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Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramific

Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.

virtue3 2mo ago
you can test case / bug fix your way through bad code. You can't always do that with art. Also - the playerbase is sometimes ok with buggy games; for example - the first ARK game was a buggy nightmare, but it was still awesome and fun (it used the unreal engine visual development system...)
tsimionescu 2mo ago
Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).
- rdbl27 2mo ago
  The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
  - danaris 2mo ago
    Why would you say that? On the contrary; it seems to me that caring about its authorship even though the product may be outwardly indistinguishable from something a human could have made shows that human authorship is, in fact, precisely what they value. Are you trying to make an argument that "if they really valued human authorship so highly, they'd devote their every waking moment to learning what every possible method is to tell when a given work was created by an LLM" or something? Because I would think that was fairly obviously bullshit by this point. For one thing, there's plenty of ways to make LLM-generated works (especially smaller, simpler ones) that are 100% indistinguishable from something human-created. (This is especially true in text formats, where the amount of information, and thus the possible failure modes, available in the output is smaller than in images or video.)
  - picofarad 2mo ago
    That doesn't seem to follow.
    - threatofrain 2mo ago
      The degree to which you can discern is the degree to which you can meaningfully ask for human vs AI.
      - tyromaniac 2mo ago
        Art consists of decisions made by the artist that are interpretable by the audience. Automatically generated imagery lacks this, but still presents a fascimille of it. The intention and thoughtfulness of the artist is encoded within their creation, and when there is no artist this is lost.
        tough 2mo ago
        ai art usage isn't a binary black or white thing as most imply
        threatofrain 2mo ago
        And the degree which this is discerned... sometimes AI art wins contests.
        tyromaniac 2mo ago
        Do you understand how that addresses none of what I talked about?
        threatofrain 2mo ago
        It is a direct refutation.
        tyromaniac 2mo ago
        Art is not a contest, and the lie is not one of quality
  - nucleogenesis 2mo ago
    I can tell you I hate more than anything when I’m lied to. Some AI art could be fantastic (haven’t seen anything yet but I’m sure it’ll happen someday). I don’t want something you prompted an AI for because genuinely I could just do that myself. The barrier to entry is nil. I’m not interested in the idea an artist has I’m interested in how they execute it. If they executed it through human effort then I place a much much higher value on that. Same as I would if someone selling a hand forged a knife rather than a mass produced cut out. Even if the human-made item is lower quality I’d prefer it by a mile if for no other reason than I know someone’s love and effort went into it. I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated. The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made. Point is - the output quality fundamentally doesn’t matter. It’s principle, not the output quality, that guides most people in avoiding AI art.
    - zeryx 2mo ago
      If you saw two paintings and one was painted with the blood and guts of the artist, and another was a nice oil painting - would you value the former more regardless of aesthetic merit?
    - maccard 2mo ago
      Generally anti AI person who is a game dev here: > The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made. Where’s the line? Is using tools in maya and photoshop to rapidly speed up asset generation ok? > I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated. Do you feel the same about PCG?
      - pmontra 2mo ago
        Procedural Content Generation?
      - teamonkey 2mo ago
        PCG is authored, its usage has intention.
  - jubilanti 2mo ago
    > The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all. By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all. Or: the fact that (some) people can't tell between food that is marketed to them as "healthy" and food that actually makes them healthy, is strong evidence that healthy food was not what they value at all. Neither follows. Both blame the victim of a lie.
    - deleted 2mo ago
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    - vidarh 2mo ago
      > By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all. Well, no? Most people don't value gold for intrinsic attributes of the metal, but for the market-assigned value of it or perceived status. I think GP overstated the point, but it's clear that a lot of people who object to AI authored content are objecting not because of the intrinsic attributes of the content but because of their emotions on the subject. That doesn't make it invalid. If someone really doesn't want to consume AI generated content, then so be it. But I also think the people making a big deal out of this seriously overestimate how deeply most people care. I suspect most people care only to the extent that the quality is lacking. I'd justify that view with your example: People keep eating unhealthy food despite knowing it's bad. And as another example, we keep buying things we can't be sure is ethically sourced. We're willing to look past a whole lot. The same way "Made in ..." labels were originally protectionist measures, I suspect disclosure requirements etc. will seriously backfire when it turns out most people stop caring the moment the quality is usually good enough.
  - DicIfTEx 2mo ago
    Imagine I sell you something and you pay me in cash. The notes look authentic, but I later discover that they are conterfeits. It would be absurd to claim that your successful passing-off deception demonstrates that I don't value money at all.
    - scarmig 2mo ago
      Whatever the morality involved, it's an unstable norm. There can be good actors who use AI and disclose, and good actors who don't use AI and don't disclose. There are bad actors, however, who will use AI and not disclose. The entire discourse will be flooded with non-disclosers accusing each other of AI use (particularly, the bad actors will accuse everyone else of AI use, to flood the zone with shit), and there will be no way for a consumer to distinguish good from bad. Bad actors will prevail economically. See e.g. corporate green and rainbow washing, Amazon marketplace, organic food.
      - jhanschoo 2mo ago
        I agree that the current culture of disclosure is unstable. Nevertheless, I think that there will still eventually be a mechanism to verify the degree and manner to which AI was involved in the production of art, though perhaps with very different economic scale and distribution channels. Speculating, perhaps there may be an "organic food" niche of mass media art.
    - OroPla 2mo ago
      If you find a counterfeit bill, you experience a loss. Imagine if instead of a counterfeit bill you got a counterfeit movie. The quality is exactly like the real deal, but it's an illegal copy. You find out after the fact. Does this affect your enjoyment of the movie? You've been bamboozled either way, but in one scenario you lose out and in another scenario the people selling the movie lose out.
  - deleted 2mo ago
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  - majormajor 2mo ago
    You don't get to play the game before you pay for it. Do you want to have to go ask for refund after refund after noticing it's yet-another-AI-slop-cookie-cutter-lookalike several hours in?
    - Calazon 2mo ago
      Being unable to tell a game is garbage without personally playing it is a problem with or without AI. Though AI is vastly increasing the amount of slop out there, for sure.
  - jayd16 2mo ago
    Just because it takes effort or time to tell a fake doesn't mean its not important. If you buy a fake that looks extremely close but falls apart a month later, that doesn't mean you don't care. If art is visually polished in some way such that quick quality cues are handled that doesn't mean that it will actually have a meaning or a message. You won't know until you have a chance to fully consume it.
    - rdbl27 2mo ago
      The AI product doesn't fall apart (at least, not a good AI product.) The proposition is that is functionally indistinguishable from a human product to the extent that _there is no way to tell_, absent a formal and seperate disclosure. It's a Turing test for art -- and the machines are winning, at scale.
  - deleted 2mo ago
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- HeavyStorm 2mo ago
  As a professional coder, I both agree and deeply hate this position. And code indeed has its values. See all algorithms invented by Carmack like BSPs, z-fail, etc.
  - bob1029 2mo ago
    > See all algorithms invented by Carmack The problem is very few (none?) of them actually were. He was just a wizard at applying them. This furthers the utilitarian argument.
  - bitwize 2mo ago
    Carmack didn't invent BSP trees. He read about them in a paper and produced an efficient implementation that could render a 2D map in 3D using integer math on 386-class CPUs. He has always envied the mathematicians who actually come up with this stuff. I think he did come up with "Carmack's Reverse" (a dynamic lighting algorithm) independently. But not even the "fast inverse square root" was his; that, oddly enough, came from what is currently probably the premiere AI company: NVIDIA. But his implementations of these algorithms were indeed beautiful. I suppose AI could do something similar today, because the likes of Carmack had come before. But using AI for code is hobbling the creation of new Carmacks; and humans have the remarkable property that they can learn from other humans and still push the boundaries forward. When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs.
    - esafak 2mo ago
      > When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs. I don't think is so. Models continuing to improve by learning from other models is a counterexample.
ungovernableCat 2mo ago
My guess is from the "cheapness" association. AI generated images and video are used a lot in scams, really cheap and bad marketing, waste of time clickb8 videos and stories etc. I can't speak for everyone but my brain associates it with that and when I see AI tells my immediate thought goes: "is this trying to lie/cheat me in some way, did they really put in effort and care in this?". Code is more opaque, an ugly unmaintainable mess can still create a decently functioning game experience from the player's pov. There's infamous examples of some very shitty code still resulting in games people adore. Ultimately your point stands, if the product is genuinely good and appeals to people, they will like to buy it and play it no matter how the sausage was actually made. AI generation just ruins the signal though, it's tougher to find the jewels among the sea of slop and that'll affect how consumers judge your product.
semiquaver 2mo ago
Because people can tell the difference between AI art and human art. Not true for logic unless you are incompetent.
- drdaeman 2mo ago
  Agree on the substance, but hate the way things ended up colloquially called. AI art is human art. It is based on human intent and choices (and in non-trivial cases it’s a lot of effort to get the machine to produce something that resembles a artist’s mental image), and the rest is mathematically sourced from human art. I strongly suspect the only difference is in level of decision making, where details that aren’t explicitly planned are randomly generated rather than chosen (consciously or not). Or unable to be planned - refining the generation results is the most difficult part. Which translates to that “sloppy” image. Humans can detect sloppiness, not “AI”.
  - vintermann 2mo ago
    Humans detect mode collapse. If there was one artist making art in the style of AI (by hand), he'd be no more annoying than say Reg Mombassa, Guy Delisle or Tony DiTerlizzi or anyone else drawing in an idiosyncratic, easy to recognize way.
    - drdaeman 2mo ago
      Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I think this would be true if "AI" art would have a limited set of distinct styles - and it surely does not. I agree - there are a few distinct neuroslop styles from major models, and those trigger aversion. But that's not the full picture. There's an insane amount of fine-tunes out there (be it base models or LoRAs), that drastically vary in styles they produce. "AI" art can look very different, and I still think the only common property to it is sloppiness, lack of intentional attention to the fine details.
nucleogenesis 2mo ago
The most widespread ramification I think is just a continued disintegration of shared trust in the public square. If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs. It’s just a matter of principle. Some of the evilest people on earth are the ones who own, operate, and directly benefit from the commercial proliferation of these tools. They commit crimes against us but see no consequence for which national-level politicians they’ve been sure to own. They’re aggressive in how they buy and corrupt local governments against the wishes of their constituents and the burden of responsibility is diffused because it’s not Anthropic buying your city council, it’s some other corp who focuses on building and operating power sinks that ruin entire neighborhoods and drive up their natural resource costs. The reasons to hate AI (the industry as opposed to the technology) are impossible to ignore unless you keep your head buried firmly in the sand. If one’s moral compass suggests that building a business on deceit is okay then I suspect they don’t particularly care about all of the externalities anyway.
- galangalalgol 2mo ago
  If the difference between me getting to enjoy some solo developer's vision or not is whether they use the ai, I'll ignore it. Not everyone who can create a great gameplay experience can code, draw, or create music, and the margins can preclude having three different people. The problem you are pointing out is that ai is allowing a repetition of "Engels' pause" where capital accrues all the benefits of automation. Back then the unrest was resolved with workhouses and shipping people to Australia. Also shooting them in the streets. It is hard to predict how that will end up this time.
- lotsofpulp 2mo ago
  >If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to zero is bad? >If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs. Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to a number greater than one is acceptable? >It’s just a matter of principle. I am having trouble understanding the principle. If I interpreted correctly, then what is special about reducing number of employees to 0 rather than reducing them to some other amount.
_aavaa_ 2mo ago
That’s how double standards work, there often isn’t a clear reason. The art and audio is somehow seen as more important and something only humans should de in a game than the code and design, you know the actual game portion of the game.
- smcameron 2mo ago
  I recently was sent patches for my open source space game[1] that added cascaded shadow mapping[1] and gravitational lensing[3] for black holes, both things that I've wanted for years, but found too difficult to tackle. The patches were made with Claude Opus doing pretty much all the work, guided by a human. The quality of the patches was, in my estimation, pretty damn good. It didn't do weird things, it used the infrastructure already present, it looked like what I wish I could have written. It was clearly not plagiarized in bulk, in as much as it was so well integrated with my existing code, though I imagine all CSM code/shaders and gravitational lensing shaders tend to look pretty similar, or at least do similar things. It was eye-opening to find out that Claude was capable of doing such a thing. Neither of these changes affect the game play, they are both purely aesthetic in their effects, without introducing anything which might be called "art" in a traditional sense, unless you count crudely modeling the behavior of light in shaders and C code as "art", but at that point the distinction between code and art vanishes. I had previously had a "no-ai" policy in my codebase, just as a kind of over-reaction, and kind of, "if I ban it, then I don't have to think about it" response. But these patches... after studying them, there's just no way I wasn't accepting them. [1] https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
- otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
  AI slop is cringe and bad. (From an artistic point of view.) You can't force people to like it.
  - _aavaa_ 2mo ago
    Nobody is talking about forcing people to like it. But people hate AI art on principle, even if it’s as good as people. And those same people don’t care about the AI code in the same games.
deleted 2mo ago
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justinhj 2mo ago
As a former game coder who worked before there were game engines the attitude depresses me. Game programming was an inventive and creative art and the models that are spewing out barely playable imitations of games are using all that code we put out there, just as they are using all the art. Same is true of game designs. I think we should be making games with AI however. I just don't think art is special; we have all been robbed and now we should all use the new tools that are the result of that robbery.
Narishma 2mo ago
Because code is invisible to the end user while art is right in their face.
to11mtm 2mo ago
When you're playing a game, you don't -usually- see, let alone care about the underlying code, you care about what it does. At least in certain genres, the use of AI art (or worse, writing) can become obvious to the player, and it winds up breaking whatever level of immersion that existed. There's also the issue where it causes the 'signal/noise' ratio to go out of whack; Using Visual Novels as an example, the amount of shovelware has increased by at least one order of magnitude. You can still have a VN with good enough writing, that 'AI Art' can be forgiven; and some devs actually do that to get started, i.e. they are hoping the project gets enough interest and support that they can go ahead and pay for an actual artist.
vkou 2mo ago
> Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? There's no good reason for it. Nobody seems to piss on an artist who leans on AI for the programming side of their game, whereas when it's the other way around... The consistent position is to condemn all of it, or to only focus on the quality of the outputs. AI-gen art looks like shit, and always requires an artist to fix it post. (Just like letting an AI vibe-code it's way to a finished program with no programmer oversight will inevitably produce a large pile of shit.)
numpad0 2mo ago
A lot of people are confused and/or behave defensive and hallucinate copyright issues(which is real, but IMO not the reason why artistic or creative AI contents aren't accepted). It's just not good enough. AI art generators aren't used in porn industry much. That should tell enough about quality and value of those. Bad VHS tapes were worse than YouTube 144p, and still totally fine for that industry. We're almost as far away from viability of AI art as we are from reliable self driving cars. AI code generation is simply good enough. It might spit out GPL or Classified codes, but a lot of code just works. So they're widely accepted. AI translations and text interpretations are good enough too. READMEs are okay but barely. People are quick to point out Claude isms and reach for dislikes. "That's not just a double standard - it is a concrete indication that code and text are not the same" or whatever.
- DiscourseFan 2mo ago
  >We're almost as far away from viability of AI art as we are from reliable self driving cars. Have you been in a self-driving car?
  - devmor 2mo ago
    Have you driven around them? Waymos have caused me more near misses in the last month than I can recall in a year of driving in Atlanta.
- goosejuice 2mo ago
  I agree art lags text, but it's not that it isn't good enough, it's that it isn't controllable and it lacks expression that comes from an innately human thing. Self driving cars are pretty fucking good, that's not doing the work you think it's doing.
  - numpad0 2mo ago
    I'd argue it's not even that. AI generated data all has malocious/hostile undertones that affect sanity of both users and viewers. The situation appears to be getting better especially in Chinese open weight models, but it hasn't reached the point where the resultant data neutrally compare against human sanitized data("art").
f13f1f1f1 2mo ago
I don't care about "acceptability" personally however I have tried a bunch of different flows for AI generation of assets and will likely use them to some extent in the final product. The main issue comes to coherence. With code the coherence is strictly syntactic not semantic it's just about symbolic relationships and those are what LLMs are good at. An LLM implementing a piece of code with 0 preparation is likely to be indistinguishable from an engineer writing in manually. Coding itself is just the representation of syntactic relationships. The variables are true or false, that's it. Whether AI writes it or a person does if the variables end up in the right state at the right times it's insignificant especially if it's the same person structuring the code and just gets the AI to write it exactly as they would. For AI generated assets getting coherence in terms of art assets not even just say like character art design, but artistic coherence is much broader and hard to make explicit. What is it that makes the colors, texture, models and animations work together well? What is the relationship between having an item with a specific color and texture in a specific context in relation to all those other items? That's essentially the question of what good art is and it's far more intuitive you could attempt to formalize it but someone can just disagree with your formalization and you can't really say anything. Getting art that is coherent with the rest of your work depends upon having someone who is able to internalize it and express it. I personally don't think AI will ever be capable of that however I do think we will likely end up in a place where a good artist could leverage AI to produce far more assets then they could have individually. It will depend on them feeding it a bunch of structure and criteria and evaluating what it does though. How can an AI understand enough about your character and his role in the story such that his personality is conveyed through his animation, his gait, his voice acting, the materials and clothing, etc. It's just not a strict syntactic relationship which is what AI is actually good at, there is no way to actually formally represent that. The issue with AI generated assets for me is that they are just bad and ugly and being used by people with bad taste. I can see a future where you have technically competent artists having AI tools they can train or set up to reflect their vision and be closer to their work following principles they establish but we aren't there now. For coding because it lacks that a well written program by a human or AI (guided by a human) is basically identical. I could say an AI designed game would probably be awful for similar reasons that AI is or purely vibecoded things that are artistic like shaders, specific mechanical tuning, etc for the same reason AI art is bad. Those are also much easier to tune because they are at the end of the day symbolic formal representations that can be easily manipulated by AI.
nkrisc 2mo ago
From the user’s perspective, there’s not much difference between good code and bad code if the gameplay is the same. The bad code might be a nightmare for the developer adding new features and updates, but it doesn’t directly affect the user’s experience with the game. AI art, on the other hand, generally looks like obvious AI shit, and the user will see that and notice it. Even human-made art will negatively affect the user’s experience if it just isn’t that good. From what I’ve seen of AI art, nothing is yet coming close to the overall quality and effect a talented team of artists can achieve. I think AI disclosures are good though for a different reason: when there are so many games, I want to know if this game was worth someone’s time and effort and money to make, or is just AI slop.
micromacrofoot 2mo ago
code is a tool that produces an outcome, art is the outcome you can produce art with ai, but not everything ai produces is art, etc... when you produce code with ai it is always code

virtue3 2mo ago

you can test case / bug fix your way through bad code. You can't always do that with art. Also - the playerbase is sometimes ok with buggy games; for example - the first ARK game was a buggy nightmare, but it was still awesome and fun (it used the unreal engine visual development system...)

tsimionescu 2mo ago

Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).

rdbl27 2mo ago
The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.
- danaris 2mo ago
  Why would you say that? On the contrary; it seems to me that caring about its authorship even though the product may be outwardly indistinguishable from something a human could have made shows that human authorship is, in fact, precisely what they value. Are you trying to make an argument that "if they really valued human authorship so highly, they'd devote their every waking moment to learning what every possible method is to tell when a given work was created by an LLM" or something? Because I would think that was fairly obviously bullshit by this point. For one thing, there's plenty of ways to make LLM-generated works (especially smaller, simpler ones) that are 100% indistinguishable from something human-created. (This is especially true in text formats, where the amount of information, and thus the possible failure modes, available in the output is smaller than in images or video.)
- picofarad 2mo ago
  That doesn't seem to follow.
  - threatofrain 2mo ago
    The degree to which you can discern is the degree to which you can meaningfully ask for human vs AI.
    - tyromaniac 2mo ago
      Art consists of decisions made by the artist that are interpretable by the audience. Automatically generated imagery lacks this, but still presents a fascimille of it. The intention and thoughtfulness of the artist is encoded within their creation, and when there is no artist this is lost.
      - tough 2mo ago
        ai art usage isn't a binary black or white thing as most imply
      - threatofrain 2mo ago
        And the degree which this is discerned... sometimes AI art wins contests.
        tyromaniac 2mo ago
        Do you understand how that addresses none of what I talked about?
        threatofrain 2mo ago
        It is a direct refutation.
        tyromaniac 2mo ago
        Art is not a contest, and the lie is not one of quality
- nucleogenesis 2mo ago
  I can tell you I hate more than anything when I’m lied to. Some AI art could be fantastic (haven’t seen anything yet but I’m sure it’ll happen someday). I don’t want something you prompted an AI for because genuinely I could just do that myself. The barrier to entry is nil. I’m not interested in the idea an artist has I’m interested in how they execute it. If they executed it through human effort then I place a much much higher value on that. Same as I would if someone selling a hand forged a knife rather than a mass produced cut out. Even if the human-made item is lower quality I’d prefer it by a mile if for no other reason than I know someone’s love and effort went into it. I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated. The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made. Point is - the output quality fundamentally doesn’t matter. It’s principle, not the output quality, that guides most people in avoiding AI art.
  - zeryx 2mo ago
    If you saw two paintings and one was painted with the blood and guts of the artist, and another was a nice oil painting - would you value the former more regardless of aesthetic merit?
  - maccard 2mo ago
    Generally anti AI person who is a game dev here: > The lines might blur if an artist uses an AI to manipulate their own art that they made. Where’s the line? Is using tools in maya and photoshop to rapidly speed up asset generation ok? > I could never have that appreciation for something a machine generated. Do you feel the same about PCG?
    - pmontra 2mo ago
      Procedural Content Generation?
    - teamonkey 2mo ago
      PCG is authored, its usage has intention.
- jubilanti 2mo ago
  > The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all. By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all. Or: the fact that (some) people can't tell between food that is marketed to them as "healthy" and food that actually makes them healthy, is strong evidence that healthy food was not what they value at all. Neither follows. Both blame the victim of a lie.
  - deleted 2mo ago
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  - vidarh 2mo ago
    > By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all. Well, no? Most people don't value gold for intrinsic attributes of the metal, but for the market-assigned value of it or perceived status. I think GP overstated the point, but it's clear that a lot of people who object to AI authored content are objecting not because of the intrinsic attributes of the content but because of their emotions on the subject. That doesn't make it invalid. If someone really doesn't want to consume AI generated content, then so be it. But I also think the people making a big deal out of this seriously overestimate how deeply most people care. I suspect most people care only to the extent that the quality is lacking. I'd justify that view with your example: People keep eating unhealthy food despite knowing it's bad. And as another example, we keep buying things we can't be sure is ethically sourced. We're willing to look past a whole lot. The same way "Made in ..." labels were originally protectionist measures, I suspect disclosure requirements etc. will seriously backfire when it turns out most people stop caring the moment the quality is usually good enough.
- DicIfTEx 2mo ago
  Imagine I sell you something and you pay me in cash. The notes look authentic, but I later discover that they are conterfeits. It would be absurd to claim that your successful passing-off deception demonstrates that I don't value money at all.
  - scarmig 2mo ago
    Whatever the morality involved, it's an unstable norm. There can be good actors who use AI and disclose, and good actors who don't use AI and don't disclose. There are bad actors, however, who will use AI and not disclose. The entire discourse will be flooded with non-disclosers accusing each other of AI use (particularly, the bad actors will accuse everyone else of AI use, to flood the zone with shit), and there will be no way for a consumer to distinguish good from bad. Bad actors will prevail economically. See e.g. corporate green and rainbow washing, Amazon marketplace, organic food.
    - jhanschoo 2mo ago
      I agree that the current culture of disclosure is unstable. Nevertheless, I think that there will still eventually be a mechanism to verify the degree and manner to which AI was involved in the production of art, though perhaps with very different economic scale and distribution channels. Speculating, perhaps there may be an "organic food" niche of mass media art.
  - OroPla 2mo ago
    If you find a counterfeit bill, you experience a loss. Imagine if instead of a counterfeit bill you got a counterfeit movie. The quality is exactly like the real deal, but it's an illegal copy. You find out after the fact. Does this affect your enjoyment of the movie? You've been bamboozled either way, but in one scenario you lose out and in another scenario the people selling the movie lose out.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- majormajor 2mo ago
  You don't get to play the game before you pay for it. Do you want to have to go ask for refund after refund after noticing it's yet-another-AI-slop-cookie-cutter-lookalike several hours in?
  - Calazon 2mo ago
    Being unable to tell a game is garbage without personally playing it is a problem with or without AI. Though AI is vastly increasing the amount of slop out there, for sure.
- jayd16 2mo ago
  Just because it takes effort or time to tell a fake doesn't mean its not important. If you buy a fake that looks extremely close but falls apart a month later, that doesn't mean you don't care. If art is visually polished in some way such that quick quality cues are handled that doesn't mean that it will actually have a meaning or a message. You won't know until you have a chance to fully consume it.
  - rdbl27 2mo ago
    The AI product doesn't fall apart (at least, not a good AI product.) The proposition is that is functionally indistinguishable from a human product to the extent that _there is no way to tell_, absent a formal and seperate disclosure. It's a Turing test for art -- and the machines are winning, at scale.
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HeavyStorm 2mo ago
As a professional coder, I both agree and deeply hate this position. And code indeed has its values. See all algorithms invented by Carmack like BSPs, z-fail, etc.
- bob1029 2mo ago
  > See all algorithms invented by Carmack The problem is very few (none?) of them actually were. He was just a wizard at applying them. This furthers the utilitarian argument.
- bitwize 2mo ago
  Carmack didn't invent BSP trees. He read about them in a paper and produced an efficient implementation that could render a 2D map in 3D using integer math on 386-class CPUs. He has always envied the mathematicians who actually come up with this stuff. I think he did come up with "Carmack's Reverse" (a dynamic lighting algorithm) independently. But not even the "fast inverse square root" was his; that, oddly enough, came from what is currently probably the premiere AI company: NVIDIA. But his implementations of these algorithms were indeed beautiful. I suppose AI could do something similar today, because the likes of Carmack had come before. But using AI for code is hobbling the creation of new Carmacks; and humans have the remarkable property that they can learn from other humans and still push the boundaries forward. When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs.
  - esafak 2mo ago
    > When AIs learn from other AIs, model collapse occurs. I don't think is so. Models continuing to improve by learning from other models is a counterexample.

ungovernableCat 2mo ago

My guess is from the "cheapness" association. AI generated images and video are used a lot in scams, really cheap and bad marketing, waste of time clickb8 videos and stories etc. I can't speak for everyone but my brain associates it with that and when I see AI tells my immediate thought goes: "is this trying to lie/cheat me in some way, did they really put in effort and care in this?". Code is more opaque, an ugly unmaintainable mess can still create a decently functioning game experience from the player's pov. There's infamous examples of some very shitty code still resulting in games people adore. Ultimately your point stands, if the product is genuinely good and appeals to people, they will like to buy it and play it no matter how the sausage was actually made. AI generation just ruins the signal though, it's tougher to find the jewels among the sea of slop and that'll affect how consumers judge your product.

semiquaver 2mo ago

Because people can tell the difference between AI art and human art. Not true for logic unless you are incompetent.

drdaeman 2mo ago
Agree on the substance, but hate the way things ended up colloquially called. AI art is human art. It is based on human intent and choices (and in non-trivial cases it’s a lot of effort to get the machine to produce something that resembles a artist’s mental image), and the rest is mathematically sourced from human art. I strongly suspect the only difference is in level of decision making, where details that aren’t explicitly planned are randomly generated rather than chosen (consciously or not). Or unable to be planned - refining the generation results is the most difficult part. Which translates to that “sloppy” image. Humans can detect sloppiness, not “AI”.
- vintermann 2mo ago
  Humans detect mode collapse. If there was one artist making art in the style of AI (by hand), he'd be no more annoying than say Reg Mombassa, Guy Delisle or Tony DiTerlizzi or anyone else drawing in an idiosyncratic, easy to recognize way.
  - drdaeman 2mo ago
    Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I think this would be true if "AI" art would have a limited set of distinct styles - and it surely does not. I agree - there are a few distinct neuroslop styles from major models, and those trigger aversion. But that's not the full picture. There's an insane amount of fine-tunes out there (be it base models or LoRAs), that drastically vary in styles they produce. "AI" art can look very different, and I still think the only common property to it is sloppiness, lack of intentional attention to the fine details.

nucleogenesis 2mo ago

The most widespread ramification I think is just a continued disintegration of shared trust in the public square. If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs. It’s just a matter of principle. Some of the evilest people on earth are the ones who own, operate, and directly benefit from the commercial proliferation of these tools. They commit crimes against us but see no consequence for which national-level politicians they’ve been sure to own. They’re aggressive in how they buy and corrupt local governments against the wishes of their constituents and the burden of responsibility is diffused because it’s not Anthropic buying your city council, it’s some other corp who focuses on building and operating power sinks that ruin entire neighborhoods and drive up their natural resource costs. The reasons to hate AI (the industry as opposed to the technology) are impossible to ignore unless you keep your head buried firmly in the sand. If one’s moral compass suggests that building a business on deceit is okay then I suspect they don’t particularly care about all of the externalities anyway.

galangalalgol 2mo ago
If the difference between me getting to enjoy some solo developer's vision or not is whether they use the ai, I'll ignore it. Not everyone who can create a great gameplay experience can code, draw, or create music, and the margins can preclude having three different people. The problem you are pointing out is that ai is allowing a repetition of "Engels' pause" where capital accrues all the benefits of automation. Back then the unrest was resolved with workhouses and shipping people to Australia. Also shooting them in the streets. It is hard to predict how that will end up this time.
lotsofpulp 2mo ago
>If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to zero is bad? >If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs. Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to a number greater than one is acceptable? >It’s just a matter of principle. I am having trouble understanding the principle. If I interpreted correctly, then what is special about reducing number of employees to 0 rather than reducing them to some other amount.

_aavaa_ 2mo ago

That’s how double standards work, there often isn’t a clear reason. The art and audio is somehow seen as more important and something only humans should de in a game than the code and design, you know the actual game portion of the game.

smcameron 2mo ago
I recently was sent patches for my open source space game[1] that added cascaded shadow mapping[1] and gravitational lensing[3] for black holes, both things that I've wanted for years, but found too difficult to tackle. The patches were made with Claude Opus doing pretty much all the work, guided by a human. The quality of the patches was, in my estimation, pretty damn good. It didn't do weird things, it used the infrastructure already present, it looked like what I wish I could have written. It was clearly not plagiarized in bulk, in as much as it was so well integrated with my existing code, though I imagine all CSM code/shaders and gravitational lensing shaders tend to look pretty similar, or at least do similar things. It was eye-opening to find out that Claude was capable of doing such a thing. Neither of these changes affect the game play, they are both purely aesthetic in their effects, without introducing anything which might be called "art" in a traditional sense, unless you count crudely modeling the behavior of light in shaders and C code as "art", but at that point the distinction between code and art vanishes. I had previously had a "no-ai" policy in my codebase, just as a kind of over-reaction, and kind of, "if I ban it, then I don't have to think about it" response. But these patches... after studying them, there's just no way I wasn't accepting them. [1] https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
AI slop is cringe and bad. (From an artistic point of view.) You can't force people to like it.
- _aavaa_ 2mo ago
  Nobody is talking about forcing people to like it. But people hate AI art on principle, even if it’s as good as people. And those same people don’t care about the AI code in the same games.

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justinhj 2mo ago

As a former game coder who worked before there were game engines the attitude depresses me. Game programming was an inventive and creative art and the models that are spewing out barely playable imitations of games are using all that code we put out there, just as they are using all the art. Same is true of game designs. I think we should be making games with AI however. I just don't think art is special; we have all been robbed and now we should all use the new tools that are the result of that robbery.

Narishma 2mo ago

Because code is invisible to the end user while art is right in their face.

to11mtm 2mo ago

When you're playing a game, you don't -usually- see, let alone care about the underlying code, you care about what it does. At least in certain genres, the use of AI art (or worse, writing) can become obvious to the player, and it winds up breaking whatever level of immersion that existed. There's also the issue where it causes the 'signal/noise' ratio to go out of whack; Using Visual Novels as an example, the amount of shovelware has increased by at least one order of magnitude. You can still have a VN with good enough writing, that 'AI Art' can be forgiven; and some devs actually do that to get started, i.e. they are hoping the project gets enough interest and support that they can go ahead and pay for an actual artist.

vkou 2mo ago

> Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? There's no good reason for it. Nobody seems to piss on an artist who leans on AI for the programming side of their game, whereas when it's the other way around... The consistent position is to condemn all of it, or to only focus on the quality of the outputs. AI-gen art looks like shit, and always requires an artist to fix it post. (Just like letting an AI vibe-code it's way to a finished program with no programmer oversight will inevitably produce a large pile of shit.)

numpad0 2mo ago

A lot of people are confused and/or behave defensive and hallucinate copyright issues(which is real, but IMO not the reason why artistic or creative AI contents aren't accepted). It's just not good enough. AI art generators aren't used in porn industry much. That should tell enough about quality and value of those. Bad VHS tapes were worse than YouTube 144p, and still totally fine for that industry. We're almost as far away from viability of AI art as we are from reliable self driving cars. AI code generation is simply good enough. It might spit out GPL or Classified codes, but a lot of code just works. So they're widely accepted. AI translations and text interpretations are good enough too. READMEs are okay but barely. People are quick to point out Claude isms and reach for dislikes. "That's not just a double standard - it is a concrete indication that code and text are not the same" or whatever.

DiscourseFan 2mo ago
>We're almost as far away from viability of AI art as we are from reliable self driving cars. Have you been in a self-driving car?
- devmor 2mo ago
  Have you driven around them? Waymos have caused me more near misses in the last month than I can recall in a year of driving in Atlanta.
goosejuice 2mo ago
I agree art lags text, but it's not that it isn't good enough, it's that it isn't controllable and it lacks expression that comes from an innately human thing. Self driving cars are pretty fucking good, that's not doing the work you think it's doing.
- numpad0 2mo ago
  I'd argue it's not even that. AI generated data all has malocious/hostile undertones that affect sanity of both users and viewers. The situation appears to be getting better especially in Chinese open weight models, but it hasn't reached the point where the resultant data neutrally compare against human sanitized data("art").

f13f1f1f1 2mo ago

I don't care about "acceptability" personally however I have tried a bunch of different flows for AI generation of assets and will likely use them to some extent in the final product. The main issue comes to coherence. With code the coherence is strictly syntactic not semantic it's just about symbolic relationships and those are what LLMs are good at. An LLM implementing a piece of code with 0 preparation is likely to be indistinguishable from an engineer writing in manually. Coding itself is just the representation of syntactic relationships. The variables are true or false, that's it. Whether AI writes it or a person does if the variables end up in the right state at the right times it's insignificant especially if it's the same person structuring the code and just gets the AI to write it exactly as they would. For AI generated assets getting coherence in terms of art assets not even just say like character art design, but artistic coherence is much broader and hard to make explicit. What is it that makes the colors, texture, models and animations work together well? What is the relationship between having an item with a specific color and texture in a specific context in relation to all those other items? That's essentially the question of what good art is and it's far more intuitive you could attempt to formalize it but someone can just disagree with your formalization and you can't really say anything. Getting art that is coherent with the rest of your work depends upon having someone who is able to internalize it and express it. I personally don't think AI will ever be capable of that however I do think we will likely end up in a place where a good artist could leverage AI to produce far more assets then they could have individually. It will depend on them feeding it a bunch of structure and criteria and evaluating what it does though. How can an AI understand enough about your character and his role in the story such that his personality is conveyed through his animation, his gait, his voice acting, the materials and clothing, etc. It's just not a strict syntactic relationship which is what AI is actually good at, there is no way to actually formally represent that. The issue with AI generated assets for me is that they are just bad and ugly and being used by people with bad taste. I can see a future where you have technically competent artists having AI tools they can train or set up to reflect their vision and be closer to their work following principles they establish but we aren't there now. For coding because it lacks that a well written program by a human or AI (guided by a human) is basically identical. I could say an AI designed game would probably be awful for similar reasons that AI is or purely vibecoded things that are artistic like shaders, specific mechanical tuning, etc for the same reason AI art is bad. Those are also much easier to tune because they are at the end of the day symbolic formal representations that can be easily manipulated by AI.

nkrisc 2mo ago

From the user’s perspective, there’s not much difference between good code and bad code if the gameplay is the same. The bad code might be a nightmare for the developer adding new features and updates, but it doesn’t directly affect the user’s experience with the game. AI art, on the other hand, generally looks like obvious AI shit, and the user will see that and notice it. Even human-made art will negatively affect the user’s experience if it just isn’t that good. From what I’ve seen of AI art, nothing is yet coming close to the overall quality and effect a talented team of artists can achieve. I think AI disclosures are good though for a different reason: when there are so many games, I want to know if this game was worth someone’s time and effort and money to make, or is just AI slop.

micromacrofoot 2mo ago

code is a tool that produces an outcome, art is the outcome you can produce art with ai, but not everything ai produces is art, etc... when you produce code with ai it is always code