While I wouldn’t consider myself an AI purist I do have different views when it comes to using AI for coding compared to using it for art or music.

I feel that expecting a game to be completely AI free when it comes to coding is pretty much an impossible task. Now matter how much you try at some point a developer will have to use a tool or library or whatever that were developed with the use of AI. Expecting them to audit everything they use would mean spending more time on that than coding the actual game or spending time developing non-AI alternatives. The genie is out of the bottle for coding and there’s no putting it back.

Now when it comes to art, music and music I personally am less accepting. AI has been trained on the art of millions of people around the world without their permission or offering them any compensation. That is unacceptable to me. It also feels very weird that people are trying to replace art with something generated by a machine, it feels soulless, each piece of human art no matter how simple has some meaning to the artist. AI just mashes it together with no rhyme or reason.

Now some people are going to say that I’m a hypocrite and coding AI has also been trained on the code of millions of people without them getting compensation or asking for approval. While that is true I think that for coding it’s different just for the simple fact that at the end of the day it’s just a set of instructions. There is code that could be considered art? I would say there definitely is but the vast majority of it is just telling the computer to do a thing in just slightly different ways. This is just how I see it and no doubt people are going to disagree.

I draw the line at using it personally. I can’t control everyone else using it but I’ll gladly prioritize the work of someone who put the sweat in over one that simply prompted a model.

To me the AI use has become tantamount to endorsing and accepting the problems it is creating. Once we solve the problems it has created, I’ll feel fine using it again.

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.

“Temptation” is one way to put it, I suppose, when the human experts tell you it’s impossible. This award’s criteria was already decided, and they’re entitled to their definition, but this is just information that was surfaced to them rather than work done for them.

I’m not sure this is a great policy. You can tell the difference between using ai for debugging and a whole game made ai slop. Nobody in that second category will be just sneaking by unnoticed.

But using ai in the final stretch to squash some bugs, that’s pretty hard to notice from the outside. If you outlaw the use of ai entirely, what do you get? People still use it for the little things, but don’t admit to it. Is that better?

Note how pretty much every major piece of software has gotten less reliable and less user friendly in the last few years. There might be a connection…