It seems the “APARTHEID” has begun. It’s a bit absurd; while I think separating and adding value to HANDMADE/ARTISANAL work is positive, going after things developed with AI is a dead end. In the end, the hunter will end up shooting himself in the foot. Using almost any device involves using AI, even without realizing it.
All this has been discussed already.
It’s nonsense if you (choose to) ignore the bigger picture a couple of levels removed from “it makes my developing work easier”
PS this take is purely idiotic:
It came as no surprise that, after a few years of ΑΙ model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers’ time for more valuable tasks.
It really takes someone far removed from the society and economy and markets and history to not realize that this should read: it came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up payroll’s bandwidth for more stock buybacks
PS2 and to make it juuuust a bit clearer how much “easier your work will get”:
This is the vision.
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I don’t deny that it has been debated, I just see that independent circles have already made up their mind—like AMSTRAD POWER—or randomly groups of scene veterans like Alfonso F. Borro (Borrocop TOPOSOFT), who have decided to discriminate based on whether they consider it AI garbage or like it with or without it.
Has an agreement been reached here? I’d be surprised. The debate will linger in the air. Deciding which cases to discriminate against will be done more out of “nepotism” than actual analysis. I’m following the thread with interest, since there are weighty opinions here. It’s very interesting.
Well, when I said it’s been discussed, I meant that answers (such as they were) were given to those questions
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Most of us probably cannot do difficult mental work for several hours. Placing simpler work in between is not a bad thing and might help to get new ideas for the difficult work. If this simpler work is done by AI, other kinds of pauses or distraction are needed, farther away from the project. I cannot tell if this is good or bad.
The AI topic has many facets. Better software could be one of them, but all too often it is not. Work is speed up and done carelessly. I only saw a few projects that probably were done with the help of AI and reached a good quality in a good time. Here one could not be certain, only the short development time gave a clue. But many, many projects are just done fast and then pushed to the web with questionable quality.
Forming disjunct bubbles whose members confirm each other is not a good thing. The discussion here helps to understand other points of view. I hope that I will always stay on the analysis’ side. However, due to the broad topic I wont only look at a given game or software, but also at future results and consequences. They are too important to get ignored.
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Here are some new strategies to dodge the bad rep artificial intelligence gets for fooling folks. In this case, is AI involved or not? Mega Commando by MXRetroDev
Setting aside the fallacy of appeal to authority, if I were in charge of an OS that aims to be competitive, like Linus Torvalds, I, too, would publicly advocate for the use of AI in that context.
But if my hobby is programming obsolete 8-bit machines at the lowest level to understand them and have absolute control over what happens, why would I want to use AI?
I never minded that others used Basic, C, or all kinds of engines to contribute software to the community, just as I don’t mind that others now use AI. What I believe is corrosive to any community that values merit is when someone claims authorship of the graphics, music, or code created by an AI in order to pass themselves off as a brilliant and deserving graphician, musician or coder. That’s why I believe it’s necessary to distinguish between what was created with AI and what wasn’t.
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but is anyone really claiming they are a great at graphics, music, or coding if they use AI?.. im certainly not…thats why i use AI.. coz im not the best at whatever.. and AI helps get my ideas out… i will claim im getting better at prompting tho!
“what matters is the end product, whether its a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games fasters is a win for everyone”
this is the big statement everyone seems to be missing…
use it or dont…but everyone benefits in the long run
i mean look at how much has already been created (even if some is sloppy), and how much the community has had a kick up the backside and got a whole lot more active
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But do they? I know you say the scene has had a kick up the backside but when the likes of Old School Is Beautiful is churning out unfinished ports for various machines constantly, what’s the actual benefit to any of the communities?
It’s not necessarily pushing creators to make better games for the machine, just more and more unfinished games which are slightly playable but not ones that we’re going to go back and play more than once or twice.
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It goes without saying; all it takes is for someone to release something created with AI and hide that information for them to be given credit that isn’t theirs.
I’d like to be as optimistic as you are, but cold logic leads me to believe that AI will cause saturation, saturation will lead to a lack of feedback, and a lack of feedback will result in a lack of care in development.
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yeah i get that… with the quality of alot of stuff being released, it should have stayed on the prompters HDD!
but.. people have always produced and released half-arsed stuff… its no different to the ai ‘slop’ now, the effort still needs to be put in to polish everything properly to produce something good…
But it is different, we’ve not seen this quantity of games released on all 8 and 16bit platforms until recently when AI has been more available.
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i only see that as a good thing… more = more options for everyone… you dont have to like it or consume it.. just like anything in life…
i cbf with most of the new games being produced by AI, id prefer more hardware and tools being built by AI, (im not gonna mention “return home”!.. doh!), but there has already been some gems that were built using AI (in some capacity) amongst the slop… and thats just the same as the entire game industry has been for the last 40 years, (gems amongst the slop)
It shows the “art of the possible” and that can be a big deal to a developer wondering about an idea. If you’ve seen any of Reassembler’s “Port Sonic to the Amiga” videos he put huge amounts of work into trying out various possibilities for how best to implement things and if it was even possible. But he had the advantage of a large library of existing Amiga games he could at least point to and go “yeah, that seems like it’s possible”
A few weeks ago, had someone asked if a racing game would benefit from the Plus hardware, chances are most people would say no. The only real examples like Crazy Cars II, Fire and Forget II and even Burnin’ Rubber don’t really come across as entirely convincing. You might have got some speculation as to whether certain tricks might help, but it’s a lot of effort to try something out and reach that “yeah this could work” point. But now you can look at things like the AI Chase HQ 2 knock off and, even though it looks pretty terrible as a game, as proof that you can get a lot of performance out of the right approach it’s undeniable. It’s hard to understated quite how big a deal that can be for someone even considering a project that might takes months or years to complete.
Do we all really need to play every slop conversion that someone throws together with no effort? No. Yeah they’d probably be better hidden on some Devs hard drive as PoC work they can return to later, but as inspiration to try new things they should not be so easily dismissed.
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I mean, we have, but it was the 80s. We all seemed to cope fine back then only playing a small subset of games that were actually released and doing our best to avoid the terrible garbage that wanted our hard earnt pennies.
I suspect sites like Indie Retro News that have tended to post information on anything and everything, often with only minimal editing from the developers release note, will find themselves in a new age of journalism. Actually having to pick what is worth reviewing and spending a bit more time on things that matter. Just like mags did back in the day.
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thanks Andy…articulated it way better than i could! 