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John Carmack on AI in game programming
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- techpineapple 2y agoI’m trying not to sound elitist but maybe this is just plain elitist. But it seems like lowering the barrier to entry to some skills too much just gets us too much crap, _and_ worst of all changes the economics so you can’t get anything good anymore. See: the movie industry. And actually, the problem is not that my neighbor who’s passionate about video game design but makes bad games. I’m glad social media is full of that. It’s the highly capitalized content farms that flood the zone.
- dmarcos 2y agoWhat’s your opinion of Youtube? We were better off when just a few could create and distribute video at scale? There was similar criticism to yours when the printing press was invented.
- galleywest200 2y agoGood points, but it is worth considering that in both of those scenarios you listed the content within the end product is fully created by a human and not generated by a machine.
- codybontecou 2y agoThat’s severely discounting the machines used to generate the video content.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoThe machine is "compiling" the video, not taking the creative helm. That was the relationship we had for some 200 years. The machine automates and accelerates the predictable labor, and the creative heads composes and conducts the tasks. As of late, we seem to want to flip the script under the guise that "we can make more content" without considering the impact on the creative process. Not how to drive the output, but just how to make more and more. Creativity be damned. That's the issue.
- dmarcos 2y agoAI is just another form of automation that replaces more of the manual labor. Humans still driving it. How do you feel about photography that replaced portrait paintings? Or photoshop filters? Or computer animation vs hand drawn? I don't see any difference with AI. You can indeed let the AI output stuff automatically but it's as interesting as stock photography. Do you disagree with Carmack's assessment? "AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics"
- johnnyanmac 2y agoUnlike a camera, these new automation still need require paintings. That why I don't consider generative AI as true iteration. It's literally stealing the town's paintingsand using it to mash together this collage that's called "art" . Why would I call that "progress"? You're making metaphorically uglier horses, but you're boasting about breeding them faster. We wee not worried about breeding more horses to begin with. >You can indeed let the AI output stuff automatically but it's as interesting as stock photograp Yes. And stock photography had agreements with the photographer. Much of the art scraped explicity said not to. It's not interesting and potentially illegal. The worst of both worlds. >Do you disagree with Carmack's assessment? I left a top level response somewhere, but overall, c. 2025 : not really. It feels like more hype generation, and this isn't the first time he's had to be a hype man. Maybe one day, maybe before or after we get convinent VR/AR hardware. It'll be a while. And no small team is touching this stuff whike the courts battle about this. Come back to me in 5 years when the ethics is settled and the tech might be more ready. It's pretty hard to even look 5 weeks ahead in these times, let alone 5 years.
- flashgordon 2y agoYeah this is where my own internal conflict is too. May be this cheap flooding is required to bring down the cost of creation so the truly high quality games/content creates by the top 1% will be valued more (though finding would be much harder?)?
- codybontecou 2y agoWe moved from a content generation problem to a search problem.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoIt was always a search problem.
- flashgordon 2y agoYeah this was where I was getting to. Are the content enablers enabling flooding of content so now they can start selling the search tools/tactics. Wonder if this another way of creating a pandemic so you can sell a cure haha
- bryanlarsen 2y agoI think we're saying different things. In 1977 finding a good video game amongst the drek was difficult. It was a search problem in 1977, it's a search problem in 2025. Sturgeon's law. 90% of everything is, and always will be, drek.
- flashgordon 2y agoInteresting. But was the drek in 1977 because flooding the game market was "easy" (I meant to say game development was hard in 1977 - I think - so if there was really drel back then was there a high supply then that was the cause of it?
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
- fullshark 2y agoOr maybe the music industry? I feel like there's more music than ever, but none of it seems to be of much value and/or lasting cultural impact. It doesn't seem like it's gotten better with easier accessibility to tools, just there's a lot more options for you if you are a fan of a certain genre. I can see games being similar, maybe a few creative people invent new genres never seen before, or mix elements in creative ways with AI tools, but I'm guessing it will more likely mean a lot of slight variations of games that bring in money churned out quickly.
- ironman1478 2y agoI think when it comes to music, it's really disheartening to hear people say it hasn't gotten better. There is a lot of good music coming out in so many genres, but it really requires actively seeking it out.
- fullshark 2y agoI've dug pretty deep in the genres I like...it's just all slight variations imo of the work the trendsetting artists did establishing the genre in the first place as far as I can tell.
- lostmsu 2y agoYou might have just gotten older.
- hlfshell 2y agoThe issue is that as music progresses and changes so too does distribution networks. Traditional, or even nontraditional to those from the pre spotify internet days, pipelines of music discovery have been largely co-opted by industry. Outlets of organic discovery are different now - and people typically don't continually keep changing their habits enough to keep up with it. Pair this with the fact that most people settle their musical tastes to be in line with when they are experiencing the most emotionally significant time in their early lives (high school for some, college for others, etc) and the result is an assumption that A) What they encounter forms an overall opinion of "all" new music despite being the tip of the iceberg and B) It's not as good as what they grew up on
- techpineapple 2y ago> What’s your opinion of Youtube? We were better off when just a few could create and distribute video at scale? Yes, I think I would make that argument. But also I think I’m making a different argument. The game market already seems to be pretty flooded. I think many people see it as “we get more great indie games”, but I wonder if we don’t get less. That it creates more of a bipolar distribution. Triple-A relatively unaffected, and more vaporware games but it hollows out the middle. I also think that “we objected to earlier progress and it turned out ok, therefor all objections to progress are bad” is a logical fallacy.
- AstralStorm 2y agoWhat is actually showing up is more asset dumps, rather unimaginative variations on a game. Often seen as job simulator games because they're so formulaic. Sometimes you see unimaginative remixes like Palworld.
- camillomiller 2y agoThis comparison suffers from what I call “the scale fallacy”. You can’t compare disrupting technologies like this as if the scale of their impact plays no role at all. How many people’s livelihood depended on monks writing books by hand?
- emseetech 2y agoThere's a valid argument to be made there though. We possibly were better off when tastemakers managed to filter out the lowest common denominator. When you think of Youtube, you might think of pretty decent stuff but you have to remember the absolute slop like Spiderman/Elsa videos, crude ripoffs and near porn gets many, many more views than the good stuff. I'm not saying strict gatekeeping is necessary, but open systems are an absolute minefield for humanity. That's clear to me after the last 10 years or so.
- dmarcos 2y agoI don’t mind the slop. Filtering and discovery is a solvable issue. I care about tons of niche and educational content that I enjoy that would not exist if it had to be funded / approved by gatekeepers.
- emseetech 2y agoI believe it's more complicated than saying slop is required for niche and education content. That said, we've already decided that truly open systems are not viable. That was settled years ago. Now even 4chan has rules. Right now we have algorithms that promote terrible content based on automated metrics that don't make the good stuff any easier to find. Especially considering the consolidation of platforms into a few hegemonic sites. In that sense we already have gatekeeping, it's just a terrible approach to it. And for the record I mind the slop because of how easily it drowns out and eventually overtakes the good stuff. Even good, educational content feels the need to cater to the algorithm to survive. We're not at a tipping point yet, but it certainly feels we're headed in that direction. Algorithmically promoting tastemakers might be a solution. Pushing the good content to the top and burying the slop.
- AstralStorm 2y agoUnfortunately a big chunk of the public likes the taste of the slop, or is too nostalgic or reticent to try anything new. Sometimes the new thing is also unpolished and needs work, perhaps even a second artist to pick it up and make it good...
- numpad0 2y agoI think it's ok to add selective pressure whenever spammy, unethical, low-quality content starts flooding the system. Books has copyright laws and resistive book distribution channels, YouTube has Likes and moderation systems, etc. With hindsight, one of silent assumptions very common of both pro- and anti-AI arguments up to this point was as follows: because AI is potentially superhuman in arts, the existing selective pressures could inversely punish desired creativity if AI outputs were not unfairly treated. Pro-AI arguments assumed that warping the system is wrong, anti-AI assumed allowing the system go down is worse. IMO, superhuman AI didn't happen anyway, and so now AI slop problem is just spam control problem. No one was ever against punishing spams and unethical actors. It's fine and safe. We're at a postmortem phase during which we'd patch the bugs in laws and law enforcement that allowed AI companies do outlandish hacks like torrenting books and redistributing it as lossy compressed 500GB GGUF.
- keybored 2y ago> There was similar criticism to yours when the printing press was invented. A similar thing was discussed in the past, checkmate. We have this commonsense whig-history where everything became a little bit better century by century. But one could argue that the printing press makes propaganda possible. From that you get thought control by the elite. Now you ironically get an elitist outcome, or an elite-benefiting outcome. Was the printing press a net good? Maybe it’s more complicated than “more books good”.
- dmarcos 2y agoWould you go back to a pre-youtube, pre-printing press, pre-internet, pre-pick-your—favorite-tecnology that democratized content creation and distribution? I know I wouldn’t.
- keybored 2y agoI would not with the snap of a finger revert back to a time centuries ago when I have spent all my life up until now learning to live in the current one. No. Just like a tribal Papua New Guinean would not want to, with the snap of the finger, become one of the vice presidents in the American Psycho movie. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Beyond that I don’t know what there is to say about our so-called democratizing technologies when the discussion gets reduced to—and never goes beyond—those very slogans about them being democratizing. Yes. We are now free to repeat the same slogans that everyone else repeats.
- manmal 2y agoAnother example is fast fashion. It’s almost impossible to get clothing in a store that will last, say, 10 years. While in earlier decades, that was pretty normal.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoWhat's the correlation between programming skill and video game design skill? It's probably not 0 but certainly well under 1. We want good video game designers making games, not just good programmers. I get the feeling that Balatro is not a well coded game. It was coded by one person. Yet it's a great game. The world will be better with more Balatro's.
- techpineapple 2y agoI assert we get less Balatro’s this way(I don’t know Balatro specifically, but I imagine it’s a stand-in for indie-game by one developer), perhaps counter intuitively. This is a question I’ve been pondering post-2000, where are all the new Kevin Smiths? Where are all the great counter-culture indie movies? That Market has certainly not exploded post YouTube the way you might think.
- scld 2y agoThe new Kevin Smiths are on youtube.
- Pet_Ant 2y agoI mean won’t the leave the door open for people to bring value to the market by helping curate? Sifting there the turds to find diamonds? This could be the golden age of the reviewer. Yahtzee could make millions!
- itsdrewmiller 2y agoHow is the movie industry an example of this? There are great movies still coming out every year, and the main commercial trends have been around IP exploitation that may or may not be reducing movie quality but certainly not due to lower barriers to entry.
- ralusek 2y agoA world of slop increases the demand for products that help you discern.
- jasonlotito 2y agoWe've been lowering the barrier to entry for decades now. Where is the line? Some would say digital. Some have pointed to electric. Some have pointed to cars. And on and on and on. But older entertainment doesn't instantly make it better. Will there be more crap? Sure, but that's always been the case. But that also means more stuff of quality. That could mean it's hard to find the quality stuff, but that's a different issue entirely, and one mostly solved with old school stuff (reviewers, just find reviewers you mostly agree with). But in the end, good games are still released every year. And many/most of these good games wouldn't exist if the barrier to entry wasn't lowered.
- AstroBen 2y agoThere are other forces acting on the movie industry. The rise of streaming killing DVD sales, YouTube and tiktok competition for attention etc. lowered their revenue a lot leading to a lot less ability to take risks on new ideas that may or may not sell well Actually the opposite of what you think might come to happen. If you lower the barrier to entry for creating a movie, we might see a lot more creative ideas coming from people that would never have the chance before
- johnnyanmac 2y agowe already hit that point as is. At this point, I just want proper ethics around this rampant scraping going on. It's simple consent, but it seems tech still has problems reminiscent of the old games industry.
- curl-up 2y agoRelevant, I guess: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ferguess_k 2y agoI think people are arguing about two different topics on the same item: - Technological advance - Political and economical fallout once AI starts replacing a meaningful amount of jobs, and quickly Me? I'm scared. That's it.
- hlfshell 2y agoIt's only a problem if we live in a society where people's perceived value, and thus capability of living a healthy, full life, is tied to their productivity to produce profit for an increasingly shrinking pool of people and organizations. Which is what we have, hence the problem. Yes, AI has the potential to screw things up royally. But do not mistake its' exacerbation of symptoms as the true illness.
- manmal 2y ago> increasingly shrinking pool of people and organizations What do you mean, is the pool really shrinking, worldwide? I must have missed some statistics?
- hlfshell 2y agoWealth concentration and corporate consolidation.
- ferguess_k 2y agoYeah that's the political problem. Honestly, I don't see a way out of this. One way or another, it's going to be a mess.
- telchior 2y agoYou missed one: theft. When you click a button in Unity or Roblox or whatever to generate a new texture, the thing that gets generated comes from a model that could not have been built without using IP. But because it all got chucked into a blender and turned into an anonymous slurry -- and because AI is a politically important growth industry -- the people whose work went into the slurry will not benefit, at all. They'll never see a dime, while the companies selling the slurry will get billions. A lot of those people are the exact ones whose job will be replaced, which is extra painful when you know it was your own work that was used to replace you. Although in a sense it's pointless to bring up because that milk is already spilt, and it ain't gonna get back into the container.
- torlok 2y agoLooks like a run-of-the-mill opinion. What's the story here?
- wjholden 2y agoIt really is a pretty measured and reasonable take.
- simonw 2y agoJohn Carmack has earned more attention for his opinions than most people, especially when it comes to game development.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoIt's a well known developer paying lip service to people here who are strongly for LLM and generative art. Not much otherwise.
- kmeisthax 2y agoJohn, this isn't a power tool. This is a copy machine. And while I don't have anything against copy machines per se, that's not how it's being sold to the public. The public is being told this copy machine is a really good power tool that can do lots of things. So what creatives are hearing is "your work is interchangeable with a slightly smarter copy machine, so stop paying creatives and just rip them off".
- kleiba 2y agoI think you're wrong. Anyone who argues that LLMs are "just stochastic parrots" fundamentally doesn't understand what neural networks do. The power does not come from sampling from a distributions over words but from the multi-dimensional representation. And it is that that enables LLMs to be more than just mechanisms that produce copies of material previously seen in training.
- Findecanor 2y agoDoes it matter how the data is processed? You're still just saying that while stealing a lot from one person is wrong, stealing only a little but from many people would be OK. And the people who are stolen from don't agree with you.
- AstroBen 2y agoIs an artist finding inspiration from another's work stealing? Creativity is very rarely building something completely new from nothing at all - it's the end result of inspiration and a merging of ideas Which seems to be exactly what these models are doing Satisfactory the game didn't "steal" from Factorio - they took the idea of an automated factory game from them, brought it into a 3d world instead of 2d, and pulled in some other ideas, perhaps from other games. This is a hell of a lot closer to stealing than an LLM taking 0.001% each from 100000 images to create something new.. and yet no-one would ever call it such It's disturbing because it's automated on an insane scale, not because of a solid legal ground
- nh23423fefe 2y ago
- sysrestartusr 2y ago> It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone Except that the quality of mass-farmed, labor-saving tech produced 'stuff' is approaching a level of literal shit and the methods have poisoned air, water and soil to a horribly dumb degree. Will the same happen to the analog/digital soil, water, air in SWE, game dev and content creation? Likely. It started a while ago, before the big AI boom and that's what young creators and devs see in their youth and get inspired, stimulated and motivated by: toxic, low quality shit that they have to shove down their throats and into their minds. "I can do better" is not something we see a lot anywhere; not in cinemas, not on the news, not in SaaS and sure as hell not in VC culture or portfolio capitalism. Next generations brains are wired and minds nourished by the current environment. And we've been fucking up for a while, even if we leave out politics, news, culture and how we systemically perceive, portrait, never defuse and always escalate conflicts in a slow burn fashion. All that wires brains, reinforces behaviors and thought patterns and perception and nourishes minds. I like the comparison to farming. The end game is displayed in movies and games alike and it's always dire, dry and satisfies no one. There's no case against AI, though, but a momentous one against experienced, educated people who have witnessed the shit show long enough and don't need predictive algorithms to know what's coming. How silly it is to 'let it happen', to 'let it be'.
- morgango 2y agoThere is a fundamental business challenge at work -- games these days are "worth less". Not having no value, but being of less worth to investors and companies to invest in. This is simple fundamental economics, since game prices are not growing as fast as their input costs. For example, I spent $30 for Atari video games in the 1980s and it was a lot less expensive to produce. That game would cost $90 today with inflation. For a comprehensive breakdown, see https://www.gamesindustry.biz/are-video-games-really-more-expensive#:~:text=Even%20the%20%2469.99%20games%20that,the%20years%20in%20relative%20terms https://www.gamesindustry.biz/are-video-games-really-more-ex... If your costs are increasing and you can't raise your price then your industry is being commoditized, or at least in a real quandary about how to move forward. AI could be a way to slow the huge, up-front costs that go into AAA games and help limit the risk to making new ones. If this subject interests you, there is a great long-form interview with Matthew Ball on Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-matthew-ball-about-the-gaming-slump/ https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-matthew-ball-... Anyway, Carmack is right on the money on this one.
- vinkelhake 2y ago> That game would cost $90 today with inflation. Speaking of $90 - Nintendo recently announced the Switch 2 and physical copies of the games will be just that, $90.
- manmal 2y ago> For example, I spent $30 for Atari video games in the 1980s and it was a lot less expensive to produce. That game would cost $90 today with inflation. And the Nintendo Switch has sold 5x as many consoles as did Atari. Likely a similar scale for games sold. Nintendo very likely makes more in total than Atari did, even with lower prices.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI don't know, maybe. The economies of scale and 40 years of iteration make it hard to compare apples to apples like that. As well as the fact that Nintendo's game team went from maybe 5-10 Japanese designers that can fit in a garage (well, not a Japanese garage) to multiple thousands of employees focusing on different sectors of the business. The main surprise is that they can bs surprisingly lean with their core development teams to this day. Apparently Super Mario Wonder had a core team of around 20 devs.
- 0x20cowboy 2y agoUsing AI tools in a professional code base, currently, seems a bit dangerous to me. However I have changed my mind on using it for vibe coding. I used to type in program source code from magazines and had no idea what I was doing until something broke then I had to fix it. If I am honest, that was how I learned how to code. AI will either teach that kind of thing to the new generation, or coding will become irrelevant. Either way, I think that’s good. But I still don’t want my bank or airplane guidance software using it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- whazor 2y agoAI makes it too easy to create tech debt. In contrast, source code from a magazine is limited in size. But when project becomes too big, it can also become discouraging.
- 0x20cowboy 2y ago100%. I am not a fan of AI generating code in a professional context (for a number of reasons), but for side projects and as a learning tool I’ve become less yells-at-clouds about it.
- LorenDB 2y agoFinally somebody with a sane take.
- Workaccount2 2y agoJust wait until we start creating user friendly IDE's that automate the technical moat needed right now to go from code to running program. Recently I (Gemini 2.5?) created an android app that calculates options prices given different sets of parameters set by the user. The hardest part of doing that is doing all the android studio leg work to get the pieces in place to eventually compile the code into an app and put it on your phone. No real reason that cannot be automated to "Paste the text the LLM gave you here, and the app icon will show up on your phone in a minute" right now. I'm almost positive it is already being worked on somewhere.
- brador 2y agoPasting it here: “I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers. My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance. Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers. Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering. AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics. Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers. The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost. Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.” - John Carmack
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance. Given the importance even today of understanding assembly compilation towards low level game performance, I'm surprised he'd say this. It wasn't rendered obsolete, it was abstracted away from most of the stack. Meanwhile you need to understand assuembly even more intimately to look under the hood of a modern day game or game engine. esoteric does not mean outdated. >AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics. Okay, I'll believe it when I see it. You said the same about Oculus. I'm not even doubting that VR will evolve to a revolution one day. But technology's march can be slow at times. And that's one of my top 3 problems; I think like VR's hardware barrier, AI is hitting barriers on how iterations with LLMs work. It seems industry's been brute forcing it and we clearly hit a wall already. But we haven't rethought the approach yet. We're just promising and prpmising. >there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers. Depends on how legal proceedings go. At least Quake is Open Source and kinda free ( I think). The vast majority of games probbaly won't let you train that easily. They spent decades making it as hard as possible to back them up, after all. >“don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy. If industry is going to fire you anyway, it's the only move. If industry worked on fostering workers instead of replacing them, they wouldn't be worried. Instead it's finally starting to unionize to protect itself.
- wink 2y agoI'm more confused but why seems to be ignoring (or just being modest?) the technical feats of Quake and Quake 2 and (what I read to be) some sort of "well we just somehow made it work, but the game development (maybe artistic) was the thing" - and I mean, he wrote them - but for Q1 and Q2 working so flawlessly, not crashing, good netcode... for the huge amount of multiplayer I think the revolutionary tech was more important than the art style, even if it pains me to say it. We also played it long after better looking games had come out. I doubt you'd get the easy moddability into an engine with AI, one of the huge points for the longevity.