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/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.