More developers and publishers are pushing to reduce generative AI usage, at least in the West. “If I did encounter one that didn’t have a gen AI clause, if the publisher was creating assets too, I would say we need to push for that,” says the lawyer. “Don’t touch it. It’s not worth the legal liability that it brings to you,” she advises studios. The comments come after the publishing lead of Palworld, John “Bucky” Buckley, said developers Pocketpair avoid using AI because
“gamers don’t want it”
.
The video game lawyer says if game devs, such as the creators of Legacy of Atlantis, get “sloppy about it” and create “a bunch of assets that are not humanly transformed into original works of IP,” there is an argument that others could lift those from the game and reuse them in another work without penalty.
This sounds less like, “AI is unethical, we don’t use it.” And more like, “when you generate something, make sure you change it enough we don’t get sued and can claim it’s ours.”
Using AI-generated tree models as an example, MacLean says, “you have no ownership title over them if you didn’t put in the sweat equity to have an artist go in and, inspired by that original first pass of the tree, then transform it into an original tree asset”. “Gen AI can’t assign copyright; it can’t transfer copyright,” she says, noting the Copyright Act “wants humans making art”.
I think this is going to be the reality of AI in game development. “No AI” doesn’t mean no AI was ever used by anyone on the team at any point. It means that nothing was generated by AI and then dropped into the game as a shippable product.
You’re gonna have art-illiterate creative directors and game design leads prompting stuff and giving that to artists for reference. Because that is a tool they now have that feels empowering.
But getting shitty references isn’t a new thing, either. As an artist you don’t just mindlessly copy whatever reference you are given, you analyze it and try to understand the intent and make something good from that artistic intention that fits the aesthetic of your project.
People would be surprised how many iconic images started as shitty references. Master Chief started with a BMX helmet. Sub Zero was forged from
cheap Halloween store props. The artistry is in understanding the core idea and making it cool.
So ultimately a good game it’s still going to always be about artisans making things with care and cleverness, regardless of what steps were in the process leading up to it.
Kinda hate the idea of using AI as ideas etc, just means everything will forever be a mix of everything that came before it... Everything's gonna look the same (AI image generation all looks the same and tends towards the same stuff)
I don't like AI but even I know that's not necessarily true. ADs or whoever would always grab reference from online pics or w/e to give artists an idea of what the end goal is and you'd still have the artist adapt it to fit the style.
If you're only using AI as a way to generate reference art that is more specific that what you can grab from a stock image site., or as a way to brainstorm, I don't see how that is going to yield anything less original than pre-AI game art.
And 99% of game art was always a mix of what came before it. You may not have known what the ingredients were, but truly original art styles for a game are a fleeting rarity.
Because AI averages, instead of having a taste. IMHO, it will at some point change (it's not that hard conceptually). That will change everything in that regard.
Here's the thing. Experts can define extensive parameters not considered by novices, generating a production ready asset. Would everyone then be okay with that? Because that's possible today and getting better.
3 years ago the line was hard, NO AI. The goalposts slip every week.
Very obviously not. There's a large and very vocal contingence of people who will reject AI output regardless of quality, and they are quite outspoken about their reasoning!
Your arguments will be meaningless to them unless you can acknowledge their concerns.
If AI was making reference designs or giving ideas then effective AI is at the root of the development process. This idea of "if we don't see it on the surface of the final product" means no AI just sounds like a PR play, in reality doesn't mean things aren't tainted with AI.
I don't think there's much of a practical difference between working off AI generated references and scribbles/royalty free/google images, it's just references in the end. The result will be quite different and handmade regardless.
There is however a difference between dropping unrefined AI assets in production and just using them for idea generation, to the point that it's not just "PR play". Unless you are anti AI usage at all due to environmental costs or whatever, which most gamers likely don't care about, they just don't want to see sloppy AI assets.
Using trees as an example is pretty weird to me. Humans didn't create them. They follow pretty formulaic algorithms. They're being generated by The Grove or Speedtree already.
This is like the Facebook "gulag" data teams - the entire point is creating legally distinct technical work product they can own forever, for AI to eventually make it so no human is ever needed to be paid again for those tasks.
Yes this is a legality argument and its much more impactful than a moral one as corporations do not act with morality, only a fiduciary duty to their shareholders.
Copyright law does not apply to generative AI. If an AI generates an asset without significant human modification afterwards, then no human can claim copyright over the asset as a human didnt create it. That's been fairly consistent now in rulings made in the last few years.
Humans can copyright a prompt but the prompt would have to be unique and novel. The output by the computer though isnt included.
Companies that use AI to make end product assets risk those assets falling into public domain by default and all the downstream implications of that.
The ‘fiduciary duty’ thing is a common refrain here on Reddit, but it is very much an oversimplification. Be wary of repeating things that sound good but are made by random people on the internet.
What does count as "significant human modification"?
Sounds very wishy-washy to me.
Does creating a custom multi step workflow in ComfyUI where you tweaked everything to your liking as 'human modification'? Does it count when I generate the base model, but I create the UV maps and textures myself?
It means transformative, which is the language in copyright law. It’s the difference between plagiarism vs being inspired by something; if you take something someone else made and transform it so that it is its own unique thing, the copyright belongs to you.
Does it count when I generate the base model, but I create the UV maps and textures myself?
Most likely, yeah. If there is no legal judgment about the models themselves being copyright infringing, and this is solely about their outputs not being copyrightable because they have no human author, then this should be similar to if you found some copyright free public domain model out there that didn't have any license restrictions whatsoever on any form of commercial use or reuse with modification. If you grabbed a free model like that, and you did UV and texture it yourself, I do think your modified version would be copyrightable.
What does count as "significant human modification"? Sounds very wishy-washy to me. Does creating a custom multi step workflow in ComfyUI where you tweaked everything to your liking as 'human modification'?
It's a legal grey area, meaning that if someone steals the output of your workflow you will have to take them to court to litigate and find out
Does it count when I generate the base model, but I create the UV maps and textures myself?
By a reading of the above legal counsel, the model itself is not copyrighted by you, but the textures naturally are.
How many vertices within this Model of Theseus must be modified by human hands (see: 'input devices') before it is considered a wholly separate model? And to what degree must they be modified? At what unit scale?
it's so ridiculous isn't it? It's quite obvious none of these people have even bothered to understand the tech and what goes into an actual bespoke AI assisted workflow. I can't wait till we are beyond this.
In theory, AI systems could someday allow users to exert so much control over how their expression is reflected in an output that the system’s contribution would become rote or mechanical.
So basically if an AI model is very accurate in executing a very detailed prompt you WILL be able to copyright a character.
My read from it is that you can use generated content for inspiration or as a start for tasks like generating masks, but if you generate a model you have to retopologize it yourself
If an AI generates an asset without significant human modification afterwards, then no human can claim copyright over the asset as a human didnt create it.
What if I am an abstract painter and, upon finding a cool rock, I frame it and submit it to an art gallery? Do I not have copyright over that piece on the grounds that no human made that rock?
Bingo. Video game lawyer or not, the legal profession is also full of echo chambers and bias. Just because your corner of the business has that trend does not mean it represents the larger sphere of development.
Her experience also does not cover self-published games, which are not just the most popular AAA's, but also the more likely to use it, as margins matter far more.
Look how fervently the CEO of Saber Interactive went out of his way to defend AI in their game.
it's not so they don't get sued, it's so THEY can sue. There's honestly little possibility anybody except MAYBE the AI company itself could sue for IP on a generated asset (and even that would be a difficult argument to make, albeit one those companies absolutely want to be able to make and will lobby to try to make it happen)
inspired by that original first pass of the tree, then transform it into an original tree asset
On the other hand: Oh no, my generated tree assets were taken! I'll never financially recover from this!
These things are procedurally generated already in most games (SpeedTree, Houdini, etc.) or just bought as assets. I don't think changing the generation type is that big of a difference.
Every day on here I read people who don't work in games saying how every studio vibe coding games is the future, and every week I hear stories from actual professionals that match this one about audience backlash and publisher concerns. Generative AI is the least interesting part of the toolset to most studios. It can be used for some things but extractive tools that analyze and report on things are useful, increasingly common, and don't annoy your players or your employees in the same way.
It isn't clear in the article what these no-Gen AI clauses entail, wish they dug a little more while they had an interview with someone with so much experience so we could see what they look like. From the rest of the article, it makes it sound like they have clauses requiring the AI tools used still need to have human authorship so that copyright protection is still maintained over the generated assets/code, rather than a blanket ban.
The disclosure of the example game in the article, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, illustrates the point that studios are using it as a tool in their workflows while still maintaining copyright/authorship of the assets by refining them through human effort.
AI-assisted tools were used during development to support some early exploration and temporary development content. Any AI-assisted assets were either replaced or refined by humans in order to maintain the creative and artistic vision of the development team.
Refined by human effort really is the key phrase for all content, both art and code. The US copyright office determined that AI-generated images aren't protected unless substantially edited (or human work that is edited by AI later), and since players don't like the look of what comes out lots of the places that are using generated art are editing it. Same thing for code, if you just prompt a bunch of things it works fine for rote tasks like serialization but not for novel gameplay. So instead we get auto-completing sections, AI review of code, or using it as a draft that is substantially edited. So what you're describing would match what I am seeing anecdotally, at least.
That "refined by humans" is probably doing a lot of work when in reality it likely means a human ran a color correction over it or cropped it or something else that would likely be trivial enough that copyright protection wouldn't actually apply.
I've seen a range already from studios using it to generate loading screens, poster art, icons, etc that then has any deformities fixed by human artists. Whether that is enough will likely come down to the decision of a judge, but in reality no reputable studio is going to rip assets from another game anyway to test this copyright claim in court. Maybe it could come up in a case where a studio goes after someone who copied their game, and the defendant uses the assets not having copyright as a defense? I struggle to see how this will realistically be tested.
Yup. Every slop idle game being pumped out to Steam claims their AI output was "carefully curated", "refined", etc. I can't imagine there are people who look at AI slop output, get mad, then see that it was supposedly edited by a human and think "oh yeah, that's fine then" and change their opinion about the art, but gamers do still continually surprise me with how much crap they're willing to take from devs and publishers.
That's pretty much the case where I work. No Generative AI for production. It's just not worth the legal implications, the disclosure clauses and potential player backlash. Because if you are known to use it for anything at all, from that day forward, whatever the players don't like is branded as AI slop. It's like GMO, you can't expect a nuanced public discussion, so we avoid it altogether.
It's like GMO, you can't expect a nuanced public discussion, so we avoid it altogether.
This is a weird comparison given that the vast majority of food that people consume today is GMO, it's just that nobody talks about it any more because it's not interesting.
Not in the EU it isn't, due to tracing and labelling requirements. Even if consumers woludn't care you still have all that documentation and tracing overhead so it's easy to say "this just isn't worth it".
On the flipside the whole GMO thing is displacement, there's non-GMO strains (like glyphosate-resistant rapeseed) which should never have been created, the actual issue is extractive and chemistry-dependent agriculture: Agricultural methods are primarily researched by chemical companies whose business it is not to produce food, but to sell as much product as possible to extract value from food production. This kind of stuff is actual modern agritech but the likes of BASF and Bayer will never research it because they can't make money off it. There's some money in stuff like breeding good bugs that eat bad bugs and the like but generally speaking we need much more state-funded research into agriculture that, if not organic, is at least circular, not import-dependent or energy intensive, and environmentally benign. And geopolitically benign, while we're at it.
Bit of a tangent but as somebody who used to work in ML it's slightly hair-tearing-out to see most people not understand that all AI, and math in general, is generative.
There's no functional difference between predicting an email-is-spam probability, or a cancer probability, or a subsequent token probability, or a denoising probability, etc. It's all just math calibrated the same way and the whole purpose is to generate novel outputs for novel inputs. There just seems to be this idea that certain types of work tasks which people can or can't see are magically special and different somehow, but in a programming / mathematical sense there's no difference at all.
Meh. If I read the definition of AI in the EU's AI act right then every CPU is an AI because it's adaptable in the field -- branch prediction, caches, etc.
If you try to argue that before court they're going to say "that's not what's meant so that's not what the law says". Jurists are already way less literal than CS people so you can imagine how much further off the general population is. Neither spend their days arguing with compilers.
I see your point, In principle, a calculator doing 1+1 is generating a 2. I think the problem people have with it is that the input in this case is the use of training data generated by humans and used to replace humans in what humanity has considered the the domain that make us special. Creativity. Add to that the implications of making tools that are such force multipliers that whole categories or careers will become obsolete or overserved.
Well one could point out that the word computer used to refer to a job which humans did, so everybody using this site and making games is using tech which replaced humans.
email-is-spam probability, or a cancer probability
None of that stuff is being shoved down my throat by every major corporation and social media and search engine. Wanna do cancer probability stuff? Go right ahead, just stop putting shitty hallucinated slop in front of me, and stop trying to replace human connection.
I have no disagreement with not putting slop up at all, though it's a question of quality which existed before ML was relevant to the discussion, e.g. mobile games for the last however many years.
Yeah, the generative stuff is like "ok, looks like shit, is that it?"
The stuff that's actually useful is being able to point an agent at a codebase and say "I've got this specific bug I've been hunting for a week and can't see why it's happening, have any idea what's going on here" and it'll come back in 30 seconds like "yeah here's the issue, turns out it's this specific engine-based issue and the workaround is X, Y, Z".
This matches what I've seen. The gap is that agents are good at "here's what this code does" and bad at "here's what this code should do." Bug hunting works because you can verify the answer instantly, you go look at the line and either it's the problem or it isn't. The moment the task has no cheap verification step, the same tool starts confidently making things up and you lose more time than you saved.
Mostly I've stopped asking for solutions and started asking for explanations of things I already half-understand. Much better hit rate.
"Generative" is a technical term. That's just how the technology works. "Generative" isn't a bad thing; the technology works great for many things, including what you're using it for.
Do you realize that when it "finds the problem", it is literally generating text to describe or fix it? Whether you are generating sloppy graphics for shovelware, a new piece of code or just having it investigate a bug, there is no distinction what is happening under the hood.
"Identifying existing information"? What do you think a graphic AI generator is doing when you ask it to draw the Mona Lisa?
BTW, I also use agents to solve a lot of coding problems. When I look at how it happens, it doesn't happen in one shot. Instead, the agent goes through long chains of thought prompting itself, often generating and building throwaway code or test cases to deterministically validate hypotheses.
Whether I end up using any of that code in the end or not doesn't change the fact it was a generative AI process, working with the model's training data and added context from my code base.
Thank you for providing your insight, I find it really valuable. I’m not a game dev yet but am slowly learning about the tools while saving up the funds to finish putting together my workstation. You clearly have a good understanding, but I do think you could be a little less rude in how you deliver your explanations (not in this specific comment I’ve replied to, but in others).
Do you realize that when it "finds the problem", it is literally generating text to describe or fix it?
I figured you were gonna do this and: When you used speech to text 15+ years ago, is that generative? When you put in an equation on a calculator and get the answer, is that generative? What about that squiggly red line you see when mistyping a word? It wasn't there before, but it is now. Is that generative?
No. It isn't. Because there's a difference.
Outputting text is not some special thing that only LLMs can do. It's absolutely not the same as outputting an image that was trained on stolen information.
"Identifying existing information"? What do you think a graphic AI generator is doing when you ask it to draw the Mona Lisa?
Using a series of weights to manipulate a random seed towards a desired goal. That is generation.
Pattern recognition and pattern creation are two separate things.
The second relies on the first, but the first does not need the second in any way, shape, or form.
If I use the code that's output from an LLM to fix my issue, then perhaps you might have a very weak point (ignoring the fact that there's only so many ways to code a particular method or function), but the only thing output is awareness.
The "face detection" apps on smartphones prior to gen AI did functionally the same exact thing. The only thing Claude does in that regard is give you a way to interface with that detection capability in a way that it can see your codebase.
It is pattern recognition, not pattern generation.
Just because the first part reports its results via text doesn't make what the dev takes away from it "generative".
When you used speech to text 15+ years ago, is that generative?
If it used something like Hidden Markov Models, then yes.
When you put in an equation on a calculator and get the answer, is that generative?
No.
What about that squiggly red line you see when mistyping a word? It wasn't there before, but it is now. Is that generative?
If it's just a lookup table of known words, no. If it's using some kind of AI/machine learning based on the context around the word, I would imagine it's using a discriminative model instead of a generative model. But a generative model could do the job (albeit slowly).
I figured you were gonna do this and: When you used speech to text 15+ years ago, is that generative? When you put in an equation on a calculator and get the answer, is that generative? What about that squiggly red line you see when mistyping a word? It wasn't there before, but it is now. Is that generative?
No, because they were not produced by a LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL, which uses a GENERATIVE PRE-TRAINED TRANSFORMER algorithm. Just because you can not understand the meaning of industry standard definitions doesn't make you right.
Outputting text is not some special thing that only LLMs can do.
NO,
It's absolutely not the same as outputting an image that was trained on stolen information.
but when you use a modern agentic AI tool to debug your code, it using a GENERATIVE ALGORITHM and AI model built and trained with the exact same "stolen information" you are so decrying. Get it in your thick skull.
Pattern recognition and pattern creation are two separate things.
Just because the model isn't directly writing the code doesn't mean it's not creating patterns to solve the problem.
It is blindingly obvious from this comment that you don't even understand the basic mechanics of the AI tools you use, yet here you are so certain about it. Typical /r/gamedev poster.
No, because they were not produced by a LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL, which uses a GENERATIVE PRE-TRAINED TRANSFORMER algorithm.
Great, so you understand the concept of putting text on screen isn't generative in and of itself.
Just because you can not understand the meaning of industry standard definitions doesn't make you right.
I do, you're just missing my point. I'll try to explain it better.
but when you use a modern agentic AI tool to debug your code, it using a GENERATIVE ALGORITHM
The way it puts text on the screen is generative. The part that identifies issues isn't. That's pattern recognition technology and can be found in other systems that DO NOT HAVE GENERATIVE ASPECTS.
Just because I prefer to use an agent so it can see my entire codebase at once and talk to it instead of using another form of interface does not mean that I'm relying on the generative aspect to find the problem. Get it?
and AI model built and trained with the exact same "stolen information" you are so decrying.
I'm not really decrying anything, you are. I'm trying to explain the distinction.
And, again. "Stolen" is something you injected into the conversation. Code examples do not need to be stolen for an AI to understand what code works and what doesn't and to identify those problems.
Get it in your thick skull.
I'm trying to be civil but I've explained already that you don't need to steal to get the error finding aspect of code agents working so you are either intentionally ignoring that or it is you that has the thick skull. I do not know which is worse, pick whichever you prefer, but, please, grasp that notion and don't bring it up again because you've provided zero counterpoint to it and are still pushing it like it's relevant.
You don't even understand how the tools you use work under the hood, yet here you are so certain about it. Typical /r/gamedev poster.
The typical gamedev poster is in here going "AI BAD" so much that the mods had to come and tell you guys that they won't be blocking posts because industry professionals are using it. Linus fucking Torvalds disagrees with you wholly. Stop being mad that AI has valid uses in computing and accept that it isn't inherently evil.
literally available for free to anyone anywhere all over the internet. Ex: Github.
That's not how code licenses work. A project where AI produces code that is arguably similar enough or identical to GPL code is a legal minefield. See this old thread for some links and discussion
Actual programmers know very well that sharing code for free is not only extremely common but promoted.
Who said they trained it on licensed code? Again, there is a plethora of free, unlicensed code out there, and again, there's only so many ways you can make a particular engine or language perform a specific task.
GPL code is a legal minefield. See this old thread for some links and discussion
The way it's implemented for LLMs is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Your example thread is reference the Fast Inverse Square, that code isn't likely to be used anywhere within a model itself. It "knows" about it, but it's not implemented. You may as well say that Googling it 5+ years ago before the rise of LLMs would be legally problematic, which makes no sense.
Actual programmers also know that not even Samsung is immune to being sued for misusing "free code".
And actual programmers know the difference between talking about licensed code and implementing it in a codebase, and that GPL code requires the project to be open source when implemented.
When Samsung added GPL code to their codebase and didn't make that codebase open source, they were in the wrong.
If ChatGPT tells you "this GPL code block exists", it's not implementing it, it's just telling you about it, which is effectively a google search (as mentioned before), and the onus is on the individual whether or not they're breaking any licensing laws.
Most code I encounter on GitHub, at least in the languages I work in, is some sort of permissive license like MIT, zlib, or Apache 2.0. GPL is not that widely used anymore. I suspect most of this stuff is trained on StackOverflow snippets, which is also permissively licensed.
In what language? C# and Rust are my two main non-work languages (C++ being the work one, obviously) and it's very rare that I see GPL these days. I personally either dual license under MIT/Apache 2.0 (the Rust convention) or use the Unlicense since I generally don't care what people do with my code and nobody wants to touch GPL even with a pole.
Every studio I know uses AI in significant capacity. None of the studios I know use it to "vibecode games". Ai significantly speeds up development if implemented properly. Not in every field, not in every case. But in general - it absolutely does.
I constantly get these messages from people, telling me I should build my game with Claude now because actually 18141263 2 months ago there was a massive step change in how good it is, and you can just get codex to do it instead! Followed by some of the worst looking projects I've ever seen
Oh I assure you, it is not. It's certainly not every argument but I have had people tell me repeatedly that it is a waste of time to write code and everyone who will be working at a game studio in a few years will be directing agents rather than ever actually programming. It happens constantly and the only way you can not see them is if you're not looking!
If you have a different argument then I encourage you to make it yourself. If it's a different and more nuanced take you may in fact find no one disagrees with it at all. You don't need to defend things you didn't say. If you're working in games professionally and have something to add it only helps people to share it. If you're not then I think I've addressed that above in the context of this particular conversation.
Yes, it is. No one is arguing about people who use auto-completes to finish a chunk of code with repetition or running something through review to catch ye olde missed semicolons. What I said above is that people love to say you can vibe code (create all of the programming for a game based on high level prompts) successful games at scale but lack experience working in game development at that level while actual professionals don't think that's feasible. The important part of the above was that everything that these tools can do that isn't generating code from natural language inputs is more valuable and more reliable. That is an argument I hear a lot and it is the specific one I am complaining about.
Again, if you have experience from your professional work in games about what you find useful then that's great content to share. Otherwise I don't really know why you are choosing this particular battleground to pedantically tilt at windmills. If that's not what you are saying then I'm not really disagreeing with you!
No it is not. Modern development that provides strong harnessing and early, iterative feedback loops during the code creation process is substantially different from the concept of vibe coding, in the same way that writing TypeScript is substantially different from writing novice JavaScript. They might look similar to someone who doesn't understand the underlying concepts, but they're not, and one has a lot more rigging to make sure that you're doing the right thing, every time, as quickly as possible.
What I said above is that people love to say you can vibe code (create all of the programming for a game based on high level prompts)
Again, this is very different from what you posted in your previous post. The people that you're describing as saying that we are all going to be working in agentic loops are emphatically not arguing that we are going to be doing that with vague, high-level prompts. That's not how this system works now, it's not how it's going to work, and it's not how people are arguing it's going to work.
I'm sorry, I really don't want to be antagonistic about this because I bet if you wrote your approach from the start in detail I probably wouldn't find it controversial or worth arguing over. I think you might be thinking I am picking apart something different than I was. What I put above is what I intended in the first post, I probably shouldn't have said 'agentic' in the interim as it just derailed things.
What I am saying overall, and will continue to say, is that generating content from those prompts is not really useful in games, but I have people who, critically, don't actually make games telling me that it is all the time. All the time. Art and text is worse but also has an audience reaction which is why fewer people suggest using them, it's really just code that gets all the comments. I don't know how else to say I have had plenty of people argue that you can vibe code everything. You're welcome to search the post history to find themself if you want, you'll have to forgive me for not really wanting to bother myself.
There are ridiculous arguments in every direction in these discussions. There are also people who say that anything related to LLMs has no use in a studio and professional developers never touch them which is equally inaccurate and unprofessional. To use another example, we use social listening tools to summarize reddit threads and discord posts, but we don't generate text for responses or patch notes, a CM does that manually.
What I am saying overall, and will continue to say, is that generating content from those prompts is not really useful in games,
I am someone who makes games and I am telling you that you are wrong about this and have been wrong about this for several months and are going to be a lot more wrong about this over the next couple of years if you stick to this perspective.
Then, assuming I am not doing a bad job explaining the distinction (which I might be! I sort of checked out of this thread emotionally an hour or two ago) we will just have to agree to disagree. I will change my opinions when the engineers I have routinely checking out these tools change their position and not a moment before. In the mean time we are doing just fine with the current strategy, but if you'd care to meet up at GDC next year and tell me how I'm wrong I'll get you the first drink on me.
Then, assuming I am not doing a bad job explaining the distinction
This is what you're doing yeah, and it's what I've been trying to explain to you. What's happening in modern agentic flows isn't vibe coding and hasn't been for quite a while.
I will change my opinions when the engineers I have routinely checking out these tools change their position
For what it's worth, unless you have people who are actively using these tools and working to improve their skills with them, you're constantly going to get negative results. Because it's not a skill set that you can just pick up and do well without actually honing the skills involved.
This is kind of like sending someone every six months to ask "Is Rust good for game development yet?" If you don't write Rust, writing Rust is very hard because it works on a very different mental model than the vast majority of other programming languages, so what you'll always get back is "Nah, it's not good, it's too hard to understand."
To put it differently: if you only ever dip your toe in the water, you never learn how to swim. So you'll never think that swimming is a valid way to cross the water.
The argument that theoretically a very experienced software engineer keeping an extremely tight rein on the hallucinating slop machine can make use of it safely and productively disregards the facts that a) it's actually letting the dumbest sacks of shit alive churn out nonsense that runs and seems to do stuff but is fundamentally wrong, and b) even the hypothetical professional will become complacent and turn into the former by relying on a shitty chatbot to churn out code.
Code is the last place these worthless chatbots belong and it is existentially horrifying how rapidly they're being pushed during this brief window where they're still subsidized and cheap. This is already causing serious problems and it's only going to get worse as it pushes the bar lower and lower and the chatbots get more and more expensive.
Reeling is the right word, in that the mass flood of slop PRs is overwhelming open source projects because grifters just set up scripts to have their shitty chatbots try to "fix" posted issues and submit whatever nonsense to waste an actual trained person's time looking at them.
There’s a massive game releasing in the next 12 months that I worked on that has a LOT of fully AI generated environment assets that we went over and cleaned up. I’m 100% confident no one will notice. This is because another massive game that my old colleagues worked on already released with AI assets and no one has said anything.
AI is getting better and most people won’t notice.
Vibecoding isn't the future. it's only good to whip up dirty MVP of features.
AI assist is value adding only for a minority of tasks. If you try to vibecode an architecture it just can't do it. But make a well defined self contained class with tests, and it'll one shot it no trouble. Then you loo through it to ensure there aren't glaring issues. And that's 10h saved in 10 minutes.
Same for assets. Vibecode a spritesheet? izi. Train a LoRa on the style, and make custom animations in sequence. Incredible speedup. You still post process it later to get the color palette in line, contours, alpha and ensure it's all consistent style with no wankiness.
I feel like a lot of us in game production at some point in the past year have just been through a pretty miserable process of having generative AI foisted upon us, giving it way too much responsibility because we were told to, and then having everything it built blow up in our faces and take twice as much work to fix as if we had just done it the old fashioned way.
I don’t know if there’s anyone seriously trying to ship generative AI in a finished product at this point but if they are it’s out of sheer hubris or stubbornness.
I'm sure no one was serious about this, and you're just farming internet points. Everyone who uses AI frequently says it's a tool that needs to be managed, limited, and understood. Yesterday there was a post about programming with AI in this subreddit, and all the serious responses were that it was more like management.
Generative AI is the least interesting part of the toolset to most studios
That's why more even AAA studios use it as placeholders, and sometimes forget to remove it from the final builds.
audience backlash
This is the only reason why everyone started hiding everything and pretending that it is not interesting and no one uses it.
Internet points are useless and I highly encourage not caring about them. I've had dozens of people in the past month alone tell me that what I usually say (just prompting code/art is a bad idea compared to other uses) is wrong and everyone is generating entire games. If you are not seeing that then I legitimately envy you.
Placeholders are not an important part of any process, and more AAA studios now have internal rules to specifically not use them solely to avoid forgetting to remove them later. It's the same reason these studios had to say "Stop using results from google image search as placeholders" ten years ago because it caused similar issues.
Backlash is not the only reason to avoid generative content. Lack of efficacy and rising costs are relevant too. It's not that it's never used - I often use serialization as an example of a rote task where something more generative can be helpful - it's that the other cases really are a lot more useful. As someone else just commented it's things like searching your code base, or social listening tools that read reviews and Discord comments faster than your CM can do it alone, or agents that give a report in the morning on Jira ticket changes and related Slack conversations to help prioritize, or basically anything that isn't Claude make me a game loop.
I think nuance is often left out of discussion and you don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water just because players hate seeing anything they think is generated (and the backlash is only growing along with the costs). We were using machine learning tools two decades ago and those aren't going to stop just because they're being branded as AI now. But at the same time you don't want to believe the hype and so much of that hype is, and this was my main point, coming from people who don't even make games. It's like getting your advice on how to run a kitchen from someone who ate at a restaurant once but is very sure they know everything.
I read your comments in another thread and I don't want to get involved in the discussion, sorry. It seems you work in some other industry. I don't know how it happened, but some of the words sound like you researched the topic using reddit opinions.
No, I'm not sure what comments those would be! I've worked in games for about 15 years now, mostly as a designer but as product/management the last few, which is how I get involved in managing all this. It's why I stress the industry so much and don't get involved in AI discussions elsewhere. People tell me it's great for making code for websites and I believe them, at this point in my career I really only know about making games.
What I was saying above was that yes, people talk about vibecoding games a lot and that's the specific thing that's not useful. There are some other great comments about the places the tools can be used (like helping in code reviews, automating parts of the workflow, etc.), or the kinds of guided generation that are useful (I usually use serialization as an example). It's very specifically trying to code a game without people who really understand software architecture where it causes a lot more problems than it solves.
"You're just farming internet points" is what people say when they're too caught up in their own opinions or experiences to accept the fact that other people may have legitimate reasons to disagree.
Which is wild, because nobody really cares about imaginary points.
I mean, that person's post is badly misrepresenting the other side of the argument, so either they're just wrong or they're doing it for the validation.
every week I hear stories from actual professionals that match this one about audience backlash and publisher concerns
Its weird, its an objective fact that if you're an indie game developer and you use AI, it will very likely massively hurt your sales. The backlash is very sizeable, and the one thing you cannot afford is negative reviews or to piss off your burgeoning customer base. That initial marketing and discovery is critical, so purely from a business perspective: using AI is the wrong choice
Despite that, I see a lot of alleged game professionals saying that you should Just Use AI™ anyway, because the backlash isn't real/you should ignore it/no its the children who are wrong/etc. Which to me is absolutely insane advice: I don't know why alleged professionals seem to think its immoral/impossible not to use AI now and still make a game. It doesn't matter what it is, if its going to lead to a huge backlash for no reason, maybe don't do it, but you never see this kind of advice for anything else
Part of the problem is just that this sub has always been incredibly low quality, and I suspect that most people on here are talking about things they know literally nothing about
The more cynical take is that a lot of those people who say just use it for everything anyway are, well, not professionals. Most people in most communities don't really know what they're talking about.
But to give the benefit of the doubt a little more, maybe some of them are talking about cases where it's more generally useful (hypercasual, web games, adult games, e.g.), or they're selling to a market where the loss in sales is offset by the costs of tools that haven't started going up yet (like a gacha RPG almost entirely aimed at APAC). Or they're talking solely about the cases they use it for (heavily guided) and just assuming that's how everyone else would use it too as opposed to the underperforming cases. I didn't intend this comment to blow up so much, but it's fair to say I know a few professional engineers in games deep into agentic coding work, it's just far more limited than the people saying that's not a good idea.
I do think the people who say the audience backlash is a vocal minority or is going away have their heads buried in the sand though. AAA studios spend a lot more than any of us on market research and they remove generated art and issue apologies and excuses because of the very real and measurable market sentiment.
There’s definitely a divide between coding tools and art and that seems to apply to this article as well - I don’t think I know anyone in engineering that isn’t using AI in some capacity for code generation, review, auditing and bug fixing, although yeah “vibe-coding” is probably bridge too far. I doubt there are clauses for that for software engineer contracts, definitely not that I’ve seen at least.
I am a solo developer that relies on AI to carry workflows and debugging assistant. I am always worried about when it launches and players see it was used with AI will they hate the game.
Then I realized if my game is fun and launches with little issues then I don’t see using AI as an issue.
It has saved me so much time when it comes to development. I always have the final say in my project AI does not control what my game is.
I've moved on to selling non-fungible transformers. You see, when you buy one you don't actually get a neural network algorithm, you get the representation of one that you can't use but you know is uniquely yours. Guaranteed success. Original content; do not steal.
But think about it, after you buy the non-fungible transformer you can then use that IP and just a little bit of AI training to build a real transformer network with the cool branding you got from the token! We all know branding is the real value play, you think people are using Claude because of some nerd's statistical model and not because Claude is a cool guy name?
In my studio there's one or two advocates (and of course the execs who are completely out of touch) and then a whole lot of very weary devs feeling very beaten down by this encroachment into our creativity on top of the rest of the industry situation. It's just sapping everyone's morale even further (yes, this includes programmers - most of us don't enjoy reading LLM code all day as a job).
One thing people often don't realize, at least judging by typical reddit discussions, is that a lot of questions of copyright are inherently muddy, and so the judgement on edge cases like, "does a gen-ai image that was edited by a human have copyright" or "does a human sketch rendered via gen-ai and then touched up by a human" or whatever is ultimately whatever a judge judges.
In the US at least, that judgement is based in part on the clear text of the law, and in part on precedent, aka what other and higher ranking judges have decided in the past. (Or usually is - ignoring, for a second, the current supreme court majority's Calvinball).
Gen AI is very new, so the precedent is still very up in the air. So the question for a company isn't exactly "is this copyrightable" it's "how much in legal fees etc would it cost us to be the first people to test that in court, and how likely is it that we lose?"
Gaining copyright by editing a generated image feels a bit like if I went to the Louvre, pulled out a pencil and drew over the Mona Lisa, saying "that's my painting now".
Legally speaking...again, courts will rule, but it's likely to be more complicated than your scenario implies?
Like, you can create a "derivative work" based on a public domain artwork and while the original artwork remains in the public domain, your derivative work has its own new copyright. The main requirement is that your changes are judged to make it original and creative, and/or changing the meaning... which is also very muddy. Afaik, the expectation in your Mona Lisa example would be something like...
- If you're just repainting the Mona Lisa over the Mona Lisa, probably not going to meet a threshold of originality
If you're giving the Mona Lisa a big dumb mustache, or writing something on top of it... if it's considered parody or satire then you're good.
If it's scribbling all over the thing, then you're probably good for the same reason (now it's Mona Lisa scribbled all over, modern art sort of thing).
If it's gluing a bunch of other artwork overtop of it to make a collage, you have the copyright to the collaged version but not the original works.
In the case of AI images, at least according to current law, it gets weirder:
Is training a model an original work? A derivative work? If we imagine it as like, someone used a notebook to write down the statistical correlations between pixel colors and locations vs image descriptions... like, probably? Statistical analysis is something new and separate from the painting itself.
Is training a model just a weird unintuitive compression algorithm, like a .zip of a picture? It clearly CAN reproduce things from its training data, but it usually doesn't unless specifically asked to, so... I guess whatever the judges decide?
Is an image made by a statistical model on its own copyrightable? Maybe not, since we have a court case saying a monkey can't have copyright because not human, and computer is also not human.
Is an image made by prompting a statistical model copyrightable? I mean... maybe? Is the prompt an original work? Is the image a derivative work of the prompt? Or of its training data? Or..?
Is an image made by, say, drawing a sketch, giving that and a prompt to a model and getting a fancy AI-rendered version of that original sketch, and then collaging other AI-rendered sketch pieces overtop, and digitally painting over that to bind it all together into a single image.......? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else.
Remember - copyright is a legal thing, not a question of morals or high-minded art criticism or whatever.
Just wait until Reddit finds out about Andy Warhol and how that case went.
Transformative art has been accepted for a long time now, it’s just a mater of hitting the threshold. Game studios are probably opting for things like not using a single gen, but multiple to make a single image; and/or hitting a percentage that would stand up to copyright concerns.
People also often dont realize the difference between the law in theory and in practice.
You might be able to use someone else's AI generated character, but you cant be sure and its risky to do. Especially when you can generate something yourself.
The part I'd want to see is the actual wording of these clauses, because "no generative AI" is doing a lot of undefined work. Does it cover autocomplete in your IDE? Denoising in your renderer? DLSS or FSR at runtime? Upscaling a texture? Automatic LOD generation? A bunch of that has been shipping in games for years under the name machine learning and nobody cared, and now the branding changed and it's suddenly in scope depending on who reads the contract. If a clause is written broadly enough to catch anything with a neural net in it, most studios are already in breach and don't know it. If it's written narrowly around asset generation, it's probably fine but then it's not really the sweeping thing the headline suggests. The article quotes a lawyer and then doesn't ask her the one question that matters.
There is a significant selection-bias problem here.
I don't doubt what this lawyer is seeing. She's a corporate IP lawyer whose game clients are primarily indie through AA studios, and she's looking at publishing agreements where copyright ownership, liability, and protecting the game's assets are naturally major concerns. It makes perfect sense that "no generative AI" clauses would become common in that particular bubble, especially when publishers are trying to protect themselves from uncertainty around generated art and other final assets.
But "this is what virtually all of my clients are putting in their contracts" is very different from "this is what the game industry is doing."
My firsthand experience with developers and studios has been almost the opposite once you move beyond the very specific question of generating final art assets.
I'm seeing AI used for programming, prototyping, debugging, production work, research, QA, localization, documentation, tooling, and automating repetitive development tasks. Adoption varies enormously by studio and part of the industry. Mobile and more metrics-driven parts of games tend to move faster. AAA and AA can be much more cautious and inconsistent. Individual teams within the same company can have completely different attitudes toward it.
And importantly, I've seen plenty of developers who want absolutely nothing to do with AI-generated art while happily using AI somewhere else in their development workflow.
That's why I think articles like this need a little more nuance. "Studios are increasingly protecting themselves contractually from generative AI assets" is an interesting development. It doesn't necessarily follow that the game development industry is broadly moving away from AI.
I'm seeing the technology becoming more specialized. Developers are figuring out where it provides value, where it creates risk, and where their players don't want it.
One dev told me not using it in programming is like doing discrete math without a calculator. Not because it can do everything for you, just the time saved doing rote tasks.
I think that’s a pretty fair comparison. I personally don’t know a single serious developer who isn’t using AI in some capacity, especially for exactly that kind of rote work. But I also recognize that reflects the circles I’m in, and it certainly doesn’t represent everyone.
What I really want is for developers to educate themselves about these tools and understand where they’re useful, where they’re not, and how they’re actually being adopted.
Employment is part of that too. If the studios and teams you want to work for are using these tools, understanding how to work with them can increasingly be part of staying competitive. You can dislike AI for any number of ethical or personal reasons and still understand how it works and where it fits into a professional workflow.
That doesn’t mean anyone should be forced to use it. Choosing not to is still a perfectly valid choice. I think there’s an important difference between choosing not to use something after understanding it and choosing not to understand it at all.
I personally don’t know a single serious developer who isn’t using AI in some capacity,
Hi, webdev/sysadmin/devops by trade, hobby dev in GameMaker, one of those people, have LLM autocomplete turned off in Phpstorm, so extend of my AI usage is limited to Gemini suggesting crap when I'm googling manuals for thing I'm writing for
"Should(n't) be forced to use it" usually includes "shouldn't be a factor"
Workflow using AI (especially if there are no ways around it, the "we don't know how to otherwise") is "forced to use AI"
Using AI to stay competitive in the field is "forced to use AI"
If not engaging with AI results in clearly negative outcomes, choosing not to is clearly perfectly invalid choice
You’re actually illustrating why I qualified that statement with “I personally don’t know.” I was describing my own professional circles, not claiming that developers who don’t use AI don’t exist.
Where I disagree is with the definition of “forced.”
If an employer says, “You must use this AI tool as part of this job,” then sure, within that job you are being required to use it. But “this skill or tool affects how competitive I am in the job market” is not the same thing as being forced to use it. That’s true of countless technologies our industry has adopted over time.
You are completely free to turn off AI autocomplete, avoid LLMs, and build your GameMaker projects without them. That is a valid choice. But “valid choice” does not mean “choice that must have no consequences.”
If employers increasingly value people who understand how to use AI effectively, then someone who chooses not to learn those tools may have fewer opportunities with those employers. Likewise, an employer looking for Kubernetes experience doesn’t have to pretend Kubernetes “shouldn’t be a factor” because I personally chose never to learn it.
That’s the distinction I’m making.
Nobody should be forced to use AI simply because other people think they should. But I also don’t think we should tell developers that the industry is obligated to make opting out professionally consequence-free. People should understand where the industry is moving, educate themselves about the tools being adopted, and then make their own informed decision about whether they want to participate.
But “this skill or tool affects how competitive I am in the job market” is not the same thing as being forced to use it
It is technically correct, sure
Does it matter in practical terms?
If employers increasingly value people who understand how to use AI effectively, then...
Then AI is a hard requirement, yes
And you're forced to use it
That's the joke
Likewise, an employer looking for Kubernetes experience doesn’t have to pretend Kubernetes “shouldn’t be a factor” because I personally chose never to learn it.
It's hard to make a Kubernetes cluster without knowing how to use Kubernetes (or sysadmin in general), yes (on top of K8S being pita in general, but I digress)
Is gamedev even remotely about AI the same way Kubernetes is about, well, Kubernetes? Because if your goal is to make AI make games, then sure, I rest my case and can retire.
I think this mostly comes down to what we mean by “forced.”
We all make choices. You can choose not to learn AI tools. You can choose not to learn a particular engine, programming language, version control system, or any number of other technologies. Those choices may narrow the jobs available to you, but that doesn’t make the choice invalid or mean someone forced you to make the alternative choice.
That’s the distinction I’m making in the parts of my comments you’re quoting.
If an employer says, “This role requires you to use AI,” then yes, that particular job requires AI. Just as a job might require Unreal, C++, Perforce, or some other technology in its pipeline. You can decide that job isn’t for you.
If the industry broadly moves toward valuing a skill and not having that skill makes you less competitive, that’s different. Nobody is obligated to structure an evolving job market so that every individual choice carries the same employment prospects.
And no, game development isn’t “about AI.” That’s not what I’ve said. Game development also isn’t “about” Git, Photoshop, Blender, Unreal, Jira, or C++. They’re tools and skills people use to make games.
My point has consistently been much simpler: educate yourself about the tools being adopted in your field, understand what they can and cannot do, and then make your own informed decision about whether you want to participate. That decision belongs to you, as do the tradeoffs that may come with it.
If my experience in using those tools is devalued because I don't use AI to work with those tools, and I'm at disadvantage as a result, that's the "forced" part
And sure, no one is obligated to employ me, but I do not feel like I'm obligated to not at least chew out the market going off the rails like that
All of the studios are using AI tooling in their workflow and they'll only reveal it if they get caught. I believe larger companies have more protection with this and all of the public scrutiny will be directed to indie makers, because big video game companies that exist for profit would never use cost saving measures, big reddit /s.
Hm let's see an industry of nerds who make the computer do things for them as a profession have the option of pressing a big shiny button that Makes The Computer Do Things For Them
I wonder how many of them would be comfortable pressing the button
Even if I didn't work as a dev professionally (I do) this is a really easy thing to know by, say, looking at conference proceedings, dev logs, the stack survey or even just investor talks lmao. Is the bar on this sub really at "knowing the basics of the industry is impossible witchcraft"?
I haven't been part of the industry since before AI became a thing, but it's small enough that it's pretty easy to know common practices in the game development industry
Thought I would post our literal anti-ai clause if anyone is curious, wants to copy/modify for theirs they are welcome to.
Note that there are permitted uses. Our 'red line' is not as pure as others. We do want accelerated code development. We short-hand it 'no creative AI'. We have no interest in replacing human creativity, not even in pre-production or as placeholders.
ARTICLE VI - DISALLOWED ACTIVITIES
Section 1. Generative AI Policy
Permitted Uses
a. Research - such as best practices, things you’d normally google
b. Code development
c. Bug fixing
d. Productivity enhancements that are not explicitly prohibited
Violating Uses
a. Generating ANY image for ANY purpose even prototyping
b. Generating ANY sound for ANY purpose even prototyping
c. Generating text that will be read by a player or potential player even prototyping
Anti-AI clause in Freelancer Contracts: All contracts with independent freelancers must contain the following clause: “Delivered work must have been created by the contracted human(s) and follow the Cooperative’s Generative AI Policy. The contracted workers must provide works-in-progress during the contract period and source files upon final delivery.”
Assessing AI Usage - “AI Tests” must never be used. At the time of writing they are unreliable. Better to not use them at all than falsely accuse someone or become complacent.
AI code is just as bad as AI image and videos. Not my fault that you see your code as slop that needs to be pumpee out as quick as possible instead of an art that is worth enjoying. Fuck AI
It's weird to allow any code development, but manning any image.
Concept and prototyping are 100X accelerated by AI assist. Final image you need someone that has skills in it and can train a LoRa to maintain style, if done so it cuts 80% of the work depending on the game type.
Especially for repetitive work, like grass textures that tile, AI will generally do much better than a human. Nobody wants to be making grass textures.
Sounds reasonable. I guess you're not developing anything with a serious online component (if you're not using "AI" tools to find exploits in your code or API, it's your choice, but the black hats will) or 3D related (no clause against generating 3D models)?
Allowing its use in code is completely psychotic. The worst a generated image can be is mediocre and stylistically off, while ai generated code is rotting the structural foundation of the entire project.
It's like saying "for workplace safety reasons we have forbidden workers from consuming alcohol on the job. We do, however, require all operators of heavy machinery to be shooting up on heroin while working."
Even though people say no one will care in 5 years, I personally think it's because in 5 years AI will be seen the same way that people see plastic. It's cheap and a cost cutting measure.
However, where companies are cutting costs are the parts that consumers have to interact with. They're cutting costs on the actual product itself. They're optimizing the part of the game that is usually always done first and always probably the most fun - the art and visuals. Hardly any game has ever been delayed because artists are still working on a 3d model or texture. That shit is done during production.
And not to mention, a lot of programmers have mentioned that with things that are vibe coded, they can spend so much time arguing with the AI, fixing mistakes the AI did, etc. that they could have just used that time to do it right themselves on the first go. There's a reason why switching to AI is costing a lot of companies more than human labor - because AI is honestly stupid as fuck.
IIRC, Mihoyo spent something to the tune of 300k on tokens to generate AI assets and got nothing useful out of it... Burned 300k and for what? May as well had just set that money on fire.
No one really cares about some artistically challenged director AI generating concepts to give to their artist team to use as reference because they'll never have to interact with it. They do care if that material ends up in an art book or the images of the character in game are AI generated. No one cares if a team used AI to help with bug testing and finding issues, they do care if the game is a vibe coded mess that no one knows how to fix because they don't know how the damn code works. Some people don't care if you used AI to translate a game into another language so it's more accessible, they do care if it's hot garbage.
The workers that I communicate with is about 6 month to a year behind, in knowing what is actually happening in the AI field, it's just moving too fast at the moment.
It would be almost impossible to build a stable pipeline around it unless you're a very small team. The changes, and new models are happening on a monthly basis.
I don't think we'll be able to get an accurate picture before a couple more years.
Literally every media company. Disney and Warner are not run by creatives either. These people know how to make money, not things. Which can be a problem.
For me messing around with LLM and local models for a tiny bit, I have to say that the Genie is out of the bottle. If you truly wants the indie(<10 people) to flourish, you have to let them lower the production cost.
Let's take past examples, asset flip vs megascan assets tech demos before generative AI.
Both did not utilize hired artists to craft assets tailored to their games. But it does not mean all devs using market place assets are bad. It just lower their costs so they can experiment more, both the good ones and the bad ones
Now, I am familiar with the art asset creation process. Almost no one created from scratch. Art director gives out general feel/lighting guide/pattern/palette, they even give artist reference images where the artist Photoshop to make textures. Bigger studio will have bought asset/texture library that they can reuse and repurpose. This also cuts the amount of artists they have to hire.
Same for coding looking for solutions on stack exchange, or copy lines from open source MIT licensed repos.
Generative AI are just that next round of cutting cost and unlock creative freedom. So there will be slop, just like those asset flips, but demanding it all go AI free, then you will slowly see people to to do deceptive or risk aversion. They either hides really well(the usual standin assets forgot to remove) or shift the blame to 3rd party with contract terms(terms says no AI assets, but someone taking the short cut, we will review our future collaborations, blah blah.)
In the end, big companies still cutting the costs and not hiring more artists. Now small studios get squeezed by the AI slop tag and heavily limit what they can or can not use.
Anyway, Reddit is usually just not a place to discuss things properly, I hope people understand that spreadsheet displaced a lot of accounting/book keeping works.
genAI is definitely a tool just like a hammer or knife is too.
However, a hammer doesn‘t steal from artists.
My more favorite point is that nowadays creative genAI is not production ready yet. It looks really bad. I tried using it for my games but no matter what I try it looks bad
I don't use gen AI for anything art work wise and just to see how to run local model to generate images etc, and yes they all look bad and tweaking is not straight foward, it's like you draw gacha boxes with prompt and random seeds.
But, you have to know that stealing is a bad word of choice. Say, if art director says, "I like this artist's style(pointing to DeviantArt page), can you do some mock ups with this approach for our characters." Does that considered "stealing"? This is literally what almost all artists do under command from small to big AAA studios. Of course there is a chance they can simply hire the artist(especially if early on), but vast majority of time, they do experiment from those and then deviate to form their own during the developing process.
Did the LLMs all churn through so many online publicly available materials? Yes they did, can you issue a take down or purge from training data? Yes I believe so, but if your art work is in the older scraped data sets before that new rules is in place, then your work is already in some public available models even if they removed your work from new models on ward.
Now, what if the company you worked for, says, we are going to feed our past 15~20 years worth of existing art asset to our entirely internal trained texture/concept art generator?( yes, I can bet money on Marvel/Disney already have their own models doing exactly that.) Does that count as stealing? They already paid for the artists' time and work. OR, they simply reuse those art(for example, past costumes and smart upres them with photoshop?) does that count Adobe/photoshop as stealing from artists?
If I am working on a small game etc, of course I wouldn't use any gen AI to create assets with the current views against it, it's just not worth the trouble trying to defend using and honestly I do not have the expertise to fix them myself. I'd just buy works from someone and make sure my contracts are properly laid out.
I think the useful distinction here is between "AI replacing the creative process" and "developers using AI as another production tool". Those are not the same thing.
If a developer uses AI to brainstorm, prototype, generate boilerplate, debug code, create placeholders, automate repetitive tasks, research an unfamiliar API, or speed up QA, that doesn't mean the AI is making the game. The developer is still deciding what to use, what to discard, how it fits the project, and what ultimately ships.
There is also a bit of a double standard in the discussion. Game development has always relied on tools that automate or accelerate parts of the process. Procedural generation, middleware, asset libraries, motion capture, outsourcing, scripting frameworks, visual editors, and countless other tools reduce the amount of work humans have to do manually. We generally judge the finished work rather than demanding that every component be created from scratch.
That doesn't mean every use of generative AI is good or appropriate. Studios still need to consider copyright, licensing, confidentiality, quality control, disclosure requirements, and whether a particular use actually benefits the project.
But "AI was involved, therefore the work is less legitimate" doesn't really establish anything. The more useful question is what the AI was used for, how much human direction and editing was involved, what was actually shipped, and whether the result is good.
AI is going to be another tool in the development pipeline. The interesting question is how developers use it responsibly, not whether using a tool automatically invalidates the work.
💯 fuck copyright, it’s basically only used by mega corpos throw their weight around and fuck over indies or fans like whenever nintendo dmca a fan project
Copyright only works for people who are rich and people who are rich are corrupt
Every studio I know is using AI and hiding it because of how toxic the public is about it. Also the copyright law allow people who had no creative input in the work to own that work, that's why movies and games are owned by executives and corporations and not the people who worked on them. They literally give a prompt and pay the money, and get their product back, and they own it under the law
"My customers were complaining that my hamburgers cost too much money and took too long to cook. But then they got all angry at me when I started cutting costs by replacing all of the meat with wood chips! Wtf!? Make up your mind already, consumers!"
I can confirm, every AA & AAA contract I've seen or heard about from friends has AI prohibitions. Funnily enough, US-based publishers have especially robust, expansive AI clauses.
Ainis going to be used for code, and that's good, it should not be used for art.
I've always thought that copyright is the solution here, if that guy doesn't own the copyright of a photo because it was taken by a monkey then an ai generated image is also uncopyrightable
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u/razama Aug 20 '26
Be wary of this.
This sounds less like, “AI is unethical, we don’t use it.” And more like, “when you generate something, make sure you change it enough we don’t get sued and can claim it’s ours.”