I made the mistake of assuming one liners would be acceptable. For example, I wrote a custom resource that uses tweens. This resource has a function whose parameters include a "target: Node". I wanted to use a tween to animate that target node, so I googled how to do that and it informed me I could try target.create_tween(), because Nodes have access to the create_tween function whereas custom resources do not. I disclosed the use of AI by stating "Syntax clarification and assistance with GDScript" and so my game was appropriately disqualified. I feel that I did not use generative AI in an unethical or plagiarizing way, rather it felt like an education experience because now, I understand how to create tweens in a custom resource. I don't feel like it generated code for me. I was curious about your thoughts on this. I consider this to be sort of a grey area that would be considered acceptable but I really offended the people who I was working with, and they feel I kind of invalidated their hard work. Am I being foolish? Don't go easy on me, I do really want to better understand if using AI in any capacity is simply unethical or not.
Viewing post in Question about AI usage in search engines
I'm sorry to hear that, but the jam rules were explicit. I also looked things up on google but used the -ai flag to ensure it was made by humans. There are even more robust methods like using duckduckgo no Ai search. In the future, if you enter next year lets say. Remember that GDscript, C#, and pretty much every engine and programming language have documentation written by people where you can find stuff like what parameters a function needs. for example I just googled the question you asked AI with the -ai flag at the end and got this real page from Godot where it shows you how to do what you wanted to do in both GDscript and C# syntax. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.4/classes/class_tween.html. I am sure you are a smart person Brandon. You don't need AI to be creative or make cool things. Have more faith in yourself!
I didn't prompt AI to generate code. I'm well aware of documentation, its built into the editor. I didn't say I need AI to be creative or that I don't have faith in myself. This isn't as constructive as it is condescending. I'm not defending my use of it, the rules were explicit. I'm just a bit confused on why people feel so strongly about search tools being AI-free. I've always understood the plagiarism that takes place when using a coding agent but in this case, the search tool plagiarized the documentation, which I've never considered to be exploitative of anyone.
When it comes to AI usage, I'm very much an advocate of it being unethical in basically any way. Obviously, if you even use most things on the internet, it does the damage without your intention, but there's a difference, to me, between Googling something and the AI automatically sending you a result and you kind of ignoring it and looking for an actual source/just clicking on the source cited by the AI, and going out of your way to use AI to generate something to aid you/search for things.
If you're using AI, you're actively partaking in the negative usage of AI. It's made even worse when that usage of AI is explicitly banned in the thing you're using it for. It would be like if you commissioned a painting from someone who says they never use AI, but then they used the AI search to work out how to mix a specific colour. Sure, it might seem minor, but it goes against what was asked by the commissioner.
I believe I've been messaged by one of your teammates about this on Bluesky already; they asked if they could remove any AI-assisted code and redo it and then be let back in the jam. I've allowed this, since it was seemingly a choice made against the team's wishes. I appreciate you coming here to ask and to learn and I hope you take these words on board, because other jam hosts might not give a second chance so easily. Even if, after all of this, you still don't believe you did anything wrong, I would only ask that you apologise to your team.
I suppose this just isn't very clear to me. Using AI is unethical in basically any way, but its not unethical if its being used to find sources? This line between unethical use and ethical use does not appear to be very consistent. The answer that Google provided me was identical to the example provided in the documentation. I'm not trying to justify the use of AI in this case but it seems that the line is not explicitly defined and more or less subject to opinion.
The reason to check the actual source is that AI is essentially guessing. By actually looking into sources rather than blindly trusting the AI, you can ensure that information is correct whilst also not encouraging the AI takeover of the internet. This also isn't to mention that, again, this is a game jam which doesn't allow any AI. You disclosed you had used AI, so your project was disqualified. There was a Discord server in the Jam description where you could have asked questions if you wanted to guarantee you didn't use AI. I feel like I have defined the line rather well, especially since others have explained the same thing that I have in this thread and generally in this comment section.