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Indie devs have begun adding a no generative AI stamp to their store pages
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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This feels discouraging as someone who struggled with learning programming for a very long time and only with the aid of copilot have I finally crossed the hurdles I was facing and felt like I was actually learning and progressing again.
Yes I’m still interacting with and manually adjusting and even writing sections of code. But a lot of what copilot does for me is interpret my natural language understanding of how I want to manipulate the data and translating it into actual code which I then work with and combine with the rest of the project.
But I’ve stopped looking to join any game jams because it seems even when they don’t have an explicit ban against all AI, the sentiment I get is that people feel like it’s cheating and look down on someone in my situation. I get that submitting ai slop whole sale is just garbage. But it feels like putting these blanket ‘no ai content’ stamps and badges on things excludes a lot of people.
Edit:
Is this slop? https://lemjukes.itch.io/ascii-farmer-alpha https://github.com/LemJukes/ASCII-Farmer
Like I know it isn’t good code but I’m entirely self taught and it seems to work(and more importantly I mostly understand how it works) so what’s the fucking difference? How am I supposed to learn without iterating? If anyone human wants to look at my code and tell me why it’s shit, that’d actually be really helpful and I’d genuinely be thankful.
*except whoever actually said that in the comment reply’s. I blocked you so I won’t see any more from you anyways and also piss off.
I understand where you're coming from. AI can be a learning tool to help fill in some gaps in knowledge, however the moment you don't understand what it's doing and just copy and paste the code, it no longer become a tool but instead a crutch. Instead of copying and pasting code you can take the time to look into why it's doing what it's doing. For Godot in particular they have really good documentation and there's plenty of resources to learn. GD script is a pretty easy language to learn on a surface level. You should do some research into game design patterns and basic programming concepts.
I did take a look at your code and while you do have your main.gd organized, having a large monolith like that with 1100+ lines of code that has multiple responsibilities is certainly a choice. Typically you want your scripts to handle specific responsibilities, that way each script and each object that contains that script has a single responsibility. This helps with efficiency and debugging since you have smaller scripts running and if something breaks you know what broke without everything else falling apart. You employed that partly with your save manager and notification manager etc. But you could certainly pare down your main script. Also considering how much it's handling I'm curious as to what the structure of your game looks like. Godot likes to have nested objects but based off your code yours doesn't seem to be conducive to that. Also there appears to be some needless abstractions with your variable storage.
Anyways I think taking the time to research and learn some basic programming principles and game design patterns would go a long way to help you. Coding can be difficult and seem like a black box when you first get started, and AI can seem like a way to pierce through that, but if you don't learn why it's recommending the code it is then you'll never really understand what your own game is doing and that's not helpful to you or your players.
Thank you, seriously. This is literally the first human feedback I’ve had on the project and you’ve given me a bunch of stuff to work on and some sense of ‘at least not the wrong direction.’ So thanks again this really helped.
If you learned to code with AI then you didnt learn to code.
If you learned math with a calculator you didn’t learn math.
Firstly, a calculator doesn't have a double digit percent chance of bullshitting you with made up information.
If you've ever taken a calculus course you likely were not allowed to use a calculator that has the ability to solve your problems for you and you likely had to show all of your math on paper, so yes. That statement is correct.
Same vibes as "if you learned to draw with an iPad then you didn't actually learn to draw".
Or in my case, I'm old enough to remember "computer art isn't real animation/art" and also the criticism assist Photoshop.
And there's plenty of people who criticized Andy Warhol too before then.
Go back in history and you can read about criticisms of using typewriters over hand writing as well.
As an artist who is learning to code its different. It is night and day wether you have access to undo and HSV adjust but still must nail color, composition, values, proportion, perspective etc. Especially when a ton of shortcuts are also available to trad artists who can just paint over a projection. Only thing besides saving tons of money and making it easier to do your daily practise, digital art will also give you is more noob traps like brushes and then the lack of confidence from the reliance on undo and other tools like that. I transferred to traditional oil paints just fine cause the fundamentals are the one that separates the trash from the okay and above.
It is night and day when you ask ai how to make a multiplication table vs apply what you have learned previously to learn the logic behind making it yourself. Using AI wrong in programming means you don't learn the fundamentals aka you don't learn to program. Comparing using AI to learn to program with learning to paint on ipad is wrong. Comparing using AI to learn to program with using AI to make art for you is more apt.
You're right, my bad. I should have worded that reply better.
I meant it as a tool to help you code etc it's useful, especially if you know some coding. It can help you to say finish a game by coding mechanics you don't quite know how to make work which you can then fix up yourself with the desired parameters etc.
If it helps with finishing your idea of a game (especially if it's something like the first game you've ever made), it's useful in order to learn some of the workflow involved in making a game.
None of your examples are even close to a comparison with AI which steals from people to generate approximate nonsense while costing massive amounts of electricity.
Have you ever looked at the file size of something like Stable Diffusion?
Considering the data it's trained on, do you think it's;
A) 3 Petabytes B) 500 Terabytes C) 900 Gigabytes D) 100 Gigabytes
Second, what's the electrical cost of generating a single image using Flux vs 3 minutes of Balder's Gate, or similar on max settings?
Surely you must have some idea on these numbers and aren't just parroting things you don't understand.
What a fucking curveball joke of a question, you take a nearly impossible to quantify comparison and ask if its equivalent?
Gaming:
AI:
Lets just say we're at the halfway point and its 600 TWh per anum compared to 285 for gamers.
So more than fucking double, yeah.
And to reiterate, people generate thousands of frames in a session of gaming, vs a handful of images or maybe some emails in a session of AI.
But we're not comparing the global energy use of LLMs, diffusion engines, other specialized AI (like protein foldings) etc to ONLY the American gaming market.
The conversation was specifically about image generative AI. You can stop moving the goalposts and building a strawman now, and while at it answer the first question too.
Apparently you can only read 2 of 3 lines, that estimate was a global projection of gaming cost IF the globe followed similar trends to the USA (because thats the only available data) so the real global cost estimate for gaming might be far far lower.
The USA alone spent 27 on gaming, not 285.
That still doesn't address that the energy use of AI in your statistics includes all AI rather than just image generation.
If we're including all AI use cases, we'd have to consider all non-AI use cases on the other end too, not just gaming, such as anime production, 3D rendering, etc that also using graphic card cycles.
And still ignoring the very first question.
So, try again.
LMAO wtf? I included all of gaming opposed to all generative AI. My estimate also included the cost of production if you check the source.
You're the one who wanted to compare AI power costs to gaming costs and now you've shifted the goalpost to all power costs for everything total?
It's a waste. AI is a massive fucking waste. It's going to actually literally kill us all with climate change alone, it's going to multiply our power consumption many times over in only a couple of decades at the current rate even after you account for efficiency gains. It's beyond worthless, it's an almost pure negative.
Reread what I said, calmer this time.
Reread what I said, smarter this time.
Grumpy fucks sure love pullin that ladder up behind ‘em.
FWIW I agree with you. The people who say they don't support these tools come across as purists or virtue signallers.
I would agree with not having AI art* or music and sounds. In games I've played with it in, it sounds so out of place.
However support to make coding more accessible with the use of a tool shouldn't be frowned upon. I wonder if people felt the same way when C was released, and they thought everyone should be an assembly programmer.
The irony is that most programmers were just googling and getting answers from stackoverflow, now they don't even need to Google.
*unless the aim is procedurally generated games i guess, but if they're using assets I get not using AI generated ones.
It is now "purist" to protest against the usage of tools that by and large steal from the work of countless unpaid, uncredited, unconsenting artists, writers, and programmers. It is virtue signaling to say I don't support OpenAI or their shitty capital chasing pig-brethren. It's fucking "organic labelling" to want to support like-minded people instead of big tech.
Y'all are ridiculous. The more of this I see, the more radicalized I get. Cool tech, yes, I admit! But wow, you just want to sweep all those pesky little ethical issues aside because... it makes you more productive? Shit, it's like you're competing with Altman on the unlikeability ranking.
These same discussion happened with photoshop and “brush tools” why are those acceptable to make it less labor intensive, but this isn’t?
It’s more hypocrisy over purism, as you’ve so nicely pointed out.
You're missing the point. "This makes things easier" isn't the problem, it's more along the lines of "this is only possible by stealing the works of countless people, it will attempt to obviate their jobs, and make billionaires even richer." People aren't mad you want to work less, they're mad you'll make things worse, and won't even bother to grasp how.
Comparing GenAI to brush tools is extremely disingenuous, talk about hypocrisy.
I like to use AI autocomplete when programming not because it solves problems for me (it fucking sucks at that if you're not a beginner), but because it's good at literally just guessing what I want to do next so I don't have to type it out. If I do something to the X coordinate, I probably want to do the same/similar thing to the Y and Z coordinates and AI's really good at picking up that sort of thing.
Back in the day, people hated Intellisense/auto-complete.
And back in the older day, people hated IDEs for coding.
And back in the even older day, people hated computers for games.
There'll always be people who hate new technology, especially if it makes something easier that they used to have to do "the hard way".