comments and others will be less
| surprised over ai typical inconsistences and issues.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Keep in mind that aggregate statistics about Steam games
| include things like student projects, and hobby efforts never
| expected to make money.
|
| But that said, I absolutely expected a high rate because I
| assumed game devs would be forced to use it by management, just
| as I am.
| stego-tech wrote:
| The "they're just jelly that we can do better than they with AI"
| camp really needs to spend more time hanging around artisans in
| general, instead of flouncing into comment sections and
| evangelizing the AI-booster groupthink.
|
| Artists and creators are, broadly, _incredibly pissed_ that their
| output was used to train these models without compensation or
| consent by trillion-dollar megacorps and VC-funded startups. That
| is, and remains, the core grievance. People who already make a
| pittance by devoting themselves to the creation of art are now
| forced out of art entirely because programmers just couldn't be
| bothered to - _GASP_ - have an original thought and commission
| someone else to execute it for them.
|
| A distant, but still important, secondary concern is the quality
| of the slop itself (or lack thereof). Anyone who engages with art
| sufficiently can see the "seams" in generative content, even in
| state of the art models: perspectives lack consistency across key
| frames, anatomy isn't grounded in reality or bends in ways
| befitting of a horror movie, geometry and materials that do not
| "graft" together due to a lack of negative space. These models
| are _garbage_ because they don't recognize core artistic
| concepts, only haphazardly reassemble pieces by prompt.
|
| I challenge the AI crowd to actually go to an art faire, or
| commission a custom piece of your idea. Have something you had to
| contribute more than a simple prompt, to. Identify styles you
| like and artists that work within them. Take the chance to make
| more human connections and bond over shared creativity.
|
| The artists will thank you, and you're likely to enjoy the
| resultant output far more.
| catapart wrote:
| At this point, I just assume anyone who advocates for the use
| of AI is actually just an output from some AI. Given that
| "human-sounding speech" is the thing that AI is most easily
| able to produce, and how many different AIs are out there, and
| how beneficial an army of never-softening commenters can be for
| any specific pet cause you like, I can't think of why it
| wouldn't be statistically irresponsible to not assume that.
|
| I've met enough real humans with completely self-important
| defenses of it that I know that they exist, so I'm willing to
| at least give them doubt. But the assumption is that they are
| AI and they need to prove being human. To assume otherwise is
| unreasonable.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| I debated a bit about how to answer this, because I've seen
| this idea _so much_ after stable diffusion came out. I have a
| serious answer, and a sarcastic one. I 'll go with the serious
| one. The sarcastic bit was just replacing coders with artists
| in your text. You can imagine it, I guess :)
|
| Why are "artists" special? Why did _you_ feel the need to type
| these 4 thoughtful (but overdone imo) paragraphs, defending
| "artisans"? Why are _they_ special, when compared to coders?
| Why do the artists get to use ever better tools designed to
| help them, but when the other side gets the same kinds of
| tools, it 's suddenly faux pas? Is it just "AI hate" or is it
| something else? Can you at least see the double standards that
| you apply in your post, as I can see it from outside?
|
| It used to be that games were coded by passionate people.
| People who knew how to code. They'd painstakingly find ways of
| making ascii characters do silly things on a screen that wasn't
| necessarily designed for what they were doing. Later, they
| started playing with pixels. But they were still coders. So
| they coded away until the pixels started doing funny things on
| the screen. You talk about "art"? Hah. THAT was art. The
| ability and tech knowledge to make those early systems do those
| things with pixels is something that we just don't see today.
| And we don't see it, in large, because coders did what coders
| do and made it simpler for anyone else to do those funny things
| with pixels on a screen.
|
| At every step of the way coders built software to _help_ other
| people. They built engines. Then they built harnesses for the
| designers, animators and so on. Then they built simplified
| engines. The endless RPG generators, and so on. Then they built
| "no-code" solutions. Here, friend, you take this piece of code,
| plug in your art and you have a game! And they were happy to do
| that, because it was _enabling_ other people to do their thing.
| With code they wrote. And many of them free of charge!
|
| But now, when suddenly coders have a tool that _they_ can use
| themselves, to empower them with things that they couldn 't
| previously do, now suddenly there's a problem? Why is one
| artist's output "art", even if the game code is shit, while the
| opposite isn't? Why can't a coder enjoy creating a game, with
| help from tools that do something they simply don't care about?
| They want to do the logic behind the things moving on the
| screen, and can't / won't spend time creating the art. Why
| should they be shunned? Why not enjoy the experience for what
| it is? Is it just AI hate? If so, perhaps you should disclose
| it. Dunno, this whole take of yours feels mighty high-horsey
| for my taste.
| subb wrote:
| There's a spectrum of human involvement in producing a thing,
| and art is possibly the last thing I want to see automate.
|
| In the end, art is about human connection. There's a
| difference between an print of some generated AI slop found
| online, a painting made in a Chinese factory for a big store,
| and the scribble your friend made when they went through
| depression.
|
| You can make a game with all three process. They are not the
| same.
| stego-tech wrote:
| While I can see where your argument comes from (because up
| until about ten years ago, I would've written it verbatim
| myself), I must respectfully disagree with it. _Some_
| programmers build tools to help people, but _most_ do not.
| They build tools for surveillance, engines for advertising,
| exploit human psychology with patterns and site designs that
| deliberately _hinder_ users, not _help_ them. Most
| programmers never contribute to Open Source, but instead go
| to work for tech conglomerates to make money, because that is
| what society demands of us and coding - until recently - was
| a solid path into Middle Class status.
|
| I question the sincerity of this narrative that the AI
| companies are doing this to "help" us, when their actions say
| otherwise at every turn. I also question that diffusion
| models and LLMs "enable" programmers to somehow create things
| others could do with a pencil, paper, and practice. I
| question this notion that a human must be able to be entirely
| self-sufficient through technology rather than cooperative
| with their fellow man, or that every skill must be
| commoditized for maximum extraction of wealth instead of
| respected as expertise within a community. I do not hate AI
| because to do so would be to hate a hammer, or a screwdriver.
|
| Where the hate in my heart lies are towards those who demand
| we reduce humanity, its chaos, its ephemeralness, its
| _qualia_ , to a mathematical model devoid of entropy. I hate
| that because these people - not the tools themselves - deign
| themselves superior men who are somehow above or immune to
| the fundamental force of reality (entropy), devoid of
| responsibility or accountability for their actions or harms.
|
| A true AI booster should be screaming angry that this compute
| capacity is being squandered on shitty image generation and
| chatbots that convince teenagers to commit suicide or
| psychologists that they're discovering inter-dimensional
| communication. These vaunted tools should be used to balance
| the economy, uplift the populace, hold the powerful to
| account, mediate disputes, improve outcomes in quality and
| longevity of life.
|
| They are emphatically not being used in this capacity, and
| their owners have made it abundantly clear through their
| repeated actions that said outcomes have never been, and
| never will be, their intent.
|
| And _that_ is the source of my personal hate.
| blargey wrote:
| I honestly have not idea what you're on about.
|
| First, the "by artists for coders" equivalent always existed!
| There's tons of free-for-commercial-use art packs and BGM
| tracks and sound effect packs out there, and more when you
| add cheaply priced stuff. Will you get hate for using those
| common assets in a commercial project? Only as much as you'll
| get for visibly running on RPG Maker!
|
| Which leads into the second - those "no-code" solutions you
| refer to are a far cry from "just add art". They're really
| "slightly lower code", relying on heavy scripting to actually
| shape the faintest approximation of a personal vision out of
| it. They were never the "by coders for artists" gift you
| frame them as, any more than Godot or Unity was. They're
| essentially just a pack of libraries for well-trodden genre
| boilerplate, used by hobbyist game coders and artists alike.
|
| Artists have always needed to learn to code in order to make
| their vision for a game into reality. They equally cannot
| "enjoy creating a game, with help from tools that do
| something they simply don't care about" unless you want them
| to - wait for it - _AI vibe code_ the whole thing. Or do you
| think all the artists nominally against AI art are secretly
| vibe coding a new wave of games too? Do you even think a
| vibe-coded game will hew to your expectations for a good
| game? If not, why?
| rcxdude wrote:
| Hi, I have interacted with a lot of artists, and spent more on
| commissioning art than is probably financially sensible, as
| well as playing around with models for writing and image
| generation and I have a few thoughts on this.
|
| I think, on the whole, the distaste for AI is primarily about a
| threat to the value of the artist's work. Importantly, I think
| the idea that this was done by training on their collective
| work is a bit of a sting on top but it is _not_ the primary
| reason for the objection. Especially importantly, I think
| copyright is 100% not a good way to try to mend this issue,
| because it will primarily enable the parasitic centralization
| that already plagues the art business, as well as allow for
| further moat-building by tho ones creating these models (Adobe
| having already demonstrated this). In my view, a world where
| the big tech companies have models that only they are legally
| allowed to train is the worst possible outcome from this tech.
| I think addressing this either needs to involve some kind of
| blanket compensation from the big companies (with the important
| proviso that even their entire valuation spread amongst all the
| artists in their training set is a relative pittance), or
| through a general push against AI generation entirely, but from
| the perspective of the importance of supporting the artists as
| opposed to leaning on copyright claims which the AI industry
| can happily navigate if they must.
|
| With regards to quality, Sturgeon's law applies doubly here.
| The vast majority of AI generated stuff you see will be slop,
| because it's so easy to make. It is possible to make very good
| stuff with AI with more effort, but this requires at a minimum
| some taste and willingness to put thought into what you want to
| get out of it, and better also some artistic talent. To me the
| best is when someone engages with it as a tool to achieve a
| vision as opposed to a perfunctory 'I need to fill some space
| with something' stock-image type thing (something which humans
| had already been doing, but were a bit more limited on because
| of expense and it's hard for someone doing art to not care at
| least a little bit about making something good even if it's
| utterly soulless corporate clip-art).
|
| I'll also say it's not universal amongst artists. I know of
| multiple who are OK with it, and starting to incorporate it
| into their work. But it's also a somewhat dicey position to
| take publicly in those circles at the moment, so they're not
| very visible on the whole. (I suspect this is often dependent
| on _why_ they got into art: in general the ones who are OK with
| or actively like AI are the ones who got into art because they
| wanted to see more art of the kind that they make (insert 'oh
| boy, two cakes!' meme here). The ones who got into art because
| they enjoy the process of making the art generally don't like
| it, though they're not always utterly virulently against it,
| and the ones who got into art for the status it affords them
| absolutely _hate_ it. Though of course these are somewhat
| oversimplified categories)
| mjr00 wrote:
| Seems like a misguided fight.
|
| Slop is slop because it's slop. Sounds tautological, but AI is
| orthogonal to the problem. Before AI, there were and are
| Unity/Unreal "asset store piles" which grab a bunch of (mostly
| free) assets from the engine's store and slap them into a game.
| Nothing looks coherent or cohesive. AI has made that a lot more
| easy and customizable, of course, but the end result is the same:
| a bunch of disparate elements coming together incohesively,
| making for a poor player experience.
|
| In the end it's about taste. People with poor taste will make bad
| games, whether they use AI or not. AI has certainly accelerated
| the rate at which bad games can be made, however.
|
| Personally I'd rather play an indie game made by one person who
| uses GenAI to help build out their coherent, unique, and personal
| vision, rather than an entirely handmade yet another soulless
| Roguelite Deckbuilder, 2d pixel art platformer, or extraction
| shooter.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I think the next decade will be one that values anything provably
| authentic and it will keep becoming more and more rare.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| It's the sales pitch that doesn't work for "normal" people, but
| only artsy-fartsy people and "games journalists".
|
| Ie. a vocal and mostly irrelevant small minority.
|
| Never forget who your main audience is.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| But normal people also arent pro AI. Thats again a very small,
| vocal and irrelevant minority.
|
| The main audience isn't going to not buy a game because it
| doesn't use AI
| Johanx64 wrote:
| "Normal" people will just buy the game if it's good.
|
| So it's irrelevant if it uses AI or not. Ie. it's not a sales
| pitch and not part of decision making process when making the
| purchase.
|
| There are increasingly more games that use some form of AI
| generated content, voice lines or otherwise, and nobody could
| care less, except the people outlined above.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| By your own admission its not irrelevant, there are a small
| group of people who do care about that kind of thing on
| either side. For an indie dev, that matters. AAA studios
| can pretty much guarantee at least a few thousand sales,
| indie devs, especially the less established ones, have far
| less. For first timers, there'll be none at all.
|
| The thing is though, appealing to the pro-AI crowd is much
| more difficult. They want a game thats a shining example of
| what AI can be in gaming. The anti-AI crowd doesn't need
| that, they've got examples of that for decades. A few AI
| generated voice lines won't do much to appeal to the pro-AI
| crowd.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd" (whatever
| the fuck that even means) when they use AI tools.
|
| If an indie (or even less of an indie) is using AI
| generation, they are doing so to save costs or work
| around their very limited budget. Or using it to work
| around some limitations where voicecasting every line
| would be infeasible, etc.
|
| And losing the small portion of the miniscule-vocal-
| always-complaining crowd (who odds are - wasnt part of
| their audience to begin with), to be able to use AI-gen
| is not a loss at all.
|
| Data on Steam is telling, these tools are becoming
| increasingly prevalent.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| > Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd"
|
| Oh yes they are, there's a lot of games (or at least,
| promises of future games) that promise to be 100% vibe-
| coded or that make heavy use of AI in a way thats very
| prominent to the player. There was an example just last
| week:
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/3730100/Whispers_from_
| the...
|
| > And losing the small portion of the vocal-always-
| complaining crowd (who odds are, wasnt part of their
| audience to begin with), is not a loss at all.
|
| That seems like a very different crowd to me. I've been
| around the industry long enough to see the signs of that,
| and I don't see that much from the anti-ai crowd, or at
| least not in any more significant numbers. See: the
| project zomboid AI art issue
|
| But like I say, for an indie, yes losing a small audience
| can still be a big loss.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| It seems like you're way too bought into warring
| internet-weirdo tribe dynamics.
|
| If you use or don't use a tool (your choice), it doesn't
| make you pro or an anti. It's basic pragmatism, if a
| tools is useful to you, you use it, if it isn't, you
| don't.
|
| The consumer base mostly doesn't care, nor should they.
| They care about end result. Or else nobody would buy
| iphones, nikes and what not.
|
| The moment you bring up "pros and antis" and tribe
| dynamics, I smell a brainrot from a mile away. You do you
| I guess.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Only a small number of indie games will go mainstream enough
| for that to matter, I think. If your likely outcome is selling
| 10,000 copies getting in with the reviewer and blogger crowd is
| probably helpful.
| tete wrote:
| > It's the sales pitch that doesn't work for "normal" people
|
| it's anyways about gamers and of that only gamers that are
| reachable for not yet successful indie games
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| If I had to guess, and this is just a wild guess, I would
| assume the average consumer cares if a game is good, not what
| tech was used to make it.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| It just seems weird to me.
|
| It's like a carpenter saying they're power tool free.
|
| You have an amazing tool to speed up your work why wouldn't you
| use it?
| HugoTea wrote:
| I think of it more like Ikea furniture produced in a factory vs
| an artisans hand-crafted chair. One of them is made with love
| and care, the other is an industrial product, one of millions.
| The difference with video games is the artisan's chair is
| cheaper than the Ikea product.
| justinmarsan wrote:
| The problem with AI isn't really the tool itself, it's the fact
| that the tool is only able to produce because it has stolen the
| work of real artists to rip them off, and then take their
| jobs...
| the_real_cher wrote:
| All science and art comes from people before you.
|
| There's a term for that
|
| "Built on the shoulders of giants"
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Generative AI isn't a tool, it's an oracle.
|
| You understand the difference? Instead of improving your
| skills, you just spin the prompt roulette and hope the AI gods
| gift you with something palatable.
| xyzal wrote:
| This
| oreally wrote:
| Because the tool threatens to put the majority of them out of
| business and jobs.
|
| The rest of their arguments, however illogical, all stem from
| this core of the fear of losing their livelihood.
| ronsor wrote:
| > Because the tool threatens to put the majority of them out
| of business and jobs.
|
| Unfortunately technology has done this for centuries now, and
| everyone may as well quit whining get used to it, because
| it's not going to change. The market can "stay irrational"
| longer than they can afford to complain.
| xyzal wrote:
| I feel it is more like a restaurant advertising cooking from
| basic ingredients instead of heating ultra processed prefabs.
| With power tools you do not limit your creative options.
| tete wrote:
| To be fair I think if there is any kinda okay use of GenAI is
| being able to get some images and such without needing the money
| to hire an artist.
|
| Maybe that allows for way more niche games.
|
| In other words: It's the whole package. If I get something
| unique, and the dev used some "AI" for translation or to make
| some avatar image for a character I am happy this game is allowed
| to exist.
|
| If I see a AAA studio putting out the hundredth iteration of the
| same old game, of some franchise that used to be good and
| interesting in the 90s and then doesn't even bring actually new
| art to the table it's a huge disappointment.
|
| But here we are. EA cannot even manage to fix their basic bugs
| (like players running into nets or a new kickoff for less than a
| second) after a dozen of new expensive releases.
|
| Non-indie games have largely been a complete farce for decades
| now.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I've been working with a partner on a game and we decided that AI
| assets are acceptable to use for targeted scenarios like
| localization and accessibility (text-to-text, text-to-speech).
|
| The red line is AI cannot be the prime generator of content. For
| example, the text that is to be localized must be authored by a
| human. Using ChatGPT to generate scripts from a brief prompt and
| then feeding that into another AI tool is an example of strictly
| prohibited use.
|
| You can have an actual human redo the translations or voice lines
| without much frustration (i.e., if we actually make any money).
| Anything further than that gets a lot more invasive in terms of
| rework.
| dwroberts wrote:
| > like localization
|
| I think you're making a big mistake with this one. Assuming
| it's being used for anything other than eg placeholder before
| real translation/localization.
|
| Even decent professionally translated games get this stuff
| wrong sometimes and irritate their audiences, I can't imagine
| how badly AI will bungle it
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I think in this case the choice is between AI localization
| and no localization at all. If that is the case, I actually
| think that users will appreciate localization with minor
| issues over doing things in English.
|
| Anecdotally, I have found AI translation to be perfectly
| acceptable for the languages that I do know, on par with a
| human translation service, at least. This may be different in
| a game with e.g. fantasy vocabulary that is made up.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| I can understand people who are upset about AI being used to
| generate artwork or more "creative" tasks that lean into other
| people's work, but using this to paint AI as "bad" as a whole is
| simplistic.
|
| There are a million things AI can do that wouldn't fall into this
| category (repetitive, time-consuming work) that technically
| wouldn't make the product "AI free."
|
| It's about as smart as hearing a phone was used to plan a bank
| heist, therefore we need "phone free" communication.
| nottorp wrote:
| But world building and graphic assets _are_ repetitive, time-
| consuming work.
| nasmorn wrote:
| The industry tries to use generative tools for assets since
| forever. Textures, terrain, foliage and eventually even
| parametric human models. I don't see transformers much
| different.
| dheatov wrote:
| The stochastic nature, minimal amount of care required to
| get something going, and the inefficiency, just to name a
| few.
| nottorp wrote:
| Oh I do. Because with a tree generation library the trees
| do look random (they are because the algorithm has a random
| component).
|
| "AI" assets all look the same.
| dheatov wrote:
| I doubt it's anywhere near million. Non-zero? Sure.
|
| But even for those scenario where "AI" helps, I still believe
| there exists other alternatives that doesn't consume
| unreasonable amount of energy and are not megacorp controlled
| blackbox. Usually it's just better tooling, and/or a change in
| the process.
|
| The reason why "AI" is simply bad is way beyond malicious abuse
| of these stochastic models, thus the analogy of banning phone
| doesn't actually work.
|
| On the creative side, I feel like punk act like this, fighting
| back against all these throat-shoving and gaslighting, is
| pretty artistic.
| ronsor wrote:
| > On the creative side, I feel like punk act like this,
| fighting back against all these throat-shoving and
| gaslighting, is pretty artistic.
|
| Joining a moral panic mob isn't punk; it's just
| irrationality. The "AI is evil" crowd is just as idiotic as
| the "AI will do everything perfectly" crowd. They're married
| to ideology and are more than willing to bury themselves
| alive for it.
| sincerely wrote:
| Making a minor-to-moderate sacrifice of convenience/money
| so that your actions align with your ideology and beliefs
| is extremely common human behavior. Organic food. Clothes
| made in the US instead of a sweatshop. Following a
| religion's customs e.g. Sabbath.
|
| There are plenty of good reasons to not want to use gen AI
| (and many stupid ones as well). If someone wants to market
| their product that way, who cares
| MangoToupe wrote:
| I don't think choosing to not buy something is a moral
| panic mob; it just means I didn't see the game as worth the
| money.
| geldedus wrote:
| Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets"
| of 1950s _yawn_
| geldedus wrote:
| Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets"
| of 1950s
| andai wrote:
| Many years ago I was watching a video of some sculpture being
| done. I was quite unimpressed with the art itself.
|
| Then the video zoomed out, and I saw that the guy had spent like
| 2 years making it out of individual toothpicks.
|
| Suddenly I was amazed, right?
|
| With AI it's kinda the opposite process, right? You see
| something, it's impressive, maybe you even like it personally,
| and then you realize orders of magnitude less effort went into it
| than it looks like "should" have, based on the result.
|
| So we seem to have here the "direct experience" of the art
| itself, and then a "narrative layer" which obscures that. And we
| seem to value the latter more highly.
|
| A related example is those pages selling "handcrafted" leather
| bags and they have an life story about Grandma Williams and
| suddenly the bag is worth a billion times more to the buyer.
| thisisit wrote:
| This is the sad reality. Because things can go the other way as
| well. Something can be amazing but beaten down because - AI.
|
| Here's a video which was discussed by VFX artists at Corridor
| Digital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43h61QAXjpY
|
| This is so much creative work. But once people know that genAI
| and ComfyUI might be involved they might beat it down.
| somenameforme wrote:
| To me, that is kind of the essence of contemporary AI. It's
| showy but lacks any point or spirit whatsoever. For instance,
| imagine the morphing was on beat with the music - suddenly
| it's actually quite neat. As is, it just looks like some
| fairly low effort prompts. Even the dancing seems relatively
| low effort and makes minimal effort to play to the scene or
| music in any way outside of a vague sort of liquidy theme. It
| just feels very disconnected.
|
| Take, for contrast, the original Matrix. The reason the
| effects in that movie were revolutionary is not because of
| them just looking neat, but because they fit extremely well
| into the movie, and were supplemented by other effects that
| bumped them up to the next level. CG tends to age
| horrrrrribly (for anybody over 40, watch the original
| Jurassic Park again...) but the original Matrix lobby scene
| [1] still actually looks pretty decent, and I think that's
| because it had spirit. Note how so much love is put into the
| choreography, even small things like the footsteps being on
| beat with the background audio at the start of the scene, the
| military style marching drums when the paramilitary forces
| enter the scene, and more. It's just great.
|
| There's no reason AI can't play a major role in these
| artistic pipelines, but that's the thing - there's a huge
| difference between making something showy, and making
| something that feels like it has spirit, like something that
| is _art._ And it 's for this reason that I don't think
| artists are going anywhere.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eCmhBgsyI
| freehorse wrote:
| I don't know about the specific piece, but my essential
| problem with AI art is that it lacks intentionality. I am not
| sure how use of AI tools in a creative manner can be
| reconciled with this fact, also because I do not really use
| the actual professional AI tools. Maybe it is analogous to
| using LLMs for tab-completion vs prompting and letting them
| roam and write the code as agents. I would rather "AI" as
| tightly integrated into a process and being an actual tool
| without disrupting it, than something that essentially turns
| us all into some kind of managers.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Absolutely. It's the same reason I won't watch woodworking
| videos that incorporate CNC. I am here for the craftsmanship,
| not just the end result.
| nicbou wrote:
| You would love Pask Makes.
| oreally wrote:
| This is called marketing and pushing a brand. It's nothing new.
|
| It could even be faked. There was a clothing brand who said
| their stuff was all hand made, artisanal, only to be found out
| they sent their stuff to China to make. Now the Chinese workers
| are ranting about getting credit for their quality work.
|
| It's why I think it's a sign of maturity to be able to get past
| all the narratives and spin to a product, all the while living
| less materialistically.
| andai wrote:
| I was in Uzbekistan one time. A granny sold a scarf to my
| mum. "My daughter made this. Hand made." A week later in
| Turkey, we found the same scarf on the street. "Made in
| China!" the shopkeeper said.
| immibis wrote:
| In Germany things are frequently labelled "Hausgemacht" or
| "housemade" which is designed to make you think "homemade",
| but actually, any kind of building is a "Haus".
| freehorse wrote:
| As humans, we appreciate also the process in making things,
| not just the end result. For art this is especially more
| important than for everyday, for practical use products. The
| more one knows about a specific kind of art and can relate to
| the experience of making such art, the more they are usually
| interested in parts of the process because the more
| information they can extract about the piece of art. That
| also often gives new perspectives in the art piece itself.
| Art (and many other things) is much about contextualizing.
| Contextualizing an art piece to a specific process of making
| it or a specific era that was made may help notice details
| that would otherwise go unnoticed. Perception is not neutral
| and cannot be, and art appreciation even less.
|
| Yes it is true that some may try to trick people with fake
| information about the process of producing something, but
| that does not mean that the reason people may be interested
| in the process itself is marketing. It is part of the human
| condition and experience imo that some may try to take
| advantage of, but is important otherwise.
| oreally wrote:
| > As humans, we appreciate also the process in making
| things, not just the end result.
|
| I generally think this doesn't apply to most people unless
| it affects the result they want out of the product. But
| hey, more power to you!
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| All else being equal, most people prefer to own things
| that are valuable and exclusive to things that are cheap
| and mass produced, and the fact that care and effort has
| been put into making something affects the perceived
| value of the product.
|
| This is why affects like 'limited run', 'hand-made',
| 'artisanal' tend to imply a higher price than the
| equivalent temu slop.
| raincole wrote:
| Almost all humans appreciate the process.
|
| However it doesn't mean they will actually pay more for
| the process. At the end, money talks, thoughts and
| prayers don't.
| freehorse wrote:
| It depends what we are talking about. Are we talking
| about investors in a company? Or about people going to a
| concert? I am talking about stuff like the latter,
| mostly.
| nicbou wrote:
| I kind of disagree. The more I learn about manufacturing and
| crafts, the more I appreciate made objects. I used to skip
| old furniture in museums and now I look as close as I am
| allowed to. Same with art, cars, typewriters and most
| machines.
|
| Considering things at face value is wasting a good
| opportunity to truly appreciate what's in front of you. I
| think that being more discerning makes you more mindful about
| the things you surround yourself with. That might mean buying
| less junk, and loving what you end up buying.
| oreally wrote:
| I'm talking about the practicalities though. For example
| I'd really like my smartphones to be long lasting and
| reliable such that I only have to replace every 10 years.
| All that Apple marketing isn't convincing me to buy their
| iphones knowing that I'm going to be locked in.
|
| Generally, the majority of humanity is too tied up in their
| personal troubles to think deeply about their products. So
| the best thing is to accept the narrative of the marketing
| of the best marketed product, then deviate comparisons from
| there.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Apple phones are typically fully supported supported for
| 7ish years, and security updates for longer. For example
| the iPhone 6s, a ten year old phone, still received
| security updates this fall.
|
| My 6 year old iPhone 11 is still trucking along fine. I
| did opt for a new battery recently, but the old battery
| was still at 78%. Quite frankly, its pretty incredible
| that a device that lives in my pocket, has been frozen
| and exposed to extreme heat, has gotten wet, and is
| probable my most used possession is running great, and
| probably will be supported by the manufacturer for
| another 4 years.
|
| Lock in seems exaggerated to me, but if that's what
| worries you, then the Fairphone is promising a decade of
| support, and Samsung is offering 7 years now on the s24.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > There was a clothing brand who said their stuff was all
| hand made, artisanal, only to be found out they sent their
| stuff to China to make.
|
| So is _was_ hand-made (in China) as the advertising claimed.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's all second and third order effects. You'd then be less
| impressed if you found the zoom out toothpick video was itself
| just made with AI. And even less impressed if you zoom out
| further, and discover your entire feed is just different AI
| toothpick sculpture videos, because that's what went viral
| yesterday so now everybody has prompted one overnight.
|
| There are about 250k games on Steam and over 125M users. What
| happens when full sloppification means there's 250M games on
| Steam? You scroll forever without reaching a game that more
| than a few other humans have played. But you can't distinguish
| it from the thousands of other similar games. Choice is a
| fatigue all of its own.
| immibis wrote:
| Steam used to be tightly controlled but they loosened it over
| time - originally only Valve games, then Valve partners, then
| you had to pay a lot of money, then only a little money.
| Maybe now they'll tighten it again.
| andai wrote:
| One game per player eh? At that point we won't need Steam,
| you'll just put on your thinking hat and the computer will
| synthesize exactly what you're in the mood for.
|
| (Well, maybe Steam itself will do that -- VALVE's been
| researching brain computer interface entertainment for years
| :)
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Much if the value of art is that it links you to everyone else
| who views it, which is fundamentally diluted by any process
| that makes art faster than it can be observed. This stays true
| no matter how high the quality of the fast art making process
| climbs. Making a sculpture out of toothpicks on the other hand
| preserves this value by synthesizing the needed scarcity via
| proof of work, and would do so even if it added nothing
| aesthetically.
| andai wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody's touched the ethical angle of this yet.
|
| Like fairtrade... this code was produced without exploiting
| enslaved human knowledge ;)
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I think it's so interesting that people want to know something is
| created by AI to not consume it. Personally I don't care if
| something is made by AI or not. If I like it I like it. If not,
| then I don't. At this point at least I don't like bad usage of
| AI. But there has been some absolutely bangers of content created
| by AI. My previous background was AI generated for example.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| I give it a year or two and people will stop caring
| haunter wrote:
| When you copy paste assets in UE that's AI free but is that
| really "hand made"? I don't know where is the line
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoY062kY1s
| poutu wrote:
| A huge amount of music now is "copy and pasting samples" in FL
| studio or GarageBand and that is considered 100% human so I
| would say the line is very clear. The line is at "did it matter
| that _you_ did this, or would any layperson in your stead have
| been able to make pretty much exactly the same thing
| (qualitatively judged)?"
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I wish YouTube videos had an "AI free" label so I can choose.
| auxide wrote:
| A very, very weak sales pitch. I've seen more things start
| prominently displaying that they're "AI-free" recently, and it
| has only driven me away as opposed to being more interested
| because do you just not stand out enough to the point where you
| have to say that in order for people to care? Or is it because
| you're stuck-up? I'm not sure anymore.
| xyzal wrote:
| Interesting, it has an opposite effect on me. It signals the
| game is more probably a labor of love instead of a generic
| asset flip.
| faidit wrote:
| Genuine question (this is more about code than art): Since some
| indies brag about having no "assistance" whatsoever, is it still
| AI-free if you ever asked an LLM for help with a tricky
| programming problem, and incorporated that knowledge into your
| game's code? What if you just used a search engine and your eyes
| glanced over an AI-generated answer? Or you unknowingly benefited
| from an AI-written post or StackOverflow answer? I mean, is it
| really possible to code without _any_ AI assistance any more?
| Also what about using third-party assets, that are likely to have
| a fly in the ointment somewhere (maybe at least a tiny bit of the
| asset creator 's code involved asking Claude for help, or they
| tangentially benefited from a Google summary).
|
| As much as I dislike the taste of AI slop, it seems to me like AI
| has so thoroughly permeated the internet at this point that a
| truly AI-free game is impossible unless you are a programming
| genius and/or independently funded to a point where you can hire
| domain experts for everything, such that you could make the game
| fully offline without even going on the internet at all. I
| actually find it hard to believe that anyone could code a game
| above a minimal level of complexity without searching problems
| online and using at least a tiny bit of AI-generated/summarized
| info, even unintentionally.
| nottorp wrote:
| For writing code, actually you _have_ to use "AI" instead of
| searches because search has become useless in the last couple
| years.
|
| If you blindly copy paste the results though, I'm sure there
| are some smart people in north korea writing automated generic
| exploits _by hand_ for vibe coded web sites...
| liampulles wrote:
| Most of the gamers I know who are not in the tech space are very
| against AI, especially if it is being used for stuff that is more
| on the art side. Anything that displaces "game industry workers"
| is viewed as a bad thing.
|
| I personally don't mind AI use to write code, and while I haven't
| seen AI art that conveys much in me, I'm open to the idea that it
| could be used in interesting ways.
| alexitorg wrote:
| I'm looking forward to having LLMs used for character
| interactions. It will be like that thrilling point in half life
| where the soldiers start talking about freeman and for the first
| time you realize that characters are responding to you in normal
| game play.
| Shorel wrote:
| I tested a Sherlock Holmes game where AI was used for character
| interactions.
|
| The actual dialogues were of course awesome, and relevant.
|
| I gave them feedback about the controls for moving the
| character, which were a bit awkward.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Emulating real life isn't going to be as exciting as you think
| it is. That awesome moment in Half Life is scripted to make it
| immersive like that, but most of the game isn't and that's what
| makes it special. If all the enemies behaved realistically all
| the time, the game wouldn't be fun, I can guarantee you that.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Idk I kind of want to use transformers/LLMs in a crap game jam
| sometime.
|
| Ever since Skyrim was advertised with the early promise of "If
| you break this lumber mill it would change the local
| economy"...which obviously never happened, I've loved the idea of
| dynamic systems in games.
|
| For a truly dynamic system you'd need to build in more than a dev
| team can manually build - so you need AI for these systems. And
| where you have dynamic systems, sometimes you'll need dynamic
| assets.
|
| However, the human touch on art is still far better than AI (at
| the moment, who knows what the future holds). So I think
| something like how character creators work is the best solution;
| handmade art but with morph targets etc and where sliders would
| be, it's an AI creating dynamic NPCs.
|
| Aha! Even ChatGPT couldn't find this:
| https://youtu.be/O0zPYpEGpVI?t=324 "we have a working economy you
| can sabotage this wood mill if you want" LIES TODD, LIES!
| nickserv wrote:
| There's a few different Skyrim mods that use AI. In particular
| for adding dialogues using the original voices, basically a
| more advanced version of line splitting that has been done for
| a long time.
|
| There are some where the AI is used to add dynamic content,
| pretty cool actually.
|
| This one in particular is pretty popular:
| https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631
|
| I've never heard of anyone complaining about use of AI for mods
| freely given to the community. Paying mods would likely be
| different.
| jcurtis wrote:
| Mods using AI to clone voice actors' voices without their
| consent or explicitly against their wishes has certainly been
| controversial in the Skyrim modding community.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I've determined I hate AI. Luddite reasons, but they're mine.
| qustrolabe wrote:
| That's "GMO-free" kind of marketing, not a good thing
| dpcan wrote:
| When it comes to games I absolutely don't care what they used AI
| for because the point of games is to be fun.
|
| If it's fun and you used AI, that's fine with me. The game served
| its purpose.
|
| The line for me is copyright on images. If you use ai to generate
| images to copy a popular game art style, I think that's over the
| line. Create your own art or pay the artist.
|
| Code however, I see it as a tool. You wouldn't scold me for
| hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. So to me, AI for
| coding isn't any different than hiring a programmer to do the
| work for you. No problem there.
|
| That being said, I do game dev, and using AI to help figure out
| an algorithm or do the work of creating my inputs code, etc is a
| big time saver. However, at the moment, it really struggles with
| anything else because it has no vision and explaining to it how
| to put code together for a weird game mechanic or level
| generation reminds me of that game where you explain how to make
| a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the 3rd grade, and you tell
| your teacher to put the peanut butter on the bread and she scoops
| it out with her hand...
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > Create your own art or pay the artist.
|
| > You wouldn't scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get
| the work done.
|
| It's literally the same. There is no difference, either you
| acknowledge AI is potentially a useful tool to lower costs of
| development (especially important for indie devs) or it's
| exploitative and puts both artists and programmers out of a
| job.
|
| There's plenty of things in the art workflow that can be
| automated same as code, pay an artist to do key
| frames/storyboarding and use the AI to animate between them? Is
| this exploitative?
|
| EDIT: I'm reminded of this thread from 2019 about a successful
| game dev that admits their games look like shit due to cheaping
| out on art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20804998
| constantcrying wrote:
| I think AI is a wonderful tool for indie devs. Much of the code
| they work on is low stakes, where AI can be very helpful. AI has
| made voice actors obsolete and gives even solo devs the ability
| to have a fully voiced game, which might cost hundreds of
| thousands of dollars otherwise.
|
| I am sure that it can be very helpful for graphical or musical
| art, but I don't think it is quite there yet.
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm pretty sure nobody cares about this?
|
| My main gripe with indie games since forever has been that
| they're usually boring. They often fall into creative traps that
| ruin the whole thing. Gameplay is constant grind, minmax,
| pointless choices, funnels, and "inspired" by some tired old
| genre. Music and art can be good, but not in the last decade or
| so anymore. The final nail is if there are political undertones.
| It's as if every developer out there only listens to their own
| echo chambers on discord and reddit.
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