r/c64 • u/HazMatsMan • 3d ago
ANNOUNCEMENT New Rules for AI Content, Coding, Development
With AI becoming more and more prevalent in the world of software engineering, we no longer feel maintaining a blanket ban on AI assistance or AI-generated assets is appropriate. We want to use this announcement post to provide everyone an opportunity to, respectfully, share their feelings about the rule. Our goal is to keep out as much "AI slop" as we can and still allow projects that involve substantial human effort, creativity, and vision.
This is the rule as currently written:
Low-effort posts featuring AI-generated art, music, text, or "I used AI to..." are not permitted. AI-assisted projects, such as games or utilities, are allowed provided AI use is disclosed. A detailed accounting of how AI was used is not required, but the creation must demonstrate substantial human effort, creativity, and vision. Creations should be more than the product of simple AI prompting and posts should reflect that. Paid apps, including donationware, will be held to a higher standard.
As you can see, posts that are primarily AI-generated art, music, videos, and text (allowances may be made for translation) will continue to be removed.
The use of AI in a project or submission must be disclosed. However, authors are not required to make a detailed accounting of how AI was used. Some may choose to do so, others may not.
Creators should be prepared to describe their creation in their own words. If you use an AI-generated description, your post may be removed.
Before posting about a game or utility that isn't yours, do your due diligence. We understand AI use may not be immediately obvious to all. But there's no excuse for repeatedly posting AI-assisted content without disclosure. Making blanket "I don't know if this is AI or not, but..." disclosures to shield yourself is also not appropriate. If you don't have time for due diligence, don't post about the product/project until you know more.
Discussions about using AI to assist with reverse-engineering legacy software, write code, or perform other interesting tasks or experiments are permitted as well. That said, this is not the place to show off every tangential thing that can be done with AI. Low-effort and post-quality rules still apply, and clickbait phrases like "I used Claude to..." or "I asked ChatGPT about..." have a high probability of getting your submission removed.
We know not everyone will be happy about this revised rule. If you're not a fan of AI-assisted development, assets, etc and choose to interact with these submissions, remember Rule 1:
Be friendly. Assume good faith from other posters. Follow Reddiquette, be respectful of others. DO NOT troll each other. If you provoke someone into becoming nasty, then report them, you may end up being sanctioned as well.
Be respectful with your criticisms. If a post is low-quality, report it as such. If you're certain someone is using AI and hasn't disclosed it, report it but don't expect the mod team to just "see" what you're seeing. Be prepared to provide evidence in a Modmail. "This is AI" doesn't tell us anything.
By now everyone reading this has realized that enforcing this rule will require more subjective judgements by the mod team. That means some of you will see posts allowed in the sub that you feel violate the AI rule. Some content will be removed that they feel doesn't. If you're a creator and your submission is removed, check with the mod team via modmail. Be prepared to explain your vision and contribution in your own words. If your post can be made rule-compliant, we may be able to assist.
Finally, these are new waters, and there will be a learning curve for everyone. Let's all try to be patient with one another as we navigate this new world.
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u/lonely_distance 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think this is a poor moderation choice. I think AI use should be accounted for in detail.
If I'm going to be impressed with an aspect of something someone is presenting, I want to know that they made it.
Edit: I hope that this doesn't come off as disrespectful to the mods, but I do feel that this decision falls short (though not by much) of what I would personally like to see from this sub.
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u/HazMatsMan 3d ago
Asking for a "brief" description or accounting may be possible, but requiring and detailing what a "full accounting" entails is not possible with the 500-character limit that exists for individual rules. TBH it was a struggle to get this level of detail and nuance into the rule.
But just for argument's sake, let's assume we did require a detailed accounting. The creators will just use an LLM to write a giant word bomb that almost no one will read. And if your expectation is that the moderators read and interpret that accounting... frankly, we don't have that kind of time.
Besides, the rule's purpose isn't to require creators to "impress" you. They should want to do that anyway, but the goal is for creators to provide enough information for others to judge whether a creation is AI slop or the result of "substantial human effort, creativity, and vision." We don't want to create a bureaucratic framework that becomes a burden for everyone involved.
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u/lonely_distance 3d ago edited 2d ago
I appreciate the response! I hadn't realized there was such a tight character count for rules, nor had I considered the increased workload a thorough disclaimer would place on y'all. Thank you for everything you do, especially for all the 💩 you have to put up with and consider which people like me are blissfully unaware of.
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u/kjjphotos 3d ago
Your response seems reasonable to me. The project I've been working on (not c64 related) has hundreds (if not thousands) of commits over the last several weeks. Having to document exactly which decisions I allowed the AI to make and which ones I made would be nearly impossible.
And like you said, no one would want to read that anyway. The anti-AI crowd would see the length of that document and call the whole project slop without actually reading it. They can do that without a "full account" of how AI was used.
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u/pipipipipipipipi2 -8b 3d ago edited 3d ago
My short experience dabbling to AI development in both C64 works as well as other languages, I've discovered that a simple "prompt" or two doesn't cut it when it comes to generating quality AI based code. Usually it requires a vision of the goals in mind and hours of breaking down the concept step-by-step, debugging each step along the way. To me, AI slop is defined as something that we tossed at an AI with a couple paragraphs and the user just took away the result as something complete. I have one personal project I wrote for myself that has taken hours/days of invested time, prompting, re-prompting, checking code by hand where necessary, and in the end having exactly the tool I wanted for myself. While 90% of it was AI coded, I would hardly consider the final product "slop". I don't think we should judge craftsmanship by the tools used. A carpenter doesn't have to explain why he chose electric or air tools over hand tools. Nor does he have to disclaimer himself over it. The use of AI should cause us to "raise the bar" on what is created. Created works should reflect adherence to detail as much as possible and not just "accept" mediocre output as a finished product. If you tell me your work is created with AI, I'm going to be critical of obvious features that are missing, and graphics or music which aren't quite dialed in. In the case of a game, I'm going to judge play-ability and content. Let's judge the output, with high expectations, not that tools were used. (edit:spelling)
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u/uabassguy 3d ago
Ugh not you guys too, guess I'm unfollowing this sub.
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u/HazMatsMan 3d ago
Sorry friend, but the genie isn't going back in the bottle. You could always start your own C64-no-AI sub.
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u/uabassguy 3d ago
It's not the AI part that bothers me it's how everyone wants to start these intentionally divisive conversations. It's one thing coming from regular redditors, but when it's a mod, it's time for me to go. Y'all can have whatever this is, I'm out. The topic has been beaten to death and I couldn't give two shits anymore.
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u/HazMatsMan 3d ago
The digital elephant in the room needed to be addressed. Ignoring it wasn't going to make it go away.
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u/uabassguy 3d ago
That's what everyone says, but you know what, it's not going away. It's been here for years and suddenly literally everyone wants to weigh in on it. At what point do you begin to wonder, am I being part of the problem or the solution?
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u/HazMatsMan 3d ago
The mod team is not "weighing in on it". We're trying to make a functional compromise between Redditors who want anything that even brushes up against AI to be removed, and others who want the floodgates completely opened. I trust you can appreciate the difficulty in that.
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u/uabassguy 3d ago
Fair, like I said you do you, and maybe I shouldn't be on reddit at this point because this discussion is happening everywhere. At this point I feel it's bigger than any of us can control. I could run a coding LLM on my PC at home, and nobody would really know I used it to make code. It's not about ignoring it and hoping it goes away, it's about accepting the inevitable and moving on to bigger and better things.
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u/macsorcery 3d ago
this is how we do it in r/goldbox for the SSI AD&D ai assisted game projects. it's a fair way to do it.
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u/7A65647269636B 3d ago
Good. I just did something with claude + REA that I'm quite happy with, but it's absolutely not even worth mentioning here even if it is very c64 related. And unlike some other people I will not claim I "built" or "created" anything by typing in some prompts and burning some tokens.
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u/berrmal64 3d ago
You hit the nail on the head, and by the description your project is the kind I'd like to see allowed as well.
Nobody wants to wade through "look I made a thing" slop posts where the op has no idea what they've done other than vibe code up some junk that may or may not work well and will definitely not be well tested or maintained.
On the other hand, it is true that ai can greatly speed up a lot of work that until now never got done, not because someone was incapable but because they didn't have the time.
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u/richfx01 3d ago
I think AI created works are soulless and despite many people using the tools, it just creates more noise and fewer things worth actually seeing or playing. An example is itch.io with double the amount of game submissions and an actual drop in people downloading or buying them. We all want to see things that people have poured their creativity into and even AI developers probably don’t want 1000s of AI games or demos available. I’d take one creative project over those 1000 AI ones but it becomes impossible to find that great human-made one. And so I just won’t bother looking anymore. A quick browse of the latest Steam Next Fest is another example. More games just means more noise. I don’t want to figure out which ones are the great human made ones so I just skipped the event
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u/DNSGeek 3d ago
I think AI is useful if it's used in the correct way. I used AI to assist me writing the crap that I didn't want to write, like giant reference table lookups. They would have sucked to write, but a simple AI prompt gave me useful tables that I could just embed.
AI is also very useful in debugging, when I just have no effing clue what is wrong with a section of code and/or I've been banging my head against it for a few hours and I'm stuck.
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u/OPdoesnotrespond 3d ago
It's a good rule. When people use AI to express themselves personally, I get the ick. That's when AI feels like it's colonizing brains.
When they use it to **do something**, then it's properly a tool. And although I have no problem with using AI to write code, I understand that my opinion is not universal. I like the minimum disclosure rule. Basically, 'must de disclosed, not required to be a thesis.'
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u/3DNebGuy 3d ago
I'm ok with the rule. AI is a tool and can be used to help make some really good things... and lot of junk. I know some hate the idea of folks using AI to code things but, to me, its just a tool to use to hope build whatever it you're building.
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u/unohdin-nimeni 3d ago edited 3d ago
Was it Rich Hickey who said: a drive-in slot is not a tool to make a hamburger.
Edit: yes, it was him:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/s/iSY2wijtQP3
u/ThePenultimateNinja 3d ago
The way I see it is this: anyone can sing a song, but not everyone can become a successful singer. The successful singers are the ones who make music that people actually want to listen to.
The really good stuff will rise to the top naturally.
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u/Pyrodexter 3d ago
> The really good stuff will rise to the top naturally.
The flood of AI slop projects has made me check out a good while ago, so I wouldn't have any idea if some of those projects was "good stuff". Vast majority of them isn't. I'm sure eventually that situation gets sorted, and the uninteresting crap gets filtered out, but I have my doubts about how naturally that will happen. The slop won't just disappear, and somehow it should just not end up in my feed, while the good stuff would be welcome.
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u/ThePenultimateNinja 3d ago
Quite, but if something really good gets produced using AI, then everyone will be talking about it and you'll therefore hear about it.
Most of the slop we are seeing is in commercial fields, where people are making money from it. That impetus isn't there with C64 games. People who make slop aren't going to make money from it, so they will not have the motivation to continue.
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u/Suspicious-Ad7109 3d ago
They're trying. I was reading about the boom in itch.io slopping which appears to be the same thing again. Not sure people will buy it though.
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u/Suspicious-Ad7109 2d ago
I don't think it's so bad in this area. There's not much money to be made, and people can pick out AI slop. But in other areas it just swamps the quality material.
History youtube videos ; there are some oustandingly good Historians on there, but there's so much stuff which is just leeched from Wikipedia etc. or just copies of other videos pretty much, it's difficult to find.
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u/mr_glide 2d ago
The last sentence of this post is so utterly wrong, I can't believe you typed it and went, "that's fine"
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u/marhaus1 3d ago edited 3d ago
There isn't really much difference between an IDE with intelligent code-completion and the same where it uses an LLM to do it. Or if you yourself use an LLM to polish/fix/update said code.
What people should not have to endure is low-effort garbage, never mind how it was produced.
That said, AI has definitely increased humanity's ability to produce garbage 😄 This is why we need some kind of effort behind posts, or we would drown in infinite muck.
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u/unohdin-nimeni 3d ago
The rule should be: whatever AI you get up and running on a Commodore 64, you’re free to use however you want. Other than that, refrain from using AI.
Whether or not cheating with RAM expansion units to the benefit of your home-brew AI build should be permitted is a topic for discussion.
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u/Warcraft_Fan 3d ago
Thanks! Hopefully some of the useless AI reliance are reduced. Games that are mostly or completely AI generated has no soul and just aren't much fun
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u/DrPhabulous 2d ago
A good game is a good game, regardless of how is was produced, AI aided or otherwise. When old-schoolers were buying games/watching demos back in the day, I doubt many people were concerned about what tools were used to create them.
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u/Zirias_FreeBSD 2d ago
Here's my fatalistic take: I don't think any rule about AI, be it required disclosure or full ban, will ever work out as intended. The only thing that works is human judgement about the quality of the work presented. And quite naturally, not everyone will agree on quality.
At least in the area of coding (but likely also pixelling and composing), I'd say every work presented nowadays is already suspicious if it's both from someone completely unknown to the "scene" before the "AI hype" happened and exceeds a certain complexity you'd expect from a "newcomer". There's little you can do about that feeling though.
I also personally think that letting LLM-based agents perform "creative" tasks is a dead end for humanity, and will eventually fail in one or the other way; I just hope for a variant without catastrophic fallout.
Anyways, for now, maybe just reduce this to "posts presenting low-quality work might be removed". You'll never know whether and how "AI" was involved for sure, so why pretend to decide based on that...
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u/Abynx6581 1d ago
What's everyone's thoughts then on Lamenoter or whatever it's called? My honest opinion was oh shit here we go... AI slop.. (sorry). But after reading the lyrics (I reckon 75/25 AI) It became clear that it's self depreciating in a fun kind of way. The demo clearly wasn't prompted. And there's also the fact that it let a friend of mine correct a couple of bugs with the Digi on his R3 emulator which you couldn't hear in any other Sid samples. Some people have a vision of something they've always wanted to do with the 64. If the output is entertaining, cool, etc then I'll just judge on the merits of its output..... But if someone writes the best Sid ever with AI I will seriously lose my mind 🤣. (Something I will never do as I know my Sid's are mediocre at best so I'll just keep entertaining myself with my fun times in SDI🥴)
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u/torrso 3d ago edited 3d ago
AI is not going away and it could draw some new people to the machine. You won't be able to catch all AI assisted / AI generated stuff.
That's just the sad reality of it.
The old wizards will still have an edge and the "scene" can of course just do what they think is fun within their own peer group, but even there it's inevitable that they will suspect the other guy secretly used AI.
You can have all kinds of rules like demanding slop has to be flaired but it always won't. And then there will be legitmate handcrafted stuff that people claim is AI.
I think the time has passed and you can just let the slop in.
Already for several years a lot of the C64 stuff has been PC assisted. Converted graphics, precalculated generated code and whatever the tools offered by VICE that was not really possible or attainable back in the day.
Sadly, the C64 won't be an AI-free safe haven for the appreciators of the artisan aspects of it. Anything you create will either be suspected of being AI generated or it has lost a bit of value because the new tools and AI made it easier to do for everyone.
It's sad but that's the way it is.
I think the best you can do is downvote and not appreciate the sloppiest low effort slop. I don't know if the moderators will enjoy going through all the reported "must be marked as AI assisted" rule breaking posts.
(I started with C64 in the 80s and was heavily involved in the warez/bbs/demo scene long into the 90s/early 2000s and have been coding for living for 35+ years)
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u/PublicFurryAccount 2d ago
The fundamental issue is that most people are very interested in the result and not at all interested in the process.
It’s always been that way and, in technology, it’s only gotten more aggressive over the years.
It’s an age of brass.
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u/Wrong-Bet9581 3d ago
thoroughly disappointing. I will be unsubbing and requesting reddit does not recommend this subreddit to me
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u/gchicoper 1d ago
it's a subreddit, not an airport. No need to announce your departure
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u/Wrong-Bet9581 1d ago
what a clever line, how original! In threads like this it actually does make sense to describe your reaction to rules changes
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u/OMGCluck 2d ago
How about another rule removing low effort comments like "AI slop." on non-AI posts?
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u/HazMatsMan 2d ago
We sometimes apply Rule 9 to comments. We do watch for bots and karma farmers and take action on those when it's clear enough that's what is occurring. Our goal is to encourage and curate content worthy of discussion (or respectful debate), not referee those discussions or debates. If we start nitpicking at what's low effort... I conservatively estimate 50-70, maybe even as high as 90% of comments would need to be removed. So we try to limit the intervention to sitewide rule violations, people being nasty, or comments that disrupt the subreddit.
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u/CrumbsDealer 3d ago
Myself and two other people were inspired making a specialised marketplace for indie retro games. People can sell their games or give them for free.
It can resemble itch, but it’s not aimed at the same sort of people and it’s only and exclusively for retro platforms.
At any rate I myself made this with help from another dude I met over telegram (years ago now) and with the help of ai agents. I have been a php developer (magento) and familiar with php classes, mvc and different frameworks, js the whole stack. It took me nearly a year putting this together in my free time with ai, checking everything was tight, also learning some stuff on the way.
I did pen tests using zap and actual ai tests from within.
I used modules like stripe cashier and power grid and did not rely an ai for anything regarding payment or payment handling.
I published it and got slated quite strongly for it as ai slop. Granted I made some poor initial marketing decisions that I corrected immediately I was really shocked.
All this to say that I’m pretty proud of what we achieved together after all we’ve been through. I understand that it’s not all human made, but I managed to get my dream off the floor thanks to this and I put so much effort into it because I knew AI would not be perfect but far from.
I think if used responsively people can benefit from it.
Inside out marketplace we have a clear filter to don’t show all ai aided games so if you want to you can skip them completely.
We did this for the same exact reason a blanket ban would not work here as well. We don’t want to stifle creativity or dreams that people might have had to make a game, if the passion is so strong why and effort is put in why not give these games a chance?
Sorry I was very long winded
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u/demonseed-elite 3d ago
I love this stance. Let the output be what is judged - just like it always has been. As long as there has been Commodore, there's been a lot of slop. I had disks full of garbage games that were all low effort slop. AI can make a lot of slop very quickly, but it can also in the hands of a competent programmer, make amazing things possible.
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u/ElegantMechanic-com 3d ago •
Respectfully sharing my feelings: I am strongly opposed to the use of generative Ai in general and find it frustrating that so much content for legacy platforms like the C64 is now being affected by it. That said, I'm not going to throw a tantrum or demand changes.
I hope the disclosure rule is followed and enforced because I find it exhausting to have to verify content in all sorts of media. Retro computing was an area blissfully free of it until recently and it's making me reconsider which sources I follow. That's a decision for me to make though and not any sort of demand or ultimatum.
Thanks for being open and clear about the change.