Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages
AI this, AI that - you can't go anywhere without something trying to force AI on you. Usually a company trying to get you to buy into what they've wasted billions on. So indie devs have begun fighting back with their No Gen AI Seal.
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This feels discouraging as someone who struggled with learning programming for a very long time and only with the aid of copilot have I finally crossed the hurdles I was facing and felt like I was actually learning and progressing again.
Yes I’m still interacting with and manually adjusting and even writing sections of code. But a lot of what copilot does for me is interpret my natural language understanding of how I want to manipulate the data and translating it into actual code which I then work with and combine with the rest of the project.
But I’ve stopped looking to join any game jams because it seems even when they don’t have an explicit ban against all AI, the sentiment I get is that people feel like it’s cheating and look down on someone in my situation. I get that submitting ai slop whole sale is just garbage. But it feels like putting these blanket ‘no ai content’ stamps and badges on things excludes a lot of people.
Is this slop? https://lemjukes.itch.io/ascii-farmer-alpha
https://github.com/LemJukes/ASCII-Farmer
Like I know it isn’t good code but I’m entirely self taught and it seems to work(and more importantly I mostly understand how it works) so what’s the fucking difference? How am I supposed to learn without iterating? If anyone human wants to look at my code and tell me why it’s shit, that’d actually be really helpful and I’d genuinely be thankful.
I am pretty sure this is not what the people who made the seal are talking about.
Read their site. They're talking about "pictures, movies, audio (music or voice action) and writing". Code in itself, especially for simple tasks like basic game logic, is not art, and I am saying that as a developer.
I am still very doubtful AI can write quality code, but I really don't care. I am sure it becomes a mess if you try to write very complex systems, but that's not the case for most games. And if AI generated code is good enough for your use case, good for you.
I'm not quite sure I'm following.
Are you saying that AI trained on the output of humans is unethical, unless those humans are programmers?
Or, as a professional programmer, you understand the limitations of AI in your field so you don't feel threatened by it while simultaneously assuming, on behalf of another profession, that AI in "artistic" fields is somehow far more capable and an actual threat?
Terrible programmers don't become professional programmers because they subscribe to Copilot. It provides a crutch to absolute beginners, allowing even the least skilled individual to create some low quality output. For professionals, AI allows for some aspects of existing tools to perform slightly better but cannot replace the knowledge, experience and practice of a human when it comes to applying those skills in novel and interesting ways.
Terrible artists don't become professional artists because they subscribe to Midjourney. It provides a crutch to absolute beginners, allowing even the least skilled individual to create some low quality output. For professionals, AI allows for some aspects of existing tools to perform slightly better but cannot replace the knowledge, experience and practice of a human when it comes to applying those skills in novel and interesting ways.
I am not "assuming" anything on anyone's behalf. There is a clear difference that's practically not even about AI at this point.
You're not stealing from a programmer by frankensteining bits of their freely available code. As someone else said, it's basically stack overflow with an extra step. There's no secret sauce in coding, you can evaluate code quality, you can exchange tricks and techniques, but you're not expressing yourself through code.
However, if you take bits of one or several cultural products without the creator's consent and pass the whole thing as your own, that's called plagiarism, and this is a special thing for a reason.
For AI, I don't think anybody cares about a random beginner using it as "crutch". People care about big entertainment companies deciding they need 90% fewer artists because AI does "good enough" (even when it does quite poorly, and even when it's trained on the work of people like the ones they're replacing).
Buddy, using AI as a coding crutch is not the issue for the same reason it’s not an issue if you rely on stack overflow for learning how other people do things. The issue is when generative AI is used to generate assets for a game.
So would you think I’d be welcomed to join a game jam with a ‘no AI’ rule or would I be disqualified? Based on the amount of downvotes both iterations of my original comment it genuinely seems like most people think I don’t belong.
In the game jam? no, because the point to write something yourself from scratch. You’d join the game jam once you no longer require the AI as a crutch. It’s ok to not be ready for a game jam.
That's the thing, i will never be able to write a complete project unaided, full stop. I banged my head against that process for 10+ years trying to teach myself. I've tried classes, books, tutorials and i always end up failing out because i am incapable of actually writing code correctly, even when i know what im doing is the way its supposed to work. I struggle enough with just spelling english words, my native fucking language, correctly half the time. So remembering where the semi colon goes or that you need to use : instead of = in these specific cases but not these specific cases, is something my brain is simply incapable of accomplishing.
I'm not applying for jobs, i'm not trying to build any kind of major infrastructure, i just simply want to participate in a community and not be shunned and ridiculed because i use a tool that allows me to participate at all.
You’re not going to be shunned or ridiculed for using an AI helper when coding. It’s not appropriate for use in a game jam generally, but that’s not the same as being shunned or ridiculed.
Like if you go into a big weightlifting gym, there will be people there on various chemical substances that augment your bodies natural abilities. These people aren’t going to be shunned or ridiculed from the weightlifting community just because they’re not 100% natural. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be allowed into most competitions and they understand that.
I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll even find some that allow the use of AI as long as you disclose what it is you use and how. But if the point of a given game jam is to demonstrate natural ability, why would they allow AI when that isn’t your natural ability?
Thanks this helped me a bunch.
Are you learning something when making something? Could you make an app similar to one you already made, but without using AI? Are you having fun?
If the answer to all of these questions is yes, congrats! I recommend mentioning if you make something where a huge pert of the work was made with the help of AI on the page where it is posted though