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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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There are definitely levels to the ethics of AI in general and vibe-coding in particular... but I think for me mods for games you like feels like maybe the least bad? It still has issues around training and sourcing of input, and part of the associated environmental impact of training.
But on the other hand the game was already proprietary, and most modders don't make a career out of it, and there isn't the same kind of "maintenance" as a normal project, and a busted mod isn't dangerous to society, so those parts of the ethics don't apply as cleanly. And there is something nice about the idea that some random person who likes this game, and has an idea about how they'd like it even better, can tweak some other company's game to better fit their desires.
I've been a professional programmer for like 20 years, but I don't think I have the bandwidth to learn how to mod each game I like individually. I've never written any mod for any game, despite having made (gamejam) games before! So if we could hypothetically solve the input problem, I think people having the freedom to personalize their gaming experience from what Microsoft provides is kinda nice. But that's obviously a big thorny "if" 😛
Nah, good modding communities are just that - communities. They unfortunately generally aren’t as open as Open Source (though it depends on the game and mods) and have plenty of drama as a result, but vibe-coded slop just ruins that community even more. Can’t effectively build off each other’s mods if no one understands them.
I don’t think this comment is made if the ranter with ai code was musk instead of a guy from a band we all like.
I didn't actually listen to the rant in particular, and I don't know the band. If Musk was pitching why he should build more data centres or why people should invest in his company, yes that would be bad.
But if Musk was saying he was playing a videogame last week and he vibe-coded a mod to make the game better, I'd probably think that was the most relatable thing I've heard about him in a while 😛
The problem is more technical though.
A badly programmed mod, just as any badly programmed program, is going to cause security issues, as well as resources issues (i.e., memory leaks or memory and/or cache fragmentation) and severe performance issues.
You may think that it's not that bad, is simply a game, but it could make it easier for an attacker to fuck up your system, and even if we don't count this, there's still the fact that it can (and will) damage your OS and even your PC (for example, due to overheating, or to the disk[s], memory, CPU or GPU overworking).
Reasonable take. Fallout mods… I can’t think of many contexts in software where the stakes are lower and the existing human-created stuff is already pretty polluted with mixed quality.
But you know. Hating on AI is not exactly a subtle art around here.
Yeah. It also feels like the purest form of the "end user empowerment" angle. A person is playing a game, they think "I wish this game let me fly", they ask the computer, and the computer says "sure, give me a sec. Okay now you can fly". It's not for someone's job, it's not making them more efficient, it's just enhancing their personal bfun during a leisure activity.
Ignoring all the parts that come before that, that's cool 😛
And the parts that come after. Scraping websites until they go down, driving up the price of computer hardware, stealing the world's information and selling it back to us...
I'd argue those are still before costs. You scrape the websites to get input content, you buy the hardware to do training, etc.
But now I'm just being too online 😅
I think that demand partially drives supply. The more people that use AI, the greater these after costs get.
There are other after coats too, like ai-powered ai detectors marking artists original content as ai generated, or new ways people get discriminated against by AI tools.
May I ask, have ever actually developed anything in these "20 years", you smiley person?
It's so fun right? Well, until your work gets defaced, fed into a yet another random LLM, and damaged to random particles not a single person will ever know or care about, and now sold being an LLM's output, not yours idea nor human precious life time and love you invested into it to keep it all organized, careful, and with heartfelt gratitude to the miraculous, ineffably magnificent video-game, Universe (e.g., The Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout, World of Warcraft), dear Art... you discovered someone else brought to the light... and wanted to participate in hopefully improving it, or just... loving it...
Have you actually ever participated in a video-game mod/development oriented Communities out there?
I have. I have been since at least 2016. I am still, at this very moment.
Your effortless unsupervised artless awful dead sorrowful "AI" fudging sucks, and your stance on it, and of people like you - sucks, too.
I've been professionally into security, military, and both embedded and desktop software and web development for more than 20 years, too, now, so I have an idea who you may be.
Yet... You? You are not a developer, I believe. It shows. You've been in it for 20 years for nothing, and learned nothing. I am sorry about your current views on art, people, a human attitude for discoveries and adventures, the dear infinitely marvelous Human History we all develop... as best as we all can... There's no "AI" that damages the history and ruins human love. Fudge your "AI".
Some artists, including these very developers construct, shape, leave their dear expressions, unique ideas, miraculous art... for the very future... in hope... it will support someone else, too, to learn from and pass further.
This is for a human by human. This is art. A timeless communication.
You may join us right now on Discord, Matrix for ESOUI, and ask your questions about your awful "AI" or dead LLMs based on stolen art, effort, history of now unknown people. The fudging white noise machine of screams and cries of now defaced artists...
Jeez, tough read. 😛
Anyway, I love community! I do! And maybe it could be that it's impossible to have any kind of AI, and community, on this Earth at the same time. Could be, in which case I'd choose community.
But while mod communities are very cool, there is a kind of threshold to them. Maybe not gatekeeping specifically, but they are niche and technical. So, again, if I could choose between a community that makes some mod that everyone loves and supports and a cold AI mod, I'd pick the community. But I'd bet 999 out of 1000 players of a game has had some thought about how the game could be different, but isn't setup to learn how to mod it. But I don't think that means they don't "deserve" a tweak, perhaps.
Anyway, I do agree with you that the way AI is being developed right now is problematic, at least in terms of concentration of power. And so these things are maybe just philosophical for now given that the ethics of building the AIs probably outweighs the ethics of the freedom it provides a videogame player.
Sorry to have upset you! 😘
If you think about it, with open weight LLMs... Concentration of power is reversed if anything.
Used to be if you didn't know how to program and you needed a super specific tool for your own use case, you better have tons of money. Need artwork for your startup on an already tight budget? Pay up.
Things that were accessible to people with either skills or money, are now accessible to people with a few dollars to throw at GLM or Qwen or a beefy enough machine to run a good model at home. Still not free, but much cheaper than contacting someone.
My Claude subscription ran out and I ran GLM 5.3 flash to do a review on my gigantic PR (massive refactoring to keep up with upstream changes, not adding a ton of vibe coded "features") and it gave me a pretty good analysis of the weak spots. It costs 1/100 of Claude Fable or 1/50 of Claude Opus to run, API pricing to API pricing. More amazed with this than anything Qwen right now. Beat Deepseek V4 Flash which I was really fond of for a while due to its price to performance ratio.
Welllll, I wouldn't go fully that far either. There's two kinds of power here, power of some monster megacorp. Probably bad. But also a startup not wanting to pay an artist for their skill and taste... I'd say isn't the same power dynamic. If anything this is actually the part of AI I'm most worried about.
Because I think there is value in freeing people up to pursue their interests on the one hand, but on the other hand if there's no collaboration between people at all, and everyone does their own thing and relies on the machine to fill in the rest... that I think is actually a major risk to humanity.
As in, if the musician uses AI to make album art for their music, and the indie filmmaker uses AI to make music for their score, and the screenwriter uses AI to make a video from their script, and a videogame programmer uses AI to write their dialog, and on and on, we end up with a lot of people "freed up" from depending on others, but we also absolutely shred any sort of community or cooperation and the whole of human expression becomes a hub-and-spoke with the AI at the centre of all things rather than a web of collaboration. And I think that's a risk of a different kind.
But each step, each use, one by one, feels like "well why shouldn't I.. just this once" 😉
There's also the problem that some of us do try to make a living through our art because we don't want to be alienated into office or physical work.