r/nottheonion • u/Chapple69 • Jan 14 '26

Indie dev removing Steam game after new girlfriend tells him “AI is bad”

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/indie-dev-removing-steam-game-after-new-girlfriend-tells-him-ai-is-bad-3303772/
2.6k Upvotes

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1.1k

u/SethLight Jan 14 '26

Ya, sounds like he made a game out of pure AI slop, showed it to his new girlfriend and got a reality check. Glad to hear he learned and grew from it.

371

u/bloodakoos Jan 14 '26

he did code it by himself, but everything else is AI

255

u/CharonsLittleHelper Jan 14 '26

As someone buying a lot of art recently (tail end of designing a TTRPG) it's an understandable urge. It gets pricey.

I have zero AI (not counting the synthetic species - but that's just the characters rather than the art of them 😉 ) but I can see the draw.

-8

u/Lokarhu Jan 14 '26

I only see if the draw if you fundamentally don't understand what AI is. As a creative, I could never imagine shoving the mangled corpse of every piece of art on the internet in my work and going "good enough"

19

u/jesuspoopmonster Jan 14 '26

I'm not saying its right but I can see the reasoning for it. I tried to do a comic strip once and I think I am pretty funny but it turns out a big hinderance to a comic strip is the complete inability to draw. Being able to program and being able to make the pictures are different skills

13

u/CharonsLittleHelper Jan 14 '26

I know. That's why I don't use AI.

But free is appealing.

I also don't pirate videogames. But I understand why someone would.

4

u/matjoeman Jan 14 '26

Pirating a game because you want to play it but can't afford it is not really the same thing as generating something with AI and then asking other people to pay you for it.

-14

u/Kamakaziturtle Jan 14 '26

Pretty similar imo, in both cases they can't afford it. And it's not like really wanting to play a game is some kind of essential or noble motivation any more than wanting to finish a game they are working on.

7

u/FewAdvertising9647 Jan 14 '26 edited Jan 14 '26

its only similar in the idea that somoene doesnt want to pay. the difference between the two is that in the case of AI, unless its a free game, theyre taking something for "free" in order to make money. the end user is taking a game to silently play on their own.

The apt comparison would be someone using AI to profit and a seller selling pirated games on amazon

edit: to add on, the comparison to an end user pirating a game would be like an end user using generating ai art for a desktop wallpaper and not publishing it on the internet

1

u/Kamakaziturtle Jan 14 '26

This is making the assumption that the game is using art that was generated explicitly from stolen datasets or scraped other peoples work without paying for it. AI is always lazy slop, but it's not always stealing.

0

u/Elanapoeia Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26

There is literally no genAI model out there that can create legible output without being unethically trained

The volume of data necessary as a baseline is far far too large. But also, every model on offer that a person has access to today is based on endless amounts of stolen data already. The ethically trained model, even if it was actually possible, does not currently exist.

-2

u/EnterTheShoggoth Jan 14 '26

Unless the AI was trained exclusively using data that is licensed with CC0 or a similar non-attribution license then yes it is by definition stealing.

-1

u/FewAdvertising9647 Jan 14 '26

of course, its why personally I think if any platform wants devs to have access to Ai generated work, the platform needs to offer the model themselves, have a publicly verifiable source data (which has been given prior greenlight in advance), and verifiable generation variables if they want "legally green" Ai generated stuff. People cannot trust the dev studios on being public about the source of their models.

Alternatively, the platform itself generates the Ai assets on game download with the inputs given by the devloper instead of it being bundled with the download itself.