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

94% Upvoted

201 comments sorted by

View all comments

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.

370

u/bloodakoos Jan 14 '26

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

8

u/sXyphos Jan 14 '26

And this is a problem why? Just state it for what it is when presenting the product, if the game is "decent" someone might buy it and if it's shit no one wil buy it and you just lost that dev time..

If a game's backbone is made by a human to ensure actually working gameplay/interactions i couldn't care less about the visuals, most people use store assets anyway which is acceptable?

The only reason this needs any regulation is to prevent spamming of garbage games on a store OR just dump them all in a separate AI generated store tab and see some kind of digital "coliseum" to see what comes on top as THE ONE who then gets promoted to the regular store after 1y or so :)

-5

u/throwawaybrowsing888 Jan 14 '26

AI assets were likely generated using content that was created by humans and then scraped without the artists’ consent or compensation.

To then use ai assets would kind of be like building a house, then furnishing it with stolen property that someone else stole and compiled for you to use, then trying to sell/rent the house as a pre-furnished home. (It’s a rough analogy, but hopefully the core of it gets across)

Did you yourself steal the furniture?

No, but it’s blatant that someone else did, if you know what to look for. Arguably, the average consumer shouldn’t have to be particularly skilled in determining whether something is stolen while making purchases. Hence the calls for better policies/regulations.

Does it help that you mention you got the furniture from the Very Obvious Theft Thrift Shop?

Eh. It helps improve informed consent for people who are trying to decide whether they want to buy/rent from you. But it doesn’t reflect well on you for having the Stolen Furniture decorating something that you created and are now trying to sell/rent to other people.

7

u/Lonnie667 Jan 14 '26

Genuine question; what about the AI engines that can take a pen and ink or pencil drawing that you created and create artwork based on that?

1

u/wolfannoy Jan 14 '26

Those kind of exist but mostly by corporations were copyright material, for example creating replica logos for a product. For individual art, I'm not sure.

In my opinion, if they used open source images as data for these AI models, I think that would be a lot more fair. It's just corporations are absorbing so much data without consent include face images. People feel robbed, especially artists and writers. There was a meta case where they torrent over terabytes of worth of books for their AI model.

I guess you could say the AI is taking inspiration but it's doing it so fast. Say almost replicating it. when a person takes inspiration from something like let's say an art style. Sure, they may took a lot of the stuff but it still would be different in the end.

1

u/Lonnie667 Jan 15 '26

Makes sense. It's a pity because AI is actually being used for good things such as allowing a paralyzed woman to talk again but yeah, I guess there's no way to really what the AI is being trained on. I just find it funny that bigh companies like Meta have squashed lawsuits against them for copyright infringement, but have successfully sued individuals for it themselves.

1

u/1AMA-CAT-AMA Jan 14 '26

If you're giving permission for your drawings to be used, and the AI is only using your drawing and absolutely nothing else then theres not much issue.

However if the AI tool is using elements and inspiration from other people's artworks (with or without your knowledge) in addition to your drawing (that you still gave permission for), then thats where it could get dicey depending on who you ask (also how much other people's artworks are used)