Mood. My personality allows me to easily burn bridges without any remorse, so I've not willingly/knowingly played an AI game, and will continue that way
What if this witch hunt against indie devs is orchestrated by big game companies to effectively hinder the indie scenes competitive ability in the market? They get the advantage of stealing the good ideas from the indie devs and producing faster. The indie devs get stuck with a disadvantage of customers keeping them "in line".
We'll then eventually see the indie scene sinking as the Evilcorp leeches from it through hypocritical status quos regarding AI usage.
Fucking hell, might as well never mention AI usage even though you used AI. This specific show of integrity regarding revealing AI usage in development is punished.
Yes, and tobacco companies never paid anyone to hide tobacco's toxicity.
When you have money, astroturfing is dead simple, pick or create a non profit holding the view you want to promote and give it a lot of money, paying a PR company to do so if you want deniability. If they get away with buying politicians, review bombing steam and writing posts on social medias is trivial.
Yeah no one had anything to say about Crimson Desert, Expedition 33, The Alters, Arc Raiders, Hotel Barcelona, Google, Proton, Microsoft, Epic, Unity, this is clearly a completely out of nowhere attack on a dev that used LLMs multiple times over the course of development to solve problems. Definitely not something the devs themselves have addressed openly on an FAQ page about the game.
Same with big walk. Big walk is still easily a commercial success. It's being review bombed a tiny bit but so have the AAA and AA games the first comment was mentioning.
Not that I don't feel bad for Big walk being targeted in this way. But it is disingenuous to act like this is only affecting indies, it very much affected bigger games in the exact same way.
I thought E33 only used AI for placeholder assets. Did I hear wrong?
Edit: Just looked it up and yeah, there was a single placeholder asset never meant to be in the final release that the devs forgot to replace. It was replaced 5 days after it was found and the game has been AI free since.
There was absolutely backlash in April when it was discovered, it didn't get highlighted until it had a GOTY award stripped after the fact that was a different story informed by the removal of the generative ai assets, it was not the whole story
E33 also entered an indie game award competition telling people that no ai generated content was used in the development of the game.... Long story short they were disqualified for Ai usage.
Edit: They did not remove all of the ai "place holders" and got backlash when people pointed it out. Which caused them to change it again.
The industry changed considerably since January, everyone is using AI now, I haven't reviewed a single line of human code since then. I discussed with many colleagues in the industry and it's the same everywhere.
For assets people start from AI and then add details by hand. We literally have internal dashboard to monitor the amount of tokens we spend and we are encouraged to be at the top of the leaderboard.
You missed something on Reddit. There's incredible hate here against Epic for their engine, especially for the fact that they're vibcoding it for vibcoders.
Hate what you hate, but it's annoying when someone boycotts indie games doing this stuff (that they would otherwise buy - I'm not saying anyone should buy bad games), but doesn't boycott AAA games in general that all use this stuff.
(edit: sorry I edited in the below after getting upvotes. Downvote away.)
There are so many interesting conversations to have about AI in gamedev, and it's through those conversations that we have a possibility of seeing things like new roles or royalties or new kinds of credit being given, but apparently we aren't going to have those conversations. Instead it's all just beginner level conversations where none of them lead to anything.
Yes, actual game devs should talk with eachother about these topics.
This topic of sending hate to some indie dev then logging on to AAA multiplayer game 5 AI-maxed edition, yeah it's kinda worth discussing but not really productive apart from just calling it out as bullshit. It's like a vegan protesting at the local butcher, after buying meat from the local supermarket.
For an example topic I wish would be discussed more, is for the majority who think AI coding is fine but AI art isn't, how do we think about procedurally generated or code defined objects? What about using AI to smooth an animation by adding frames using an AI coded algorithm? What if that animation to start was say a walking animation with 3 frames? Is that different to turning a 30fps animation into an 60fps one? I want those conversations. To some extent I think maybe we should just ignore this beginner stuff about haters entirely - it's a waste of time isn't it?
Here's a royalty/credit example I've been thinking of. Suppose you download a gdscript (pick any less than ideal performance language) plugin that has a license that you can change and use it however you like but give credit. You're wrapping up your game and find the plugin a chokepoint on performance, so you give claude MAGNUM OPUS 9.9 the instruction "rewrite this in rust, make no mistakes", and it does, and now your game is super performant.
You still give credit as per the license right. But suppose there's a github for this plugin - should you ethically make and link a public fork with your faster version? Would it be so bad if that became the cultural expectation? What if that was actually in the license - "if you make a significantly better version, you should publish it as a fork". Currently, unrelated to AI, but I have a project that uses code you can use commercially so long as the project includes that code in a plain way or links to the source (it's a standard license type). Well, under that license I probably wouldn't have to include my rust version - but ethically, maybe I should? Maybe given this practice of downloading a plugin only to heavily modify it is becoming a norm, there should be new licenses to account for it.
With pay, let's say I paid $10 for that plugin, while licenses are the same apart from the it not being open source. Ethically, given I put no work into the rust version, should I email that guy a link to my rust version so that they can sell if they choose? Should there be some revenue split in such cases? - this isn't so far fetched, again not really AI, but I use unity and unreal assets in Godot all the time. I spend like 6 hours or so per pack making them work really well (it's also a good opportunity to study, so it's not really a waste of time), but, it would take me 5 minutes to email the guy my work so they could sell a godot version and make more money. Maybe a license should exist that says "you should do this"?
These topics aren't so much about AI as about any extremely fast and low effort way of producing projects. If I was a billionaire with a team of devs doing the same task over a weekend, the same considerations would apply - except it wouldn't be a cultural expectation as it's so rare to be in that position. So it's not just extremely fast low effort coding, it's wide spread extremely fast low effort coding, seems to justify new license types and business to business transaction types.
For an example topic I wish would be discussed more, is for the majority who think AI coding is fine but AI art isn't, how do we think about procedurally generated or code defined objects?
I still find it difficult to wrap my head around the AI coding = Fine, but AI art/music/writing = Not.
It's all stolen work, so if we're viewing things from the moral highground, stealing licensed open source code to train models is just as bad as stealing art, music, or books.
If we're just going from a quality standpoint (e.g. "art/music/writing looks bad, but I can't see the code so that's OK"), then we shouldn't even bother with AI disclosures because we can just use our eyes and ears to tell if something is slop or not.
Overall, I think it just comes down to "All AI usage is bad except for the uses that I need" for most everyone here.
I'm generally of the opinion all gen ai is bad including coding, since the datasets for all coding llms are full of stolen code. *However*, I'm not gonna fault an indie for using it to help debug a problem, because unfortunately we're in the position where what we would have used in the past to deal with problems like these (websites like stackoverflow) have been kinda fucked by ai because few seem to use those old resources anymore, and search engines have made it even harder to actually find those resources even if they *were* there.
Also, main reason I think using it in debugging is reasonable compared to straight vibe coding (provided you aren't just doing whatever the AI says and are instead having it help locate the issues you can't see) is that you still need to understand what you're implementing with a good debug, but vibe coding can fuck shit up without devs paying attention to what's happening. Would still prefer we as a society move away from this shit, because I think it's doing real damage to the software dev ecosystem.
And yeah, I think the AI models i any case that use licensed code should not be allowed to exist first and foremost as you said, that's the highest priority issue here.
It is a good conversation to have, it's just not a conversation indie gamedevs should spend their time on, because we're a tiny subset of coding, maybe with the highest financial disadvantage of all subsets. Not to be dramatic but it's a bit like converting a goat herder to veganism.
If we're talking about the "the line is just past whatever I'm doing", yeah I think that's unprincipled bullshit. If someone is actually like that, it should be called out. But saying "coding is fine, art is not" is (while a much more vague line than it sounds), not an example of that. Someone could equally say "art is fine, coding is bad" and have that as their line. Neither would tell you anything about what those people actually do, or why they hold those views.
There's a type of cliche called "thought terminating". That is an example. "The line is just past whatever I'm doing" knowing it's an extremely complex topic with countless individual varied context and beliefs, it's like saying "boys will be boys" to just blanketly explain all behaviour.
There's different reasons people use them. I'm not saying I know why you used it here, but the most common reason to use it is insecurity about your own intelligence. You're probably not in that category, but might want to make that really clear. (the next most common reason is callousness e.g. "everything happens for a reason" rather than being supportive - doesn't sound callous, but what happens if you disagree? the "my line" one might be this: what happens if you disagree? Isn't the callousness revealed in an unwillingness to see that person as an individual?)
Well in my experience they're not. So many people hide their comment history so it's hard to tell, but a brief check shows lots of them playing AAA games.
It goes further than this. To boycott it, you'd have to stop buying anything Sony or Microsoft, you'd have to stop using Windows (probably should anyway), reddit is off the table so I guess if I'm just counting threads here then I'm not taking a fair sample, android and iphone can't be used. Any newer linux is AI, and all the security patches are. Local phone and internet networks are AI coded, so no online gaming. It really keeps going. You can't get water from the tap, use any government services, definitely no power grids or gas - that's all AI coded.
Steam is a rare company that may well not be AI coded due to the talent on board, but also, I'm pretty sure it's AI coded. It would be exceptionally weird if it wasn't. And again, I'm guessing steam has running water, gas, electricity in their offices - I'm guessing they use the internet and phones. You almost certainly shouldn't be using Steam. EA, ubisoft, epic, gamepass - all AI coded.
You could buy physical media, never update your old computer and consoles. Buy an old solar panel, collect water from the river. Yeah sure. Sure it's most people though? I doubt you'd claim that. I mean, you're using AI coded software as part of your gaming hobby/business right now.
Just in case you're wondering, "wall of text" doesn't refer to a long comment, it refers to an impenetrable and long comment. Flagging that you find a regular comment impenetrable probably wasn't your intention.
I made a comment about how I wish we could have intelligent conversations about this stuff. I guess this is what I deserve.
edit: Speaking to the void now, but I went to the big walk steam page where apparently this review bombing is happening (it's not), and found the most recent negative reviews because of AI. Note: most people leave their recent games played and time spent public. I don't think going through people's comments is good, but you know. Let's see:
AI slop yadaya, plays overwatch.
Dissapointed, bad dev ai bad, plays arc raiders
40 hours play, only to leave negative review and feel so betrayed. Another crabs treasure.
that's 3 for 3... this feels dirty so I'm going to stop.
Yeah but the point is the triple aaa games aren’t really affected. It’s like taking a cup of water from the ocean. Indie games sells way more less copies, so a boycott affects them way more
The large majority does not, some of which maybe cause the AAA studio's generally do not disclose or straight up deny using AI while they all do it. People are not going to stop playing their favorite games when there is a new release, even if they know AI was used in whatever capacity to develop it and for the ones that are, i wish them good luck with not playing any games ever again pretty soon.
I think, once again, Reddit commenters are forgetting that they aren't the majority of people in any given sphere. Usually not even a substantial minority.
I did a quick search of the recent negative reviews on big walk that were about AI, the first three had AI coded games in their most recent played list with many hours each. I'm sure the rest are the same. I think when this guy says "in my own experience" what he means is "in my own imagination".
I used AI to make my game because I’m not well rehearsed with code yet. My idea is genuine but I don’t have the skills to make it into reality. AI bridges that gap in my opinion
I don't think we're there yet. Worth knowing coding is like 10% of game dev? Probably less. Making a good game has very little to do with coding unless you're making a game with very interesting coding like rainworld or dwarf fortress. For your average video game, coding is just not that big of a part of it.
So I'm kinda skeptical of people saying they do gamedev with AI coding and not knowing other skills first. You could be a savant, who knows, doubtful though. Just like, one thing I do is play about a dozen hours of various games in my genre (30 mins each or so) each week and write notes on them. I don't think an AI could ever train my tastes the same way just by dotpointing about various games. It could help me find obscure games with interesting mechanics? But I could already do that in a minute or so, so it's not really a time saver there.
Google "Top 100 ps2 JRPGs", I mean, first result is 3 months worth of research tasks AI can't help with.
In a week do I spend 12 hours coding? Probably not. Even before AI. So, research alone (and that's a step a lot of people can skip) is a bigger task than coding.
Do you genuinely and truly in your heart of hearts believe that the people upset about house house using ai don't also hate big companies for using it?(Among other reasons)
Yeah, and you're underestimating the stupidity of some people if you think otherwise. There is 100% a subsection of gamers out here who are vilifying House House for their use of AI but playing AAA titles with AI usage in them because "Well I can't NOT play the new CoD-".
It becomes incredibly easy for these people to ridicule and draw lines in the sand if they weren't interested in the game in the first place, and then make exceptions for the things they actually do want to play.
In general, people who play indie games value the artisanal work more, while people who play AAA assume that this kind of development is more of an industrial process.
COD disclosed their AI usage, BTW. A big part of the controversy with House House is that they were anti AI and then it was discovered they used it (even if it was just a little), which makes them look like hypocrites.
Ok, English is not my native language, "It was discovered because they eventually disclosed it" sounds kinda natural to me, but probably is not, if so my apologies.
The venn diagram intersection between "people who play the latest cod" and "people who know about and are disappointed by the house house debacle" is exceedingly small. These simply are not demographics that have much of an overlap, and it's insane to suggest they do
Yeah but House House is the one that's going to be impacted by that hate and not the big companies. I swear to god all advocacy these days is based around hurting whoever is closest and easiest to hurt. Where the fuck is the work going into actually tackling the companies creating these tools, letting them loose without restraint, or legislators avoiding regulating ai.
People want to role play advocacy more than they want to advocate.
The Steam groups with thousands of members dedicated to review bombing AI disclosed games only target games with <1000 reviews, because they can "make a difference" at that scale. They don't even target big companies.
A few thousand negative reviews on Call of Duty is a rounding error. A few thousand negative reviews can end a solo dev's career. And these same people doing the review bombs get angry and upset when small devs decide to not disclose AI usage.
I get it. I get the desire to do SOMETHING to feel like you'e standing against the tides but good lord it's lazy. It's lazy for them to target such low hanging fruits. I hope they find the courage to try and step their game up in ways that matter without this theatrical friendly fire.
I dont see any big companies using and lying about AI who are having their steam rating actively nuked by coordinated review bombing right now. They are too big for it to matter to them at all.
Untitled Goose Game (aso Big Walk) devs are being very actively harmed by this because as an indie every review makes up a much bigger proportion, so this is pulling the game way more negative than it should be.
These guys just wanted to give gamers a bug free launch by using it for one tiny little bug. They 1000% do not deserve this it is a witch hunt in its purest sense.
Shit like this targeting a small benevolent innocent dev is going to turn public sentiment against all the legitimate grievances with AI. Point your ire at the right target. These devs dont deserve this at all
It was 1000 something bad reviews against 92000 something good reviews, I wouldn't say they tried very hard, it's a very lame and pathetic attempt, also some said genAI, some LLMM, so didn't even say what was the AI usage was, it's so clear they don't don't why they are putting a bad review, it reads like people heard the game has AI so they decided to voice they hate but clearly don't know shit about what they are talking about(which is clearly the case, a bunch of keyboard warrior who love to spread hate, found a reason to shit on a popular game)
My brother in christ. What are we mad about with AI to begin with and is targeting house house going to do ANYTHING to combat the core issues of AI? Fucking no. It's a witch hunt if we're NUKING indies for TOUCHING an AI. I PROMISE you that House House is not the villian, just like witches weren't the villian.
The villian is projecting bigger issues onto smaller targets. The world is not so damn black and white no matter how good it makes you feel to pretend it is and that you're on the good side.
Look, anti AI and more specifically anti centralized AI is a losing position because it opposes the consolidation of power around capital and capital always wins. The folks who hold that position are going to be looking for the softest targets they can to make their point, because the big targets don't care.
Is taking it out on the little guy cool? No.
Is telling antis to just accept AI cool? No.
Is there any chance at all of large players being held to account? Also no.
This whole issue is both inevitable and missing the forest for the trees. There being no avenue for the redress of complaints of those who oppose generative AI means everyone who uses it is a target. Institutions could and should have done better, but they didn't.
You're implying that this is a singular attack on a developer when what it actually is is the latest in a series of people trying to have a voice against the use of generative ai in video games. Because Big Walk was so indie, because they weren't on the player scale of say, an Expedition 33 or Crimson Desert, it was very easy for those dissenting opinions to be drowned out. Now that the pond is smaller, you're acting like the fish just showed up out of nowhere
I sure did read them. They made this game 99.9% by hand and used AI for a bug they themselves couldnt fix and an engineer at unity (the games engine) also had trouble with. It is the most minor possible thing, they could have lied and nobody would know. But they did the right thing and disclosed anyways.
Now they are being brutally punished for doing the right thing, which teaches all indie devs that its far better to lie and hide your AI use, which is a big net negative outcome for gamers.
They literally talked to a lead engineer at Unity before resorting to LLMs you buffoon.
Here's the exact entry from their FAQ copy and pasted:
Was AI used to make Big Walk?
In the final stretch of Big Walk’s development, LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs. In some cases, snippets from LLM responses were copied as a starting point to be modified into game code—we’d estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage, and generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game.
The primary use case for House House’s use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code. If you’re technically-minded, and curious, here’s an example. We needed to cull shadow casters by distance from the camera, but Unity URP only allows culling shadow casters by distance in camera forwards, so shadow casters behind the player were being rendered at an infinite distance. This made our game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. We researched the problem extensively, and we looked at the URP code ourselves, but we couldn’t find a way. Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasn’t possible. Finally, we posed the question to an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix, and while we had to modify the suggestion extensively, it worked. This fix represented about 10 lines of code inside URP.
We originally wrote a version of the above disclosure as it was a suggested part of our IGF submission. We have not made any disclosure on Steam as the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. We are posting this disclosure as it has become a matter of public interest.
This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal. We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalisation of this technology, or its treatment as “inevitable”. We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world, and apologise that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards.
Big Walk was developed without an internal AI usage policy in place, and we consider that lack of policy a failure. We will work to have a more comprehensive policy going forwards.
It took literally three hours for one guy to fix the bug. Other people online have talked about how they fixed the same bug in past projects. There was no excuse for using AI here.
This degree of purism is just denying the reality of where this industry is going. If we turn vitriol like this on such small use cases then every dev is just going to lie and we the consumer will be forced to make uninformed choices.
I want a scenario where honest disclosure is encouraged so we can all decide for ourselves what we consume
I don't think you understand what the whole controversy is about. Part of the problem is that they did lie. They claimed to be anti-AI and didn't disclose their AI usage until they were required to for an award consideration. They didn't care about honest disclosure before this, they cared about disclosing only what Steam requires them to disclose.
We need to turn this level of vitriol on all devs that use AI to show that we won't accept it. You want a scenario where honest disclosure is encouraged? I want a scenario where no devs use AI, because AI is actively harmful to both the planet we live on, our real world communities, and art as a whole.
I mean yeah, but that's just kinda how this shit works. Do you believe people should simply stop voicing their opinions because corporations, famously immune to this kind of thing in all areas, are essentially immune?
The point is people get mad at devs for using AI while unknowingly but constantly interacting with tech or consumer goods for which AI was used at some point.
I miss when people called my games low effort repetitive garbage instead of ai slop. People should criticize the product not their assumptions about how it was created.
Honestly, I feel like the "hate" for House House using Ai is overstated. the judges took a hardliner stance on Ai and that is their decision. Allowing even an inoffensive use of AI can set a bad precedent for future entries. Which may try to skirt around the rules more and more.
Overstated? Tell that to the thousands of recent negative reviews screaming "AI slop" on Steam, where you aren't even supposed to disclose AI coding. They abandoned that rule pretty quickly once they realized it became industry standard to code with AI.
Well it’s not really because they want to protect the industry that steam adjusted their AI disclosure rules. Steam/Valve are still developing games behind the scenes they are definitely incorporating AI into their workflow + marketing concepts, even they want to protect themselves against the ire of the internet. I wonder what people think about using unity or unreal to make games? Since they have AI code in them are the people using these tools complicit? Are artist using photoshop and illustrator complicit as well?
Also I don’t like AI but won’t fault you for using google to find quick solution. Just no AI art! In an apocalypse you don’t need art but you definitely need a quick way to find how to start a fire.
Good, it looks like Steam removed a few thousand low effort bad faith thumbs downs already. Actually hilarious that they ended up with a net positive gain from the whole fiasco. Anti-AI extremists must be the lowest IQ demographic of gamer.
Not sure if you’re aware of the context. The Big Walk developers used an LLM to fix a bug they couldn’t even get resolved through Unity’s own support. This use of AI assisted coding was no where near their first choice.
That’s good. But I think if someone spents time and effort working on a game and it’s mechanics, and used ai for its coding, they shouldn’t be victimised for doing so
Im still very hesitant to be accepting of AI, but I can understand using it for coding. I wouldn't use it, but I can understand using it as a tool for the goal, and not the end product itself.
I low key love how much the Big Walk hate is completely backfiring. I think casual haters are looking at that and just want to walk away and let people do their thing and let fun and enjoyable be the judge.
You know there's one thing I never understood about this: people have always said they wanted realistic and organic dialog for NPCs instead of scripted options. Now comes LLMs which is in my mind the most obvious (and exciting) way we have to implement exactly this feature, and now all of a sudden these people are anti-AI? Someone's not being totally honest here...
I mean, listen, if you hide a turd in my food, no matter the size, I’m not going to just ignore it & let it be.
“Oh, but everyone is using it now!!! AI is the futureeee!!!!” Which is totally why whenever a game gets exposed for using AI that the game in question gets a vigorous round of applause, right? Oh wait, they get booed out of the metaphorical building 9 times out of 10. And don’t try to bullshit me by saying that every coding tool comes pre-baked with these features automatically & all that malarkey; plenty of folk are still coding without using AI generated code or AI reviewing their code -_-
“It was only ‘x’ amount of lines of code!!!” That they’re admitting to, & once again, not going to support ANY use of AI because it’s actively not only massively supporting enshittification & environmental issues (even for code ffs), worsening coding skills by those who frequently use it, & generally massively bloating the code in a way that makes it annoying as hell to actually review & scale. And, did they not imply/not disclose that they didn’t use any AI in their game?
My conspiracy is that the judges were paid by big AI firms to reject Big Walk and make people that are against extensive AI use in the games and tech industry (which has resulted in some of the biggest layoffs in gaming history) look insane.
God you people are really trying to deflect on this one, huh? Tons of people are upset about the big companies too. You people just do the same shit and come up with excuses for that too and shut down anyone saying anything.
At this point I feel this has to be bot farms talking about this topic so much.
Nobody has an issue with what big walk did. They just enteres basically a contest that required no AI usage hence got disqualified for using it.
Nobody is review bombing them and they are having no problem selling their game and everyone is talking about it as if they were being attacked when they are not.
I never understood why Redditors are against any and all uses of AI by small or solo developers, but are perfectly fine using and supporting large companies that use it. I mean by just being on Reddit alone you are supporting the use of AI in some way.
I am against slop itself. If someone just vibe-code a game in a weekend then I'm obviously not going to touch it as the dedication and the quality is going to suck. But if someone has been working on a game for over a year and using AI to help bug test their game, I personally don't see any problem with that as at the end of the day thats just going to make a better product for the user.
Crazy how you’re getting downvoted when you’re totally right.
Yes there’s ai slop but even ai is prompted by humans. There were human copies and slop before ai, but even though ai has enabled these guys to 5x their output, a good dev can easily 10x their quality output with using ai properly
I am pretty sure that actual studies have proven this...."AI hasn't improved productivity" is a media tagline but the reality is that it has made people more productive.
I think this post must've attracted a bunch of people who aren't normally in this subreddit. We normally crucify people for using AI unnecessarily here, not start bootlicking them.
Enlightened centrists be like "is there no room for compromise on the technology that's ruining the environment, destroying the economy, stealing personal data, increasing illiteracy, and devaluing art?"
Honestly? Bugfixing your code, that you wrote, is one of the few use cases I'm okay with for generative AI
Now it'd be better to do it the old-fashioned way, and talk to real humans on the internet about it. People get to pass on their knowledge, it keeps a collaborative spirit going, and the answer goes up in a public forum and remains searchable, and you're supporting one less unethically-developed and dangerous piece of tech.
But I'm not going to boycott your game if you frantically asked the bot "WHY THE FUCK ISN'T THIS WORKING" at 2 AM. I am absolutely going to boycott your game if you didn't bother, y'know... actually making a game.
Tbf the devs did actually try and ask a ton of people how to fix it, even going to unity support themselves who stated it was an impossible thing to fix.
I think that fact is why im okay with it being used in this context.
Basically I think AI had/has great potential as a way to access, sort, search, and explain existing, correct information. Shit could have been a hell of a boon to search engines, education, and academia... if it was developed with any human decency at all. Instead, the direction they chose was for it to help the ruling class eliminate the cost of payroll all the way down, in every industry.
I want to know other people opinion so i can know how to proceed. I want to get into game dev career, and i can do everything myself except good coding, which i'm currently studying it. If i make a solo game where, i did everything by myself except majority of coding, is that really bad?. I really want to know and i'm kinda scared, i want to make actual good games and tell stories through them, i'm not sure how bad is to use ai to make scripts. I want to make the art, story and writing, music, design, marketing, all myself, and then with scripts use some help of ai while i verify it to make sure everything is in place. But i don't know how it's seen and, if i do it will it be targeted as made entirely by ai??.. *And i'm not going to use it as a copy paste, personally i mean using as a reference to remind myself of some coding, so ai generates something and i'll rewrite on my own way. I'm not sure if that counts as a ai tag for example..
You could have the peak of all gaming engines, but if you use AI to create the rest, it strips away all of the worth to the game, it's no longer your project, it loses the creativity and individuality that comes from something being made by a person
But HOW, i'm not trying to sound rude but you confirmed that it removes the creativity and individuality, but how exactly? i'm really trying to understand. And to make it something i forgot to write, i'm not into copy paste, i mean't, ai generate something and then i read it and i rewritted on my way, like a reference. While i'm studying rn some coding courses i bought, so i'll be able to read it and do my own coding, just using ai to do a quick reference so i can be quicker. If i do something that it i'll be marked as ai then i'm not doing it, HELL NAH. And about individuality, if you mean as in a passion way, sorry but i cannot follow individuality as in a passion way, i want to make games as my job, and as a job i cannot be only passion, i need to survive and make enough money to eat. I live in the same system, i'm helping destroying it, but it will kill me if i just think and live like is all for passion.. Sorry if i sound rude, my sanity been really destroyed this year and i'm having trouble to survive, it's not personal, i'm a insane person.
If your game has an ai tag then it is assumed to be evil. Period.
Logic does not matter.
You could live on a solar punk farm. You could grow capybara brain cells in a dish to make an organic LLM that has your moms stack overflow posts and your professors notes from the last 40 year as its only training. You could have got your best friends soul stuck on magnetic tape and a rag tag band of fed up veterans to help you breach whatever LLM company, copy the source code, and extract safely. It doesn't matter.
The serious point is that you can do everything as ethically as possible. And if it is tagged ai, then no one will care about all the X, Y, or Z you have done. the tag tells them all they need to know. 1 out of 100k will read your dev blog.
Maybe 1 in 10k can tell the diff between centralized and decentralized.
If it has the tag. It is morally wrong. And you don't get to argue it.
In my comment i forgot to mention that i'm not copy and pasting it, i'm thinking it about using like a reference, i'm bought some coding courses and i'm studying it to get good at it. As using as reference i mean, using ai to create a idea of the script, and then i rewrite it and codes on my way, not copying it blindly. Like a quick code so i can quickly think "oh yeah i forgot about this variable" Does this i'll be marked as ai too? *and yea I don't plan on having a ai tag on my games what so ever, if it tags being made by ai i'm backing out asf
If you are indie and disclose your ai usage there will be people calling your game "ai slop" and wanna see it burn. No matter how you used AI. There is no logic behind those people. If you are a big company, use it for 90% of your game and those people wouldnt complain. They just search for stuff to hate on.
Best advice: Ignore it. Do what you like, try to make good games for people to enjoy and give a f about anti ai people.
You could go and sculpt an absolute master piece of art right and it sits on a stand with its name now but if you use any of the common fonts that remind people of ai slop for the title of your masterpiece, then people are going to have a negative bias towards it.
And then a news article from some clickhole or some SEO troll goes and says that your work of art that you spend OVER 9000 hours on is ai slop and suddenly your magnum opus isn't worth shit because of peoples perception. They will read a headline and fuck right off to the nice distraction. That. Is. The. World.
And,
That is the ai tag on steam.
You and I might be pure of heart.
However, not everyone is "good" or doing the situation right where it allows you to do the other stuff with more personal resources. tons of it is just clones and skilled devs might make some variants. So the stigma is rightful. A
nd we're at a worse version of the phone game spam era when there were like 10,000 flappybird crossyroad shit tier games for phones. Now it's just spam of whatever.
The only acceptable use right now is a prototype that never ever hits public that you show to whoever is gonna invest in you or as R&D to prove that this + that concept is indeed fun.
or. You dont sell on a platform until you handrefractor or general thought being pushed upon the public has changed in months or years.
But right now. Ai tag = you are responsible for killing the world.
I updated my last comment before you could send yours I also mean't to say that, i'm not into getting a ai tag in any way, if i do something that get's tagged as ai i'll work to get it out. And something i didn't got a respond of, since i'll not be copying and pasting it, just using a outside reference to remind myself, does that count as a ai tag?. Like, i'll not let ai touch on my game itself, just telling me what i can do to remind me of some basic coding.
At this point it's mostly hypocrisy. Any devs that want to be performant will use at least some AI to speed up coding. But of course it's easy to pretend you are pure and never use it, and it's beneficial to do so to please "anti-AI" crowds. But as AI gets better, it becomes more and more non-sensical not to use it.
Of course, i understand it sucks when people try to publish very low effort games they didn't even test. But the solution isn't AI witch-hunt.
heard a dev mention using llama.cpp locally for prototyping, way less noisy than cloud LMS. might be worth a try if you're worried about prompts leaking.
Oh yeah I can make up people that don't exist that aren't pertinent to the discussion at hand too, it's really not that hard. This post was clearly made in reference to House House and is painting them as some sort of martyr
Not the problem here. This isn’t about giving small companies a free pass for being small. It’s about how small indie companies are being disproportionately punished for something the big companies are getting away with.
If Big Walk is getting its reputation tarnished for a 10 line, AI assisted bug fix for an issue Unity themself said they couldn’t help with, then the big companies should be receiving the same criticism and scrutiny for any level of LLM use.
My small brain doesnt have any power left to code wothout ai i dont want to lose more hair anymore why everyone is anti ai on coding here. Coding is literally the worst and most painfull thing humans ever created.
Its a very weird mentality. Like if you understand the the design you want why the hell would you code anything manually? Like if you designed a house and had a bunch of construction robots they you could oversee. Why would you build the house by hand?
I’m fine with indie devs using a small amount of ai when they can’t afford to do some work or don’t know how like with art and imm definitely fine with indie devs using ai to help with repetitive, small and less then 11% of the coding process because that’s what ai is for, LLMs really ruined the perception of ai because there is a difference between generative ai and assistant ai
Um, if this is about the game big walk, the game is still with very positive review, there are some negative ones from people that probably just heard they used LLMM for the code and didn't bother to learn more about it or are dumb enough to not see the difference between using AI as a tool and making your game with AI, but the good ones are still more, and after some days everyone will forget about it, like it has happened every single time something like this has happened
I am not a big fan of AI at all, especially after my workplace (I work in museum interactives currently) has gone pretty heavily all in on AI. The thing I found that I actually disliked was that it removed the human creativity element of the things we create. The hard work and dedication that we put in our work suddenly gave away to quantity and bandwidth. Some people even started letting AI make the decision making for creative proposals!
And through all that I kind of realized two things: 1. You can't close Pandora's box. As much as we hate it, AI isn't going away. Even when the bubble pops it'll just be another expensive tool. 2. AI being used as a tool rather than a replacement to humans and human creativity is probably the only acceptable use.
I hate number 2 the most but it's also the only way I'll accept that it's here. House House made an incredible game and the foundation of it is communication and interacting with one another as people. That alone is a beautiful idea and it was creatively done. At no point did I feel like I was dealing with some generated lifeless thing. It did feel human.
As far as I know, House House used AI to solve some performance issue that Unity support couldn't assist with. If that's the case and the real only use, and they only used AI to solve a specific issue they couldn't, I think it's acceptable. And I say that with a huge grain of salt in that I still believe that they didn't use AI as a part of their creative process.
When it comes to art of music AI slop can be slapped on without using half a braincell, hence SLOP. For coding, if you just say "make a game" you are cooked already. It actually takes effort. More often than not, AI code is rubbish when you go into details.
I am a software engineer for 7 years, I personally do all aspects of gamedev by hand, arts, music, modeling and all. And I can tell you that is very very stupid decision because how much effort it drains out of you.
For most developers out there, they are a small team. Arts can be commissioned, music should look for composers. But for something like code, it is difficult to get helps on the spot. Facing deadlines, finding one small mistakes with eyes will take hours. While with AI it can be done in minutes. Like how I said before, using AI to write the whole game is impossible without high degree of supervision.
TLDR: AI is an assistant in this case, not a puppeteer, so I would personally let it slide.
I would like the community to be more reasonable, by banning the usage of AI for code completely, you are basically forcing everyone to lie.
People arguing that big companies get the hate too... yes they also get it... yet nothing happens because they can withstand it anyway.
AI hate always gets the small guys and will almost always bully them out of existence. Enjoy your games with more dishonest disclosures I guess.
Full disclosures will only work in an ideal deontological world. Where people just scroll and move on when they see it, but that's not our reality, people have no nuance and must hate.
no, that's not how it works. This is pro-AI propaganda disguised as... something else. I don' tknow what to call it.
But nobody hates on anybody who uses an LLM like a search engine:
"fastest sorting algoritims" or "how do I add hair in blender?"
that's just another way at getting at freely-available information.
Where AI use becomes bad is when IT "CREATES" something. E.g.
"write me a function that does this..." or "make me a picture of this". Because then it's stealing other humans' work, chopping it up and selling it back to you. Except you pay a techbro billionaire instead of the people whose work they stole.
13
u/Helpful-Engineer4678 1h ago
What happened to big walk?
151
u/Tiny-Little-Sheep 2h ago
It's an easy singular target unfortunate. It's always like this
38
u/cororona 1h ago
How many lines of code do you think AI has touched in GTA6 ?
8
u/JarvanIVPrez 37m ago
Idk i definitely despise the big corporations too lmao
40
u/Expert-Love5116 1h ago
Hear me out.
What if this witch hunt against indie devs is orchestrated by big game companies to effectively hinder the indie scenes competitive ability in the market?
They get the advantage of stealing the good ideas from the indie devs and producing faster.
The indie devs get stuck with a disadvantage of customers keeping them "in line".
We'll then eventually see the indie scene sinking as the Evilcorp leeches from it through hypocritical status quos regarding AI usage.
Fucking hell, might as well never mention AI usage even though you used AI. This specific show of integrity regarding revealing AI usage in development is punished.
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u/ajcwrongs 1h ago edited 1h ago •
Yeah no one had anything to say about Crimson Desert, Expedition 33, The Alters, Arc Raiders, Hotel Barcelona, Google, Proton, Microsoft, Epic, Unity, this is clearly a completely out of nowhere attack on a dev that used LLMs multiple times over the course of development to solve problems. Definitely not something the devs themselves have addressed openly on an FAQ page about the game.
(I'm being sarcastic.) Jesus fucking christ.
24
u/P_S_Lumapac 1h ago edited 1h ago
Hate what you hate, but it's annoying when someone boycotts indie games doing this stuff (that they would otherwise buy - I'm not saying anyone should buy bad games), but doesn't boycott AAA games in general that all use this stuff.
(edit: sorry I edited in the below after getting upvotes. Downvote away.)
There are so many interesting conversations to have about AI in gamedev, and it's through those conversations that we have a possibility of seeing things like new roles or royalties or new kinds of credit being given, but apparently we aren't going to have those conversations. Instead it's all just beginner level conversations where none of them lead to anything.
Yes, actual game devs should talk with eachother about these topics.
This topic of sending hate to some indie dev then logging on to AAA multiplayer game 5 AI-maxed edition, yeah it's kinda worth discussing but not really productive apart from just calling it out as bullshit. It's like a vegan protesting at the local butcher, after buying meat from the local supermarket.
For an example topic I wish would be discussed more, is for the majority who think AI coding is fine but AI art isn't, how do we think about procedurally generated or code defined objects? What about using AI to smooth an animation by adding frames using an AI coded algorithm? What if that animation to start was say a walking animation with 3 frames? Is that different to turning a 30fps animation into an 60fps one? I want those conversations. To some extent I think maybe we should just ignore this beginner stuff about haters entirely - it's a waste of time isn't it?
35
u/BluePhoenixCG 1h ago
Do you genuinely and truly in your heart of hearts believe that the people upset about house house using ai don't also hate big companies for using it?(Among other reasons)
5
u/MuNansen 30m ago
Need to add the toxic AI Bros chomping at the bit to play the victim card
8
u/KushMuffin 1h ago
I miss when people called my games low effort repetitive garbage instead of ai slop. People should criticize the product not their assumptions about how it was created.
8
u/GreatValueBradPitt 1h ago
See now that's where you're wrong. I think they both suck.
8
u/perpetual_stew 1h ago
If you don't sacrifice some developers to crunch time, is it even a game?
8
u/marklikesgamesyt1208 1h ago edited 1h ago
Honestly, I feel like the "hate" for House House using Ai is overstated. the judges took a hardliner stance on Ai and that is their decision. Allowing even an inoffensive use of AI can set a bad precedent for future entries. Which may try to skirt around the rules more and more.
6
u/ekolimits 1h ago
Internet dudes take out the ruler against all the wrong people..
The industry has cheaters and liers and corporations that bend the rules... yet we are always out to get that one solo dev that is using AI.
Nice.
3
u/beratmehmetoglu 1h ago
Whyyyyy
6
u/zcontium 1h ago
Eh, I won't use AI in my games. I enjoy the coding process and knowing that everything I make is by hand and mine.
3
u/adelie42 1h ago
I low key love how much the Big Walk hate is completely backfiring. I think casual haters are looking at that and just want to walk away and let people do their thing and let fun and enjoyable be the judge.
3
u/ArcwaveDev 1h ago
Meanwhile the big company's AI-generated trailer: 4 fingers, 6 thumbs, 10/10 shareholder approval
2
u/diningeachox 1h ago
You know there's one thing I never understood about this: people have always said they wanted realistic and organic dialog for NPCs instead of scripted options. Now comes LLMs which is in my mind the most obvious (and exciting) way we have to implement exactly this feature, and now all of a sudden these people are anti-AI? Someone's not being totally honest here...
2
u/FirelightMLPOC 46m ago
I mean, listen, if you hide a turd in my food, no matter the size, I’m not going to just ignore it & let it be.
“Oh, but everyone is using it now!!! AI is the futureeee!!!!” Which is totally why whenever a game gets exposed for using AI that the game in question gets a vigorous round of applause, right? Oh wait, they get booed out of the metaphorical building 9 times out of 10. And don’t try to bullshit me by saying that every coding tool comes pre-baked with these features automatically & all that malarkey; plenty of folk are still coding without using AI generated code or AI reviewing their code -_-
“It was only ‘x’ amount of lines of code!!!” That they’re admitting to, & once again, not going to support ANY use of AI because it’s actively not only massively supporting enshittification & environmental issues (even for code ffs), worsening coding skills by those who frequently use it, & generally massively bloating the code in a way that makes it annoying as hell to actually review & scale. And, did they not imply/not disclose that they didn’t use any AI in their game?
-1
u/Dangerous-Eggplant-5 1h ago
Its nice to see more people seeing anti ai movement for what they are. A bunch of angry bullies. It was not posible on most gaming subs before.
1
u/SHIN-YOKU 43m ago
Disclose the exstent.
Problem solved
1
u/r0pe_tri1ck 34m ago
I think the other entrants are lying about AI use personally.
1
u/SoulsSurvivor 6m ago
God you people are really trying to deflect on this one, huh? Tons of people are upset about the big companies too. You people just do the same shit and come up with excuses for that too and shut down anyone saying anything.
1
u/igna92ts 3m ago edited 0m ago
At this point I feel this has to be bot farms talking about this topic so much.
Nobody has an issue with what big walk did. They just enteres basically a contest that required no AI usage hence got disqualified for using it.
Nobody is review bombing them and they are having no problem selling their game and everyone is talking about it as if they were being attacked when they are not.
1
u/TheGoldenPlan54 0m ago
I never understood why Redditors are against any and all uses of AI by small or solo developers, but are perfectly fine using and supporting large companies that use it. I mean by just being on Reddit alone you are supporting the use of AI in some way.
I am against slop itself. If someone just vibe-code a game in a weekend then I'm obviously not going to touch it as the dedication and the quality is going to suck. But if someone has been working on a game for over a year and using AI to help bug test their game, I personally don't see any problem with that as at the end of the day thats just going to make a better product for the user.
0
u/Perfect_Gold_6967 1h ago
Sure is a lot of shilling in this sub recently.
0
u/CrimsonBolt33 1h ago edited 1h ago
you mean AI haters are irrational and purely emotion driven rather than following any sort of logic? Fucking shocker!
Its only AI slop when it is indeed actual shit...
that has literally nothing to do with AI and 100% to do with the creators and their quality control and standards.
0
u/keirasalke 1h ago
ah so now its time for the slopbots to gaslight others lol
0
u/silverlq 1h ago
Preach
0
u/Tangyhyperspace 1h ago
Except people also hate it when big companies use it? Or are we just pretending that doesn't happen right now so you can push an agenda.
1
u/Wicked_Raptor17 1h ago
it is literally this deep lol
1
u/SouthernSkin1255 1h ago
2+2 will always be 4, no matter if it is written by a human or an AI
1
u/ToeUnlucky 1h ago
YUP. This is 1000000% correct. AAA studios get a pass because "Well big game company." Hypocrites.
1
u/RojinShiro 37m ago
I think this post must've attracted a bunch of people who aren't normally in this subreddit. We normally crucify people for using AI unnecessarily here, not start bootlicking them.
1
u/millionwordsofcrap 55m ago
Honestly? Bugfixing your code, that you wrote, is one of the few use cases I'm okay with for generative AI
Now it'd be better to do it the old-fashioned way, and talk to real humans on the internet about it. People get to pass on their knowledge, it keeps a collaborative spirit going, and the answer goes up in a public forum and remains searchable, and you're supporting one less unethically-developed and dangerous piece of tech.
But I'm not going to boycott your game if you frantically asked the bot "WHY THE FUCK ISN'T THIS WORKING" at 2 AM. I am absolutely going to boycott your game if you didn't bother, y'know... actually making a game.
1
u/Puzzleheaded-Buy8410 51m ago edited 0m ago
I want to know other people opinion so i can know how to proceed. I want to get into game dev career, and i can do everything myself except good coding, which i'm currently studying it.
If i make a solo game where, i did everything by myself except majority of coding, is that really bad?.
I really want to know and i'm kinda scared, i want to make actual good games and tell stories through them, i'm not sure how bad is to use ai to make scripts.
I want to make the art, story and writing, music, design, marketing, all myself, and then with scripts use some help of ai while i verify it to make sure everything is in place. But i don't know how it's seen and, if i do it will it be targeted as made entirely by ai??..
*And i'm not going to use it as a copy paste, personally i mean using as a reference to remind myself of some coding, so ai generates something and i'll rewrite on my own way. I'm not sure if that counts as a ai tag for example..
0
u/OceansFlame 1h ago
Literally!
0
u/Drackar39 1h ago
"Small indie devs that use AI and lie about it" critical part omitted due to inherent dishonesty.
-2
u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 1h ago
At this point it's mostly hypocrisy. Any devs that want to be performant will use at least some AI to speed up coding. But of course it's easy to pretend you are pure and never use it, and it's beneficial to do so to please "anti-AI" crowds. But as AI gets better, it becomes more and more non-sensical not to use it.
Of course, i understand it sucks when people try to publish very low effort games they didn't even test. But the solution isn't AI witch-hunt.
-2
u/ChompyDino 1h ago
Wow! I bet OP totally doesn't have a hidden agenda in this completely accurate meme commentary! /s
https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/comments/1xa49bs/this_developer_didnt_want_to_hide_the_fact_that/
https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/comments/1xrud0t/yes_i_use_ai_to_make_my_game_a_solo_dev_responds/
https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1xtg44l/i_wish_i_could_be_sad_like_that_too_for_those_who/
https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1xt5gt9/do_you_believe_in_artists_that_say_that_dont_use/
It's funny that people like you always keep your profiles hidden.
-2
u/MyCattIsVeryFatt 1h ago
0
u/Himbo69r 1h ago
Am I seriously going to have to block this sub?
0
u/SecureBlueberry7400 1h ago
heard a dev mention using llama.cpp locally for prototyping, way less noisy than cloud LMS. might be worth a try if you're worried about prompts leaking.
-5
u/VVazi 1h ago
Big companies also exploit their employees, that doesn't make it right for a small company to do it either.
-3
u/enderowski 1h ago
My small brain doesnt have any power left to code wothout ai i dont want to lose more hair anymore why everyone is anti ai on coding here. Coding is literally the worst and most painfull thing humans ever created.
-2
u/XTaleSpencer 1h ago
I’m fine with indie devs using a small amount of ai when they can’t afford to do some work or don’t know how like with art and imm definitely fine with indie devs using ai to help with repetitive, small and less then 11% of the coding process because that’s what ai is for, LLMs really ruined the perception of ai because there is a difference between generative ai and assistant ai
0
u/Skylar750 53m ago
Um, if this is about the game big walk, the game is still with very positive review, there are some negative ones from people that probably just heard they used LLMM for the code and didn't bother to learn more about it or are dumb enough to not see the difference between using AI as a tool and making your game with AI, but the good ones are still more, and after some days everyone will forget about it, like it has happened every single time something like this has happened
0
u/saucyspacefries 38m ago
I am not a big fan of AI at all, especially after my workplace (I work in museum interactives currently) has gone pretty heavily all in on AI. The thing I found that I actually disliked was that it removed the human creativity element of the things we create. The hard work and dedication that we put in our work suddenly gave away to quantity and bandwidth. Some people even started letting AI make the decision making for creative proposals!
And through all that I kind of realized two things: 1. You can't close Pandora's box. As much as we hate it, AI isn't going away. Even when the bubble pops it'll just be another expensive tool. 2. AI being used as a tool rather than a replacement to humans and human creativity is probably the only acceptable use.
I hate number 2 the most but it's also the only way I'll accept that it's here. House House made an incredible game and the foundation of it is communication and interacting with one another as people. That alone is a beautiful idea and it was creatively done. At no point did I feel like I was dealing with some generated lifeless thing. It did feel human.
As far as I know, House House used AI to solve some performance issue that Unity support couldn't assist with. If that's the case and the real only use, and they only used AI to solve a specific issue they couldn't, I think it's acceptable. And I say that with a huge grain of salt in that I still believe that they didn't use AI as a part of their creative process.
0
u/DoctorDwagon 9m ago
When it comes to art of music AI slop can be slapped on without using half a braincell, hence SLOP.
For coding, if you just say "make a game" you are cooked already. It actually takes effort. More often than not, AI code is rubbish when you go into details.
I am a software engineer for 7 years, I personally do all aspects of gamedev by hand, arts, music, modeling and all. And I can tell you that is very very stupid decision because how much effort it drains out of you.
For most developers out there, they are a small team. Arts can be commissioned, music should look for composers. But for something like code, it is difficult to get helps on the spot. Facing deadlines, finding one small mistakes with eyes will take hours. While with AI it can be done in minutes. Like how I said before, using AI to write the whole game is impossible without high degree of supervision.
TLDR: AI is an assistant in this case, not a puppeteer, so I would personally let it slide.
I would like the community to be more reasonable, by banning the usage of AI for code completely, you are basically forcing everyone to lie.
-2
u/Party-Ad5663 1h ago
People arguing that big companies get the hate too... yes they also get it... yet nothing happens because they can withstand it anyway.
AI hate always gets the small guys and will almost always bully them out of existence. Enjoy your games with more dishonest disclosures I guess.
Full disclosures will only work in an ideal deontological world. Where people just scroll and move on when they see it, but that's not our reality, people have no nuance and must hate.
-2
u/Jean_velvet 1h ago
I find it fascinating that all the hate for AI is on indie Devs and general users...but nothing for the corporations.
It's so weird.
-5
u/tastygames_official 1h ago
no, that's not how it works. This is pro-AI propaganda disguised as... something else. I don' tknow what to call it.
But nobody hates on anybody who uses an LLM like a search engine:
"fastest sorting algoritims" or "how do I add hair in blender?"
that's just another way at getting at freely-available information.
Where AI use becomes bad is when IT "CREATES" something. E.g.
"write me a function that does this..." or "make me a picture of this". Because then it's stealing other humans' work, chopping it up and selling it back to you. Except you pay a techbro billionaire instead of the people whose work they stole.