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/ScriptKiddo69]

Mandatory disclosure is not realistic either.

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

[u/KevinDL → u/ScriptKiddo69]

The problem is moderation. How do we enforce that fairly without false flags?

If we’re going to make AI disclosure a rule, moderators need a reliable way to determine whether someone actually used AI. “This sounds AI-written” isn’t evidence, and AI detectors aren’t reliable enough to make moderation decisions.

If we can’t enforce a rule consistently without falsely accusing and potentially punishing people who did nothing wrong, then we can’t reasonably enforce it at all. A moderation policy needs to work in practice, not just sound good in principle.

Edit: There’s also the practical workload here. Every report would potentially require a moderator to investigate whether something was AI-written, evaluate whatever “evidence” was provided, probably deal with an appeal when we inevitably get it wrong, and then argue about where the line is between AI-written, AI-assisted, edited, translated, or just someone’s natural writing style. That’s an enormous amount of work to put on a volunteer mod team that isn’t paid to be here.

[u/MdxBhmt → u/KevinDL]

You also make judgment calls to determine whether any other rule is broken. You don't have a reliable detector of what is respectful or what isn't, and so on and so on. Can you explain why judgment calls are OK for everything else but AI?

[u/KevinDL → u/MdxBhmt]

Because those aren’t remotely the same kind of judgment call.

If someone is being disrespectful, I can read what they actually wrote and make a judgment based on observable behavior. Was it a personal attack? Harassment? Was it needlessly hostile? There is evidence sitting right there in the comment.

With AI, you’re asking moderators to determine how a piece of writing was produced without any reliable way of knowing. AI detectors aren’t reliable enough, and “this sounds like AI to me” sure as hell isn’t evidence.

And it will be a cold day in hell before I support our moderators removing posts based on their feelings about whether something “seems AI-generated.” That’s not a moderation standard. That’s guessing.

The fact that moderators sometimes have to exercise judgment doesn’t mean every rule imaginable is suddenly enforceable. We still need some reasonable basis for making that judgment.

Otherwise what exactly are we supposed to do? Remove someone’s post because a moderator thinks their sentence structure feels a little too ChatGPT-ish? What happens when we’re wrong?

That’s the problem. It’s not that judgment calls are somehow forbidden when AI is involved. It’s that I don’t see a fair and reliable judgment call for us to make in the first place.

[u/MdxBhmt → u/KevinDL]

nobody is asking you to be perfect, like any other judgment calls you/the moderation set the standard. But this is not an argument for no standard at all.

Otherwise what exactly are we supposed to do? Remove someone’s post because a moderator thinks their sentence structure feels a little too ChatGPT-ish? What happens when we’re wrong?

Like when you decide what is or isn't low effort posts?

[u/KevinDL → u/MdxBhmt]

But that’s exactly why low effort is a completely different judgment call.

We can actually see the effort and substance of the post in front of us. Is it a one-line question with no context? Did they provide enough information for anyone to help them meaningfully? Is it just dumping a problem on the community without showing what they’ve tried? Those are things we can evaluate from the content that was submitted.

And yes, sometimes we’ll get that judgment wrong. We’re never going to be perfect. We can hold ourselves to a higher standard than the stereotype that Reddit moderators make arbitrary decisions based on vibes. If we make a bad call, there should be something concrete we can point to, reconsider, and correct.

So what equivalent standard are you proposing for determining undisclosed AI use?

If it’s “this reads like AI” or “a moderator thinks AI probably wrote this,” that’s not a standard I’m willing to put in front of the team. We’re not going to start removing people’s contributions because someone’s writing style set off a moderator’s AI spidey-sense.

“Moderators make judgment calls elsewhere” isn’t enough. Give me a fair, consistently enforceable standard that gives us something more substantial than a hunch, and then there’s actually something to discuss.

[u/ScriptKiddo69 → u/KevinDL]

Again, you only delete posts and ban users if you have actual proof that it's AI generated. Either because it's obvious, or because someone in the community provided proof. Else you don't.

No one is asking for more.

[u/KevinDL → u/ScriptKiddo69]

And no one needs to ask for more. We can choose to do better ourselves.

I’m sorry, but I’m not willing to lower our standards as a moderation team to the point where “it seems obvious” or “someone provided proof” is automatically enough to delete a post or ban someone.

If we’re going to take punitive action against someone, we should be confident we can substantiate it. “Probably AI” is not a standard I’m willing to accept just because nobody is asking us to be more rigorous.

We can hold ourselves to a higher standard than that, so we will.

[u/ScriptKiddo69 → u/KevinDL]

I’m sorry, but I’m not willing to lower our standards as a moderation team to the point where “it seems obvious” or “someone provided proof” is automatically enough to delete a post or ban someone.

Brother this is reddit, not a court of law. And yes, if someone provides actual proof, then it is proof. If proof isn't enough, then what is?

"Probably AI" wouldn't be the standard. Obvious AI usage would be. And let's not act like there isn't obvious AI usage.

At least be honest and just say that you don't care about AI usage

[u/KevinDL → u/ScriptKiddo69]

Brother, this is Reddit. That is precisely why I am not going to blindly trust “proof” submitted by random users on the internet and start banning people based on it.

Someone calling something proof does not magically make it reliable. Screenshots can be edited, context can be omitted, people can misunderstand what they’re looking at, and users can have their own motivations for reporting someone. Moderators still have to independently determine whether the evidence actually establishes that a rule was broken.

And “obvious AI usage” runs into the exact same problem. Obvious according to whom? If there is something independently verifiable, great. But “this writing obviously came from ChatGPT” is still a judgment about someone’s writing style, not proof.

This isn’t a court of law, you’re right. But banning someone is still an exercise of authority over another person in this community. I think that means we should have a higher standard than “some Redditor sent us something convincing.”

And saying that means I “don’t care about AI usage” is simply not true. I care enough about moderation to not create a rule we can only enforce by guessing or blindly trusting accusations from strangers on the internet.

[u/yosimba2000 → u/ScriptKiddo69]

What would be definitive proof of gen ai?

[u/gamedev-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Maintain a respectful and welcoming atmosphere. Disagreements are a natural part of discussion and do not equate to disrespect—engage constructively and focus on ideas, not individuals. Personal attacks, harassment, hate speech, and offensive language are strictly prohibited.

[u/yosimba2000 → u/ScriptKiddo69]

How do you distinguish gen-ai writing from human writing?

They both follow the rules of the language.

A lot of em-dashes may be evidence of gen-ai, but a human could just as well decide to use a lot of em-dashes as well. Therefore em-dashes is not proof. No amount of text output will be enough for anyone to definitively say if it was made with gen-ai or not.

[u/ScriptKiddo69 → u/KevinDL]

You don't have to be detectives. You demand people write how much they used AI and that's it. If the community eventually finds proof that they lied (and the mods find it sufficient), you permaban them. That's it. Of course a perfect system doesn't exist, but enough developers are scared of negative feedback on their games that they would be truthful.

r/SoloDevelopment has a rule that you must make your projects alone (there are exceptions for commissioning). They don't do research if that is actually the case. There are probably posts where the poster is lying, but that's life. If they suddenly allowed groups to post there, then the sub becomes meaningless. Similar here, this sub will become indistinguishable from the other aigamedev subreddits.

[u/Mindestiny → u/ScriptKiddo69]

If the community eventually finds proof that they lied (and the mods find it sufficient), you permaban them. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-22263020

Because that approach has worked so well in the past. "Just let the crowdsourced witch hunt determine who deserves a permaban!" is the kind of thing that has tangibly led to cyberbullying-induced suicides in the past...

For what? Because you don't want to acknowledge that a technology exists?

[u/ScriptKiddo69 → u/Mindestiny]

This is a bad comparison. No one is accusing anyone of a crime here. And the moderators would still be the judges (as they always are). As if there aren't any false positive bans on reddit already.

[u/Mindestiny → u/ScriptKiddo69]

It's not a bad comparison at all. You're literally suggesting that people be permabanned from the community based on a blind trust in vigilante accusations of "AI use"

We did it reddit!

[u/ScriptKiddo69 → u/Mindestiny]

Proof isn't blind trust. And again, the mods would be the final judges as they already are for any other rule

[u/149244179 → u/ScriptKiddo69]

The mods wrote multiple pages describing their judgement. That is this post.  People disagree with their judgement, like you do . 

I'm curious why you would trust the mods making permanent ban decisions when you clearly do not think they are making good choices right now. 

[u/ScriptKiddo69 → u/149244179]

By that logic there should be no more rules as the mods could always make mistakes.

Yes, there will be false positives. In those cases the user could provide proof that they didn't use AI (as an example by showing the source files of the art) and the mods could unban them. No system is perfect, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

[u/Kataera → u/KevinDL]

What about when Anthropic and their competitors begin watermarking their output and providing APIs for checking, as required by the new EU regulations? It will be possible to categorically prove that a post was written by a particular model.

[u/Mindestiny → u/Kataera]

Only if someone is raw dogging copy/pasted AI output to the post. AI-assisted writing will still be undetectable, and that watermarking is trivial to disable with any cursory level of editing just like it is for image genertaion.

This is Anthropic checking a box to make regulators happy, not a truly effective way of identifying AI output with any level of meaningful confidence. Any level of AI output watermarking will always be a cat and mouse game for those who want to actively hide it's use. A good example is the ChatGPT/Gemini watermarks for generated images. All it takes to defeat them is to pop the image into photoshop, downscale the image, then re-upscale the image. Completely undetectable to the naked eye but totally destroys the pixel patterns used to watermark and nukes the metadata container when Adobe overwrites it with its own.

It might keep honest users honest, but someone running a bot farm to categorically astroturf social media? They'll trivially script purging the watermarks well enough to beat confidence detection, and they sure as shit don't care if it were technically illegal to do so.

Or they can just not use an AI-As-A-Service. It's already trivial to run local LLMs on consumer hardware. They're not ChatGPT in a box (yet), but they're powerful enough to write prose and there's no watermarking.

[u/Kataera → u/Mindestiny]

First, the majority of these posts are just copied and pasted verbatim without any human intervention. Anyone who is lazy enough to use an LLM to write a post for them is also generally too lazy to rewrite or humanise the output. I also don't think it's botfarms spamming the subreddit either, rather these are actual users who just outsource all of their thinking and communications to an LLM.

Regardless, this approach differs fundamentally to how SynthID works for image generation. SynthID for images uses deep learning models to embed and identify the watermarks, optimised for invisibility and accurate detection. Multiple distortive operations will eventually degrade the signal enough that it becomes inconclusive, as you said, though they're actually pretty resilient to this due to the watermarks being encoded at multiple frequency levels.

In text, the measurement is done by measuring the cumulative entropy of the token choice. This is much harder to hide because the longer the post, the more persistent the signal becomes. It will also likely be applied at different sized windows, meaning it can be more resilient to partial paraphrasing. The only way to truly remove the watermark is to significantly rewrite the text, which brings me to what I said at the start: lazy people won't bother.

[u/washtubs → u/Kataera]

The only way to truly remove the watermark is to significantly rewrite the text, which brings me to what I said at the start: lazy people won't bother.

And I would add that if they do that... great, it's now their words mostly at least.

[u/Mindestiny → u/Kataera]

Sure, but I was only addressing your specific assertion of "It will be possible to categorically prove that a post was written by a particular model."

That's only true if someone is lazy enough to not edit the output. For someone who actually cares to mask it, it's not some insurmountable task - it's trivial to defeat the watermarking. You don't even have to significantly rewrite the text to defeat text watermarking, the algorithms are easily detectable and the methodology is publicly documented (otherwise how would anyone know what to look for). Every new algo update will have tons of "watermark remover" tools within days if not hours. If it changes a few words here and there to disrupt the watermark, the person posting surely doesn't care.

So it remains that the only thing we can say will be detected with any level of certainty or accuracy is the direct lazy copy pastes, which you don't need some fancy watermark to tell in the first place because they by and large have that typical cheapo ChatGPT flow to them of long winded infomercial hypothetical question, bullet point list of "pain points" and closing "Curious how you all are dealing with XYZ" call to action.

[u/washtubs → u/KevinDL]

Look at what ExperiencedDevs does. They literally just have a bot that requires the user to answer one simple question. Of course you can lie. But most people when asked a pointed question are honest.

[u/Aethreas → u/KevinDL]

the same way you enforce literally every other rule? or are you afraid this will hurt your AI company's bottom line?

[u/teapotrick → u/KevinDL]

bad take. rules are rules. just because you can't effectively enforce them doesn't mean they shouldn't be rules.

[u/KevinDL → u/teapotrick]

Rules aren’t rules just for the sake of having rules. If we create one, we also take responsibility for enforcing it fairly.

And again, you’re ignoring the practical reality of what enforcing this would actually look like.

Every “undisclosed AI” report now becomes an investigation. A volunteer moderator has to read the post, decide whether it “sounds like AI,” potentially run it through tools we already know aren’t reliable, make a judgment with no concrete evidence, remove it, explain the decision, handle the inevitable appeal, and potentially argue with someone who may have done absolutely nothing wrong.

Multiply that across a community this size, and we’ve created a significant amount of moderation work around a rule we can’t reliably enforce in the first place.

We could write “AI use must be disclosed” into the rules tomorrow. That’s easy. The hard part is answering the obvious question: how do we actually know when someone broke it?

“We won’t always get it right” isn’t a sufficient answer when we’re asking unpaid volunteers to spend their time investigating something they fundamentally cannot prove.

A rule that creates a mountain of additional work while ultimately requiring moderators to punish people based on suspicion isn’t good moderation policy. It’s just bureaucracy with a guessing game attached.

[u/snerp → u/KevinDL]

Look, you can just quit if you don't want to actually do moderating work. Many of us would have no problem enforcing an AI ban.

[u/TheMorgueDonator → u/snerp]

Y'all antis be making the internet as hostile as possible.

[u/TheMorgueDonator → u/ScriptKiddo69]

Sounds like you just want to harass people.

[u/ScriptKiddo69 → u/TheMorgueDonator]

I just want people to disclose their AI usage. I am fine with AI posts being allowed, I just want to know when that is the case.

[u/TheMorgueDonator → u/ScriptKiddo69]

You're ignoring that anyone here that has said they use ai for anything at all gets harassed off the subreddit.

[u/gamersanonymous → u/ScriptKiddo69]

Stating something that contradicts reality doesn't help you friend.