Comment by WhrRTheBaboons

19 hours ago

>I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI

Do you refuse to believe nearly 100% of written content isn't made by AI? Was your comment?

I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.

I don’t believe they are saying that 100% of the entire game or content is ai, they are saying that they believe that a huge percentage of titles have used AI for at least one part of the game, however small.

I can absolutely believe it, and I think it’s fine. If you have AI code up the logic for something boring but necessary (the setting screen ui, for one example. Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point) it will leave a developer to work on the parts of games that actually make a difference to the experience.

Frankly, it would be silly not to use ai for some things. The trouble is that if it’s a binary “used ai” flag, there is no way to distinguish a one shot Claude slop game from someone who uses AI for internationalization

  • > Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point

    What is the point then? The best games have all of their elements working together in service of their intended experience.

    > someone who uses AI for internationalization

    Do you think this would be an ok use of AI for a game? Did you not see the outrage over Hollow Knight: Silksong's translation last year? How every time a game is discovered to have used AI for translation there is an immediate backlash?

    • The point is that some parts of games truly don't impact the experience.

      Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way. Hell, name a game from memory that didn't have the same settings screen with minor styling variations as every other game you played. What exactly am I missing out on by having a resolution dropdown that was hand coded? Does a bespoke "ultra" graphics slider bring the characters to life in a way that AI just can't? Besides, using AI isn't mutually exclusive with all of the elements working together. My point is that AI, wielded properly, makes that easier to achieve. If you don't have to spend a month hand coding sliders for a settings screen, you can get on with making the actual game. Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?

      I do think that using AI to help with internationalization is fine, as long as you QA it just like any code or content that is created by man or machine. It's a tool, and you have to know how and when to use any tool. You can get plenty of good translation out of an AI if you are using it properly.

      Also worth noting that Silksong was verified to have a human translation team, and they never clarified if AI was used. It's entirely possible that today's SOTA AI would have done a much better job. The problem with your argument about translation is you and I have no idea how many games have been machine translated well, and never saw an issue. Because of the way gamers are (frequently unhinged about minor things. Prone to groupthink. Extremely vocal. Absolute in opinions like "There is no acceptable use for AI in gaming"), you just can't stick your neck out and say, "We used AI for our localizations, then had native speakers QA it, and not one had issues." You risk becoming a lightning rod for puritans because you wanted to give Romanians a chance to play a game in their own language.

      Even if you disagree on using AI for these things, I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better. That's why I told you not to argue against specific examples. Maybe a game designer told an AI to review the code and find performance improvement opportunities. Would you be upset if the game was half the size, and could run higher frame-rates with the exact same content? Is that still an unacceptable us of AI, or would you rather that the man hours that could otherwise go to things that humans are better at get spent on optimizations. I personally would rather have a game with better performance from an AI and more human created side quests, than a game with better performance and fewer side quests because they ran out of budget hiring people to dig into compiler settings.

      So yeah, I think it is completely reasonable to use AI in gaming or any domain of programming. I've been around long enough to remember human teams turning out absolute steaming piles of garbage. The issue isn't AI, the issue is people turning out steaming piles of garbage. AI just makes that easier, but by no means does it make it inherent to use.

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> I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.

Come on. There are shades here.

I guarantee that even your best programmers are using AI to run down certain classes of bugs--especially in corporate environments. Asking the AI to help you unwind some screwy source control merge or to remember some obscure set of flags is a damn good usage of AI, for example. Nobody thinks twice of using a search engine for this so AI is a no-brainer.

The issue is when people use the AI for all the code. I have to tell AI all the time "That code is there because X and you mangling it is a problem." or "You violated Y. Explain to me why you did that anyway and don't do it again."

The problem is that to do that you have to know the code and you don't know the code if you didn't write it.