Post by Lexyth in Echoes of Mana Tomb comments

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TL;DR: using AI as an addition is great, using it to replace people is not. For solo indie developers without a budget it's always an addition, for AAA it's almost never.

The difference is this:

AI allows this indie game to exist; without, it simply would not. Nobody's loss in having one more game.

AI allows AAA studios to save on/fire a part of the development team required to create the game; without, they would have been hired. That's a loss to the people working in the industry and no gain, since the game would have been developed either way.

That's the same as with artists. Any artist that lost a job to AI will tell you they're not happy about that, while they'll not care about AI usage for projects they wouldn't have been hired for anyway.

Of course, there are AAA studios that handle AI sensibly, so technically it's not strictly related to AAA itself, but the overwhelmingly vast majority just replaces expensive labor with it to save money.

acobham14 days ago(+1)(-1)

This game could exist without AI, people have made games for years without a AAA budget or AI.

"Nobody's loss in having one more game" Quality > quantity. There were already more games being made than you would have the time to play before AI.

Lexyth14 days ago (1 edit) (-2)

There's a difference between "could" and "would".

This game could exist without AI. This game *would not* exist without AI.

And there's also a difference between "[some] people having made games without" and "[all] people having {been able to] make games without".

People have done many great things. That's no reason to prevent people who need more assistance from doing the same.

Quality > quantity, sure. And I'll just ignore the whole argument I could make about "eye of the beholder" and whatnot and let you be the sole judge of quality, but that still doesn't make this a loss. Is this the worst game in the world? No. Would it be a loss if it was? No. You're not forced to play it. At most you'd have to scroll past it; maybe spend twenty seconds pressing the "play" button. But that's not due to AI, it's about the quality, which can be abysmal with non-AI games, too. So that's no real reason to prevent them from using AI, is it? You don't have to finish every single game in existence, either.

And sure, having a ton of AI slop in the selection list is annoying. But before, I had a ton of annoying "not my cup" stuff in the list, too. And not every game made with AI is by default slop. It's less likely than for handcrafted things, but even those have enough bad stuff mixed in. Some of it is bad precisely because a single dev had no time and was forced to focus on boring boilerplate to get anything running at all, wasting time that could have gone into developing fun features.

If you paid something for the game, sure, you'd be entitled to have a problem with the game being made with less effort than expected compared to what you paid for it. But it's a free game and nobody forced you to play it, right?

acobham12 days ago(-1)

This game would exist without AI, all the dev needs to do is finish learning how to code.

Some people doing something properly is better than a bunch of people spamming out worthless AI garbage.

It's not assistance, it's having it done for you.

Every game that's made with AI is awful and uses the same ugly UI, this will never change because these "devs" aren't going to improve their skills since the AI is doing the heavy lifting.

Something being free changes nothing, the issue is the use of AI not the price.

Lexyth11 days ago

TL;DR:

"Would [...], if [...]" is the meaning of "could". Seriously...

"Some people doing something properly is better than a bunch of people spamming out worthless AI garbage." or "Some people doing something properly with AI is better than a bunch of people spamming out worthless AI garbage." Now, either is an objective statement I can agree with.

If you were a developer, you'd know that using a single prompt — which would be having it done for you — does not get you anything worthwhile. Using it as the tool it is, however, is assistance.

And no, you're not Owner of Humanity and Decider of Fates, Acobham, the Knower-Whats-Best. You have no prerogative to restrict or in any way judge others' use of AI when you have no vested interests in the result, other than to express a personal opinion. "Never look a gift horse in the mouth."

---

What? For all you know, the dev might be a senior developer who spent an hour after work over the last months making this as a part time, passion project, precisely because he knew he could use AI to save him a lot of boilerplate and setup work.

He likely would NOT have done so if it had taken up all his time.

A game would not exist without AI just because a dev knows how to code. Just how knowing how to write doesn't mean you have time to write your own memoirs.

Not everyone has the time to spare to dedicate to all the projects they want to see completed.

I could almost agree with your second statement. It would have been perfectly reasonable, had you not felt the need to specify "AI" solely one the side that is perceived as negative.

Some people doing something properly [whether that be with or without AI] is better than a bunch of people spamming out worthless AI [or handcrafted] garbage. As it stands, that does not constitute a point against AI, but rather an opinion. You made my point for me in that. Creating half-finished products that don't have the most basic features because the devs had no time to add those doesn't automatically make them "good because handcrafted". Bad games have been spammed out for decades without AI.

And you're clearly not a developer, nor are you well-versed on AI in development. It's bad at anything other than auto-completing boilerplate code, auto-completing settings for tools and other systems and setting up presets, and auto-completing inline; that's all it can do. And for those, there were tools that handled it before AI; now they use AI. Nothing has changed, other than people hearing AI and going nuts. Anything AI does now, tools did before. Only, those tools required complex setup and handling, so they got replaced.

Assuming that a dev doesn't know how to program just because they use AI is nonsensical. As explained earlier, it's a useful tool for dozens of mind-numbingly repetitive tasks. Using a single prompt for AI to create a game for you is simple and results in trash. Using AI in development is little more than auto-complete for longer sections; you still need to have the required knowledge, or you'll end up with an unmaintainable mess very quickly.

And even then, being made purely by AI is still not a quality factor, just an indicator.

And lastly: No. Something being free changes everything. You are not entitled to demand anything you see being made according to your opinion. If you paid for it and it turns out that they put in less effort than you thought would have been worth the price at the time of purchase, that's a just complaint. Getting something for free removes that relationship between the price you paid and the (perceived) worth you received in return and renders your demands void.

acobham6 days ago(-1)

"or "Some people doing something properly with AI is better than a bunch of people spamming out worthless AI garbage." Now, either is an objective statement I can agree with." - If it's made with AI it isn't done properly. All these AI games have the same UI and awful balancing, and the "devs" of these games will never fix these issues because they will never actually learn how to make games due to using AI as a shortcut.

"Using it as the tool it is, however, is assistance" - What does using it as a tool mean exactly and how does it differ from "having it done for you".

"You have no prerogative to restrict or in any way judge others' use of AI" - Obviously I can't stop them from using AI instead of learning how to do something but I can judge them for doing that.

"Never look a gift horse in the mouth" - Doesn't apply to AI slop, it isn't a gift in any sense of the word.

"For all you know, the dev might be a senior developer who spent an hour after work over the last months making this as a part time, passion project, precisely because he knew he could use AI to save him a lot of boilerplate and setup work" - This isn't the work of someone with experience, you can tell because; the game is awful, it was clearly made using AI and it's the only game made by this "dev". There's no rush to publish work that is done as a hobby so there's no excuse for using AI to save time.

"He likely would NOT have done so if it had taken up all his time. " - Oh no, what would we do without the 100th awful AI "game" published this week.

"Not everyone has the time to spare to dedicate to all the projects they want to see completed." Which is a normal part of life, accept it.

"had you not felt the need to specify "AI" solely one the side that is perceived as negative" - AI is a negative though.

"Creating half-finished products that don't have the most basic features because the devs had no time to add those doesn't automatically make them "good because handcrafted" - Hence why I never said otherwise. Creating a "half-finished product due to lack of time" doesn't constitute "doing something properly".

"Bad games have been spammed out for decades without AI" - And do you think AI will increase the amount of spam or decrease it?

"Assuming that a dev doesn't know how to program just because they use AI is nonsensical" - It's not an assumption, the quality of the game shows it clearly.

"Something being free changes everything. You are not entitled to demand anything you see being made according to your opinion" - I haven't made any demands, but you're not entitled to do that even if you paid for the game.

Lexyth6 days ago

"If it's made with AI it isn't done properly." If by "properly" you mean the way you like, sure. If you mean with effort and aiming for high-quality, then the usage of AI is not the limiting factor. On the contrary, AI allows developers to focus on the qualitative parts of their game, i.e. the content instead of the code.

How do you know they'll never fix them? Did they tell you? And if one, even if the majority did that, what's that got to do with AI? That's on the devs, not on AI-usage.

I'd say I explained what I meant by "using AI as a tool", but to clarify:

- Prompting "Make me a game" is bad, lazy, and anything you said until now, but it also will *not* result in anything remotely playable.
- Prompting "Refactor function x to use bubble sort." is using it as a tool. And there's hardly any difference to copy-pasting from StackOverflow.

You can judge as in "have an opinion", not as in "decide what is right".

It's free. You don't like it, I got that. But it's still a "gift horse". You can take it or leave it, but you can't tell the other party you want something better. That's the meaning of that phrase and it applies to anything that is free, even to AI slop, even to any other kind of slop.

Again, AI alone cannot (yet) make a fully functioning game like this. Try to get any AI to make this same game and tell me how it went. It's gotten quite far, and it's capable of making small apps on its own, but a game is still a tab bit too complex. Maybe next year, it will be fully autonomous, but until then, there's at least some understanding of programming required to make a game (that isn't pong or tetris).

"There's no rush to publish"? Of course there is. When you work on something as a hobby that is meant to entertain others, you want that out as soon as possible, that's the same for any kind of art, be it games, stories, songs, or anything else.

"What would we do without the 100th awful AI game published this week"? Nothing different, I supposed. But what "we" do wasn't the point of the statement you quoted there, was it? They got a game published, that's a win for them. We weren't negatively affected (in any meaningful quantity). As you said, one more AI doesn't make a difference to us.

""Not everyone has the time to spare to dedicate to all the projects they want to see completed." Which is a normal part of life, accept it." So they use AI, accept it. Seriously, what kind of reply was that? Why would you accept not being able to complete a project if you *can* actually complete it. A lot of (negative) things are normal parts of life and could be accepted, but we can also just do something about some of them.

"AI is a negative though." I think you misunderstood that sentence. The point was that putting a qualifier only on the part of a comparison that you regard as "the negative one" does not turn the qualifier itself into a negative factor.

"Hence why I never said otherwise. Creating a "half-finished product due to lack of time" doesn't constitute "doing something properly"." So people are not allowed to publish anything that is not up to your standards? Not AI-slop, not prototype stage games, only fully finished products can be served for free.

"And do you think AI will increase the amount of spam or decrease it?" Definitely increase it. And do you think that's because AI produces low quality or because AI eases development? I'd wager the latter.

"It's not an assumption, the quality of the game shows it clearly." That's based on the assumption that game quality reflects code quality. It does not, by the way. There are more than enough examples of splendid games with terrible code and vice versa.

"I haven't made any demands, but you're not entitled to do that even if you paid for the game."? Was it not you who complained about AI-slop being published on the platform they frequent? Within that same reply, may I add. That aside, you are entitled to file a complaint if you paid for a product that was advertised as having had more effort put into than is true. It's part of the consumer protection sections of most legal codes, a.k.a. "False Advertisement".

I get it. It's annoying to waste time on bad games. And AI lowers the barrier for that, so more bad games appear. But that's also what enables those who make good games to produce them much faster or to add much more content. AI lowers the requirements, and saves quite some time, when used correctly.

I don't see how that can be bad for anyone who can decide for themselves what games they play, so why complain to them about the tools they used?

acobham5 days ago(-1)

"If you mean with effort and aiming for high-quality, then the usage of AI is not the limiting factor" - Yes it is.

"AI allows developers to focus on the qualitative parts of their game, i.e. the content instead of the code" - If that's true it doesn't show.

"How do you know they'll never fix them?" - Because they're the type of people to use AI to do their work for them, lazy and unskilled.

Being specific with your prompts doesn't make it any better.

"You can judge as in "have an opinion", not as in "decide what is right". - I never said otherwise.

"You can take it or leave it, but you can't tell the other party you want something better" - I can also criticise it.

"When you work on something as a hobby that is meant to entertain others, you want that out as soon as possible" - As soon as possible doesn't mean you need to rush, just that you don't waste time. Rushing is bad and leads to worse results and that's if you're even doing the work yourself let alone if you prompt it.

"that's a win for them" - It's rated two stars and they couldn't even make the game themselves, how is that a win?

"As you said, one more AI doesn't make a difference to us" - Using AI helps train it and publishing AI slop makes it harder to find something of value to play.

"Why would you accept not being able to complete a project if you *can* actually complete it" - They didn't complete it, AI did.

"So people are not allowed to publish anything that is not up to your standards" - It's not my standards, it's just basic English. "Doing something properly" and "half-finished" aren't the same thing, they're opposites.

"I'd wager the latter" - It's both.

"Was it not you who complained about AI-slop being published on the platform they frequent?" - That's a complaint, not a demand.

"That aside, you are entitled to file a complaint if you paid for a product that was advertised as having had more effort put into than is true" - What product has been advertised based on the effort put into it, how would you even quantify that?

"But that's also what enables those who make good games to produce them much faster or to add much more content" - People who are capable of doing good work don't need AI to do it for them. I don't want stuff made faster, Quality > Quantity

"so why complain to them about the tools they used?" - Because that tool is why this website has gone to complete shit.

Lexyth3 days ago

I'll skip some of those paragraphs, since I don't want to further this discussion in any direction that prompts more opinions on the result of AI usage, seeing as you're "the type of person" who's intent on prejudicially discriminating against usage of a tool in general, the people behind it, and declares their opinion the standard. I have disagreed with any statements of those kinds you made so far, and this didn't change yet, so let's leave it at that. No need to repeat ourselves.

However, I'll address a few other statements.

Using AI does not inherently train it. Some regions have consumer protection laws which prohibit that (e.g. the EU). But I'm sure you accurately decided the place of origin of this creator on your own.

And an incredibly far-fetched example of a product having been advertised as having more effort put into it than turned out to be true: any game advertised as non-AI, containing AI... wildly off-topic, I know.

"I don't want stuff made faster" You don't. I do, because it means quality stuff is made faster and more affordable, too. For you, there's still the slow-made stuff, since you prefer that. On the note of subjectivity, "your standards" doesn't preclude "basic English" — this platform still does not require projects to uphold your standards, i.e., "done properly", whereby "properly" is subjective, since it's circularly based solely on your, you guessed it (or not), standards.

Why do you want to take something away from people who have a different opinion? And why do you generalize everything? "Any usage of AI always results in trash, and anybody who uses it doesn't know how to program," to summarize a bit. And, most importantly, do you actually practice what you preach here? You do realize that many modern games used AI in some form to accelerate development, right? Not just triple-A, most of whom cause harm by laying off their work-force in favor of AI, but also a vast plethora of Indie titles did, too, who simply increased their production speed or quality, or lowered the investment risk.

Also, on a side note, when you want to create something, you win once it's been created. If they used AI for that, that's apparently fine with them, so why would it not be a win for them? If they ever decide that's not up to their standards, they'll certainly improve upon or redo it, if they have the time, or remove it, if they find it unpleasant enough.

And I cannot agree that the website has "gone" to complete shit; it looks the same as ever, to me. How one classifies that is another matter. You have to scroll past AI stuff? Well, that's because you don't like it. I absolutely cannot stand a specific genre that floods the lists here, but never has it crossed my mind to complain about people publishing works of it's kind, as low-effort compared to other genres as I regard their production to be, which it is and which is why it's so common.

"It's both" You believe people use AI *because* it produces low quality? That's a hot take right there...

"I can also criticise it." "One can do anything that may become a man; who will do more is none", to paraphrase some random guy. I.e., you can, but it's improper.

I doubt I'll agree with telling anyone not to use something for a personal project, as long as it doesn't harm others, so that's it from me trying to convince you to let them use the tools they like. Should itch introduce a no-AI policy and anyone infringes, even slightly, I'd be fully with you. But that isn't the case; it's not some unfair advantage, it's not defrauding anyone, it's not hindering others, it's nothing. Or is it any of those, or something I missed, to you or anyone else?

acobham7 hours ago

"I do, because it means quality stuff is made faster and more affordable, too" - It means more slop will be produced, not more quality stuff will be released. Companies are not going to lower their prices because they used AI, they'll only lower their costs.

"this platform still does not require projects to uphold your standards" - I never said it did.

"Why do you want to take something away from people who have a different opinion?" Because it's bad.

"on a side note, when you want to create something, you win once it's been created" - He didn't create anything, AI created it.

"so why would it not be a win for them?" Because they took a shortcut and released a two star rated game, they're a failure.

"If they ever decide that's not up to their standards, they'll certainly improve upon or redo it, if they have the time, or remove it, if they find it unpleasant enough" - They'll churn out AI slop on repeat and never think twice about it, like everyone who uses AI.

"I absolutely cannot stand a specific genre that floods the lists here" - What genre?

"You believe people use AI *because* it produces low quality? That's a hot take right there..." - Yes, many people don't want to think or put effort into anything anymore, they just want to consume slop 24/7. Poorly made games are fine by them as long as they're made quickly so that they have a new set of keys jingled in front of them every day.

"you can, but it's improper" - No it's not.

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