Comment by dpcan

1 day ago

When it comes to games I absolutely don’t care what they used AI for because the point of games is to be fun.

If it’s fun and you used AI, that’s fine with me. The game served its purpose.

The line for me is copyright on images. If you use ai to generate images to copy a popular game art style, I think that’s over the line. Create your own art or pay the artist.

Code however, I see it as a tool. You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. So to me, AI for coding isn’t any different than hiring a programmer to do the work for you. No problem there.

That being said, I do game dev, and using AI to help figure out an algorithm or do the work of creating my inputs code, etc is a big time saver. However, at the moment, it really struggles with anything else because it has no vision and explaining to it how to put code together for a weird game mechanic or level generation reminds me of that game where you explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the 3rd grade, and you tell your teacher to put the peanut butter on the bread and she scoops it out with her hand…

> Create your own art or pay the artist.

> You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done.

It’s literally the same. There is no difference, either you acknowledge AI is potentially a useful tool to lower costs of development (especially important for indie devs) or it’s exploitative and puts both artists and programmers out of a job.

There’s plenty of things in the art workflow that can be automated same as code, pay an artist to do key frames/storyboarding and use the AI to animate between them? Is this exploitative?

EDIT: I’m reminded of this thread from 2019 about a successful game dev that admits their games look like shit due to cheaping out on art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20804998