AI this, AI that - you can't go anywhere without something trying to force AI on you. Usually a company trying to get you to buy into what they've wasted billions on. So indie devs have begun fighting back with their No Gen AI Seal.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The people who say they don’t support these tools come across as purists or virtue signallers.
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.
The irony is that most programmers were just googling and getting answers from stackoverflow, now they don’t even need to Google.
That’s the thing, though, doing that still requires you to read the answer, understand it, and apply it to the thing you’re doing, because the answer probably isn’t tailored to your exact task. Doing this work is how you develop an understanding of what’s going on in your language, your libraries, and your own code. An experienced developer has built up those mental muscles, and can probably get away with letting an AI do the tedious stuff, but more novice developers will be depriving themselves of learning what they’re actually doing if they let the AI handle the easy things, and they’ll be helpless to figure out the things that the AI can’t do.
Going from assembly to C does put the programmer at some distance from the reality of the computer, and I’d argue that if you haven’t at least dipped into some assembly and at least understand the basics of what’s actually going on down there, your computer science education is incomplete. But once you have that understanding, it’s okay to let the computer handle the tedium for you and only dip down to that level if necessary. Or learning sorting algorithms, versus just using your standard library’s sort() function, same thing. AI falls into that category too, I’d argue, but it’s so attractive that I worry it’s treating important learning as tedium and helping people skip it.
I’m all for making programming simpler, for lowering barriers and increasing accessibility, but there’s a risk there too. Obviously wheelchairs are good things, but using one simply “because it’s easier” and not because you need to will cause your legs to atrophy, or never develop strength in the first place, and I’m worried there’s a similar thing going on with AI in programming. “I don’t want to have to think about this” isn’t a healthy attitude to have, a program is basically a collection of crystallized thoughts and ideas, thinking it through is a critical part of the process.
I know you’re replying to a reply here, but do people think I mean just putting in a prompt and then running the output and calling that something I made?
I’ve spent years trying to teach myself how to code but always inevitably would lose track of some part or get stuck on some bug or issue I alone couldn’t get past. I went to theatre school for chrissakes and I just wanna make games and silly little projects. I don’t have any friends in this field and pestering random people in discords or on stack overflow can be really annoying for those people.
So why is using an ai assistant I can berate with as many terse questions I want to iterate code that’d I’d normally spend hours struggling just to remember and string together, such a big stick people are putting up their butts?
I’ll acknowledge that there’s definitely an element of “well I had to do it the hard way, you should too” at work with some people, and I don’t want to make that argument. Code is also not nearly as bad as something like image generation, where it’s literally just typing a thing and getting a not-very-good image back that’s ready to go; I’m sure if you’re making playable games, you’re putting in more work than that because it’s just not possible to type some words and get a game out of it. You’ll have to use your brain to get it right. And if you’re happy with the results you get and the work you’re doing, I’m definitely not going to tell you you’re doing it wrong.
(If you’re trying to make a career of software engineering or have a desire to understand it at a deeper level, I’d argue that relying heavily on AI might be more of a hindrance to those goals than you know, but if those aren’t your goals, who cares? Have fun with it.)
What I’m talking about is a bigger picture thing than you and your games; it’s the industry as a whole. Much like algorithmic timelines have had the effect of turning the internet from something you actively explored into something you passively let wash over you, I’m worried that AI is creating a “do the thinking for me” button that’s going to be too tempting for people to use responsibly, and will result in too much code becoming a bunch of half-baked AI slop cobbled together by people who don’t understand what they’re really doing. There’s already enough cargo culting around software, and AI will just make it more opaque and mysterious if overused and over-relied on. But that’s a bigger picture thing; just like I’m not above laying back and letting TikTok wash over me sometimes, I’m glad you’re doing things you like with the assistance you get. I just don’t want that to become the only way things happen either.
thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’m in the first boat of just wanting to make games and other small, self driven projects. I think its mostly the feeling of being excluded from participating in things like game jams and the larger game development community because I use a specific tool.
In an effort to clarify what i think is an example of something like a middle ground between no AI code gen period and as you put it “do the thinking for me” let me see if i can put it in similar terms. Instead of “do it for me” its very much so a back and forth of “i want this behavior when these conditions are met for this function and expect these types of outcomes.” Copilot then generates code referencing the rest of the codebase as reference and i then usually manually copy and paste chunks over to the working files and then compile & run from there for testing.
I definitely agree that over reliance on tools as a means of masking a real understanding of a subject is a genuine problem. And I too hope it doesnt end up having the same kind of effect algorithmic social media has had on society as a whole. But i think i do have hope that it will enable a subset of people like me who struggle with the wrote memorization aspects of computer programming but still desires the thrill of putting some pieces together and watching it work.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s the thing, though, doing that still requires you to read the answer, understand it, and apply it to the thing you’re doing, because the answer probably isn’t tailored to your exact task. Doing this work is how you develop an understanding of what’s going on in your language, your libraries, and your own code. An experienced developer has built up those mental muscles, and can probably get away with letting an AI do the tedious stuff, but more novice developers will be depriving themselves of learning what they’re actually doing if they let the AI handle the easy things, and they’ll be helpless to figure out the things that the AI can’t do.
Going from assembly to C does put the programmer at some distance from the reality of the computer, and I’d argue that if you haven’t at least dipped into some assembly and at least understand the basics of what’s actually going on down there, your computer science education is incomplete. But once you have that understanding, it’s okay to let the computer handle the tedium for you and only dip down to that level if necessary. Or learning sorting algorithms, versus just using your standard library’s
sort()function, same thing. AI falls into that category too, I’d argue, but it’s so attractive that I worry it’s treating important learning as tedium and helping people skip it.I’m all for making programming simpler, for lowering barriers and increasing accessibility, but there’s a risk there too. Obviously wheelchairs are good things, but using one simply “because it’s easier” and not because you need to will cause your legs to atrophy, or never develop strength in the first place, and I’m worried there’s a similar thing going on with AI in programming. “I don’t want to have to think about this” isn’t a healthy attitude to have, a program is basically a collection of crystallized thoughts and ideas, thinking it through is a critical part of the process.
I know you’re replying to a reply here, but do people think I mean just putting in a prompt and then running the output and calling that something I made?
I’ve spent years trying to teach myself how to code but always inevitably would lose track of some part or get stuck on some bug or issue I alone couldn’t get past. I went to theatre school for chrissakes and I just wanna make games and silly little projects. I don’t have any friends in this field and pestering random people in discords or on stack overflow can be really annoying for those people.
So why is using an ai assistant I can berate with as many terse questions I want to iterate code that’d I’d normally spend hours struggling just to remember and string together, such a big stick people are putting up their butts?
I’ll acknowledge that there’s definitely an element of “well I had to do it the hard way, you should too” at work with some people, and I don’t want to make that argument. Code is also not nearly as bad as something like image generation, where it’s literally just typing a thing and getting a not-very-good image back that’s ready to go; I’m sure if you’re making playable games, you’re putting in more work than that because it’s just not possible to type some words and get a game out of it. You’ll have to use your brain to get it right. And if you’re happy with the results you get and the work you’re doing, I’m definitely not going to tell you you’re doing it wrong.
(If you’re trying to make a career of software engineering or have a desire to understand it at a deeper level, I’d argue that relying heavily on AI might be more of a hindrance to those goals than you know, but if those aren’t your goals, who cares? Have fun with it.)
What I’m talking about is a bigger picture thing than you and your games; it’s the industry as a whole. Much like algorithmic timelines have had the effect of turning the internet from something you actively explored into something you passively let wash over you, I’m worried that AI is creating a “do the thinking for me” button that’s going to be too tempting for people to use responsibly, and will result in too much code becoming a bunch of half-baked AI slop cobbled together by people who don’t understand what they’re really doing. There’s already enough cargo culting around software, and AI will just make it more opaque and mysterious if overused and over-relied on. But that’s a bigger picture thing; just like I’m not above laying back and letting TikTok wash over me sometimes, I’m glad you’re doing things you like with the assistance you get. I just don’t want that to become the only way things happen either.
thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’m in the first boat of just wanting to make games and other small, self driven projects. I think its mostly the feeling of being excluded from participating in things like game jams and the larger game development community because I use a specific tool.
In an effort to clarify what i think is an example of something like a middle ground between no AI code gen period and as you put it “do the thinking for me” let me see if i can put it in similar terms. Instead of “do it for me” its very much so a back and forth of “i want this behavior when these conditions are met for this function and expect these types of outcomes.” Copilot then generates code referencing the rest of the codebase as reference and i then usually manually copy and paste chunks over to the working files and then compile & run from there for testing.
I definitely agree that over reliance on tools as a means of masking a real understanding of a subject is a genuine problem. And I too hope it doesnt end up having the same kind of effect algorithmic social media has had on society as a whole. But i think i do have hope that it will enable a subset of people like me who struggle with the wrote memorization aspects of computer programming but still desires the thrill of putting some pieces together and watching it work.
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”.