There are endless threads to discuss in this, but two really seem lost in this debate:
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The distinction between vibecoding, and lower levels of LLM tool usage.
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How widespread the latter already is in software development.
Basically, if you’re a dev coding for money… you’re already interacting with text models, somehow. You have been. Everyone reading this post is using code touched by them, up and down the stack.
Hence I don’t think people realize how impractical the “purist anti AI” stance really is. It’s like asking devs to avoid anything touched by Microsoft or Facebook: a good idea on the surface, but how on Earth would you actually do it?
I think what gamers really hate is higher levels of vibecoding and tool usage to make slop. As they should. As well as support for authoritarian entities backing them. But this just isn’t a practical debate without discussing where to draw the line, rather than an absolutist “LLMs or no LLMs” take, as the latter is going to catch basically every dev on the planet.
You can just not use it personally?
In the modern internet and tech, get away from AI entirely, period. It’s being shoved in our faces everywhere, it’s copilot on your Windows 11 machine, it’s being used to develop Linux distros, most numbers you call for support force you through AI bots first.
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They don’t have an Ai disclosure on the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1478500/Big_Walk/ Isn’t this against Steams rules?
Edit: I don’t understand why people downvote a question. At the time I couldn’t find the rules searching the web, as no news article linked to it. So I asked here…
No, as per the article, the way they used AI does not require disclosure on the Steam page.
Where can I find the rules for Ai disclosure on Steam? I couldn’t find it.
It seems to mostly be in the developer portal, but here’s the news post about it.
This is the news from 2024, which I found too. I was looking for the actual rules a developer has to agree to. And the users need to know too, because we can report. Any news article talking about this has no link. It’s frustrating.
Quite frankly, I don’t think it’s on us. The devs have their forms to fill out, and they’ve disclosed this publicly of their own choice. If Valve found that usage to be in violation of their own policies, they’ve already got repercussions for this in place that House House would not want to be subject to.
Other developer information is online available for everyone too. So this is usually how Valve operates. I think I found it: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsurvey The part about the Ai disclosure is exactly the same as in the news article. I was just wondering if there is more to it. So its only about generative content then.
I’d challenge the AI purists by asking where they draw the line. What if your developer uses AI to create every single texture and mesh? What if the entire codebase was built with AI assistance? What if the developer used AI to fix one single gremlin of a bug? What if they create all of their regression tests with AI? What if the developer needed one single refresher on some basic C code syntax and got an AI summary from Google - where AI never touched the code? What if one of their imported python modules that is only called once has a developer who created one single unit test with AI?
Are all of these really equally heinous?
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.
When it comes to the harms of these systems, that has a lot more to do with how these companies allow use of these tools…
The real harm is in these tools being pushed as learning tools, medical advice, companionship, etc. That they can even give medical advice seems like something Doctor’s Unions should be suing over, I can’t do it so why can the AI’s? Using these in learning situations is demonstrably doing the opposite, inducing cognitive offloading and dependency. The companionship thing is probably the most dangerous facet, it’s causing genuine psychosis in some people and honestly I feel that is by design.
None of this has to be for these tools to be used for coding. They represent a regulatory failure (complicity?) to constrain the dangerous uses.
Whereas I work with a small studio (<10 ppl) as the only programmer, asking Claude for bug hunting in regex’s and shader code has saved my behind a few times.
I’d argue there is a responsible way to use these tools. Letting an agent run amok in my project folder is a hard no; I ask about specific issues, providing generalized code, and insert and test the code by hand to ensure reliability. The amount of code inserted by an AI is zero, but the code written by AI would be <1% of my codebase.
I might use the tools for coding but I advocate locally to keep them out of schools, and support all efforts to limit the harms. You can use a tool for a useful purpose (hammer for a nail), while still restricting that tool’s usage (wielding a hammer to threaten people). So I disagree that using these tools is tantamount endorsing them for all purposes.
Frankly I’ve never paid any of them a dime, so I’m actually driving up their costs and hastening the decline 🤷
Nah, too many friends of mine have been fired because of “AI”. It’s the mothern cathedral, what the powerful are using to make us dependent on them. I can argue than even when you didn’t pay them a dime, you still gave them training material for the next model; furthering their goals ever so slightly.
I’m taking a stance that looks harsh on the outset, but it’s basically the only one that doesn’t further the massive theft of our body of work onto the hands of 5 oligarchs.
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.
Big walk might be the first must play group game to come out of the friend slop category. It was such an elevated experience by the end I was thrilled. The very last scene almost got me to cry and we were just logging off. Crazy.
No amount of this game could be made with AI that would be ultimately upsetting to me unless they were personally responsible for a meaningful billing to the worst LLM companies.
My biggest concern with this is that they still don’t have the required disclosure on their steam page. Can they really be trusted if they can’t even be better to follow Steam’s ToS?
They did follow the disclosure requirements. See the article.
Please provide a screenshot of their steam page that clearly state’s their AI usage.
Please read the article.
As for why House House is only confirming AI use in the game now, rather than at release, they say “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.”
I had missed that, seems like this is a failure on Steam’s part
I am surprised the IGF jurors are having arguments about anything, I just assumed all these awards things were rigged for marketing.
it’s disappointing but i get it. these tools are meant to be alluring and addictive. i’d be lying if i said i didn’t give in to the temptation a few times, as much as i hate to admit it.
i still think it should be disqualifying for a game awards ceremony. if not, i worry that this could be used as a foot in the door by slopbros to further normalize ai use in games (and, in turn, elsewhere)
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?
All professional software development is using AI. This is normal and to be expected. Code AI contributions are rightfully handled differently in Steam’s AI disclosure.
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…
There is, but it’s not AI alone. It’s mostly the C-Suite trying to drown us in it.
I forgot the golden role of “ai bad”.
AI is a tool. A useful tool for software development. But with any tool, it’s possible to misuse it. With AI it’s easy to abuse it and get it to write everything for you and not think about the output. That usually ends up with bad code. You can also use it for debugging or code review or giving a solution to a tough technical problem that can be used as a starting point. That’s how these devs used it. That is a good way to use the tool.
Just because corporations overuse AI in software development doesn’t mean the tool is bad.
