AI mega thread

General
81

Since you seem like an frank and direct person, I guess you’re also hoping for direct and honest opinions, so here’s mine about this:

“I have deliberately left out AI-assistance in coding… I also use ChatGPT to help me profile and optimise my C code, as that sort of thing it’s very very good at.”

In my opinion, not mentioning the use of AI here isn’t honest. In a game for a machine as limited as a CPC, optimization can make the difference between a game fitting into 64 or 128 kb, running at 50 or 10 fps, and so on…
If you’ve used AI-based optimization to improve these parameters and, at the same time, have hidden this information, you might receive recognition as an expert CPC programmer that you perhaps don’t deserve.
After all, your game will be compared to similar ones programmed 40 years ago and optimized by hand based on real knowledge and effort that offered lower performance than what your AI has achieved, and yet people might think you’re a better programmer than they are based on the result and the fact that you’ve hidden information.

On the other hand, if other aspects such as gameplay or the concept are what matter in your game, why hide this info? Of course, everyone is free to use AI as much as they want and to hide that they used it as much as they want. Since you’re telling us this here, I assume you don’t intend to deceive anyone, but consider this: once your game is released, claiming that you didn’t use AI when you actually did (even if it was for aspects that aren’t important to you but might be to others) could have worse consequences than simply explaining how you actually used AI, especially given the current tensions.

82

Hold your horses there, I already always mention it.

I always am open about it, and when Hero goes up, I shall mention it on Itch, and here as necessary.

And I will do so on all my projects. I already do on other non-CPC projects that I have in progress. I’m completely open about it. How I use AI, what I use AI for, what exactly was involved.

Incidentally, for Hero, all artwork and music is by humans (well known members of the scene in fact).

The same way all my code is released upon the GPL2, I always state what help I have received. The first few games of mine were written without AI help. Forthcoming projects will use it, and they will be marked openly as such, as having had AI coding assistance.

Reginald, for example, had a lot of iterative work done between myself and ChatGPT over the course of about a month to optimise it, and it is marked appropriately as having had AI use on its itch page.

Because I agree with you on the openness. It’s important.

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83

Devil’s advocate for a moment, but is that not true regardless of AI? How many developers writing modern games are using things like zx0 compression that simply wouldn’t have been plausible with the grunt of modern PC’s? Or using cross development tools that can show exactly what happens on each and every CPU cycle in a way 80s developers could only dream of? If I write a Doom clone based on Binary Space Partitioning is it fair to compare that to a similar first person game from 1984?

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84

As Typhon said, transparency is what matters. You can use zx0, cross-development, AI, or whatever you want… the important thing is always to be honest about it.

Even before AI, I think it was already a widely held view that the availability of information, cross-development tools, etc., contributed to achieving superior performance in new developments compared to those from the commercial era and I don’t think anyone today can deny the technical merit of games like Mission Genocide, even though technically superior games have been released recently.

In Spain, “La Abadía del Crimen” was recently named the best Spanish game of all time… So I don’t think there’s a single person who doesn’t take the temporal context into account when evaluating and comparing the merits of developments.

85

Which, I feel, is my point. We don’t expect developers to declare that they used an emulator for testing or that they generated a sine table using a Python script. It’s just assumed, to some degree, that if your game was written after 1993 (or whenever) you’ll have had the option of using tools that became available since. So what is really different? Anything post 2025ish might have had some assistance from genAI. Some things might even be entirely genAI vibe coded.

It just seems weird to single it out because of some fear someone might make too good a game with it.

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86

“So what is really different?”

Perhaps my point will be better understood with an example.

Before AI, a programmer needed a thorough understanding of the CPC to achieve smooth scrolling in their game. That is why smooth scrolling on the CPC had been so rare, and the few people who invented and used that technique received well-deserved recognition. None of the tools available before AI could replace the need for knowledge or inventiveness to achieve smooth scrolling, and the only way a programmer without that knowledge could achieve it was by using third-party code, and I think we can all agree that using third-party code without attribution deserves criticism.

AI opens the door for anyone without knowledge to create smooth scrolling on the CPC, leading to many games featuring this capability, which is wonderful. But when a programmer without knowledge creates scrolling using AI, they must understand that the AI drew upon the work of others to compensate for their lack of knowledge. If they attempt to hide the use of AI to receive undeserved credit, they are acting similarly to a programmer who uses third-party code without attribution.

Therefore, In my view, ideally, if you want to use AI to make better games, you should properly credit it, because that’s the only way you can give credit to the true creators of the technique, whose code the AI copied and implemented in your game for you.

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87

Mission Genocide is actually a good example. Nobody can deny that it’s technically impressive. But does that automatically make it a good game?

Most people still using a CPC in 2026 just want to have fun or recapture some of the enjoyment they had as kids. 99% of them don’t really care about the technical side.

So if a prompter can make a game that people genuinely enjoy playing, why not?

88

Sure, “Mission Genocide” is a milestone in the CPC as a technical achievement, not in terms of gameplay.

I have to admit that I didn’t read the entire thread, but I don’t think I saw anyone here argue that AI shouldn’t be used at all. What the thread proposes is a quick way to document the use of AI, Why not?

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89

Is that @Rhino @Rhino? The former member of BATMAN GROUP? Greetings to you whether you are him or not, and if you are, I wish you’d drop a little video of VESPERTINO; I know how annoying we get about that project.

Contrary to the narrative that we are fighting against progress, technological advances didn’t used to involve the participation of a substitute ENTITY—no longer just taking aim at the artisan or artist who fought against the mechanization of their work, but the complete elimination of the human factor.

Claiming that the talent belongs to the artificial ENTITY whisperer is just an excuse to use the same name for two completely different things. No matter how you spin it, that isn’t using a tool. At best, it’s collaborating with an ENTITY that takes control, and very soon won’t even need human whisperers to feed it ideas because, once trained, it will run on its own—as is already happening.

AI is ruthlessly invading something sacred to the very definition of being human: artistic creation. In many artistic disciplines—which can be defined as human expression through various mediums—the line between human output and the output of this ARTIFICIAL ENTITY is already blurred. When that happens, that marker of “quality” you propose, called “human talent,” becomes pure fantasy, as does the very definition of art if you remove its fundamental element: the human being.

I don’t think we should discard what’s made with AI, what’s created by this hive ENTITY, but rather simply separate and protect what is made by humans. Deep down, it’s about protecting the PURE SCENE and kicking off a new era with a dedicated section for the HYBRID SCENE.

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90

Nice to meet you.
Yes, we’ll be presenting the game very soon.

Btw, I wonder if sharing videos of a game’s development will become risky once someone can tell an AI to make a similar game based on the video.

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91

Not only that, as @reidrac has documented in another post, asic28 took issue with the fact that the terms of the licence for reidrac’s version of Gold Mine Run don’t allow him to charge money for his conversion, and sent insulting and threatening messages to reidrac - so it’s clear that asic28 is a far from honest and ethical person.

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We’ve already spoken on X, or the old TWITTER — an honor, at least I think so, but that was many years ago, through the BG account. As for the ENTITY assimilating your ingenuity, you have to accept that it’s going to happen.

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Yep :grin: you are not far from the reality , it’s 100% vibe coding for this remake, but i can help him to do good work with cpcteleraNext. But maybe it’s a limitation, the original code was coded on z80 (3xz80 and another chip).

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My impression is that it’s quite unusual to fully disclose all the tools (other than AI) that were used to develop a product. Even when doing it purely on the CPC, nobody usually cares about what gfx programm, tracker or assembler someone used. And why should anyone care? If it has been done, I think, it was done out of courtesy, to thank the creators of a specific tool or maybe give that tool some publicity. Fast forward to the 2000s, we can do so much more with/on modern hardware and tooling. I can’t count (have never and will never) the amount of work dedicated Python scripts have saved me to e.g. generate a table that I included from my assembly file. So at least this comparison is invalid imo. And always be honest about tool usage has never been true - nor demanded.

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You’re right that the use of traditional tools isn’t usually disclosed by default, and many people haven’t minded that. In that regard, with “to be honest”, I’m not referring to an obligation to disclose those kinds of tools by default, but rather to mentioning them if someone specifically asks what you used. I don’t see any reason why anyone would want to hide the use of the tools you mentioned; however, I do see reasons why a lamer might lie and hide the use of AI if asked specifically about it, which indicates that these are “tools” of a different nature.
Regarding the use of zx0, for example, I think it’s good practice to disclose it by default, since that implies you’ve used third party source code, which is also indirectly the case with AI.

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96

I’ve got projects that I might finish one day going back to at least as far as 1996. It’s not that I want to conceal what tools I used in development, it’s that 30 years have passed and I honestly can probably only remember some of them. Heck I’ve had people ask me about things I wrote and I can’t even remember writing them, let alone how or what I used!

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97

And that means being honest about it.

98

You are of course correct, that’s why I’m giving it 2 years before this bureaucratic madness of labelling everything seems pointless and will have created so many headaches that it will be reversed. But we’re shouting in the desert for now…

It is baffling to me that a majority of us fail to see that it’s the 1983 “real programmers don’t…” debate about high level languages vs assembly (and before that assembly vs machine code, punch cards etc) all over again. God forbid anyone remind them that many 80s games publishers were already “cheating” with cross dev tools on PC / Atari ST, converted images and generated code for the most tedious parts. Of course they were, why wouldn’t you use the most efficient tools available to you ? That was giving them an unfair advantage compared to bedroom programmers, but nobody is asking for merit-based categories there.

The arguments boil down to being able to distinguish “true skill” vs who’s a “lamer” (a word I last used when I was 16 or 17…), who has merit and who is an impostor. This is such a narrow view of merit & skill !

Firstly, it’s clear that some commenters have never completed a sizeable project using an AI agent, and vastly underestimate the level of technical skill required to produce something great with AI, not just slop.

Secondly, it’s nothing new that the most important skillset has moved up the stack over the years.
In the 70s/80s, being a wizard at manually allocating registers in your assembly code was very valuable.
By the 90s, compilers were absurdly better than humans at that so developers shifted their efforts towards architecture / algorithms.

In the AI era, the most valuable human skills for retro dev are shifting to game design (making something actually fun to play), taste, artistic direction, and original ideas. That’s fantastic because many more people are going to be able to create. Gatekeeping it is vain.

Rhino has been teasing Vespertino for what, 10 years now ? I can see why he would be pissed to see fast racing game prototypes popping up everywhere in the past few weeks. But that feeling of losing our hard-earned advantages is what all of us with any kind of expertise are going through in our respective fields (ask mathematicians for example !)

Not saying it’s not a rough feeling, but the genie is not going back in the bottle and all you can do is embrace, adapt, use your experience to your advantage.

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99

Yes , for what it’s worth I’ve just decided that from now on I will declare everything I do as being AI assisted regardless, because I literally cannot be bothered any further.

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100

I’m the same.