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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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Look, I don't mind the tag, because it helps with categorization. If someone makes a good game with ai assets, I'm not opposed to it. But I do know that it will be an easy "sea of mucus" filter to eliminate most of the low effort games that get published.
As someone who has an ethical problem with how most generative AI has been trained on the exploited labor of other people, I do feel like I have a right to know who is and isn't leveraging it.
Sure you are, and that's what the tag is for. I think the problem is everyone has a slightly different definition of what "used AI" means.
For example there are some indie games being developed now where the assets are human made but much of the code was AI written. Artists had an idea for a game but they didn't know how to code so they got the AI to do that part. Historically the way this would have been dealt with would be that they would have simply developed the game in something simple, like game maker. AI just give them another option.
Now the question becomes should that be labeled as AI? Yes AI was used, but no one's lost their job because of it, so is it quite the same thing?
I don't think Valve makes the distinction, and that's what a lot of people don't like about the tag, it is ambiguous. Of course Tim here is just whining about the thing in general, and isn't usefully contributing to the discussion at all, as per.
Whether it's art or code is basically a difference without a distinction to me personally. I'm not sure what makes it different.
Like, in my view, if you're using a generative AI model that was trained without license, compensation or even so much as basic consent from the people who created the original training data, then I feel that is an unpaid exploitation of other people's intellectual labor. You are taking advantage of someone else's work, and in most cases doing so regardless of any kinds of copyright, license, or other agreement. And, considering a former top AI executive at Microsoft called what they were doing "the largest theft of labor in human history", I think I'm not alone in looking at it that was.
As a person, I've always been something of a "jack of all trades"--I like making art and playing music, but I also like computers, programming, FOSS and game dev. I'd be lying to you if I sad that I wasn't pretty sad and disappointed to be living through a time of mass fraudulence and exploitation, when human skills and creativity are instantly punished by theft and exploitation on an unprecedented scale, by those with the most money and compute power in the name of short term profit and "the ends justify the means" thinking.
But that's my point, not everyone agrees with that assessment.
The problem is there's things like code completers, that predate AI, and no one ever had a problem with those even though presumably they were also taking work from other people. So how much AI can be used before AI becomes unacceptable. You can set the bar at zero, but then you start getting problems of defining what even constitutes AI.
Before we can have a conversation about whether or not AI should be used in game development or anything else we should first have a discussion about what it is. No one seems to want to have that discussion.
That discussion has largely been had. There's the no AI camp that irrationally hates anything that even sounds like AI use. There's the fanatic camp that thinks AGI is basically here and everything will be AI. Then there's those that recognize AI is a useful tool, and it's not going away.
The no AI ever group is large and very vocal. It's probably a plurality and maybe a majority of people. Until that group shrinks there won't be any meaningful dialog about acceptable AI usage.
Hmm... You're kind of showing your hand here, aren't you?
I don't think the arguments that "AI is a useful tool" and "it's not going away" are strong or convincing enough to simply shrug away the real social, technological, cultural, ethical, economic, environmental and legal issues that are at the heart of the AI industry today. Part of having a rational dialog about AI is not just jumping on the hype train, but also acknowledging the new problems and challenges that come with it.
If anything, like all emerging technologies, those arguments really only highlight our social responsibility to question the uses and consider the implications of AI even more. After all, tools can be used for good or bad. And if we're going to have to live with the existence of AI, then we will certainly need reasonable laws and regulations in place to protect people from misuse of those tools, right?
So, if you're wondering why the anti-AI group is large and growing, part of that is probably because "resistance is futile" is not a compelling reason to get on board with a grossly unprofitable technology that is being shoehorned into everything while stealing from artists and threatening the livelihoods of workers. I don't like seeing working people exploited for the short term stock market gains of a handful of big tech companies. I think it's wrong, and it's not something I want to support as long as I have the choice.
But anyway, I'm more than happy to have a meaningful dialog about AI, and I don't see why we can't, because I don't think anything I've said is "irrational" or off-base at all.
Autocomplete tools didn't take people's work without their consent. They also couldn't create huge blocks of code, they'd finish a keyword or guess the end of a line that you would have to verify was correct. They were time savers that still required you to understand the code you were writing.
Well people can't even agree on who won the last election or even if the world is round, so I can only speak to my point of view on things.
To me it's very clear that the heart of the problem is not in "AI" or "machine learning" itself, but the way that almost all of the large AI models have been trained on work which has been scraped from other people without even so much as basic consent--to say little about licenses or payment. Consent is pretty massively important factor here. After all, I think most of us can agree on the fact that consent is the difference between "borrowing" and "theft", the difference between "sex" and "rape", and the difference between "employment" and "slavery".
Is it possible to make an ethical AI?
Of course it is. But I feel that it would require an AI that was developed in a non-exploitative way, trained on data that has been legitimately acquired, licensed, public domain, cc-0, or otherwise "fair use". Almost nobody is doing that, to my knowledge. Maybe someone in the open source world is working on it, and if so, kudos to them, but certainly none of the big AI corporations are.
As for where we draw the line of what is or isn't OK, in the US at least, "fair use" law is the mechanism that we have historically used to determine which particular unauthorized uses of other people's copyrighted work are OK. And there are many factors that are considered for determining whether some kind of use is or isn't fair.
So I agree there is a nuanced discussion to be had, but most of the time we are not talking about simple, small code completion tasks (like asking your IDE to create an empty definition of a method in the .cpp file or whatever). We are generally talking about people using large model AI systems to generate the actual "business logic" of a program, seemingly out of thin air (as long as you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).
Part of having a real discussion is opening our eyes to the darker side of the AI industry and acknowledging the fact that the intellectual labor of working people and the creative class are being exploited at a truly unprecedented scale.
At any rate, I'm more than happy to have the conversation, even if I don't have infinite time to dedicate to it.
I don't think these are the best examples to use for your case here, giving both touch on matters of fact that are only questioned by fringe conspiracy theorists that the rest of the world regards as absolutely crazy, without any basis in reality. Yes, people do passionately believe them, but that doesn't make them anyore true. It's like trotting out the conservative chestnuts that evolution is just a theory, or that anthropogenic climate change hasn't been the consensus position amongst scientists and framing it as a quack theory that some evil, socialist scientists have politicized because they hate US oil barons making money.
That aside, any serious discussion of AI's inevitability needs to involve a feasible roadmap to making it sustainable at a material level. I won't fully discard the possibility, as there's no telling what the future may hold, but I haven't seen any indication that there is a viable way to make these systems run with performance comparable to what they currently offer, without requiring several planets' worth of water, hardware and power capacity. They can only do their "move fast and break things" schtick for so long before people get sick of it, and you're already seeing people sour on data centers, as well as AI more generally.
The idea that AI will always be here, in something approaching its current state, now that we've invented it is just groundless, in my opinion. Yes, local LLMs will continue to exist, but they will have trade offs that I don't see being palatable for the broader market. Using AI to make a quick meme based on a prompt doesn't have the same draw when it takes 40 minutes to finish what the current money pit versions of AI will do in seconds.
I think it's fair to assume AI will be around in some capacity, but will likely be far different from what we currently have, and restricted to domains where it actually makes sense to use, like some medical applications for analyzing patient imaging to suggests issues that humans might overlook. As companies are currently learning, though, the math just doesn't work out on trying to replace human workers wholesale, and this is while the price still doesn't accurately reflect the cost of running these models as services.
Given all this, plus your remarks on the ethical side of the training material, it just doesn't make any sense to discuss the inevitability of AI existing in some capacity in the future as a reason not to offer blanket opposition to the tech as it currently exists. None of these companies can currently turn a profit just on the basis of their hardware and energy costs, so how likely is it they could offer reasonable compensation for training materials without this price becoming even more unreasonable?
I think drastically reducing these costs and ironing out the wrinkles should have been done before they ever rolled these systems out to the general public. Now, they're up against a wall, trying to find a way to do so before the backlash becomes so severe, they can no longer find steady streams of investors willing to sink money in an increasingly toxic product.
Okay, but then that argument could also be used to say that it's fine to just AI generate all the art as long as you write all the code.
You could say "just buy assets" but that's the same as saying "just pay a programmer"
Yeah I know that's why I'm asking
That's a terrible hypothetical, you could have gone for something like "using AI to generate storyboards" where it's more indirect use but you chose to go straight for sticking slop in the final product. Yeah the AI coded game absolutely needs to be labelled as made with AI.
I like the tag so I can tell the Steam app to automatically hide games with it. Cuts down on the slop.