Same. Steam is so inundated with AI slop that I’m now following like a dozen different curators that flag AI usage, for the cases when the developers “forget” to fill out their AI disclosure field D: (which I’ve restyled to be red and on the top of the page)
Thanks! Followed all of them, although not a fan of “Does this game use GenAI” adding games that they don’t think have any. I get it’s being informational, but at that point you might as well do like Half-Life just to say it doesn’t have any.
Crude MS-Paint drawings are the best placeholder art. Scribbles can be made as fast, if not faster than AI. It shows the information it needs to show, but most importantly its incredibly obviously unfinished art that needs to be redone before release.
AI art looks pretty good at a distance without close inspection. You have to look closely and spend time to tell AI from art. Late in production when rushing for the deadline is not a point when you have the time to look closely at the assets, so AI placeholders will get missed.
And what you describe is probably the best case scenario, that the well meaning artist misses it in a rush.
In the real world much of the time I bet the artist is well aware and frustrated because the game already shipped (with no input from them or their boss) to make it by the end of the quarter and now the press assets all have some bland slop BS front and center instead of the real version staring back from their own monitor.
Gonna preface this by saying I’m obviously a huge Expanse fan so my opinion is definitely biased. My username is a character from The Expanse and I consider it both my favorite TV show and book series ever. Wanted to make that clear up front.
That being said, if the game is good and they eventually replace the slop assets with proper assets, then what does it matter? As much as I like Lemmy, the hardline stances the community tends to take pisses me off at times. “Oh you’re not a full blown communist and haven’t read Marx? You’re no better than a nazi you filthy shitlib”
Or regarding “AI” (hate that they called it that, it’s basically just a smarter auto correct thats existed in smartphone keyboards for years now) anyone that doesn’t automatically and passionately hate AI or any of its uses is automatically demonized as a supporter of big tech. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate 90% of what “AI” does and is used for, especially how corpos are using it as an excuse to lay off real people and how dumbasses are relying on it as pure truth when it constantly hallucinates bullshit. I don’t support “AI” and I can’t wait for the bubble to burst.
There’s almost zero nuance here, it’s 90% “you’re with us or you’re against us” with no room for anything in between.
If the game is good and they replace the slop assets with real assets when it’s released next year then who fucking cares that they used AI, what matters is whether the game is good or not and whether the devs are treated and paid well. Expedition 33 used AI in earlier iterations and it all got replaced with real assets eventually but that didn’t stop Lemmy from shitting on one of the best games (IMO) to come out within the last decade once that became public.
You wanna make this place a more mainstream alternative to big tech controlling everything? Get off your high horse and accept that there’s nuance to everything, it’s not just black and white. Otherwise this place will continue to scare off new users faster than it can gain them. I consider myself to be a progressive, I’m Canadian and I’ve only voted NDP since I was able to vote and I’m now 32. I also really respect AOC, Mamdani, and Sanders in the states, so I’m already close enough to the target demographic of Lemmy if you exclude the tankie trifecta (ml, hexbear, and grad) and even I get sick of the circlejerk here at times.
Judge something when you can actually have a proper opportunity to do so rather than getting preemptively pissed off because they had the audacity to use something you don’t like.
If the game comes out and still has slop in it and/or just sucks in general, then yeah, shit on it all you want, and I’ll be first in line to join the club cause I absolutely love The Expanse and I’ll be immensely disappointed if it turns out bad.
Again, in the interest of honesty and transparency, I usually prefer to just throw my opinions out there and not read or respond to replies when it’s something that I know is gonna be controversial so I won’t be replying to anyone that replies to this comment. I really hate arguing with random people on the internet so I just ignore replies for the most part.
It’s my favorite book too. I’m conflicted. AI isn’t going back in the box.
At the same time, it’s kinda like the way Belters are treated, barely getting their needs met in favor of corporate profits. AI is doing the same thing to a lot of people looking for work and is built off stolen labor.
You’re right. It’s the same god damn mindless circle jerks you get in every online forum. This is why bots are undetectable, because they fit right in by commenting without actually thinking.
Your hitting on one of the biggest ongoing issues that Lemmy faces. I’m really not sure how best to combat the echo chamber though. I mean I see the problem clearly, but I don’t actually know of a solution.
if you generate graphics, story and stuff with llm and make them more pretty through human labour, you still have llm generated crud. Generated story acted by humans is still same as fully generated one.
using generated slop as placeholders might be fine, but it most likely still influences what they actually make so still no.
if you are just starting something and have no idea about anything and no mental image about what is what at all, THEN using generated stuff might be okay as an example so you can get the idea what is going on, as long as you stop using anything generated as soon as you can.
llm and any datacenters involved with it need to go up in flames.
Upside, so if these guys use AI to create assets or code, none of that can be copyrighted currently under the law. Therefore if it’s not copyrightable then pirating the game and using those assets in other games is perfectly fine.
Oh, I’m aware of that. Just that courts will not rule against things that involve the use of AI in general. You cannot take the output directly from, but once a human gets involved they will allow it. There’s too many monied interests to allow the restrictions.
That’s the fun part of all of it though, there’s no definition or even subjective ruling of what constitutes “substantial transformation” or any ruling that generative AI being derivative of copyrighted material, it’s a complete legal clusterfuck of law and consequences.
But yeah, I do agree that if a ruling or law change came about it would definitely be in the favor of late stage capitalism.
The game containing public domain images wouldn’t make the entire game public domain. Someone with a copy of the game could distribute those particular assets though. Maybe. It depends on how much human effort was involved; an AI image can become copyrightable if enough effort was done to transform it after it was generated.
Pirating the game and using those assets was always fine, no matter the circumstances, company, artist, or developer. Copyright and intellectual property is an illusion the capitalist class uses to exclude the poor from ideas they feel they can profit from.
If your placeholder doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, it’s a bad placeholder.
There is literally no workflow in which temporary assets shat by AI would be useful.
They just want to normalize AI use until people don’t care anymore. And with the waste of resources this shit represents, I just hope this never happens.
You don’t see the use in an artist viewing an approximation of the finished product in order to see what can be improved?
Do you suppose all conductors just write symphonies in their heads and never have to hear them out loud before deciding they’re done? Would it be useful to replace the tuba with a placeholder of a duck quacking, or do you think they might want it to sound like a tuba even though it’s not the final product?
You don’t see the use in an artist viewing an approximation of the finished product
I don’t because that’s not what artists do.
Artists are not people who bring nearly finished projects over the finish line. And if your finished project does not look anything like your nearly-finished AI assets, what are you actually using them for?
Okay, well if you’re going to be like that, I’ll talk to someone else:
An artist’s job is to pull together research, resources, history, knowledge, opinions, their own fluency in the language of the medium they’re using, and a bit of inspiration, and turn that into something interesting, or cool, or flashy, or thought provoking.
AI generation, even for the concept phase, skips 90% of that effort.
You can’t fabricate something with AI and then re-make it by hand later because these are two halves of the same process. By the time the hands are involved, there is very little left for them to do.
That’s a narrow definition of an art that doesn’t apply to real life. Like it or not, Marcel Duchamp won the argument over whether or not he was an artist.
Even a cheap toy synthetizer can make something close enough to a tuba sound to get an idea of what it sounds like. Need something better? people make sound fonts for that.
But maybe it’s better to use generative AI to potentially have something close to the real thing, just so you can have huge datacenters consuming absurd amounts of power and water too.
So is every other major game company. This company just is open about it.
Only someone living under a rock can convince themselves developers arent using AI for all sorts of shit.
People are deeply unaware of the fact AI autocomplete for code has been baked into almost every major editor for almost 2 years now, and its enabled by default, opt out.
There are 3 types of game devs now:
Those who admit publicly to using AI
Those who have naive PR who truly dont know AI is being used a bunch
Generated code is no different than generated imagery. They were both trained off stolen content and are both in a legally grey area. Both are equally immoral.
But just go with your Everybody else is doing it argument
You can’t steal something you copied, because nothing has been taken, and the concept of owning ideas is ridiculous anyway. Not to mention morality is subjective.
Pirate everything, because everything is yours as much as it is the original creators.
Its not “everyone else is doing it” as an argument
Its reality that a massive fuck tonne of devs are using it totally unaware its AI generated
Its just a built in, enabled by default, opt out, feature in all the mainstream IDEs now and for the most popular ones, it doesnt even tell you upfront its AI
So a huge amount of devs are 100% unaware of the fact that a huge % of their code that they just tab auto-completed with was AI generated code. Everytime they hit the tab button to accept an inline suggestion, that was AI.
They just dont even know this, they use it totally unaware.
See my other comment here for further info on what I mean, so I dont have to repeat myself.
Very few indie developers arent using it. The vast majority of casual devs have literally no idea the “code suggestions” they get from VSCode and other IDEs are AI generated, they often just assume its part of the LSP being fancy because itll only suggest a tiny bit of inline code.
Source: I do a lot of technical interviews at my company I work at, and I interview a lot of senior and junior devs all across the board.
Almost everyone has this feature enabled still (it ships pre-enabled and is opt out) and an incredibly high percent of devs are surprised when I tell them they have to disable that for the test, because it’s AI assistance. They are often like “wait THATS AI?!?!?” and are genuinely shocked to learn this.
This % is very high for both juniors and seniors alike, its never really explicitly even made clear to you that its a feature you can disable, nor that its AI, its just there already working when you first install VSCode.
And basically everyone uses VSCode for most programming, theres other IDEs but VSCode heavily dominates as what pretty much everyone uses for every language except the small handful of ones that have their own bespoke IDEs for their use case.
But the VAST majority of game dev is C# and Lua now and a bit of python, and all of those are first class VS/VSCode languages as the IDE everyone and everything will recommend when you look up getting into it.
So yeah, no, Id estimate about 95% of game dev at this point, both amateur and professional, is using VSCode and has the AI “intellicode” feature enabled still, totally unaware they are injecting a shit tonne of AI generated code into their games.
The devs dont know it, the managers dont know it, the PR time doesnt know it, the CEO doesnt know it, no one is even aware this is a thing at most places lol. Everyone is just like “wow <language>'s VSCode plugin just has such excellent quality autocomplete and quick fix suggestions, I love it!”
Not even joking, this is how most devs are atm, they have no fuckin clue haha
This isn’t about source code, it’s about using genAI for game assets like textures and character models. Steam’s disclosure policy explicitly states it’s about things a player can see or hear.
My point is, people are throwing huge hissy fits over random barely-matters stuff like “oh my god a random asset in some corner of some room looks AI generated”
When meanwhile like 40%+ of the codebase is AI generated, but because people dont know about that they dont give a shit.
They only care because they can see it and notice it.
It comes across as shallow performative upset.
I don’t see anyone who consumes games remotely bringing up the fact coding IDEs have been AI autocompleting code for like 2 years now, no one even gives a shit.
Only when it started showing up in art assets, or hell, being used just in proof of concept stuff and devs say it wont be in the final game, people are like “oh mah dawg” and stamp their feet.
Its cringe, get over it. The game is either bad quality or good quality, how it GOT to be that way shouldnt matter. The devs either did a good job, or they didnt.
Let me put it this way:
If you are busy critiquing how the result was achieved by what tools, instead of WHAT the result was, you are cringe.
If you critique “this looks bad, its low quality, it looks like garbage” yeah, I have no issue with that, its a valid critique. Regardless of HOW they made the bad game, a bad game is a bad game.
But if you care about what TOOLS they use, you are incredibly naive.
People need to go look up how much resources/power/water data centres for build servers use, which the industry has been using for decades. You think AI uses a lot of power and water? Get fucked dawg, that is NOTHING compared to companies running multi-hour long gambits of automated UX testing suites. That shit is where the real power draw is.
BUT the industry has been doing that for DECADES and yet no one has raised a single eyebrow at it, no one cared, no one even knew it was a thing companies did.
Suddenly companies are using AI, which uses a fraction of that water/power, and everyone is like “oh my dawg, theyre killing the planet”
Fuck off lol, if you werent complaining about it before, you come across as cringe, uninformed, naive, and dumb for suddenly caring about a 5% uptick in energy/water usage compared to what we were doing before.
So all you end up with left is the “stolen property” argument, which STILL doesnt apply if its not in the final product anyways.
And its a VERY wobbly argument to stand up and die on a hill for, anyways.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Rules
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you’re submitting before posting to see if it’s already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don’t share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don’t want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
Some people just dont want my money. [Steps out into the airlock]
And just like that I added it to my ignored list on Steam
Same. Steam is so inundated with AI slop that I’m now following like a dozen different curators that flag AI usage, for the cases when the developers “forget” to fill out their AI disclosure field D: (which I’ve restyled to be red and on the top of the page)
I only know of AI Check which had to make a second account cause they already hit the limit with how many games they were marking as containing AI.
I went through my curator list just now; these are the largest/most active ones:
Thanks! Followed all of them, although not a fan of “Does this game use GenAI” adding games that they don’t think have any. I get it’s being informational, but at that point you might as well do like Half-Life just to say it doesn’t have any.
Crude MS-Paint drawings are the best placeholder art. Scribbles can be made as fast, if not faster than AI. It shows the information it needs to show, but most importantly its incredibly obviously unfinished art that needs to be redone before release.
AI art looks pretty good at a distance without close inspection. You have to look closely and spend time to tell AI from art. Late in production when rushing for the deadline is not a point when you have the time to look closely at the assets, so AI placeholders will get missed.
Placeholders is a bad use case for AI.
And what you describe is probably the best case scenario, that the well meaning artist misses it in a rush.
In the real world much of the time I bet the artist is well aware and frustrated because the game already shipped (with no input from them or their boss) to make it by the end of the quarter and now the press assets all have some bland slop BS front and center instead of the real version staring back from their own monitor.
That’s fine, I’m not gonna play it.
Well, fuck. At least we got Rogue Trader and the Pathfinder games before enshittification began.
removed by mod
removed by mod
Well… you see… 25% of the game is 100% human made!
Gonna preface this by saying I’m obviously a huge Expanse fan so my opinion is definitely biased. My username is a character from The Expanse and I consider it both my favorite TV show and book series ever. Wanted to make that clear up front.
That being said, if the game is good and they eventually replace the slop assets with proper assets, then what does it matter? As much as I like Lemmy, the hardline stances the community tends to take pisses me off at times. “Oh you’re not a full blown communist and haven’t read Marx? You’re no better than a nazi you filthy shitlib”
Or regarding “AI” (hate that they called it that, it’s basically just a smarter auto correct thats existed in smartphone keyboards for years now) anyone that doesn’t automatically and passionately hate AI or any of its uses is automatically demonized as a supporter of big tech. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate 90% of what “AI” does and is used for, especially how corpos are using it as an excuse to lay off real people and how dumbasses are relying on it as pure truth when it constantly hallucinates bullshit. I don’t support “AI” and I can’t wait for the bubble to burst.
There’s almost zero nuance here, it’s 90% “you’re with us or you’re against us” with no room for anything in between.
If the game is good and they replace the slop assets with real assets when it’s released next year then who fucking cares that they used AI, what matters is whether the game is good or not and whether the devs are treated and paid well. Expedition 33 used AI in earlier iterations and it all got replaced with real assets eventually but that didn’t stop Lemmy from shitting on one of the best games (IMO) to come out within the last decade once that became public.
You wanna make this place a more mainstream alternative to big tech controlling everything? Get off your high horse and accept that there’s nuance to everything, it’s not just black and white. Otherwise this place will continue to scare off new users faster than it can gain them. I consider myself to be a progressive, I’m Canadian and I’ve only voted NDP since I was able to vote and I’m now 32. I also really respect AOC, Mamdani, and Sanders in the states, so I’m already close enough to the target demographic of Lemmy if you exclude the tankie trifecta (ml, hexbear, and grad) and even I get sick of the circlejerk here at times.
Judge something when you can actually have a proper opportunity to do so rather than getting preemptively pissed off because they had the audacity to use something you don’t like.
If the game comes out and still has slop in it and/or just sucks in general, then yeah, shit on it all you want, and I’ll be first in line to join the club cause I absolutely love The Expanse and I’ll be immensely disappointed if it turns out bad.
Again, in the interest of honesty and transparency, I usually prefer to just throw my opinions out there and not read or respond to replies when it’s something that I know is gonna be controversial so I won’t be replying to anyone that replies to this comment. I really hate arguing with random people on the internet so I just ignore replies for the most part.
It’s my favorite book too. I’m conflicted. AI isn’t going back in the box.
At the same time, it’s kinda like the way Belters are treated, barely getting their needs met in favor of corporate profits. AI is doing the same thing to a lot of people looking for work and is built off stolen labor.
So what you’re saying is we should drop rocks on the data centers, right?
No. I’m saying we should be more thoughtful about how we use it and train it.
Pensa you one of them, ke? Inyalowda no care bout welwala like you, sasa.
I know you’re writing in Belter creole, but I can’t help but read it as Jar Jar Binks.
You’re right. It’s the same god damn mindless circle jerks you get in every online forum. This is why bots are undetectable, because they fit right in by commenting without actually thinking.
Ok, but what if I don’t want new people and like how small it is filled with like-minded individuals?
Well if that were the case, then you would suck.
Don’t go in the internet, move to a cave and don’t bother interacting with the society. It solves both our and your issues.
removed by mod
Careful with what you wish for. Not everyone here is idiot enough to think everything is resolved with a bullet to the head.
Enjoy your 1 day ban.
I wish I could upvote this harder.
Your hitting on one of the biggest ongoing issues that Lemmy faces. I’m really not sure how best to combat the echo chamber though. I mean I see the problem clearly, but I don’t actually know of a solution.
if you generate graphics, story and stuff with llm and make them more pretty through human labour, you still have llm generated crud. Generated story acted by humans is still same as fully generated one. using generated slop as placeholders might be fine, but it most likely still influences what they actually make so still no.
if you are just starting something and have no idea about anything and no mental image about what is what at all, THEN using generated stuff might be okay as an example so you can get the idea what is going on, as long as you stop using anything generated as soon as you can.
llm and any datacenters involved with it need to go up in flames.
I really don’t care what they use to make a game. I care that it isn’t shit. There’s plenty of good and bad uses of generative AI.
Upside, so if these guys use AI to create assets or code, none of that can be copyrighted currently under the law. Therefore if it’s not copyrightable then pirating the game and using those assets in other games is perfectly fine.
This would never hold up in court, in part due to regulatory capture, but I think this is the only thing that would stop them.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ai-art-remains-ineligible-for-copyright-as-supreme-court-declines-to-hear
Doesnt that guy want his ai to own the copyright of the art it makes?
Oh, I’m aware of that. Just that courts will not rule against things that involve the use of AI in general. You cannot take the output directly from, but once a human gets involved they will allow it. There’s too many monied interests to allow the restrictions.
That’s the fun part of all of it though, there’s no definition or even subjective ruling of what constitutes “substantial transformation” or any ruling that generative AI being derivative of copyrighted material, it’s a complete legal clusterfuck of law and consequences.
But yeah, I do agree that if a ruling or law change came about it would definitely be in the favor of late stage capitalism.
The game containing public domain images wouldn’t make the entire game public domain. Someone with a copy of the game could distribute those particular assets though. Maybe. It depends on how much human effort was involved; an AI image can become copyrightable if enough effort was done to transform it after it was generated.
Pirating the game and using those assets was always fine, no matter the circumstances, company, artist, or developer. Copyright and intellectual property is an illusion the capitalist class uses to exclude the poor from ideas they feel they can profit from.
If your placeholder doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, it’s a bad placeholder. There is literally no workflow in which temporary assets shat by AI would be useful.
They just want to normalize AI use until people don’t care anymore. And with the waste of resources this shit represents, I just hope this never happens.
Collecting VC funding, particularly demonstrations or even gameplay captures.
You don’t see the use in an artist viewing an approximation of the finished product in order to see what can be improved?
Do you suppose all conductors just write symphonies in their heads and never have to hear them out loud before deciding they’re done? Would it be useful to replace the tuba with a placeholder of a duck quacking, or do you think they might want it to sound like a tuba even though it’s not the final product?
I don’t because that’s not what artists do.
Artists are not people who bring nearly finished projects over the finish line. And if your finished project does not look anything like your nearly-finished AI assets, what are you actually using them for?
You’re saying artists never look at their work and decide to change something. Ok, buddy.
Okay, well if you’re going to be like that, I’ll talk to someone else:
An artist’s job is to pull together research, resources, history, knowledge, opinions, their own fluency in the language of the medium they’re using, and a bit of inspiration, and turn that into something interesting, or cool, or flashy, or thought provoking.
AI generation, even for the concept phase, skips 90% of that effort.
You can’t fabricate something with AI and then re-make it by hand later because these are two halves of the same process. By the time the hands are involved, there is very little left for them to do.
That’s a narrow definition of an art that doesn’t apply to real life. Like it or not, Marcel Duchamp won the argument over whether or not he was an artist.
Marcel Duchamp is not working on video games.
Marcel Duchamp does fit my definition.
I’m certainly more interested in his work than yours.
Fine then I won’t show you my awesome artwork.
Even a cheap toy synthetizer can make something close enough to a tuba sound to get an idea of what it sounds like. Need something better? people make sound fonts for that.
But maybe it’s better to use generative AI to potentially have something close to the real thing, just so you can have huge datacenters consuming absurd amounts of power and water too.
What are ya, a shill for the toy synthesizer companies?!?! They just want to take jobs away from us hard working tuba players!!n
Here’s a good example of placeholder art being very visible from Slay the Spire 2
Whelp, my interest in The Expanse Osiris Reborn has officially died…Rest in Piss, Owlcat!
100% LOL
Welwalas.
So is every other major game company. This company just is open about it.
Only someone living under a rock can convince themselves developers arent using AI for all sorts of shit.
People are deeply unaware of the fact AI autocomplete for code has been baked into almost every major editor for almost 2 years now, and its enabled by default, opt out.
There are 3 types of game devs now:
Generated code is no different than generated imagery. They were both trained off stolen content and are both in a legally grey area. Both are equally immoral.
But just go with your Everybody else is doing it argument
You can’t steal something you copied, because nothing has been taken, and the concept of owning ideas is ridiculous anyway. Not to mention morality is subjective.
Pirate everything, because everything is yours as much as it is the original creators.
Its not “everyone else is doing it” as an argument
Its reality that a massive fuck tonne of devs are using it totally unaware its AI generated
Its just a built in, enabled by default, opt out, feature in all the mainstream IDEs now and for the most popular ones, it doesnt even tell you upfront its AI
So a huge amount of devs are 100% unaware of the fact that a huge % of their code that they just tab auto-completed with was AI generated code. Everytime they hit the tab button to accept an inline suggestion, that was AI.
They just dont even know this, they use it totally unaware.
See my other comment here for further info on what I mean, so I dont have to repeat myself.
Very few indie developers arent using it. The vast majority of casual devs have literally no idea the “code suggestions” they get from VSCode and other IDEs are AI generated, they often just assume its part of the LSP being fancy because itll only suggest a tiny bit of inline code.
Source: I do a lot of technical interviews at my company I work at, and I interview a lot of senior and junior devs all across the board.
Almost everyone has this feature enabled still (it ships pre-enabled and is opt out) and an incredibly high percent of devs are surprised when I tell them they have to disable that for the test, because it’s AI assistance. They are often like “wait THATS AI?!?!?” and are genuinely shocked to learn this.
This % is very high for both juniors and seniors alike, its never really explicitly even made clear to you that its a feature you can disable, nor that its AI, its just there already working when you first install VSCode.
And basically everyone uses VSCode for most programming, theres other IDEs but VSCode heavily dominates as what pretty much everyone uses for every language except the small handful of ones that have their own bespoke IDEs for their use case.
But the VAST majority of game dev is C# and Lua now and a bit of python, and all of those are first class VS/VSCode languages as the IDE everyone and everything will recommend when you look up getting into it.
So yeah, no, Id estimate about 95% of game dev at this point, both amateur and professional, is using VSCode and has the AI “intellicode” feature enabled still, totally unaware they are injecting a shit tonne of AI generated code into their games.
The devs dont know it, the managers dont know it, the PR time doesnt know it, the CEO doesnt know it, no one is even aware this is a thing at most places lol. Everyone is just like “wow <language>'s VSCode plugin just has such excellent quality autocomplete and quick fix suggestions, I love it!”
Not even joking, this is how most devs are atm, they have no fuckin clue haha
This isn’t about source code, it’s about using genAI for game assets like textures and character models. Steam’s disclosure policy explicitly states it’s about things a player can see or hear.
My point is, people are throwing huge hissy fits over random barely-matters stuff like “oh my god a random asset in some corner of some room looks AI generated”
When meanwhile like 40%+ of the codebase is AI generated, but because people dont know about that they dont give a shit.
They only care because they can see it and notice it.
It comes across as shallow performative upset.
I don’t see anyone who consumes games remotely bringing up the fact coding IDEs have been AI autocompleting code for like 2 years now, no one even gives a shit.
Only when it started showing up in art assets, or hell, being used just in proof of concept stuff and devs say it wont be in the final game, people are like “oh mah dawg” and stamp their feet.
Its cringe, get over it. The game is either bad quality or good quality, how it GOT to be that way shouldnt matter. The devs either did a good job, or they didnt.
Let me put it this way:
If you are busy critiquing how the result was achieved by what tools, instead of WHAT the result was, you are cringe.
If you critique “this looks bad, its low quality, it looks like garbage” yeah, I have no issue with that, its a valid critique. Regardless of HOW they made the bad game, a bad game is a bad game.
But if you care about what TOOLS they use, you are incredibly naive.
People need to go look up how much resources/power/water data centres for build servers use, which the industry has been using for decades. You think AI uses a lot of power and water? Get fucked dawg, that is NOTHING compared to companies running multi-hour long gambits of automated UX testing suites. That shit is where the real power draw is.
BUT the industry has been doing that for DECADES and yet no one has raised a single eyebrow at it, no one cared, no one even knew it was a thing companies did.
Suddenly companies are using AI, which uses a fraction of that water/power, and everyone is like “oh my dawg, theyre killing the planet”
Fuck off lol, if you werent complaining about it before, you come across as cringe, uninformed, naive, and dumb for suddenly caring about a 5% uptick in energy/water usage compared to what we were doing before.
So all you end up with left is the “stolen property” argument, which STILL doesnt apply if its not in the final product anyways.
And its a VERY wobbly argument to stand up and die on a hill for, anyways.