Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages
AI this, AI that - you can't go anywhere without something trying to force AI on you. Usually a company trying to get you to buy into what they've wasted billions on. So indie devs have begun fighting back with their No Gen AI Seal.
I meant to reply to you earlier and accidentally replied to the whole thread - I agree with the sentiment below. Honestly, using AI as a coding partner when learning is actually a pretty great use for it, if you're reviewing it properly, testing, and know its limits. This initiative is much more focused on the same sorts of low quality content farms and c-suite "cost cutting" initiatives that have been making gaming suck since long before AI. If you're the sort of developer doing game jams, focusing on learning rather than volume, and taking pride in your work the quality will show through regardless.
A very few bad games will put that badge, and in a few months no one would ever remember it. Like any other ridiculous anti-AI campaign. You can quote me on July.
If a gamedev want to use Stable Diffusion to render some art, or tortoise to make some voices/sound let them be. As it was predictable anti-AI people would began to pursue actual artist in the name of art.
I take the occasion to promote a really good indie game whose devs used AI to make some art for the game.
https://bitfans.itch.io/innsmouth
100% recommend.
Yup, AI is a tool
I don’t think I would care if they did use AI. I would care about the game being fun. There are lots of games out there that suck even though no AI was used.
Hey man, don't get discouraged. AI isn't hated on because it doesn't have valid uses - assistive language-based problems are a great candidate for AI help, and coding is language!
What people are rightfully concerned about is AI being used to replace skilled work - especially artists - or use in establishing facts, not help teach newbies. Someone using AI to help word their resume or provide some help when stuck programming is not the issue - a game dev laying off artists and coders to let AI do the job worse but nearly free is.
Also, screw the independent developer who doesn't have artists to lay off nor the budget to hire them.
If they want to make a game then they should spend decades learning to program and decades learning to create art and decades learning to create music.
If they use AI to make code or assets then it completely invalidates their work and the fun that I'm having with their game is just fake fun.
The only Real Games are those made by giant corporations with the capital to hire artists, programmers and musicians that can lovingly hand craft the loot boxes for the next major children's casino.
Hey man, I think you might've dropped these
Hang in there.
You've started on a completely false assumption.
TBH some of the best art, music and creativity in games comes from small indie studios and developers. Who put creativity and skill into their project. They make it good by actually making it all. Games with a unique style and fun ideas come from small indie studios who need supporting.
AI is a shortcut to stealing others work by proxy. It creates content that is non-novel by its very design and by the very limitations of the tool.
artists, programmers and musicians that can lovingly hand craft the loot boxes
What are you on about? It's the companies churning out loot box after loot box that are programmatically producing them. You're actively invalidating your own point in your rant.
At this point, reading your comment again. I'm really hoping I just missed some dry sarcasm.
Man, some real pathetic, deflated bullshit in this comment section.
This badge fucking rules. Let's make it a huge problem for the first game that uses it dishonestly.
I can dig it. For me it's similar to seeing physical products described as "handcrafted" to denote quality versus something mass produced. A lot of indie devs pour enormous amounts of time and energy into animation, scripts, music, etc. that a derivative gen AI would just spit out in seconds.
Yes that is a good comparison. Similarly, indirect use of handcrafted or no gen ai is impossible to trace / verify / do. You can't handcraft each component for every tool you will be using. Similarly, you can't write your own library / compiler for every software component.
Such a label will indicate only on a high level, 'that technology' is not used. Which I think is fine.
Handcrafted can still use any sort of (power)tool. The actual difference is that it is low volume instead of mass production, even if the same tools are used.
animation, scripts, music
"handcrafted" music is recorded with microphones playing real instruments, you ever saw a game labeling their music as non-digital?
I wonder if LLM companies will use that stamp as a way to identify original ideas they can scrape.
More likely they just won't bother putting any effort into preventing their AI from copying the badge.
True. Fake it till you make it as the flimflam fellas say.
I feel like this will work out about as well as "GMO-free" labels on food.
Okay, but are the games good?
Why wouldn't they be? We hand-wrote all our good games until, like, yesterday.
My game was going to be good but then AI happened and now I only make terrible games
Does this include code
Does it include human handpicked sentences that where gend.
Generate a dialogue script vs How could i rephrase this sentence to..
There is so much in between possible i feel like this label is more marketing then meaningful.
Of course i do know what they meant. They imply they did not cut corners with ai and put effort in delivering quality but i imagine there will be both low effort works using this label because they can and high effort works scrutinized after its found technically some gen ai was used.
Also, not using AI in no way precludes you from producing low effort work.
I’m loving this idea!
This 80s metal band is making real music without synthesizers!
I just know people are going to flock to my novel that I manually typewritered each copy myself.
This feels discouraging as someone who struggled with learning programming for a very long time and only with the aid of copilot have I finally crossed the hurdles I was facing and felt like I was actually learning and progressing again.
Yes I’m still interacting with and manually adjusting and even writing sections of code. But a lot of what copilot does for me is interpret my natural language understanding of how I want to manipulate the data and translating it into actual code which I then work with and combine with the rest of the project.
But I’ve stopped looking to join any game jams because it seems even when they don’t have an explicit ban against all AI, the sentiment I get is that people feel like it’s cheating and look down on someone in my situation. I get that submitting ai slop whole sale is just garbage. But it feels like putting these blanket ‘no ai content’ stamps and badges on things excludes a lot of people.
Is this slop? https://lemjukes.itch.io/ascii-farmer-alpha
https://github.com/LemJukes/ASCII-Farmer
Like I know it isn’t good code but I’m entirely self taught and it seems to work(and more importantly I mostly understand how it works) so what’s the fucking difference? How am I supposed to learn without iterating? If anyone human wants to look at my code and tell me why it’s shit, that’d actually be really helpful and I’d genuinely be thankful.
Are you learning something when making something? Could you make an app similar to one you already made, but without using AI? Are you having fun?
If the answer to all of these questions is yes, congrats! I recommend mentioning if you make something where a huge pert of the work was made with the help of AI on the page where it is posted though
I am pretty sure this is not what the people who made the seal are talking about.
Read their site. They're talking about "pictures, movies, audio (music or voice action) and writing". Code in itself, especially for simple tasks like basic game logic, is not art, and I am saying that as a developer.
I am still very doubtful AI can write quality code, but I really don't care. I am sure it becomes a mess if you try to write very complex systems, but that's not the case for most games. And if AI generated code is good enough for your use case, good for you.
I'm not quite sure I'm following.
Are you saying that AI trained on the output of humans is unethical, unless those humans are programmers?
Or, as a professional programmer, you understand the limitations of AI in your field so you don't feel threatened by it while simultaneously assuming, on behalf of another profession, that AI in "artistic" fields is somehow far more capable and an actual threat?
Terrible programmers don't become professional programmers because they subscribe to Copilot. It provides a crutch to absolute beginners, allowing even the least skilled individual to create some low quality output. For professionals, AI allows for some aspects of existing tools to perform slightly better but cannot replace the knowledge, experience and practice of a human when it comes to applying those skills in novel and interesting ways.
Terrible artists don't become professional artists because they subscribe to Midjourney. It provides a crutch to absolute beginners, allowing even the least skilled individual to create some low quality output. For professionals, AI allows for some aspects of existing tools to perform slightly better but cannot replace the knowledge, experience and practice of a human when it comes to applying those skills in novel and interesting ways.
Buddy, using AI as a coding crutch is not the issue for the same reason it’s not an issue if you rely on stack overflow for learning how other people do things. The issue is when generative AI is used to generate assets for a game.