Comment by velo_aprx
3 hours ago
I understand that it might be nice to be able to play old demos in your browser, and its fine, but...
Please keep AI away from the demoscene.
Ive been active in the demoscene for almost 30 years, its a big part of my life, and i am truly worried people using AI to build tools and code demos will destroy it by removing the very reason why its interesting. I want to be impressed by real peoples knowledge, skill and creativity. Not your ability to prompt.
Mostly, i hate the AI remaster option. It was never intended to look or sound like that.
It's over. Move on. https://x.com/kloss_xyz/status/2107696042053431360
it's as if someone took the "everything you touch turns to gold" and replaced gold with sh*t and said "yeah this is a good power to have"
The reverse Midas touch.
Some might call it, the Mierdas touch.
Combined with bad taste, so they actually prefer shit to gold.
It was similar with GPUs and people got over it. It's all about art and creativity whatever you are using shaders or AI prompts
People still use old platforms without GPUs. It's a completely different art form. On a modern PC with a GPU you can render anything you want because it was solved years ago.
No, its not at all similar. Comparing shader coding with AI prompting is just dumb, sorry.
Why gatekeeping? Demoscene was always about doing the impossible with technology. Technology now is AI.
Demoscene should embrace it.
I think i was pretty clear in my original post.
Its about people doing the seemingly impossible with technology, not technology doing whats possible with technology. If you use AI, you did nothing but ask it, and i could never be impressed by that.
And how would you vote in the competitions at demoparties? By tokens used?
Most parties strictly forbid the use of AI in production, but im afraid some people aren't honest enough to abide to that rule.
why would you have to vote any differently based on which tools are used
6 replies →
No. The demoscene was about showing the raw skill of its participants.
This obviously intersected broadly with getting the most out of technology, but the main purpose was always (and still is) showing skillsets.
> Demoscene was always about doing
Yes, but “doing” with AI is not actually doing it, is it? Yes, something gets done, but the end result was never the point of the demoscene. The finished product was merely the proof-of-work.
>gatekeeping
Opinion ignored.
From discussing with demosceners I think people pretty unanimously agree vibecoded prods are lame, if sometimes fun. There's nothing impressive about a vibecoded demo, and even if they are visually impressive, that isn't really the point. The point is that people actually made it, the demo itself is an artifact of the talent of the group that made it. If anything it's a bit awkward when people submit heavily vibecoded demos.
Yes demoscene is about doing the impossible with Technology, but its also about proving that your group is good at performing miracles with computers. Modern demos are still technically impressive, but art direction is much more important for a high-tier demo. It's not "we are doing this impressive thing" as much as it is "Look what WE are able to do with this technical trick we are harnessing". The group and people behind the demo is a brand and part of the experience.
My personal opinion is that if you think a 100% vibecoded demo is cool, you don't really "get" the demoscene. Nobody is impressed that you could vibecode a visually impressive demo. You aren't winning anyone's respect. Nobody will work to beat you (they will at best push Claude harder - its a question of money not talent). The point of the demoscene is to pull off impressive feats with computer hardware, and if you didn't even do it yourself, nobody cares, because it's not impressive.
I think few are going to hate you for outsourcing basic, repetitive work to an LLM. But if you go "hey claude make me a particle engine" it kind of misses the point?
Then again I'm not really a hardcore scener myself, with just a few mediocre prods, so maybe someone from Farbrausch, ASD, TBL, or others will show up and tell me why I am wrong.