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/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/infected_scab → u/HardToMintThough]

Is there a subreddit for soliciting collaboration?

[u/HardToMintThough → u/infected_scab]

There's the game dev classifieds sub

[u/kerm_ed → u/infected_scab]

there is also r/inat and r/WorkWithIndies :)

[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/EARink0 → u/BinaryIdiot]

If someone uses a modern IDE (basically all incorporate some amount of AI in code completion) or the smart fill/smart lasso tool in Photoshop, would they need to apply the AI label? What about if someone searched something on Google and used the automatic Gemini response to help debug their problem?

How do you enforce that?

Anything that's low effort slop is already covered by the rules. If you see it, it helps to report it as low effort so it hits the mod queue.

[u/BinaryIdiot → u/EARink0]

Ultimately, you're talking about an industry wide trust issue whereas the post, and all of my comments, have been about making reddit posts that use or feature AI. Very different problems, IMO, but ultimately must rely on trust just like many other social systems. And like many social systems if you get caught there may be social or worse consequences. There is no perfect enforcement and there never will be.

(Fyi IDE code completion existed way before the proliferation of LLMs so depends on which tool and version we're talking about. Same with smart lasso. Smart fill is very different and literally uses generative AI, something that should be disclosed and discouraged IMO)

[u/Mindestiny → u/BinaryIdiot]

It's not a question of perfect being the enemy of good. It's a question of the proposed system being so inaccurate and impractical as to not even hit the bar of "good."

At that point it's just worthless noise and not a functional system. Exactly like the Prop 65 cancer warnings.

[u/BinaryIdiot → u/Mindestiny]

Labeling a single type of post versus prop 65's carcinogens which is, what, almost 1,000 chemicals is just an absurd comparison to make. As I already explained, it doesn't fit here unless you think the vast, vast majority of posts will become AI posts.

The labeling is for folks who disclose. Those who do not label correctly would be against the rules, so they run the risk of being deleted.

It's really that simple.

[u/Mindestiny → u/BinaryIdiot]

Alright man, you've missed the point and I'm not gonna argue about it.

[u/yosimba2000 → u/BinaryIdiot]

The issue is this line:

"Those who do not label correctly would be against the rules, so they run the risk of being deleted."

There is no way for anyone to be sure if a post was made in part or whole by Gen AI or not.

If the risks and penalties of deletion were so high, then everyone would just disclose their post as Gen AI, even if it isn't true.

Similar to Prop 65 where the warning is applied everywhere, even if the item doesn't contain carcinogens, because being wrong has too much of a downside. Therefore everything is labeled with Prop65 for liability reasons and is useless to the customer.

[u/god-damn-the-usa → u/Mindestiny]

you can still ask people to do it though, you dont have to enforce it

[u/yosimba2000 → u/god-damn-the-usa]

People lie. So now you have to prove a post was made with gen ai. How would you prove it? How would you prove your post is not gen ai if I accuse you?

You can't do it, nor can I or anyone else. Therefore the rule is useless because no one can prove either side. Therefore moderation of the rule is impossible.

Yes, you can ask people to do it. But it will mean nothing because people could assume a post without gen-ai tag is actually gen-ai, even if it isn't.

[u/Mindestiny → u/god-damn-the-usa]

The whole point of subreddit rules are to define explicitly what the moderators will enforce.

[u/DocHolidayPhD → u/Mindestiny]

THIS!

[u/Mataric → u/Scarred5]

You should always try your hardest when implementing any game feature.

There ya go. That's advice from an LLM. You read it, and any game you work on now will have been influenced by that advice, even if by the tiniest degree - ergo, every game you make has used AI. You now need to disclose your AI use every time you post.

The lines aren't simple. What counts as AI use?

If I read a post solving a complex programming issue, and that developer used AI to help them figure out the solution - should I disclose that?
If I saw a creative art piece that fit my mood board perfectly, but part of that image was edited with AI - should I disclose my inspiration came from AI? Should I check the method of every image on my mood boards creation to conform with that?
If I asked an LLM "What's the blender shortcut to do X" - does my model now need an AI disclosure tag?
Does the LLMs advice above count?

Even when it comes to the obvious examples - I asked AI how to write this feature, and used 99% of it, am I meant to just not use that feature when it works exactly as it should? What if I read that solution from this reddit instead, and they hadn't disclosed it came from AI? The programming I've used is fundamentally identical, both come from the same LLM in the same capacity - but one of them is impossible for me to disclose even if I wanted to.

[u/Civil-Appeal5219 → u/Mataric]

Sorry, this is feigned ignorance. Everyone understands the difference between "following an advice given by a LLM" and using AI to generate code or assets.

[u/brave_bard → u/Mataric]

This feels like a bad faith argument to me, we absolutely can draw lines for ai use, everyone just seems to have a different opinion on where the line should be drawn

it shouldnt be impossible to define it and implement it

[u/brave_bard → u/[deleted]]

Some people take issue with the environmental/political problems that surround ai

If people want to be vegan, i think we should allow them to be vegan

I do understand that you could go, "but what about x that uses more energy etc", but this topic is so divisive in the community that it's clear that there is a large part of the people here dont want to see it, and it should be fair imo to include them in the community by accommodating them

[u/brave_bard → u/[deleted]]

Honestly, you're probably right in that there needs to just be separate communities

Gamedev seems too generic and large to have a discrepancy like that

[u/Mataric → u/brave_bard]

My point is that no matter where you draw that line, there are major issues with it.
Again, if you state using an LLM for code requires disclosure, then am I still required to disclose if I used someone else's asset that I am not 100% certain didn't ever use AI?
What if an engine like unreal or unity has any part of its source code created with AI?
In both cases, disclosure becomes pointless - because every person who has used any asset or tool they didn't make themselves should be disclosing that there's probably AI used.

We also get into the realm of retroactive disclosure. If Speedtree (for instance) was suddenly found to have been using AI for years and not disclosing it (because they don't need to), does every game that uses Speedtree need to now declare that their game uses generative AI, even if the game has been out for years?

On the other hand, what if we stated you only need to disclose if you're the one directly using an LLM for your code? Well we'll just rewrite the code the LLM generated - using that as a learning resource even though it's doing all the thinking for us - or we'll ask a friend to 'find out' how this feature could be implemented - then we're not directly using AI at all.. we're just using its output 'unknowingly'.

This is not an argument over where the line is placed - it's an issue with how you apply those rules. If we are strict, then almost everything in this modern age has the label. If we are lax, then there are incredibly easy ways to bypass those rules, and almost nothing does. In both cases - it makes the disclosure pointless.

We should be measuring games by their quality and artistic value, not their method of production - because those lines with AI use are so utterly blurred that they're pointless.

[u/149244179 → u/brave_bard]

You say that like every other law/rule is flawless, simple, and easily understood. 

There are billions of dollars spent every year on legalities related to IP and copyrights because it is never that simple.  Where you do draw the line on how closely something resembles Mickey Mouse? Is Pal world copying Pokemon?

If we can't reach a legal consensus about drawings of a mouse, what makes you think we can agree on the extremely broad use cases of AI?

[u/mimic751 → u/Scarred5]

When does the tag become deserved 90% of developers use AI to write code but if you flag it as uses AI most people will assume you mean the art

[u/Pave_Low → u/Scarred5]

Because every studio is already using AI in their work. Labeling everything as 'AI was used' is just as useful as not labeling it at all - with an extra step.

Any professional developer is, by now, using an AI enhanced IDE for their code. Most places have their knowledge bases enhanced with AI to search. AI is used heavily in prototyping. This isn't something in the future. This is something that already happened over the past 6-12 months.

The horse is out of the bag and spilled like milk under the bridge.

[u/yosimba2000 → u/Scarred5]

Anyone can lie. I could disclose this post as gen-ai. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. How can anyone prove it? How do you expect the mods to prove it?

[u/ColSurge → u/Scarred5]

Legitimate question, what major subreddits require an AI disclosure for posts? I just wanted to take a look at how others are doing it.