'We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world, and apologise that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards'
As a developer, I really think the reactionary response to AI is muddying the waters. Their stated use-case seems perfectly reasonable, as their options were “shit optimization with even the unity devs clueless” or fixing the bug. AI makes a great tool for some applications. No, it should not be used to vibecode entire apps alone, but it does have the power to search and aggregate sources far, far better than humans can. It will likely take some tweaking afterwards, because their output must not be trusted, but using AI as a research tool for solving esoteric dev problems seems perfectly reasonable to me. I would much prefer we not punish the people that are fully disclosing their (very limited) use, when many of the competitors simply aren’t disclosing.
This is exactly why barely anyone discloses AI use anymore. I use AI sometimes, my colleagues use AI sometimes, everyone I know in the software industry uses Claude in some capacity. But we don’t talk about it in public because it’s become so toxic that you might as well replace a simple AI disclosure with “please witch hunt me and call months of my work vibecoded slop even if it clearly isn’t”
Most people are over AI being used in code but some people aren’t ready for it yet. I give it two years until it’s basically normalized.
The reactionary types tend not to be developers, they tend to be people who don’t really know anything about programming or 3D modelling, or how much annoying boilerplate code you have to type just to get a rectangle on the screen.
Discussion of this topic requires technically minded people, not vague feelings.
There are inherent problems with Ai, which makes any use of them regardless of what it is, problematic. Not everyone cares about the problems. Things like not respecting the license of training data, and other ethical reasons like Ai companies being responsible for the RAM and graphics cards shortage / price hikes.
If you ignore these problems, then we can have a talk about responsible usage and not doing slop. Regardless of what you think about Ai usage, I hope you at least understand and respect the opinion of those people too. Because its grounded with (good) reasons.
I would much prefer we not punish the people that are fully disclosing their (very limited) use, when many of the competitors simply aren’t disclosing.
They did not disclose the Ai usage on the Steam page.
Not all LLM trainers are so caustic to the world. A few use open datasets for the vast majority of their training, like Nvidia’s Nemotron series or a few Olmo derivates.
Many LLms are also trained on shoestring budgets, with a relatively negligible environmental impact.
But are also other huge ethical concerns, like entities behind them supporting censorship, fascism and such. The erosion of the world’s mental aptitude from how it’s presented. Security, labor, hacking and spamming, and so on.
…This is the thing with discussing “AI.”
It can be as nuanced as things get, but few care. Most seem to want things in simple absolutist terms, and they aren’t interested in any nuance, especially the gamers on either side of this debate.
There is also the legal thing to solve too, if the generated code or art can be licensed at all (assuming it does not violate any intellectual property that exists already). Because our laws grant copyright to humans only, not to animals or machines. Does the human get the copyright to anything it prompts to generate?
There are so many layers of issues. I agree with your reply entirely. I also thought about mentioning those few exceptions, but the reality is that most companies creating games use these paid proprietary online models, because they are probably the best.
That just exposes how flawed the copyright system is, TBH. Licensed code (and even art) was already shakey to me, even when human made.
It is true that most are using Claude or ChatGPT, sadly. But I think it’s because they are the “default” and popular rather than for any particular performance reason, as is the case across tech.
It’s actually similar to how most professionals use Photoshop and can’t get away from it. There is one thing about Ai models, its like a web search engine that you can theoretically switch anytime. Because theses are just web interfaces and that’s a good thing. If ChatGPT goes crazy, people will instantly use something different.
Oh, absolutely. However, I also recognize that we live in an era where it’s impossible to have completely ethical consumption, and I suspect many of those most vocal against any AI use are generally being more selective towards this one topic. I personally don’t begrudge the (disclosed) use of the tech for applications where it is genuinely the best option available. The issues around training data and environmental concerns (even ignoring the effects of the economic bubble) are real and valid.
For the record, I do not use AI or support AI use, but I recognize that things are shifting and it will likely become a permanent tool. Hopefully the ethical issues will be ironed out before it’s too entrenched. I suspect once regulation is in place and the bubble pops, what survives will be much more sane.
also recognize that we live in an era where it’s impossible to have completely ethical consumption
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do our best to strive towards that goal. And speaking up when you see something so incredibly unethical take over everything is like the least people can do.
I agree, but I also believe in picking your battles. I am vegetarian, but not vegan, despite desiring to be. I drive a gas car. I own personal electronics and clothing manufactured less than ideally or using components sourced from exploited communities in the global South. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t really stand by boycotting or shaming those that approach a complicated and ethically questionable technology in the most moral way possible. Anyone that works in development will tell you that AI is simply going to be a staple part of the industry going forward, because it enables developers to spend vastly less time on writing syntactically correct code and more time on design, bugfixing, etc. The AI industry is very unethical and unregulated right now, but it is also literally the only option to solve certain novel problems. I think the reactionary attitude towards any use of AI is unproductive. We should be focusing on the people putting out insecure, sloppy, vibe-coded garbage and don’t disclose their use, not the people using AI in the most minimal and appropriate applications who actually disclose it.
I personally believe it is impossible to have no ethical issues with Ai. Despite this fact, I experiment with local Ai chat tools. I used it when coding offline, to lookup ask some questions I would have asked a real user in example code snippets if it finds any issues I couldn’t see. Or how something is achieved usually, when I’m new to some stuff. That’s basically the extend of my usage in projects so far. Even if I wanted to slop more, I couldn’t, because my hardware is weak for this task (still don’t want to).
I like it for extracting text from images and translate it, generally speaking translation with Ai is much better, I play games where I know Ai was used to create it. As you see, I’m not completely against it.
But this is me personally, and I still have these ethical thoughts and it feels dirty.
Agree. I have been tinkering with local solutions, but nothing quite fits my use case. I have messed around with the latest DeepSeek model, and it seems quite powerful. Lower training cost and energy footprint is a plus, but still is fed by the same scraped content. I suspect the ability to write syntactically correct code and expand pseudocode will be the most useful feature of AI that persists post-bubble.
As a developer, I really think the reactionary response to AI is muddying the waters. Their stated use-case seems perfectly reasonable, as their options were “shit optimization with even the unity devs clueless” or fixing the bug. AI makes a great tool for some applications. No, it should not be used to vibecode entire apps alone, but it does have the power to search and aggregate sources far, far better than humans can. It will likely take some tweaking afterwards, because their output must not be trusted, but using AI as a research tool for solving esoteric dev problems seems perfectly reasonable to me. I would much prefer we not punish the people that are fully disclosing their (very limited) use, when many of the competitors simply aren’t disclosing.
This is exactly why barely anyone discloses AI use anymore. I use AI sometimes, my colleagues use AI sometimes, everyone I know in the software industry uses Claude in some capacity. But we don’t talk about it in public because it’s become so toxic that you might as well replace a simple AI disclosure with “please witch hunt me and call months of my work vibecoded slop even if it clearly isn’t”
Most people are over AI being used in code but some people aren’t ready for it yet. I give it two years until it’s basically normalized.
The reactionary types tend not to be developers, they tend to be people who don’t really know anything about programming or 3D modelling, or how much annoying boilerplate code you have to type just to get a rectangle on the screen.
Discussion of this topic requires technically minded people, not vague feelings.
There are inherent problems with Ai, which makes any use of them regardless of what it is, problematic. Not everyone cares about the problems. Things like not respecting the license of training data, and other ethical reasons like Ai companies being responsible for the RAM and graphics cards shortage / price hikes.
If you ignore these problems, then we can have a talk about responsible usage and not doing slop. Regardless of what you think about Ai usage, I hope you at least understand and respect the opinion of those people too. Because its grounded with (good) reasons.
They did not disclose the Ai usage on the Steam page.
The Steam AI disclosure requirement only applies to certain uses fwiw
Not all LLM trainers are so caustic to the world. A few use open datasets for the vast majority of their training, like Nvidia’s Nemotron series or a few Olmo derivates.
Many LLms are also trained on shoestring budgets, with a relatively negligible environmental impact.
But are also other huge ethical concerns, like entities behind them supporting censorship, fascism and such. The erosion of the world’s mental aptitude from how it’s presented. Security, labor, hacking and spamming, and so on.
…This is the thing with discussing “AI.”
It can be as nuanced as things get, but few care. Most seem to want things in simple absolutist terms, and they aren’t interested in any nuance, especially the gamers on either side of this debate.
There is also the legal thing to solve too, if the generated code or art can be licensed at all (assuming it does not violate any intellectual property that exists already). Because our laws grant copyright to humans only, not to animals or machines. Does the human get the copyright to anything it prompts to generate?
There are so many layers of issues. I agree with your reply entirely. I also thought about mentioning those few exceptions, but the reality is that most companies creating games use these paid proprietary online models, because they are probably the best.
That just exposes how flawed the copyright system is, TBH. Licensed code (and even art) was already shakey to me, even when human made.
It is true that most are using Claude or ChatGPT, sadly. But I think it’s because they are the “default” and popular rather than for any particular performance reason, as is the case across tech.
It’s actually similar to how most professionals use Photoshop and can’t get away from it. There is one thing about Ai models, its like a web search engine that you can theoretically switch anytime. Because theses are just web interfaces and that’s a good thing. If ChatGPT goes crazy, people will instantly use something different.
Oh, absolutely. However, I also recognize that we live in an era where it’s impossible to have completely ethical consumption, and I suspect many of those most vocal against any AI use are generally being more selective towards this one topic. I personally don’t begrudge the (disclosed) use of the tech for applications where it is genuinely the best option available. The issues around training data and environmental concerns (even ignoring the effects of the economic bubble) are real and valid.
For the record, I do not use AI or support AI use, but I recognize that things are shifting and it will likely become a permanent tool. Hopefully the ethical issues will be ironed out before it’s too entrenched. I suspect once regulation is in place and the bubble pops, what survives will be much more sane.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do our best to strive towards that goal. And speaking up when you see something so incredibly unethical take over everything is like the least people can do.
I agree, but I also believe in picking your battles. I am vegetarian, but not vegan, despite desiring to be. I drive a gas car. I own personal electronics and clothing manufactured less than ideally or using components sourced from exploited communities in the global South. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t really stand by boycotting or shaming those that approach a complicated and ethically questionable technology in the most moral way possible. Anyone that works in development will tell you that AI is simply going to be a staple part of the industry going forward, because it enables developers to spend vastly less time on writing syntactically correct code and more time on design, bugfixing, etc. The AI industry is very unethical and unregulated right now, but it is also literally the only option to solve certain novel problems. I think the reactionary attitude towards any use of AI is unproductive. We should be focusing on the people putting out insecure, sloppy, vibe-coded garbage and don’t disclose their use, not the people using AI in the most minimal and appropriate applications who actually disclose it.
I personally believe it is impossible to have no ethical issues with Ai. Despite this fact, I experiment with local Ai chat tools. I used it when coding offline, to lookup ask some questions I would have asked a real user in example code snippets if it finds any issues I couldn’t see. Or how something is achieved usually, when I’m new to some stuff. That’s basically the extend of my usage in projects so far. Even if I wanted to slop more, I couldn’t, because my hardware is weak for this task (still don’t want to).
I like it for extracting text from images and translate it, generally speaking translation with Ai is much better, I play games where I know Ai was used to create it. As you see, I’m not completely against it.
But this is me personally, and I still have these ethical thoughts and it feels dirty.
Agree. I have been tinkering with local solutions, but nothing quite fits my use case. I have messed around with the latest DeepSeek model, and it seems quite powerful. Lower training cost and energy footprint is a plus, but still is fed by the same scraped content. I suspect the ability to write syntactically correct code and expand pseudocode will be the most useful feature of AI that persists post-bubble.