Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being 'AI free'
theverge.com197 points by 01-_- 7 days ago
197 points by 01-_- 7 days ago
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
Yup, and these are targeting somewhat immature consumers going for the fomo and marketing narratives.
Ever heard the japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi? It's the philosophy of beauty in imperfections.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
This was created with intentionality. I forgot to link to Corridor's analysis video: https://youtu.be/ct_7FU-DmfY?t=1413
As they explain this required tons of work to tell the AI what to do. It's sad that in the sibling comment this is marked as lazy.
What do you mean "once people know" - that video just looks like AI slop from the get go.
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.
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.
I've noticed this, too, and have likened it to haircuts: If you gave yourself a haircut, you don't say so, because it inevitably opens the door to a level of scrutiny and criticism that it wouldn't otherwise.
People are just going to lie about using AI and honestly that's fine. An even older idiom is that you don't want to see how the sausage gets made. Not if you enjoy sausage.
I don't think it's fine. Don't lie about your work.
Lie was probably the wrong word. Secrecy about how work is done is and has always been normal. Not saying anything at all if you're not obligated to is totally fair and, yes, fine. AI doesn't change that.
We frown on people who pass off something they didn’t do or make as the fruit of their labor.
AI isn’t good enough yet to make things autonomously, so someone who harnesses AI to make something can, at least in my eyes, claim they made it (AI isn’t just a tool).
If and when AI becomes autonomous, the human ceases to be the creator in my view since they are no longer in the creation loop. Then you cannot pretend you made the thing.
> Not saying anything at all if you're not obligated to is totally fair and, yes, fine
Which is why we need regulations that create obligations to disclose AI usage
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.
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.
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.
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!
> or 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
I don't think this is true; we've had games build dynamic systems using procedural generation long before generative AI. Look at something like Dwarf Fortress.
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.
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.
I've not seen it, but am curious to dig deeper, can you post some links please?
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
But world building and graphic assets are repetitive, time-consuming work.
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.
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.
This observation seems innately vulnerable to sampling error and confirmation bias. "Good" generative AI almost by definition is difficult to notice.
The stochastic nature, minimal amount of care required to get something going, and the inefficiency, just to name a few.
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.
They are against AI code now as well. AI anything is toxic to the general pop, which is why some companies are asking not to be forced to reveal their use of it.
The real issue is that people's livelihoods are being automated. This can be fixed with sensible policies and things like universal healthcare and universal basic income.
There are some additional policies I'd like involving AI automation gains compensating workers losing their jobs to AI, and laws making all AI open-source due to their nature of being trained on public data.
With those policies, it wouldn't hurt so much to lose your job to AI. I would think there would be leas hostility at that point.
I must say it is all very confusing to me. If someone likes a game, why does the origin of assets matter? It is the same thing I see with crypto. It is just code and data. People putting value on it doesn't change what it is. Yet now there are all these regulations because enough people assigned enough value so the code suddenly becomes regulated.
AI is just code and data. It doesn't make sense how offended people are by it. No one is being for to use AI. Sure, it is changing how our society functions, but this isn't the fault of AI, it is the fault of bad systems. We have bad economic systems, bad political systems, bad leaders across the board, and bad distribution of ownership. AI isn't causing these problems, it is just amplifying them.
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.
Also AI could also generate some code to enable the artists to make their own unique games. There will be loads of creative types out there who can unlock some neat concepts with AI support
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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
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.
As a non-English native-speaker, I strongly prefer no localization to bad localization.
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.
The "hand made" era of software
And this when "Handmade Hero" was abandoned over two years ago, after not really getting anywhere over the course of 9 years.
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.
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.
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.
Haven't you kept up with the social media status, and the conferences that came out of it?
Huh, I didn't realize he'd abandoned Handmade Hero! I somehow assumed he eventually shipped it.
Artisanal!
I remember when artisanal Doritos came out. That felt like the end of that.
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
> 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!
You do realize you can copy digital stuff as much as you want? :)
Is that fact meant to be hidden or put aside here? I am not sure I see that.
Oh no not that way. Small batches so the high quality of software is quite unneccesary because software can be copied infinite times. Sorry, bad joke.
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.
I'm surprised nobody's touched the ethical angle of this yet.
Like fairtrade... this code was produced without exploiting enslaved human knowledge ;)
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
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)?”
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.
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
"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.
"Normal" people already hate AI being chowed down their throat. The won't mind AI, when it doesn't feel like AI. As soon as it does, that is a bad not a good feature.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
I wish YouTube videos had an “AI free” label so I can choose.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
All science and art comes from people before you.
There's a term for that
"Built on the shoulders of giants"
I think the next decade will be one that values anything provably authentic and it will keep becoming more and more rare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets" of 1950s yawn
I’ve determined I hate AI. Luddite reasons, but they’re mine.
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.
I give it a year or two and people will stop caring
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.
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.
A very, very weak sales pitch. I've seen more things start prominently displaying that they're "handmade" 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.
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.
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...
> search has become useless in the last couple years.
google.com has become useless in the last couple years, all other search sites are doing fine or improving.
Thanks for the input, I still don't think there's a really clear distinction though :/
Like the fact that it's impossible to search without AI now is sort of my point, since the AI-free badge is described as projects being completely free of AI assistance, which only seems possible if you go completely off the grid while developing.
And how would one distinguish blindly vs non-blindly copy-pasting? If you use a line of code written by Claude or ChatGPT, and it works, and you need this functionality, are you supposed to rewrite it in different syntax? That seems equivalent to having AI generate art for you and then copying it by hand with different colors or slight modifications, which is still using AI imo.
I want to declare my own work AI-free because it almost totally is, but I feel like I'd be dishonest because I've definitely asked LLMs for help before and incorporated their code. Even if it was just a few lines and insights and I made changes here and there. And at least some of the assets I've used must have had AI help too. Sorites paradox kinda
I don’t dare to copy paste. But then I do relatively niche stuff and the “AI” fucks me over every second answer. And I don’t know which so I have to take everything with a sack of salt.
It probably feels different if you’re in the JavaScript ecosystem where the “AI” is trained on suboptimal and full of security hole tutorials from content mills.
Reminds me of those "carefully and entirely handcrafted TV sets" of 1950s
I hate to say this but the indie game developer community is in some local minima where tribal in-group signaling takes precedence over thinking about the consumer. The industry has developed a siege mentality and is entering a "rooting out traitors" phase. The AI thing is only one example of this self-policing; there are many. I really hope that the industry can become more free spirited, less intense and angry. I love the games and the people but the industry is not in a healthy place right now.
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.
That's "GMO-free" kind of marketing, not a good thing
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Most of the focus on this isn't the code. It's the art and music that make up the experience.
This is discussed right in the article.
> For Kanaris-Sotiriou, the question of adopting the use of gen AI to make games was an easy one to answer. “The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork [...] are unfair,” he says.
I personally think using AI assistance for the code is much less intrusive than using AI for the art and music -- the code isn't as directly experienced by the player as the art.
Much of it comes from people feeling challenged and threatened by the new tech so they construct elaborate philosophies to justify how they feel, but this rapidly crumbles when you look closer. For instance, artists felt threatened by generative AI and came up with a narrative about copyright stuff. But then Adobe comes along with generative AI which doesn't have the copyright issue and how do those same artists respond? With a loud "fuck you" to Adobe, because the root of their objection was never copyright but rather what the new technology would do to their established careers.
In this atmosphere, I think it's easy to perceive an implied rejection of and threat to AI generated code, even if the focus is on art assets, because people aren't being entirely direct and forthright about exactly what it is they're upset about, and that makes for a landmine field.
Thank God the benevolent Adobe shareholders have swooped in to protect us from people who have learned a skill.
So is it about protecting the commercial value of artistic skills, as I said, or is it about copyright?
Wait, how exactly did Adobe create noninfringing models?
Edit: not a full explanation, but https://www.mikechambers.com/blog/post/2025-09-24-generative... ; this is subtly different. It's a claim that the model will not create infringing output, but that's not the same as "this model was trained only on content which was licensed for the purpose of AI training".
(there's also a discussion of the idea that the output of a model may not be copyrightable at all, which will cause a whole second set of problems for commercial users)
According to them:
Adobe Firefly models are trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe Stock content is covered under a separate license agreement, and Adobe compensates contributors for the use of that content.
We do not mine the web or video hosting sites for content. We only train on content where we have rights or permission to do so.
Artists have been saying "fuck you" to Adobe long before llms and will continue to do so until the company dies.
A very performative "fuck you", it has to be noted, as these rebellious artists still, most certainly, actively use Adobe products.
Yeah nah. The core reason they’re pissed is the blatant theft of their work to train these models without compensation or permission (the age old “if it’s on the web it’s free to use” bullshit argument), with “artistic merit” being a distant, but still critical, second.
If you can actually write stories or create art, you can see the “seams” in generative content and it gets to be quite nauseating. The fact it was trained on your own output by a trillion-dollar megacorp via theft while you scrape money for rent is the injury to the former’s insult.
Yeah, no. The example of Adobe neatly illuminates what's actually going on. Arguments about copyright are the Motte; a seemingly defensible position people can fall back to when challenged. Instead of defending the position of opposing non-infringing models, which Adobe created, AI opponents ignore that argument and fall back on copyright (you just did this, ignored the point about Adobe and reiterated the Motte arguments.)
Now, as for "seams" in generated out: insofar those seem are visible to the general public and not only those with artistic talent of their own, the seams are reassuring to artists concerned about tge future commercial value of their talents. But insofar as those seams are only apparent to the artistically trained, that concerns artists because if the buyers of art won't necessarily perceive it.
Arc Raiders and The Finals got some controversy lately for using AI voice acting. Those games don't have any "normal" vocal performances.
Arc Raiders has 160k Steam reviews (which is a lot) and 90% of them are positive. It also has an estimated >4M owners despite a high price tag and is currently the #4 most played game on Steam globally. The AI nay-sayers are a vocal minority - and likely just terminally online Twitter people that do not even play the game, the rest of the players are too busy enjoying the game regardless of whether it's made with AI or not.
What do you mean by "high price"?
"Normal" price for a AAA game is more like $60, and Arc is 40.
Sure, indie/2D can be had for less (like Factorio or Silksong), but I would not expect an <$40 price tag for a 3D game like that.
Helldivers 2 which services the same niche goes for the same price.
I think it's more that the use of AI is in an unimportant part of the game. They could have zero AI voice overs without impacting the game in a meaningful manner. They're pretty bad though and I've definitely seen them getting mocked.
Is that some multiplayer only thing?
I bet no one listens to the "AI" voices, they have the game muted and chat on Discord with non AI generated humans...
The only controversy was from the dying games journalism complex trying to manufacture the controversy to save their sinking ship of exploiting gamers and developers for their political activism. The sales figures herald their impending demise.
I haven't seem a game voice every fucking item pickup or mini location callout like arc raiders, so it's a quality win for me. I didn't care about the voice performance of "lets head to the olive grove" ever
Those games are shooter-slop anyway.
I can't remember the last time I cared about voice lines in Quake or Unreal Tournament or any other multiplayer shooter.
It's not an RPG or a rich-story genre game, so who cares.
I don't know if that's what you were already referring to, but for me, the shout-outs for "Double Kill, Multi Kill, Ultra Kill, MONSTER KILL!!!" account at this stage for probably a majority of the nostalgia for the original Unreal Tournament. Of course it didn't hurt that the game was phenomenal and a great fit for its time, but still, I think that the quality of voice lines can make or break a game.
I kinda see your point. The warm feeling of knowing a real human told me "die, bitch!" isn't a feeling I've ever taken away from playing UT.
On the other hand, lots of AI-generated VO is very easy to spot, and sounds awful. It stands to reason it could meaningfully take away from even a completely plot-free game. If I were a voice actor, I'd feel insulted that anyone would find it comparable to my work.
It really depends on the voice. For some reason, AI impersonations of Dagoth Ur are remarkably accurate even though Dagoth Ur has only a few sentences of dialogue. I've listened to several audiobooks made with his voice and they're very close to dead on, just with some cadence issues and occasional heterophone fumbling.
Other voices cloned with the same tech are usually much worse. There's something about the nature of Dagoth Ur's voice in particular that makes it work well.
I don't remember Dagoth Ur's voice but I'm guessing it had effects applied to it to sound ominous? So it was artificial already.
I could be wrong but I think it was just voice acting. However he sounds very eloquent speaks clearly with good pronunciation.
No, if anyone is wrong it's me. I played Morrowind ages ago. I also have an OpenMW playthrough ongoing (for the last 4 years) but I haven't made it to Dagoth Ur yet :)
> I also have an OpenMW playthrough ongoing (for the last 4 years) but I haven't made it to Dagoth Ur yet :)
You can make it to Dagoth Ur in about 4 minutes :)