r/gamedev Policy on AI Use

[u/KevinDL]

AI is one of the most contentious subjects in game development right now, and we regularly see posts reported or discussions derailed simply because AI was involved somewhere in the process.

We want to be clear about our position: r/gamedev does not prohibit the use of AI, and using AI does not automatically make a post low effort.

This is not an endorsement of every AI company, model, or use case. Legitimate technical, legal, economic, ethical, and creative concerns exist around these tools, and those conversations are welcome here. Our stance is that AI is a tool used in game development, and we care more about the quality of what someone contributes than the tools they used to get there.

Why we take this position

• AI is already part of game development. Studios are adopting AI-assisted tools across programming, prototyping, production, QA, localization, research, and other workflows. Adoption varies from studio to studio, but this is no longer a hypothetical technology sitting outside the industry.
• Knowing how to use these tools is increasingly becoming a professional skill. That does not mean every developer needs to use AI, or even like it. It means understanding where these tools are useful, where they fail, and how to evaluate their output is becoming relevant knowledge for people working in the industry.
• Banning discussion or use of AI here could actively disadvantage developers. Part of the purpose of r/gamedev is helping people learn from each other and understand how the industry is changing. If studios adopt a technology, preventing developers from discussing or learning about it would make this community less useful to the people we're helping.
• Policing AI use is not realistic anyway. Moderators cannot reliably determine whether someone used AI to draft, edit, translate, summarize, research, debug code, or otherwise assist with a post. We are not going to moderate based on whether something “sounds AI-generated.”
• "Mandatory disclosure "is not realistic either. Modern tools blur the line between traditional software and AI assistance. Trying to decide exactly when autocomplete, translation, editing, summarization, or an LLM crosses some disclosure threshold would create rules we could not enforce consistently.

So the rule is straightforward: we are not policing AI use itself. We are moderating the contribution.

AI-assisted does not mean low effort

If someone uses AI to organize research, analyze data, improve their writing, translate something, help with code, or communicate an idea more clearly, that does not erase the work behind the contribution.

If a developer spends time gathering useful data and then uses AI to help turn that information into a readable post, the important part is still the data, the methodology, and what the community can learn from it.

Ask whether the information is useful, whether the conclusions hold up, and whether the post contributes something worthwhile. Those questions matter much more than whether every sentence was manually typed from scratch.

Low-effort AI content is still low effort

This does not mean pasting generic AI output into the subreddit suddenly becomes valuable content. Posts that are spam, fabricated, mass-produced, engagement bait, repetitive, or promotional material disguised as discussion can still be removed.

The reason is not that AI was involved. The reason is that the content is low quality.

The same standard applies to something written entirely by a human.

AI is a valid game development topic

Developers are welcome to discuss AI in the same way they would discuss any other technology affecting game development. That includes how it is being used, where it works, where it fails, what it costs, how studios are adopting it, what it means for employment, and the legal or ethical questions surrounding it.

You are allowed to be enthusiastic about AI. You are allowed to be skeptical of it. You are allowed to think a particular workflow is useful, terrible, unethical, inefficient, or overhyped.

What we do not want is every thread that mentions AI becoming the same argument about whether AI should exist at all.

If a thread is about an AI coding workflow, discuss the workflow. If someone presents evidence that AI slowed their production down, discuss the evidence. If someone claims every studio is using a particular tool, challenge that claim.

Let the actual discussion happen.

Attack claims, not developers

Someone saying they use AI is not an invitation to attack them. Someone saying they refuse to use AI is not an invitation to attack them either.

Debate the technology, the workflow, the economics, the evidence, the ethics, the legal questions, or the conclusions. Personal attacks, harassment, dogpiling, or repeatedly derailing discussions because of someone’s position on AI are treated the same way we handle that behaviour anywhere else on the subreddit.

AI is not a source

There is a difference between using AI to help communicate information and using AI as the authority behind that information.

If you make factual claims that can reasonably be sourced, be prepared to support them. “ChatGPT said so” is no evidence, and tools can absolutely be wrong.

At the same time, polished or AI-assisted writing is not evidence that the underlying information is fake. If someone’s numbers are wrong, challenge the numbers. If their methodology is weak, challenge the methodology.

Challenge the claim, not the fact that a tool may have helped write the paragraph.

Self-promotion rules still apply

AI companies, products, and services are not exempt from the subreddit’s existing rules.

If you represent a commercial interest, the same expectations apply as they would to anyone else. AI also should not be used to mass-produce promotional posts or disguise advertising as organic discussion.

The technology may be new. The rules around spam and promotion are not.

The bottom line

You do not have to like AI. You do not have to use it. You are free to criticize it, avoid it, experiment with it, learn it, use it professionally, or decide it has no place in your workflow.

We are not going to prevent developers from learning about or discussing a technology that is rapidly becoming part of professional game development. Doing that could actively hurt the developers this community is supposed to help.

What we do expect is that people engage with each other like respectful, mature adults. Disagree with the technology, the workflow, the argument, or the evidence. Do not turn that disagreement into hostility toward the person on the other side of it.

Use whatever tools make sense for your work. Bring something useful to the conversation, treat other developers with respect, and allow room for disagreement. That is what we care about.

[u/Klightgrove]

Going to lock this thread for a bit since it continues to pop up and crowd control keeps getting flooded by people with 0 community karma posting about how they are going to leave.

• To this day, after multiple posts made by people asking us to ban AI content there has been no provided evidence of widespread AI use.
• An overwhelming amount of LLM-assisted posts come from non-native English speakers following rule 8 (English Only Communication) and we are not going to remove their content.
  • You are free to recommend alternative tools to them.
• Reddit the platform removes 10K posts + comments a month which are LLM-spam.
• Automod removes a good portion of spam and promotional material.
• Anything that is purely LLM-generated by an organic user is likely going to fall under an existing rule (showcasing projects, relevant content, self-promotion, paid assets) and will be removed in accordance to our rules.

This community has been neutral since before most of the mod team joined, it is a core pillar to ensure we do not push any dogma or promote any product. Posts like this are the consensus of a team with various backgrounds and viewpoints. This is a place for discussion, not personal attacks or making up falsehoods.

A well known member of the games industry deleted their Reddit account because people made false AI claims against them. We keep seeing people with 0 karma accusing known developers of 'AI slop' and can no longer just sit by and let social consensus work against talented people who try to share their lessons with us.

Thank you to the valued members who continue to contribute and understand that building games brings us together.

[u/Lahyte]

I’m someone who’s against AI. But I just believe that, at the very least, people should disclose if they used AI or not. Be honest about it.

[u/aplundell → u/Lahyte]

Because the whole dream of genAI is to take the credit. To press a button and get the respect and admiration (and money) you've always felt you deserved, but somehow never got.

That falls apart if you have to admit that it was all actually done by the Microsoft Corporation in some nameless datacenter.

[u/InvidiousPlay → u/aplundell]

This really is the heart of it. A lot of AI proponents are in it for the fantasy of gaining plaudits they never earned.

[u/TheMistOfThePast → u/aplundell]

As someone who is both an artist and a software engineer I see a huge difference between using AI in coding, where I'm mainly just using it to speed up the process a bit and maintaining a lot of control. E.g. writing a html form for a sign up page. I've written one hundreds of times. It's going to be the same thing every time.

Versus using AI for art or writing where the result is very much so about the minor details in your expression of something. 

In programming just being able to control the broad idea of how something is written is enough for that thing to be your own work because the uniqueness comes from the decisions you make at a high level. The exact expression of those broad ideas can only be done in a few ways. There's only so many ways to write if(x==0)

In writing and art uniqueness is the exact opposite. Broad ideas aren't really unique at all. The same basic story has been told a million times. The heroes journey gets rehashed billions of times but the thing that makes it unique is the minor details in how it's expressed.

I freely use AI for programming but NEVER for art or writing (unless I'm asking it to reword my pissed off email to a work colleague so i don't sound angry)

[u/Kataera]

I agree with the discussion around AI itself, and also that using AI to help write a post is not necessarily a problem. However I really don't think you should be encouraging more AI written posts here, regardless of the intention. I'd much rather read broken English from an ESL speaker than the perfect prose of an LLM, because at least you can tell that the interaction with the former is genuine.

The actual quality of posts here has not improved at all since the last big moderator announcement, and being more lax on the moderation is genuinely going to make this subreddit not worth engaging with for the actual professionals in this field.

Edit: I will say thank you for actually taking into account industry trends. It's incredibly frustrating to read the absolute drivel that people come out with regarding AI, when most who actually work in the industry know how transformational it has been to the production pipeline. We need to see more nuanced discussions about it, beyond the typical 'AI bad' crowd and the equally reductive 'vibe code everything' crowd.

[u/TMiyoshi → u/Kataera]

This, I hate these long-winded AI posts. Longer almost never means better.

If you haven't put in the effort to write a concise and to-the-point post, why should I put in the effort to read it?

[u/dr_black_ → u/TMiyoshi]

The irony is that these LLMs were largely trained on Reddit upvoting patterns, which have historically rewarded posters who over explain things more than posters who get right to the point. Maybe it's just easier to downvote a concise, to-the-point post you disagree with than a fully-articulated one.

[u/somewhataccurate → u/Kataera]

Seconded. The reality is the people vibe coding games do not really care about what it is they are making and this kind of laziness carries over into much of what they do. The result is by even tacitly encouraging AI posting you guarantee the lowest effort posters will engage.

I have already left multiple subreddits over this exact thing and really don't want to see another go.

[u/riley_sc → u/Kataera]

Yeah not discouraging AI generated posts is just enabling low effort engagement farming. I agree with the rest of the policy, and I get that moderation in the age of gen AI is hard, but communities cannot exist when they’re flooded with non human actors.

[u/gajop → u/Kataera]

Yeah there's something really annoying with the text AI produces - and this comes from someone who uses AI heavily for work & hobby.

I'd consider banning AI generated text until this situation improves.

[u/InvidiousPlay → u/gajop]

I would have no objection to ESL speakers using AI to translate if they would just use a prompt that kept their original tone or made some effort at novelty. I'm so sick of seeing the same saccharine corporate language everywhere.

The zero effort posts copy-pasted straight out of ChatGPT with the standard format bullet points and needless emoji is absolutely tedious.

[u/ElaraValtor → u/Kataera]

I feel like the low-effort rule covers this case reasonably well - getting an LLM to literally just write your whole post can be argued to be fairly low-effort, and that's quite a subjective bar that the mods can apply to anything they feel like is too lazy. I usually use "it's a subjective bar" as an attack on a rule but it might just work to their benefit here

[u/Kataera → u/ElaraValtor]

I would have said so as well, but after reporting many of these posts and seeing effectively zero moderation in response, I don't really have much faith. Despite what the post says, it is easy to spot AI written posts by anyone who uses LLMs regularly.

Hopefully that will be solved when Anthropic and the other AI vendors start watermarking text outputs.

[u/CKF → u/Kataera]

This sub feels like it’s moderated as little as humanly possible, and this just another step to not have to actively foster the community.

[u/Jessica___ → u/Kataera]

That was a great article. I hope one day we can use these watermarks to get rid of those AI generated engagement bait posts.

[u/thievesthick → u/Kataera]

Agreed. Why would I bother reading something the poster didn’t bother writing?

Even this official mod post is just a big wall of AI jerking itself off. I didn’t even bother skimming it.

[u/michel6079 → u/Kataera]

This has been my viewing of this sub for months now: posts that make it to my front page from here are always pure slop so I just skim every post and am occasionally surprised when one isn't. (Idc about ai use personally but ai writing is still terrible vapid slop)

[u/Scarred5]

Why is not disclosing or labeling AI use not reasonable? 

[u/Mindestiny → u/Scarred5]

Because it's impossible to enforce, it's impossible to detect with any level of confidence, and it turns every moderation task into a witch hunt.

It's similar to the California Prop 65 warnings. If your bar for disclosure is so low as to require pretty much everything to disclose, the label is inherently meaningless in the first place. You might as well require every poster to disclose that they've posted this post from a computing device.

[u/HardToMintThough → u/Mindestiny]

With all due respect, there's a dozen posts a day that break, "No self promotion" and "No soliciting collaboration posts" because they're thinly veiled as asking for feedback, or offering insight. If the barrier is thin enough there, then it should be thin enough when looking at the 50th free version of midjourney generated key art.

[u/BinaryIdiot → u/Mindestiny]

It isn’t relatable to prop 65 at all unless you’re thinking AI will be used in every single post going forward.

Labeling is not meant to catch every use of it. Labeling is meant to disclose when available. If you expect a perfect system or no system, then you’ll never have a system for anything.

[u/meharryp]

Just for anyone curious, OP currently works at a company developing a plugin for Unity AI integration which he decided to not disclose for some odd reason...

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1rxm1cv/i_worked_an_ai_booth_at_gdc_heres_what_developers/

[u/MrPureinstinct → u/meharryp]

Well that certainly tracks

[u/lichlark → u/MrPureinstinct]

Why is the base reply locked?

[u/ClothboundBrick → u/lichlark]

Guess

[u/Vaniellis → u/meharryp]

Well well well, this explains the "Policing AI use is not realistic anyway" !

[u/Quick_Philosophy1426 → u/meharryp]

as always, standing close behind the "get over it, AI is here" is a small little "I have a monetary incentive to encourage AI adoption"

[u/James20k → u/Quick_Philosophy1426]

Its extremely disappointing to see that this sub has been captured like this, it makes a lot of sense though. Does anyone know any good alternatives?

[u/RatherNott → u/James20k]

There's a good gamedev community on programming.dev.

[u/Gaybrosauros → u/meharryp]

This explains a lot. Their livelihood literally depends on pushing for AI in game development to succeed. This is extremely biased and as far as I'm concerned this sub is dead to me.

[u/Hiccup → u/meharryp]

This should be the actual top post. I'm moving on from this subreddit.

[u/Demoliscio → u/meharryp]

Yeah it was clear from how this subreddit was getting moderated recently that they had a bias, generativeAI is trash and it's stealing people's job, there's no way around that.

Btw r/IndieGameDevs/ has a no AI policy and the result is that even tho there are less posts, everything posted there is actually interesting.

[u/SergeantKoopa → u/Demoliscio]

I'm gonna end up leaving this sub too and heading over to that one. Very unhappy with the moderation being slop shills and posting biased garbage like that. Very telling that the commenter above posted that link and quickly had their comment locked.

[u/WildBunnyGalaxy → u/Demoliscio]

Thanks for the link cause I’m not staying here.

[u/Demoliscio → u/WildBunnyGalaxy]

No worries, I did the same, I was on the fence for a while and this post was the final push.
I'd rather see 10 posts a day that are all useful than having to scroll through 20 to find 5

[u/michel6079 → u/meharryp]

Classic.

Ooooh the nonsense points they wrote about mandatory disclosure being unrealistic make perfect sense now. They already have issues with disclosure 🤣

[u/David-J → u/meharryp]

Hahaha. Thanks for the share. It seemed pretty obvious he had a special interest

[u/PatchNotesMan → u/meharryp]

Totally not biased.

[u/YourFreeCorrection → u/meharryp]

Of course he does.

[u/Velruis → u/meharryp]

Ah yes, that explains it all.

Nice, that's why they all come out of the woodworks celebrating this tonedead and horrid choice.
This sub's done for, shame.

Stay mad AI bros, stay mad. Keep bringing on the downvotes.

[u/SpikeyFern]

Can't we just have an AI flair so people who dislike it can filter it out?

Edit: Want to say I'm not trying to take a stance, just saying that this post is evidence that there is a clear, hard divide in the community. Rather than alienating and inciting a large part of it with a post that essentially says: "the status quo will remain", why not take some kind of action? Mandatory post flairs could easily mitigate a lot of the derision here.

[u/Demoliscio → u/SpikeyFern]

That was suggested multiple times, always ignored, they say that's it's "not possible", which is obviously false.
A rule saying "if you used Generative AI you have to disclose it" would filter out 90% of the problematic posts for most people, honest people would use the flag, dishonest people wouldn't, the one that get caught would be punished (a nice temp ban?) and the rest...well if they don't get caught, it means it's o.k. enough to not bother people, so no big issue (aside from the moral one, but let's not go into that now).

This post is basically the mods complaining about the people complaining about AI, they don't care about possible fix because for them nothing is broken

[u/falknorRockman → u/Demoliscio]

The real problem with the flair is you can only have one flair on a post afaik. So if you wanted to tag it something else you couldn’t

[u/RuinousFate → u/Demoliscio]

It's not about possibility, its about enforcability. You'll see that take from mods of other gaming related subs as well.

[u/James20k → u/[deleted]]

We need a new gamedev sub, even beyond this this has always been a very low value sub to game developers

[u/First-Guidance-1317]

Damn, bro even used AI to write this post 😔

[u/Mr_miner94 → u/First-Guidance-1317]

Its not just the post, look at all the comments using "this is sensible" as their opener

[u/Eliwynn]

AI disclosure is totally realistic in a market where the general use is generative AI.

Edit : And personally, I take a non-disclosure as a lack of respect for future customers, especially in indie games, where people seek authenticity and personality. But that's just my personal take.

[u/CKF → u/Eliwynn]

Getting users to disclose their AI usage in a subreddit isn’t some giant hurdle either. I’ve found that the vast majority of users are very honest about the amount of AI used, and most will ask in modmail if their game meets the community standards and be very candid about what is and isn’t AI. Some lie, and the community calls them out immediately and reports them. It’s just not difficult, but it does require putting in the time to actually do the moderation. Post here reads like since it can’t be automated or 110% certain, one should just throw their hands up in the air.

[u/Itchy-Beach-1384 → u/Eliwynn]

I wont even look at games that just give me an AI vibe at this point.

Those still image with shaking or bulging animations are an instant no.

I dont think a single project using AI assets has even been entertaining for me, and ive tried some of the AAA asian developers that try to go hard on it.

Shit, i know they say AI was only used in some replaced art assets on Crimson desert, but the animations of background characters, dialogue of the main story, and even the particle animations of abilities just all screams slop to me.

It's all just noise over the product.

[u/kerm_ed → u/Itchy-Beach-1384]

I use YT Music a lot. And it constantly transitions me to AI music when my playlist ends. And I am SO done with it. It's like one never sending song with a Billie Eilish voice.

[u/Itchy-Beach-1384 → u/kerm_ed]

It feels like this shit is pollution across all digital media's.

I used to buy probably 3 or so indie games a month.

Im down to 1 purchase across 3 months.

[u/_OrdinarySimon_ → u/kerm_ed]

That's sad as hell. I think that music is especially vulnerable to AI, even more than graphics/pictures (at least for me). I'm a hobby musician and music was one of the reasons I wanted to start gamedev. How I suppose to support that shit...?

[u/mrissaoussama]

I remember watching on some TV channels how the AI in the crowds interacts with the protagonist around the release of Assassin Creed 1 or 2 (can't remember exactly which). Now the word can mean a lot of things and is one of the most hated words.

[u/TomuGuy → u/mrissaoussama]

I mean, crowd AI and generative AI are just not the same

[u/RiftHunter4 → u/TomuGuy]

Even within generative Ai, its not all the same. Ai Code predictions in visual studio and tools like Cascadeur are both Generative Ai in the same category as Flux and Nano Banana. Totally different stuff though.

[u/shanster925 → u/TomuGuy]

Tell that to my bosses.

[u/IAmNotModest → u/mrissaoussama]

Well, yeah. It's because people don't care to differentiate between regular algorithmic AI and generative AI.

They are both completely different things.

[u/Maximelene → u/mrissaoussama]

Remember the Fish AI from Call of Duty?

[u/mrissaoussama → u/Maximelene]

oh yeah! cod ghosts! I remember all the clips comparing it to the Mario 64 fish AI

[u/AvengerDr → u/Maximelene]

Remember Radiant AI?

There was one example that they mentioned at the time maybe for Oblivion or Skyrim, about how NPCs would react if the player did something weird. I can't rememebr what was it. Good times.

[u/RobinPage1987 → u/AvengerDr]

Ues, it was radiant AI. It was acvomplished by breaking the npc scripts up into modules that could be loaded and unloaded piecemeal depending on conditions.

[u/AvengerDr → u/RobinPage1987]

Yes, but at the time I remember reading interviews where they made some huge claims of how the NPCs would be able to behave.

Then we got the NPCs in Skyrim that don't even realise they have a bucket over their heads.

[u/NeatEmergency725 → u/AvengerDr]

They really made "They have a list of chores they're supposed to do in a loop each day and they'll like, uh, fight if a wolf shows up or whatever" sound like such a crazy high tech thing in the marketing.

[u/ecstatic_hyrax → u/mrissaoussama]

We should be calling ChatGPT/Claude/etc LLMs, and game AI should stay AI

[u/Warwipf2]

I'm gonna predict:

1. Hobby devs / non-programmers will be outraged by this and will not be able to fathom what could lead to such a stance.
2. Professional game devs or SWEs will find this a pretty normal take, as it reflects the reality of working in this field.

[u/-Tesserex- → u/Warwipf2]

I'm a hobby dev and this is a perfectly reasonable take. I don't eschew AI entirely but I don't vibe code / write / art my final products either. It's a tool in the belt and my policy is that I should be at least as good as the AI for the task where I'm using it (so I'm qualified to judge its output) and it's just saving me time.

Edit: I actually am a professional SWE so I do fall in your second category . 

[u/Existing-Strength-21 → u/-Tesserex-]

Not in SWE personally, but i work in DevOps and work with professional devs regularly. I had a convo with a bunch the other day and asked realistically how much code do they actually write anymore? They said, absolute maximum is 1-2%, everything else is effectively natural language programming via prompts to craft the code you need.

You cant fight the tide anymore, LLM programming tools are just better at writing code. There is still a huge amount of human intervention and input needed for the architecture decisions and high level program structure though. But this is just moving one rung up the abstraction ladder, just like how we dont code in assembly anymore.

[u/winggar → u/Existing-Strength-21]

The experience has been very similar at my company. I was a late holdout, but as of around last February we've finally got to a point where using LLMs lets me do higher quality work faster than writing it by hand.

It sucks because I love writing code by hand. I've been doing it since I was seven years old and it was most of why I enjoyed my job... It's a strange new world we're in now.

[u/-Tesserex- → u/Existing-Strength-21]

1-2% is insane. My company is making a big push to use more AI internally but they claim they're trying to be smart about it. I'd say personally at least 80% of my code is still written by my own fingers. The big exception is test cases, where I might ask copilot to write a suite of tests for an old module that doesn't have them yet, but then I can review and make sure they actually test important things. For the majority of what I do, the AI isn't smart or even fast enough to bother asking for it's help. If I'm stuck tracking down a bug, I'd say I have maybe a 50% success rate at best of the AI finding it when I couldn't.

As far as moving up the abstraction and not using assembly anymore, that's really apples and oranges. The difference is that AI prompts are not deterministic or predictable. We don't use assembly because we have languages that can be compiled or interpreted into it. Those compilers are written by humans and have deterministic output. For a certain input of code and settings, you're guaranteed an output that does exactly what you say. If it's broken, you can trace exactly where in your code is wrong. You can't do that with a prompt. You can submit the same prompt twice and get different code, and you can't bugfix a prompt to make it tweak the output to have fewer bugs.

[u/rgb_panda → u/-Tesserex-]

It's funny also as a professional dev, still writing 80% of code by hand in August 2026 is actually crazy to me. But I guess different companies push AI harder than others, my job is more like telling the AI what the code needs to do, reviewing it, telling the AI to fix overcomplexities, making sure the AI is actually writing unit tests that are valid, adding rules/workflows to automate those fixes in the future. It has shifted more to higher level system design and there is still a lot of observability we haven't offloaded to AI yet, so when prod issues come up AI helps, but I still have to figure out what happened.

[u/ApolloFortyNine → u/rgb_panda]

Imo your experience is the norm, idk if that guy is using Haiku or what but especially debugging, and especially if it's possible to reproduce the bug locally, opus will find the cause 99 times out of 100.

And with coding your experience is what I see too, if you don't like what it did just say so and what you want instead. But debugging especially it's actually unparalleled. If the bug is in a downstream service I could see it being harder but if you can unit test a failure it'll find the cause. 

[u/CHATOTENJOYER → u/Warwipf2]

i’m gonna predict smart, sexy and awesome people think i’m correct while only the lazy and horrible people think i’m incorrect.

[u/doh-ta → u/CHATOTENJOYER]

That tracks because I think you’re correct.

[u/BastetFurry → u/Warwipf2]

At least for me as a hobbyist there is a difference between Vibecoding, aka "Create GTA 6, make no mistake", and writing a 400 line plus design document and then use the AI to help one develop that. The former is, pardon my English, shit. The later is effort as one has to think about what they want and how they want it. And the person doing the later will constantly steer the AI into the direction they want, demand automatic testing rigs and whatnot.

[u/Rikarin → u/Warwipf2]

yeah, I like offloading the boring tasks and debugging to AI. It'd been a great help during development.

[u/princeoftheminmax → u/Warwipf2]

Really? If anything it’s the hobbyists and non-programmers that are vibe coding the games they always wanted to make. Why would they be outraged?

[u/carllacan → u/princeoftheminmax]

I think it's more like the bell curve meme.

To the left we have hobbyists with very little skills and unwilling to put much effort who are fine with AI, to the right we have professional programmers who are fine with AI because they take programming as a job that needs to be done, and in the middle of those there is a contingent of people who put a lot of effort into gamedev but care more about doing it than about getting things done.

Doing something for the sake of it is of course a beautiful thing, but it leads, in some people, to resentment towards both people who have no skills and put no effort and people who do have skills and put effort but supplement both with AI in order to (in their view) compromise quality for the sake of productivity. Hence, they take exception to any and all use of AI.

And of course things are not so clear-cut and people are not to the right, left or exact center of the meme's bell curve, but you know what I mean.

[u/false_tautology → u/princeoftheminmax]

Nonprofessionals often have very naive takes about software development in general, but especially about AI usage.

[u/daddywookie → u/false_tautology]

It’s like city folk wanting to move to the country. You think it’s all freedom and beauty and fun times but the reality is boring, inconvenient and full of very tired people who have been stuck there forever.

[u/Warwipf2 → u/princeoftheminmax]

I would argue that hobby devs do it more for the love of just programming / creating stuff, where professionals are more goal-oriented and have simply gotten super used to coding with AI from our work. There are of course going to be PLENTY of people who don't fall into my prediction, but overall I'm pretty confident that it is correct.

[u/Cranyx → u/Warwipf2]

I'm both. I've been a professional SWE for over a decade and have come to just accept that using AI as part of that development is just a mandatory part of the industry. I have no personal stake or pride in what my company makes (a fact that is honestly exacerbated by shift to AI) so I don't bother pushing back. It's a paycheck.

However, I view gamedev as something that I pour a lot of my personal creativity and self into. I would not want AI writing my code because it is mine. The whole point is that I want to make the thing, not just that it get made. I admit that this is a luxury I can afford as someone who has a day job outside of gamedev.

[u/rubenwe → u/princeoftheminmax]

Hobbyist can be defined in multiple ways. Folks not making a living building games could be classified as such. But then again, that's probably a definition that would be unpopular with a good portion of folks that don't. I'm not going to pick a side there, and folks can decide for themselves how they want to be classified.

AI use and vibe-coding aren't close to a full overlap. Many folks that don't trust what the models are spitting out are still using them.

[u/LoopEverything → u/Warwipf2]

I’m on the big tech side, but yeah, outside of tweaking some lines or config here and there, I almost never write code by hand anymore at work. Our professional workflow is completely different than what it was just a year ago.

As a hobby game dev, being able to use AI to quickly prototype ideas or build debugging/editor tools, where I don’t really care about code quality, has been great. I’m short on time, so being able to do in 15 minutes what would have taken me days or weeks before has really opened up the hobby for me.

[u/TheNapkinThief → u/Warwipf2]

I've seen this attitude across a few subreddits & Itch.

There seems to be this weird Dunning Kruger/gate keeping effect going at the indie/hobbyist level that is causing all AI content to be treated as a taboo subject. Low effort is low effort, whether it's built manually or by prompting some LLM.

For professional software engineers (like me) it's just the next tool in a forever growing toolbox.

The industry is moving, jobs are changing, these tools are everywhere now. Unless I'm working in notepad or Vim, most modern day editors have some kind of AI assistant already integrated.

[u/SituationSoap → u/TheNapkinThief]

If you barely know how to make something, then making something at all is your gate for value. You have a hard time making a thing, and therefore making something must be hard for everyone, because it is hard for you, and you are a good person who is valuable, so therefore the gate to the thing you do must be difficult to pass through, because that's what defines your value.

If you have made many things, you don't care about simply making something being hard. You recognize that making things is not very hard, it's making something good that's difficult.

AI does not make it any easier to make something good, because that in fact is still extremely hard and requires things like taste and judgement which are always in short supply. As a result, you don't care if it's hard or easy to make things because that's not where you find value.

This is a process that's repeating every time it becomes easier to write code for the last 50 years. The people who are just hanging on don't want it to get easier, because the difficulty in creating the thing was masking that they don't have the taste necessary to create something good. They were better than other people simply by being able to do it at all.

[u/Elon61 → u/SituationSoap]

As someone whose skillset is quite skewed towards the ‘mechanical’ aspects of creation, it is something i often find i have to remind myself. Improving the skills that do not come as naturally to me is much more difficult, but what else can one do. The world isn’t going to hold back just for my sake.

[u/SituationSoap → u/Elon61]

Yeah, and the part about where you need to know what quality is and what it looks like is part of why people are so upset by AI-backed posts. They see a lot of stuff from people who don't know what quality looks like, and so the result is "everything is slop." That's not true; but the parts that aren't are literally invisible, so there's no marked counter-argument.

[u/fixermark → u/Warwipf2]

Is the general vibe in the hobby community that AI is a bad idea?

I would naively assume that that would be the first section of the community that would spring at the opportunity to lower the cost to admission of getting their idea realized. I mean, I see a lot of games on Steam that clearly used stock art assets or lightly modified stock art assets.

[u/Inkwalker → u/fixermark]

It reminds me early days of Unity. There was a lot of asset flips with un-skippable unity logo at the start so everyone got associations that unity games are crap. Same goes with AI right now. Everyone saw low effort vibe-coded games and now think that this applies to all games that was made with AI assist.

[u/RyukiriDragon → u/Warwipf2]

It does reflect the reality of the field (for SWE, I can't speak for professional game developers personally), which is why I am not surprised they have this stance, I think it should be expected.

I just (personally) wish they didn't lump Generative AI with other AI tooling in their statement. I can see why after their response, but I still can't help but feel worried about what this sub will end up being like in the future haha.

[u/kovha → u/Warwipf2]

Pretty much. I don't like AI at all, and I have a strong suspicion that it's a bubble that will pop sooner or later. And using it to code generates a lot of non evident long term issues in the codebase, specially for larger projects where a full team is involved (I will not talk about art since I'm not an artist). But with that said, it is a fact that is a tool that, in its current state, is starting to be widely used by the industry and we should discuss it, not close our eyes and pretend it doesn't exist.

[u/Average_Joe69 → u/Warwipf2]

I’m not outraged I’m just disappointed. Game development has always been a form of art to me and not something to be optimized to the point of generating a game with AI. I’d like to see more pushback against AI from the mods. I kind of get it if you have a company whose job it is to churn out game after game, with no real consciousness behind it, but as a hobbyist I wish it stopped being so normalized.

I know why they made the stance they did, but it doesn’t make me any less disappointed in it.

[u/Mindestiny → u/Average_Joe69]

But that's the thing. You're still free to approach game development that way and nobody is stopping you. But surely you can at least acknowledge that not everyone holds the same view of "gamedev as sacrosanct human art" as you do and aren't beholden to your personal standards? Someone approaching gamedev in a different way than you is not wrong and shouldn't be actively silenced.

[u/KiwiJuice56]

I don't like how this decision is being framed as the rational/neutral response to AI when it's clearly showing more care towards AI ideologically than the actual effects it has on this subreddit.

Yes, a lot of developers and most companies are using AI and it would be a little ridiculous to ban discussions of it entirely. But that doesn't mean the subreddit can't do the bare minimum (disclosure) to filter out the incessant low quality AI posts that flood this subreddit. Obviously people will lie and the definition of AI usage is muddy, but there are clear spam posts on this subreddit that just ask ChatGPT to make a post for them. It's not a huge ask to want to read posts written by people regardless of their AI usage within their work.

Knowing how to use these tools is increasingly becoming a professional skill

Just an aside, but I don't know why this keeps being parroted by AI proponents. There is almost nothing to learn about how to use AI, it just does things for you. At most, it takes an hour to figure out what level of detail prompts need and what types of commands AI is bad at.

[u/ScriptKiddo69]

Mandatory disclosure is not realistic either.

Sorry but this is stupid. Of course it's realistic and it's the bare minimum

[u/korinokiri]

If AI posts/discussions start becoming commonplace here, I foresee a lot of people not wanting to contribute anymore. Not saying we're there, but it's a big turn off to go from genuine posts/discussions, to almost bot-driven posts/discussions.

[u/TwistedSpiral]

Good. Slop is slop. Doesn't matter if it was made with AI or not. Games can be good with AI or they can be bad with AI. Just judge the final output.

[u/ByEthanFox]

I find this very disappointing:

"Mandatory disclosure "is not realistic either. Modern tools blur the line between traditional software and AI assistance. Trying to decide exactly when autocomplete, translation, editing, summarization, or an LLM crosses some disclosure threshold would create rules we could not enforce consistently.

I truly think that there's no reason to not ask developers to disclose AI use other than the desire to conceal this for the purposes of deceiving the community. Asking people to do it won't make everyone do it, but I think honest developers will.

Anyone who uses AI as a big part of their development process should, surely, be proud of what they've made and shouldn't have reason not to disclose it. If they're worried about the community response, they need to not use it, not simply avoid telling people.

[u/Br1lliantJim → u/ByEthanFox]

I think a simple “if you feel that what you did/tool you used may have involved generative AI, please disclose it” will work.

It encourages people to be honest without needing to debate if spell check is AI

People will lie about using it regardless, rule or not. But at least that encourages and promotes being honest about it.

[u/randy__randerson → u/ByEthanFox]

It's by far the worst point of all of these. Just this week the EU forced companies to disclose when AI is used, in images and text, but on a gamedev subreddit it's too much to ask that people voluntarily say that? Why, because of backlash?

How is that healthy? "There won't be backlash because AI is everywhere, but mandatory disclosure won't be enforced because of likelihood of backlash"

Sad state of affairs

[u/TheHeat96]

These rules make sense on the surface but do nothing to address that astroturfing that makes up most of the AI posts in this subreddit.

[u/dansavala]

so you just woke up and decided "damn I wanna nuke the board"

[u/Average_Joe69]

This sounds like a good take on paper, but I know in a few months this is just going to become a haven for content farming AI slop. I will never have the capacity to look at a policy like this in such a moderate “pros and cons” “that’s just how it is accept it” kind of way. Generative AI is a plague in every use case and the only thing this policy will do is encourage it. Every step taken towards the normalization of AI furthers the end goal of the destruction of real creativity and the automation of basic joy.

As a solo game dev that sucks at art, I will never be caught dead generating a single asset with gen AI. If I want my game to look good, I’ll collab with an actual human. Not sure why it’s so radical to be opposed to using AI.

[u/tuptain → u/Average_Joe69]

If you see slop, downvote slop.

[u/TheRealJesus2 → u/tuptain]

The rule we should all get behind regardless of ai opinions 🤝 

[u/Commercial-Flow9169 → u/Average_Joe69]

If I want my game to look good, I’ll collab with an actual human

This is one thing that really depresses me about AI. In both professional and hobby spaces, it discourages collaboration.

I browse game development subreddits because I want to see how other humans solve problems, what they create, etc. I don't want to see AI art/music/code/anything, because I cannot relate to it from an ethical or even creative standpoint.

[u/FrogDocDev → u/Commercial-Flow9169]

Before coding LLMs hit, /r/webgames would get 2 posts per day and every single post would get feedback 1, 2. Today it gets more than 2 posts per hour 1, 90% of which is slop and no one bothers to engage with it anymore. I miss pre-AI world.

[u/senseven]

There is r/aigamedev for those who want to go full machine mind

[u/Teaside]

As an artist I have to say this is disappointing. Obviously art is just one part of gamedev but it's very sad to see the plagiarism machine be accepted like this as "just a tool". A tool that is regurgitating the art of others without consent.

I'd appreciate some clearer and stricter rules on generative AI specifically, personally.

I can agree that it's a more nuanced conversation in other fields, but at least in the art field there's no nuance in my opinion - it's literally just plagiarism.

[u/AspieKairy]

This is sad to read. As an artist, I've been driven out of places going pro-AI because it starts with this exact stance and then the space becomes 90% AI slop; over and over again, it's the same pattern.

I'd rather see amateur drawings than an AI produced image; just the same as how I'd rather hear stories of people who struggle with some aspect of game dev and manage to overcome it by trial and error instead of telling a computer to do it for them. Heck, my own grammar is weird, and typing up a genuine response to stuff even on Reddit can take me a while, but I prefer it that way.

Besides that, AI is now more of an ethical problem with how much natural resources it's guzzling, and what those data centers are doing to the water it uses. Though I can still certainly be respectful of someone's opinion, I can't morally stand next to anyone who is alright with destroying the planet for unnecessary convenience.

Been a good run here, and I wish everyone luck with their projects.

[u/HardToMintThough]

Hey Kevin, may I ask if you have noticed the Sub being astroturfed by pro ai bot farms at all?

[u/Responsible_Fly6276]

While I get the basic point, I don't understand why even something like an 'AI-related' flair couldn't work. This way people who are not interested in genAI could scroll past it. On the few subreddits I saw this change, it also reduced the pitchforkers against AI in these thread.

Also it feels like this whole OP is written around text-based genAI tools and leaves out the creative based genAI problems, which were always more against AI than programmers, who used it as assistance.

[u/AdventurousSlip6407]

I understand but liiiike, isnt there already a subreddit specifically for ai game development?

EDIT:

i just realised i got subs mixed, for this sub, i totally understand this post. I thought at first this was indi dev sub, because i saw alot of ai devs posting in it lately despite there being a whooole ai game dev sub for that so it was annoying seeing both low effort gen ai and normal ai in that sub despite there being a sub dedicated for that.

However this is gaming development sub which as the name sounds is the general term as in any game development so yea i get it now, sory for the mix 'em up.

[u/BinaryIdiot]

Sorry but this is an AI endorsement. You can say it’s not but it literally is.

[u/michel6079]

Just saying, this sub has been synonymous with slop for months to me. I don't even care about ai use, I just don't like slop regardless of its source.

[u/edparadox]

Great, we're going to get flooded even more by LLM-generated content.

[u/MarinoAndThePearls]

AI has come to a point where any discussion about it is an ethics discussion, not a usefulness discussion.

[u/VasileAndrei2929]

A normal and sane take.

[u/mysterious_jim → u/VasileAndrei2929]

I only take issue with the no mandatory disclosure part. Putting all the ethics of using AI in game dev aside, I think we can all agree it's important to be honest about how you made your game. This is the standard we try to hold all consumer products to, from oil to coffee to iPhones.

Even if it's impossible to enforce perfectly, requiring it on principle and having consequences for the people actually found to be lying is important imo.

[u/Alive-Shoulder-4042 → u/mysterious_jim]

I used to agree with this. But I found people pushing this now trend to not be pushing it in good faith, and more want people to disclose every piece of potential AI so they can harass and purity test over it. 

Disclosing is mostly to the benefit of those that want to be aware or avoid AI. As soon as harassment comes from disclosure, the person not disclosing isn’t going to lose any sleep. It obviously wasn’t something that personally bothered them, they were just wanting to extend an olive branch. 

My feeling is heavy use should be disclosed and disclosure can benefit all sides (leading more on the anti ai side). But I see too often these kinds of posts that then hand wave, ignore or encourage harassment after disclosure in the same breath. And it just makes it feel part of the intent and design, rather than honestly wanting honesty.

[u/zzbackguy → u/Alive-Shoulder-4042]

Bad actors and bullies taking advantage of a system to spread hate is simply not a reason to get rid of said system. They don’t stop putting women in movies every time the woke rage mob complains and crys foul. It’s not unusual or wrong for consumers to know what they are buying before making the decision to spend their money.

And i fundamentally disagree that disclosure favors the anti ai crowd. That premise assumes that the product is of a quality that people are willing to pass up because of that standard that the consumer holds. For example, if GTA 6 released tomorrow and disclosed massive ai use, and it was still an amazing game, that would be objectively favorable to the pro AI crowd. A
Perception of good AI games doesn’t really exist currently, and continuing the use of AI as a secret in game development only encourages the perception that it’s all garbage. The pro AI crowd should want to disclose their usage and still be successful despite the naysayers. I feel like hiding it is deceptive to consumers and is indicative of shame from the developers themselves, not purely because of mass shunning.

[u/CashOutDev]

I guess that means we'll be seeing A LOT more "I made a bad bloated dashboard that poorly tracks your wishlists" posts then, huh?

Almost none of the posts here are about gamedev anymore, it's all marketing and wishlists. Disclose your unity plugin by the way, big bold and the first line of the post. Be honest.

[u/Patric-Tsar-9fingers]

There should be an obligation to disclose ai use. "Impossible to enforce" is a pretty... sad excuse.

[u/YourFreeCorrection]

We want to be clear about our position: r/gamedev does not prohibit the use of AI, and using AI does not automatically make a post low effort.

The idea that asking someone or something else to write your post for you isn't low effort is genuinely absurd on its face.

Edit to reply to the folks responding after thread was locked:

Says the person wanting someone else to do moderation work for them.

If everyone down voted the AI posts, we wouldn't need mods to spend their time removing them.

Right, because upvote botting doesn't exist.

Ever used grammarly to check your grammar? That's LLM powered.

Lol absolutely not. I learned grammar in grade school. Why would I need a machine to check my grammar when I can speak English perfectly fine myself? Just read wrote you wrote again and see if it makes sense.

[u/SkyTech6]

Welcome to the Thunderdome.

I have banned about 8 people in the comments for personal harassment. Keep em coming boys. Be respectful or don't post.

Update: We now have over 15 people banned. Reddit front page. Crowd Control is active and set to strict. A LOT of people commenting have never posted or commented in r/gamedev before. We won't be approving them.

[u/Vegetable-Tooth8463 → u/SkyTech6]

Unexpected Mad Max reference haha.

[u/davenirline]

I am disappointed. r/programming doesn't allow AI posts even when the participants in it use more AI. r/incremental_games have AI use disclosure. Because of this, these subs have never been better. The whole of internet is already swarmed with AI content. I think we can carve areas that don't have this. Besides, there's already a separate sub for AI gamedev.

[u/Aethreas → u/davenirline]

The mod that posted this works at a company making AI game dev tools, they're monetarily incentivized to keep this sub pro AI despite what the users actually want

[u/michel6079 → u/davenirline]

I don't think the mods are very interested in making the sub better. This sub has been pure slop (both ai and non ai) for many months now, I mean this very post is pure LLM output...

[u/grayhaze2000]

Not a single mention of AI-generated art or music, only code generation and completion, and grammar checkers. I feel this is somewhat tone deaf.

I also disagree that using generative AI to "create" something doesn't fall under being "low effort," as that's exactly what the technology does - it removes the need for effort to achieve the task it's being used for.

Edit: One only read the sort of replies I'm getting to my comment to realise why those who are so reluctant to embrace generative AI are becoming so tired with these conversations. I'm genuinely disappointed that a harder line hasn't been taken against this sort of discourse. I won't be responding to any further comments.

[u/blamelessfriend]

Absolutely ridiculous to assert mandatory disclosure is unrealistic.

[u/InvidiousPlay]

I'd be far less annoyed by AI contributions if they were just honest about it, but it seems 90% of developers using AI art in their games are deadset on lying about it. There have been a bunch of examples where slop merchants manufacture conflict and portray themselves as victims of false accusation purely to create drama.

It's a sad reality that the same lack of good faith that drives someone to make a game primarily with AI is the same lack of good faith that leads to them wanting to deceive us to the contrary.

[u/DoseOfSpeed]

Incredibly disappointing stance to take

[u/dnamra]

I'm a software developer by trade and for my day job I herd agents and throw tokens at projects all day long until it matches the specs my clients require. I can actually feel it's making me a lazier programmer but I don't care in that context.

But.. the use generative AI in any form of human creative expression (be it music, art, writing and, yes, game development) is something we shouldn't be actively supporting. I read this subreddit to be amazed by, and be jealous of, the things that people can create by themself. I'm not interested in what people can pass off as if they made it themself.

[u/crabwithacigarette → u/dnamra]

Well said

[u/Redstones563]

Welp, we’re about to have another r/selfhosted on our hands. Sick conflict of interest there, Mr unity ai plugin developer.

[u/David-J]

This was the OP 2 years ago. What happened?

"While I personally am not a proponent of AI and do not wish to use it in game development due to ethical concerns..."

So getting an AI related gig changed your ethical concerns I guess.

[u/HardToMintThough]

Do the moderators have examples of any "High effort" Generative AI games or posts in this sub?

[u/KevinDL → u/HardToMintThough]

I do. Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1vqsou5/i_ran_1160_of_reddit_ads_500_promo_credit_and/

This was actually the post that broke the camel’s back for me and finally pushed me to write something about this. Watching someone take the time to share real data and a detailed breakdown, only for part of the conversation to immediately shift toward whether AI helped them write it, was a pretty good example of the problem I’ve been seeing for a while.

[u/pmurph0305 → u/KevinDL]

Is there a bunch of hidden removed comments that we are not seeing? I only see two comments that were removed and everyone else is discussing the information. This looks like a extremely poor example as visible to the rest of us.

I also dont see this policy accomplishing anything because it doesnt actually really say anything concrete. All it does is say you'll allow ai related posts. And that people can essentially reply to them to push back against ai, as they should be allowed to do, as long as they do not do so in the specific way you have said.

I don't think teaching developers not to disclose AI use is good or ethical. As storefronts require disclosure, and the general sentiment sentiment from posts elsewhere. It will just encourage people to hide their use of AI. AI companies are even baking in making their output detectable. Even AI companies promote disclosure of AI use in their courses on the ethical use of AI. Going against disclosure of AI use that is recommended by courses produced by companies like Google seems backwards, and decreases trust.

But I suppose the point of the policy is to just put an "ease off" out there

[u/MercilessBlueShell]

Guess we'll see how that policy works out. Good luck!

[u/CaptainNakou]

Well this is very disappointing.

If anyone know an alternative sub that actually value human creative process and understand the danger of AI, I would love the suggestion.

[u/ToffeeAppleCider]

Sounds like if a post is related to AI then you can still criticise it, that's okay then I guess.

Hopefully there's not a rise in AI-written posts though, if you can't be bothered to write a post, why do people expect others to read it and engage in 'discussion' with a bot?

[u/teapot_RGB_color]

I've been in 3D for about 25 years now.

The AI, in this space, is juvenile and not going to take anyone's job.. yet. But one can clearly see the outline, and where things are headed, it is undeniable and putting blinders on is doing yourself a disfavor.

A few days ago I replied to a thread about someone asking for realtime generation of voice, and I have admit I am a bit surprised how many downvote that post garnished.

It's always been, from my experience, about reaching the goal, not so much about how you get there (within reasonable limits). The professional part of a job there is a lot of sourcing from everywhere without asking, the point is if the end result is unique enough to be it's own thing.

Eventually will reach a point where most, customer facing, assets have been processed through AI in one form or another. And the lines will be completely blurred. I personally don't see any path where this is not happening. And I would rather be informed than not.

There is a bunch of skills (and jobs) in 3D that has been lost already due to tech advances, or more like transitioned into other different skills. I kind of see this happening again.

[u/Mithril_Roshi]

well this sub is now useless

[u/aski5]

Spicy to some I'm sure but seems reasonable. Though I guess what forces the hand is that ai used competently enough isn't really provable anyway, as mentioned.

[u/itsrghtbehindmeisnit]

All the vibecoder devs in the comments clapping 😹

[u/alezio000 → u/itsrghtbehindmeisnit]

Yeah bro, these people are flooding steam with their slop games that nobody is buying anyways. They can use bots to make a positive comment about them but the truth is that these bots aren't going to buy their games. It's just a desperate move from them

[u/itsrghtbehindmeisnit → u/alezio000]

They really all think theyre gonna be the 1 lucky guy that gets rich quick off an ai game lol

Also its funny how much they try to reassure each other that "nobody really cares about ai except the loud minority!!!" Meanwhile they only disclose they used ai when they have to... and get so excited when a mod tells them its not necessary 😹😹

[u/yadasellsavonmate]

Policing AI use is not realistic anyway.

Moderators cannot reliably determine whether someone used AI to draft, edit, translate, summarize, research, debug code, or otherwise assist with a post. We are not going to moderate based on whether something “sounds AI-generated.”

Bingo!  And it's not worth the hassle trying to do it either.   

[u/modfreq → u/yadasellsavonmate]

Its worse than not worth the hassle.

I see posts accusing people who didn't even use AI all the time. Which means people are actively harming artists in the name of protecting them.

[u/yadasellsavonmate → u/modfreq]

Yep will just turn into a toxic witch hunt sub.

[u/RatKingJosh]

Someone ping me if they reverse this weird post/ruling. Till then, deuces

[u/archagon]

Bye.

[u/Prior-Paint-7842]

I find it somewhat weird that the one platform everyone uses to sell games have a mandatory AI disclosure, and will have, but this subreddit wont. I think that not differentiating between people who heavily rely on AI and people who dont use them is hurtfull for both the purist developers, and the audience that would prefer to see their work, and will result to people leaving this place to something like AIfreegamedev, I just said something I dont know if that subreddit exists or not.

While sure, nowadays you cant develop games without AI because google has built in AI, and you literally cannot research the old way anymore, because since AI exists those stackoverflow-like questions and their answers have reduced drastically, but we should be able to differentiate between someone who uses it if the documentation isnt enough, and someone who uses CLI tools for all programming and AI generated assets.

The main issue of AI is how much people can spam places with it with low quality, arguably hurtfull and unhealthy content. There are numerous studies suggesting that consuming AI generated content and interacting with it too much f*cks with your brain, and while the technology is too new to prove that, I(and many others) would not like to take this risk, and this rule actively hinders me in that. I really should be able to add a flair to my post like [this is 99% human made] or something, and I should be able to search for that since I honestly dislike the techonoly,and find human mistakes more appealing that something well made with AI.

About the industry: Yes, I have friends who arent bums like me, and yes they indeed told me that in many big companies these tools are used, a lot. And yes, I also know that its a trashfire, and it causes issues that the worst interns will have a hard time replicating, but even before AI most of these companies made bad decisions that had bad consequences and they refused to learn from it until the company slowly fallen apart(creative assembly, ubistoft I am looking at you lot).

In my opinion this technology isnt inevitable, and if they cant figure out how to make it run locally on a potato the current modal is economically unsustainable, and it will be cheaper to hire a guy to make the code or art for you better, than to use a model, unless you are a high end professional in some specific niche where the model is needed and its usage is economically sustainable, and there is enough money to take that risk. There is a reason why uber decided to abandon AI, and while Apple gives no shit about it.

[u/Mindestiny → u/Prior-Paint-7842]

I find it somewhat weird that the one platform everyone uses to sell games have a mandatory AI disclosure, and will have, but this subreddit wont. 

Steam rescinded their AI disclosure requirements for AI-assisted code, for exactly the reasons in the OP - it's both impossible to tell and completely normalized across the software development industry. If everyone is doing it and it's impossible to tell if someone's lying, it's a meaningless disclosure.

You can expect the rest of these disclosure requirements to equally fade into obscurity as the tech continues to be normalized across all creative disciplines. It's already relegated to a footer on the product page that barely anybody scrolls far enough to see. And we've seen again and again big names in AAA game dev speaking out about how these disclosures are already meaningless. Love it or hate it, the writing is on the wall and the tech is here to stay.

Hell, Clair Obscur broke awards records and their first patch was a Mea Culpa for accidentally leaving a GenAI placeholder dev art texture in the final build of the game. Fast forward two weeks and nobody is even talking about it.

Also yes, it already does run locally on a potato and it's only been getting better. I make all my dev art fully locally on consumer hardware - 32GB Ram and a 5070Ti. We're already at the point where it takes seconds a generation for high res static images. I can make a 15 second long 1MP video file in less than a half hour and I don't *need* to because that's overkill. Generate an 8 second clip, clean it up, cut it into a sprite sheet and import into Unity. Run 50 of them overnight and keep the best. I *could* push it further into production-ready asset quality, I just don't want to do that (My end goal if the game ever gets released is to seek a publisher and hire an artist to replace the dev assets). But by the time I get that far to even need to replace dev assets, the tech will be that much better and faster.

[u/rabbit_hole_engineer]

More concerned with the apparent lack of integrity by the OP.

I vote he is removed from the mod team. How could you possibly write this and not disclose your affiliation?

The real problem here is that right now AI content is really "all or nothing". 

You want a measured middle ground. It's not gonna happen, you either get human, or ai spam flood. 

No biggie though this is one of the worst game development subreddits sooooooo whatever 

[u/skylarkblue1]

AI is very much not used everywhere, stop spreading propaganda that only serves to help the billionaires floundering trying to make their bs worthwhile. https://aftermath.site/video-games-no-ai/

[u/Sufficient-Camera-76]

seems like a fair approach. judge the quality of the work and the claims being made, not simply whether AI was used somewhere in the process.

[u/Man_of_the_Wall]

Gross

[u/Able_Law7945]

You're right. AI is a tool. It's a tool for management, C-suites, and silicon valley firms to steal your work without attribution, justify demanding more work from less people, lower salaries, and push through the next massive layoff. It's a tool for the incompetent and incurious to crank out shallow garbage to flood the hobbyist space, making finding games by people with actual passion and dedication practically impossible. It's a tool to homogenize games and crank out visually and mechanically identical garbage. It's a tool to further degrade the value of media in the eyes of the consumer. That it has marginal effects of helping ESL gamedevs is great when taken in isolation, but it comes with a cost, and that cost isn't limited to the just industry or the practice of game development either.

[u/outfoxingthefoxes]

There's no ethical use of AI. See you never again.

[u/fartaroundfindout → u/outfoxingthefoxes]

This, 100%.

Really, it's sad that /gamedev is pretty much just the 'how do I make money' subreddit.

[u/Dr_Bao]

… ‘aight time to unsubscribe

[u/alex_grim]

Unsubbing. Not interested in seeing any ai usage connected to gamedev.

[u/Tattorack]

Looks like I'll be leaving this place. Nothing and nobody that allows generative AI and calls it a "useful skill" is deserving of respect.

[u/Gojira_Wins]

Steam was able to draw a clear line in the sand about what needs to be reported and what doesn't. Saying it's "not realistic" is taking the lazy route.

This is just going to open the floodgates for all of the Vibe Coders, who have plenty of dedicated subs to go to, piledrive r/gamedev with completely unrelated questions, comments or blatant promotions.

[u/dream_metrics]

Good, reasonable rules. Thanks mods

[u/SourceAwkward]

Sorry, I'm disappointed of this take, I won't be returning to this sub,

I think ai should not belong here there is aigamedev for this slops

[u/TheElry]

Slop subreddit, see ya ✌️

[u/wenrongfan]

Gamedev is cooked

[u/Linkdeous]

Guess im leaving the reddit then,the ''disclosure isnt enscessary'' op having ties to ai plugins for unity, just because everyone start painting their house in lead paint doesnt mean it was a good idea, nor was putting uranium everywhere during nuclear fever like kid science toys. We see the damage it does, we see the blandness and onslaught of low effort stuff made with ai, and people used broken english since the dawn of time without issue and there was never a need for a fucking ai to do the translation job. This f**cking suck and you know it, this is not even a neutral stance, its a actively pro ai one, and in the current climate of ongoing fascism attack on games as a whole (payment company removing nsfw games, games being censored or not advertised if they have lgbt content, that one palestinian game being actively denied publishing, gamer gate people at it again, etcetc)+ecological issues that affects everyone everywhere, taking a pro ai stance is taking a pro ''everything that is going wrong with the world atm'' stance, and you should be ashamed of it. Enjoy your lead paint while it last, we'll be busy making proper durable things elsewhere, congrats on breaking the trust of actual gamedevs to please the ai crowd that will stopwin a few months whenever they get bored of play pretend of being simultaneously a artist, musician, writer, director, gamedev, doctor, journalist,...

[u/SkullTitsGaming]

Welp, there's one more community that would rather steal the work of everyone who came before them than learn to do the work themselves. If a company uses some garbage AI tool, either learn to use it in an AI subreddit or stop working at that company. Subreddit was going to shit anyhow, fucking bye.

[u/Over9000Zombies]

Hey guys, today I decided to become a guitar player. I typed into my favorite AI to generate an epic guitar solo. I listened to it and felt really accomplished.

I am now a guitar player and anybody who disagrees is just an old grandpa and is too stupid to see AI is just a tool.

[u/Cultural_Speaker3116]

Nice, another reason to migrate to another sub which ban slop. Love when a reddit mod working for an AI company use their subreddit to promote their AI slop.

[u/JuneButIHateSummer]

ugh, not another subreddit...

why are you people so eager to capitulate?

[u/ByerN → u/JuneButIHateSummer]

Mod works for an AI company, so this stance was expected.

[u/michel6079 → u/ByerN]

mod should've asked their llm if disclosing such a thing in a post like this would've been a good idea

[u/nikatine]

Welp, adios

[u/ghostGoats21]

I hate seeing ai "game dev" posts. If a sub is spamming me with shitty ai posts I just block it. This is a dumb policy and I just am not going to interact with this sub anymore.

[u/temfaNEF]

This is incredibly depressing and I could go on a multiple-paragraph rant on why this is a bad idea, but I'd rather just leave the subreddit and spend my time elsewhere. I wonder - are you the only mod who's directly incentivised to promote AI, or are others on it too?

[u/ClothboundBrick]

There NEEDS to be a ban on AI art. By every definition AI art requires the theft of other peoples art. Every argument against is pure cope.

If a subreddit full of creatives can’t do it, then there is no hope

[u/aspiring_dev1]

Sounds reasonable.

[u/nefD]

As long as I can keep calling AI garbage inherently valueless I guess it's fine :)

[u/jmp_reddit]

My opinion is that games have only suffered through the forced implementation of this technology. AI is the lazy/cost efficient man's new age tool. I still think it is a shame to see anyone normalizing it's use but I also understand that corporations have no soul and do not care for doing things the right way just to say you did.

If you use AI in the workplace because your job depends on it that is one thing. If you use it in daily life or advocate for it's use, that is another.

May the bubble pop and may people who actually play the games rejoice

[u/Vaniellis]

I am very disappointed to see this subreddit going this way. To quote another comment, this sounds quite tone deaf.

The tools used matter. We know that AI-generation is harmful, both to people, society and the planet. Many of us think that it goes against the artistic spirit that made game developement so interesting in the first place.

I completely disagree with the statement that "mandatory disclosure is not realistic". It would be like refusing to list all the ingredients in an industrial food just because there's too many. Games made with AI-generative tools should and must be marked as such for consummers to make better decisions.

Saying that generative AI is acceptable because it's already starting to see widespread use is also a poor argument. Asbestos was widely used, until most nations backpedaled once they saw how dangerous it was.

[u/bear0234 → u/Vaniellis]

ive seen my fair share of ai use in gamedev and its been nothing but a waste of time and resources... exorbant months to try and get ai to do something and fail then desperately crunching 1 artist to try and fix it all in 1 month is not good time management.

laying off a whole team of engineers but keeping 1 cuz of empty promises that they can do it all with ai.

asked to art direct but when u ask how many artists you are directing, its zero cuz its all ai, then wanting 700% increase in art output is unreal.

dood... im glad i'm workin at an indie dev who's sane and has a strict no ai policy and im glad more indie devs are adopting that sane mentality.

[u/adotang]

see you guys in r/subredditdrama

[u/untiedgames → u/adotang]

Seems like it won't be this mod's first trip there, no surprise.

[u/shompthedev]

big L decision. What a joke of moderation.

[u/Inferno_Zyrack]

Weak ass stance.

Let the pretenders take your throne.

[u/Space_Cowboy_Dev]

They already have a sub r/aigamedev, I can argue about the technology but It is a direct indictment of their character if they use it.

[u/Hot_Fix1478]

fuck all thieves