It would not lose all meaning. If you don't want to be tagged as AI, don't use AI to write your games. Customers can decide if that matters to them.
Personally, I do not think that Opus 5.5 has visual taste, and I find games with a UI clearly written by Claude to be unplayably ugly. I would love a filter that excluded them.
What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
Yes. Of course you can explain all the nuance in your AI disclosure statement and consumers can decide if it matters to them.
>What if I made a game before LLMs existed, but now I'm using Astra to look for memory leaks and help me fix them? Does my "NO AI" label now flip?
Yes.
When it comes to software development, LLMs are present somewhere in the pipeline. Even if it’s a simple google search, you have AI overview. Even if I only use an LLM to debug or read code. Even if I only use an LLM to do web searches.
There would legitimately be no software left that’s AI-free.
Look, many domains can do just fine without LLMs and LLMs don’t enhance them too much. Software is the exception. Every software engineer, everywhere on Earth, is using LLMs to some extent in their workflow. The only exceptions are where it’s literally illegal to do so.
This is not true. Mobius Digital, for example, does not use generative AI.
> Every software engineer, everywhere on Earth, is using LLMs to some extent in their workflow. The only exceptions are where it’s literally illegal to do so.
Surely you know such a broad statement cannot possibly be true
I doubt this heavily. Somewhere in their workflow, some developer is using an LLM for something.
You have a coding question, which is typical. You Google it. Congratulations, your game is now AI-assisted. Or, maybe you use a piece of open-source code. Highly likely that said code is AI-assisted. Linux is, after all. You're probably not including parts of the Linux kernel in your codebase, but you certainly ARE linking to some libraries which are AI-assisted.
> Surely you know such a broad statement cannot possibly be true
Yes, I am sure of it, as sure as I am that their developers use a computer. Sure, it could technically not be true. Maybe they use punch cards and have someone else compile them the old fashioned way. But, let's be real. If it's not 100%, it's 99.99% and we can round up.
I've talked to a lot of developers at a lot of companies. I've yet to meet one where they don't use LLMs at their company in some way. I've met developers who personally don't use AI to generate code too much. Even they use LLMs for research and debugging. And, I've met many who are forced to use LLMs.
I think a lot of people who are not developers don't know what it's like in the industry. For most jobs, LLMs have had a marginal impact. Specifically for software development, it has had a huge impact. You CAN write software without AI, just like you can write software without a mouse and keyboard. Are people doing that in the industry? No.
Motte and bailey
Yes I can. You are not entitled to a greater share of my attention than I feel your post is worth. I'm sorry if you find that upsetting!
It's even worse if you include AI via libraries, frameworks, or modules. If you write your game in Epic or Unreal engines, do you need to disclose that you used AI?
I don’t think you understood my point. If 90% of new games get tagged as AI no matter how non-slop they are, no developer will care if they get tagged, and most players will ignore the tags since it carries no meaning about the quality of the games.
We are almost certainly already there with AI coding, and if we aren't I give it six months to a year tops. AI is being used for coding everywhere now. The difference between the slop and non-slop isn't whether or not AI is being used. It's how much care is being taken by the developer. But it's no longer a question of whether new code had AI contributions. It did.
By the simple mechanics of information theory, there's always going to be certain common grain to what you get if you try to prompt entire massive systems into existence with minimal human input as to what the system should be. You'll always be able to type in "give me a 2D platformer like Mario but with cats and barn animals instead" and get some sort of slop result, no matter how good that slop result may eventually become in the abstract. It'll take more information from somewhere to make it something other than that slop result.
(Though that information may not all source from a human sitting there and batting things back and forth with an AI, though that will be an effective method.)
I'm confining myself to "code" here, which is mostly useful to a game because of the results of the code. Gamers do not sit there and actually admire the cleverness or cleanliness of the code. I'm not speaking to art, which is a more complicated scenario. You can make a similar case for visual and audio art, but I also don't think the AI stuff is as far along relatively speaking as it is for code.
That trivially maps on to the exact argument being made in that video. You think you haven't come across any software that has improved since the developers starting using AI. But if you encounter improved software, you have no mechanism to determine whether or not it was improved by AI. So you decide without even consciously thinking about it that it isn't because of AI. So of course you have not encountered the thing your sensors can not sense.
And just like CGI, there are some characteristic failures that allow you to realize that the failure is due to AI misuse. So you do identify AI failures, and as a result, all the AI you can identify is a failure.
But your sensors could never have given any other result. So it's not a surprise that your sensors give you that result. The result has no meaning.
Has all software only gotten worse? Really? I’m not particularly against that worldview, although I would probably argue software was degrading before AI.
The Linux kernel uses AI and it’s patched a lot of vulnerabilities. Is that bad, or lower quality software? No, it’s the opposite.
AI is fundamentally a tool. AI makes it much easier to write higher quality software because you can write more tests, use more comprehensive tests, do more thorough security research, and much more.
You presume in favor of the existence of non-slop.
Again, I'm saying this would end up not impacting any developers' finances, because nearly no players would take the AI tag seriously.
Consumers absolutely hate AI companies. Consumers hate their leaders, distrust their workers; why shouldn't consumers be allowed to know which companies are eating at the LLM trough and which ones aren't?
The only reasons I see here is that it's bad for those gaming companies, which just leaves me to retort: who cares?
Consumers have a right to know which types of businesses they are supporting. If the business doesn't like it, they are free to do something else.
It's okay to disagree with what I'm saying but please acknowledge that you are arguing against a statement different from what I'm saying. I'm claiming that they would not lose business at all. Not that they shouldn't lose business.
> it carries no meaning about the quality of the games
It doesn't have to, Steam already has reviews.