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.
Good shit. A carefully thought out handcrafted experience will always be better than interactive slop.
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.
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!
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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Humans are confident statistical black boxes. Art doesnt have to be made by a human to be aspiring.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.