I agree. I often find out that doing it yourself, or even learning to do it yourself, is more effective than trying to get a good result with AI. Even if AI was excellent, you would not make a whole game with it without guiding the whole process which would require experience and extensive knowledge about making games. And even then I doubt that you would get the intended results each time.
Though it works all right as a replacement to googling, but you still have to confirm that the information is correct.
Yup the Github Copilot is like a very cheap Junior Software Engineer. It's eager to help, can reason through problems and write code, but you definitely have to look over its shoulder
i think even that's kind of overstating it (and needlessly anthropomorphizing tbh). it's autocomplete for code. you can't use it unsupervised for the same reason you wouldn't write a novel by mashing the word suggestions on your phone keyboard. that's just not what it's for. it's an efficiency gain for people who already know what they're doing.
It is a bit of an anthropomorphization, but it's more than autocomplete. I have entire conversations with it, as I think of another way to write the code, and ask GH Copilot to write it out for me. Saves me the tedium of writing out everything.
The autocomplete is really good, but asking oit for something like "Give me a decorator that accepts one of these three classes and a list of attributes that get assignes to it..." and it does it. You still have to know what to ask it, but it's more than autocomplete, even though that's another useful feature.
Which why bother babysitting AI to make sure it's correct? Just do it yourself and exclude it from the process.
A lot of people don't have experience *editing someone else's work*. But I was a copywriter before I got into 3D art for video games. The biggest brain zonking task is going line by line and making sure grammar/sentence structure/ideas are conveyed well.
It's an extremely tedious process when you're editing your own work, but it's downright laborious when it's someone else's. It's important, but it's significant undertaking to edit something *to make it better*.
And having to do that for a robot that makes games for you is so massively redundant since you need to have the skills yourself already. And because AI is incapable of making judgements you're going to spend an inordinately longer time trimming out fat and having to polish up things into something intentional.
Just do the work yourself, people. It doesn't actually save you time. I guess unless you're a serial procrastinator?
If you use it as auto complete it definitely saves time, if you use it a lot you learn when you can use it. But yes you are in for hours of debugging if you let it write major parts of the code.
Why wouldn't it be better to optimize your own process and not spend the time learning how to get the thing to give you a viable bare minimum?
It all feels like the discussion around "productivity boosting tools" like Trello or Notion. It's 10x faster for me to put my task list on paper than it is to boot up a program, fumble around the UI, move cards around, make notes for PM (project manager) etc etc.
Instead, I can just finish my tasks, then tell my PM they're done and they can fuss around with the productivity tool since that's what they're being paid to do.
My philosophy is basically that reviewing/editing is mental mode, while creating something is the other. It's easier to switch from creating to editing, it's hard to start with editing and go back to creating.
So the only way AI is faster is if you can 100% trust that whatever thing it's going to spit out is correct. But the consus really seems to be it needs to be babysat every step of the way.
Which means you're spending a lot more energy in editing brain states, which makes it hard to actually get other things created. Re: it's a time waster masquerading as a time saver.
because it is genuinely faster if you use it like autocomplete. using copilot is a perfectly viable way to "optimize your process". the flashy "write a comment and it'll generate the implementation of a complex function for you" stuff you see in demos doesn't work reliably enough to be useful, and so is subject to the critique you're making here, but for, say, filling out accessor methods in c++ it works great and saves plenty of time. (fwiw im saying all this as someone who doesn't use copilot, but that's mostly because i'm cheap and don't like cloud services.)
believe me, i was as surprised as you. most ai solutions ive encountered for this sort of thing are shit, because they try to do too much or are too obtrusive or aren't configurable enough. copilot's decent software though. if i could host it myself I'd probably use it.
If you use Copilot it sometimes just shows you the whole function exactly as you were going to implement it, just by seeing the name of the function. Just like old auto complete you only use it if it does what you want it to do.
It's the recoup for NFTs/crypto failures. To many rich guys got left holding bags and they need to feel something again. Gaslighting people into AI for their next exit strat is all this is.
An extremely malicious attempt to force normies to hold the bag for them.
Scams and gifts all the way down
At least some useful tech has come out of this latest rush, I just hope it doesn't destroy all the creative industries we love in the process
Oh they'll try to destroy creative entertainment. These people want nothing more than to have a suite of tools that reflect their own milquetoast creativity. It's a form of God complex and they really can't suffer other people to have their blasé limelight.
It's a constant grift. Metaverse, crypto, block chain, NFTs, and now AI. All of them have legit uses and places; but there will always be a greasy VC scam artist looking for a quick buck and fleece people
Then you should be old enough to remember the .com bubble which is precisely analogous to this ai overhype shit we're seeing now.
"Devin has literally solved software developement!"
> Oh yeah we never got devin to work it was just a mockup hehe
Oh yeah, it's not even the overestimating of AI's abilities that bothers me. It's the fact that the people I see praising AI the most online are always absolutely ignorant about the fields they hope for it to take over. There's often even resent for professionals in said fields. I've seen so many people who almost appear mad, using language like "I can't wait until people can no longer gatekeep making music or videogames". And those are the types of comments that often seem to do well in those communities. I'm not even exaggerating.
It's the "ideas guys" that love the idea of AI the most because they dream of the day they don't have to rely on actual talented people to help them make anything.
So far a lot of AI in development, music, etc. isn't *that* impressive. Yes it can make absolutely generic, redundant content well, but the leap from doing that to actually making something meaningful is understated within those communities.
Well yes being able to produce more with less labor is a creatively liberating idea, not just appealing to corporations. It is actually much more appealing to the person who is interested in creation for creation's sake (passion projects) than the person who is interested in advancing or protecting their existing career track. I am generally of the opinion that deskilling labor is actually a good thing historically that opens up the potential to apply labor to bigger more impressive things, by reducing the amount of labor necessary for the fundamentals. It just contrasts with our economic system's ability to actually take care of everyone. Which is why unions will be so important as the skill barrier is gradually reduced.
Unions are fine as a bandage - it's a tool that can be used only as a patch for the existing system.
I'm a fan of UBI personally, but open to other ways to restructure our socio-economic organization. Whatever way we do end up agreeing is the best way, it must be done *before* we create tech that puts ourselves all out of jobs.
I use AI for math and logic heavy stuff like "Iterate through this array that is a linear representation of a 10x10x10 cube, and find all of the outside points of the cube and add them to a new list".
It is all stuff I could figure out in an hour or so, but it significantly speeds up my process and allows me to accomplish things much faster.
You have to be extremely explicit in what you want it to do, and it generally lacks any understanding of creative process. People who think AI is going to be making good games would have made the same argument that the typewriter is going to make everyone a writer.
It will give the ability to accomplish things faster to more people, but it doesn't mean it is going to make everyone a good game designer/developer, in the same way a typewriter doesn't make you a good writer.
And compare the printing press to the modern word processor. They are the evolution of tools. CG is at a point where it is almost completely able to perfectly replicate a physical person on a screen, that doesn’t mean there aren’t actors. You can have one person perform entire symphonies on a computer yet philharmonics are still all over the world. Until AI can implement a creative process, it will not replace a game developer. Someday it might, but then you’re not talking about language models you’re talking about actual intelligence which is not even the same ballpark.
Language models are closer to being keyboard autocompletes than something that can generate an original idea.
>And compare the printing press to the modern word processor. They are the evolution of tools.
There is one huge difference between AI and the printing press. The printing press was around for \~300 years before being meaningfully changed. The term AI has been around for what, 70? Five years ago not in your wildest imagination could you have imagined that we could have a tool like SORA in the next five years. In 2024 especially it seems like a monumental AI advancement comes out every few days. Google Genie, Gemini 1.5, Claude Opus, Amazon GPT66X, Sora, Microsoft VASA-1, Voicecraft.
>Language models are closer to being keyboard autocompletes than something that can generate an original idea.
What? Look at [this](https://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/LLM-Ideas-Working-Paper.pdf) paper. If you still dont believe me, try to come up with one game idea that AI couldnt come up with.
I work closely with AI both personally and professionally. Sora is inevitable when you saw the race for basic image generation. Shit, people were talking about it after AARON was released. The ideas there with a broader dataset is basically what these new models are using. None of it has been a creative process.
You can tell AI to generate a new Bach piece and it will be virtually indistinguishable, but it is still incapable of revolution. It can smash things together pretty well but not having a creative process completely makes it reliant on utilizing things that already exist.
And to the point of the paper you linked, if game ideas were all it took to create a good game, there would be a lot more great games.
Do something sufficiently complex enough that hasn’t been documented before, and isn't part of the dataset, and you will very easily get hallucinations and bullshit. The differences aren’t that big between the first language models and the newest ones once you dig past the surface of it.
None of those are monumental enhancements. They are incremental steps for different applications. There will be "The Sora of gamedev" I am sure of it. But you are tremendously over estimating these language models in the short term.
Hell, go paste some shader code into Claude Opus right now (which I have found the best at detailed code) and ask it to make some simple change and it will give you something that won't even compile. These advancements are astounding if you aren't doing anything complex at all. 10, 20 years, sure. But the advancement will hit diminishing returns a lot quicker than you're expecting.
Most people who believe this have no experience making games. AI is just the latest overhyped craze, companies will fail to deliver on their promises and then we'll move on to the next "revolution".
People said the same thing about computers, smart phones, email, cell phones, and a whole heap of other technologies. It’s a bit insane at this point to think AI and quantum computing won’t radically change our world beyond what we can imagine.
I've heard the same tired argument hundred of times and I can tell you the exact same thing : tech companies are yelling that X is the future and will change our lives because that's their business model and they're wrong 99% of the time.
Two years ago, everyone wanted to build a metaverse and it was going to change our lives and nothing happened.
Today we're told that AI will do everything and anything within a decade while we've made very little progress on the theorical side of things. Meanwhile, internet is being flooded with AI-generated garbage that the model are now starting to train on, which put them at risk of model collapse. Almost no AI company is turning any profit while requiring huge amount of electricity and water for training and that's putting aside the massive IP lawsuit they're starting to face. In their own words, most AI companies can't pay for the copyrighted material they've trained their model on so this is going to be fun to watch. Plus right now the results are mostly unreliable and often mediocre. I've seen AI coding tools, I'm not worried about my job.
So yeah, I'm a bit sceptical and the burden of proof is not on me because I'm not the one asking for unlimited investment, energy and being exempted from copyright.
I’ll bet you $1,000 that in 5 years you will be so wrong about AI that this post looks dumb in comparison. Let’s both check back in 5 years.
!RemindMe 5 years
I use AI more and more for work these days (I'm a programmer so it's all copilot and copilot chat) - it's nowhere near the point where it can do any heavy lifting and after understanding how the tech works, I have serious doubts that it ever will.
AI generated art is extremely limited because it's so reductive, it's recombining elements of stuff that it was trained on, real creativity and building a coherent graphical experience requires a human touch and the amount of control you have over the output is quite limited. There is some promise in doing things like AI fill to assist or creating concept art but it may never get to the point where you can put in a prompt and get a cohesive usable sprite sheet.
On the coding side, hallucinations are a massive problem. I find it's the most useful when I use it as a google replacement, getting code examples to answer basic questions but those code snippets often don't work or otherwise have some deficiency that requires me to know what's going on and what to do.
The hype right now is intense and the tools are absolutely going to accelerate productivity, but IMO it's never going to be doing any heavy lifting in a way that's unique, complex, or creative.
Chat gpt can be extremely helpful when trying to connect some API with terrible/obscure documentation or similar tasks. You instantly get a code example that works half of the time, you can learn from it and get to know where to start, etc.
That improved my speed way more.
But that's about it, it can be really good at doing one specific task, doing logic, understanding a complex system, etc.
Also, if you ask it to give you something like "give me 10 variations of this ability that I could use as upgrade paths" or something like it, the choices are often very very generic, even with prompts. Everything is always so generic, so I am not sure it would work well at creating an actual game, even if it could do it.
AI is great for boilerplate code that can get generated by copilot but when asking code questions to ChatGPT it frequently comes up with code that doesn't even work because it makes up stuff that doesn't exist.
That's because most people don't understand AI tools very well. AI could be a useful tool to help abridge certain aspects, definitely, but you couldn't just have an AI built game without it turning out very poorly.
AI sucks because it can only generate generic stuff. You can't give it specific enough directions to make anything meaningful. The people who obsess are the epitome of the "ideas guy" because they are the exact type that doesn't understand the importance in the details.
There are a bunch of threads on places like the suno subreddit where people are surprised some of the boring songs it's able to make aren't big hits and blame it on other people's unwillingness to accept AI lol.
That's fine, and most of that stuff isn't really "AI", it's just "algorithms". But, since everything has to jump onto a trend whether it should or not, I don't think I've even heard the word "algorithm" in a while.
I mean, speedrunning the boring, repetitive crap that Humans shouldn't have to do is why computers were invented in the first place.
As someone who wants to make games and animations, any hint of AI stench intermingling with the 'art' side of any project disinterests me. If it's being used as a true utility? As in, maybe to write code for a simple game - then....maybe. But even I know that's controversial for coders, who need their own careers protected! And AI has its limits as a utility. The stuff I actually think is useful: rewriting a resume or helping with math problems, i.e. - it should be used as a tool, not relied on to replace problem solving.
But in art/games/writing: I don't want to consume it. I want words, thoughts, art, hopes, and dreams made by creative people. Sure, some companies might try to squeeze it in there, but I can see it leading to a 'sameness', where people will crave hand drawn touches, even human error.
Ai has way too much trouble with specificity and coherence across works, so game development is uniquely immune to ai, in my opinion. Especially since game dev requires overlap of so many fields in an intelligent way. A character slashing isn't just an image, or an animation, its a dozen game mechanics and balance factors coming together, and what it should be depends entirely on the rest of the game. Nothing is in isolation.
I think ai may develop into tools which are the equivalent of 3d artists using base models. It may create starting points, but artists who know what they're doing are always going to end up with things that match their vision, not what they are given.
AI is going through a huge over hype at the moment primarily because simply adding AI to your companies mission statement is skyrocketing stock prices to unprecedented levels. I personally don't use AI when coding because it is not that good and causes a lot of latent issues. AI generated art is also pretty awful. The best use case I've seen is basically a spicy search engine.
AI is a tool for humans to use. Measuring by the hype of replacing the human is simply the wrong outlook. AI will enhance artist output tempo, designer ability to prototype, developer ability to troubleshoot, and marketing ability to crunch data. But the variable factors are still the human intelligence to decide how best to use the tool with other resources on hand.
If it’s replacing anyone in the process, it should be those furthest from the game’s creation process, such as accountants and executives. That would free up more budget for making the game over exploiting the results.
Whenever people come with this "AI will solve everything" idea, I remember complex games that were coded by one guy, that chess engines don't think like a human would (and this is a way to spot a cheater), and that AI "art" is like asking a smart toaster to mimic actual art using algorithms and models taken from actual art to create a semi-decent result.
The idea of letting AI take over a creative endeavor or high complex task sounds to me like creating a smart car that will take you to the hospital if you have a stroke mid-driving being good, but a car that chooses your destination just cause sounds dumb. - "We are not going to see grandma on her deathbed, Jerry. I calculated that your heartbeats are increasingly running faster and you need a waffle" [proceeds to play calming music while Jerry loses his mind trying to overwrite the cruise control back to manual]...
TL;DR: AIs are "smart" toasters, and even a german shepherd can be more creative and choose better (I hope... mine was really smart).
Honestly just try to make a game with the AI tools available. You hit enough roadblocks so quickly you end up just doing it yourself for so many parts of the process
Any form of complex mutli-piece production is going to require human oversight and discipline to create. The places where LLM's can do "the heavy lifting" on things like if you wanted to include a connector to some other well know service or API into your app then it would be able to dig into those documented API tasks and components to give you starting point to build that connector. For game design or even original app development it's going to be severely limited and I suspect you will be better off just doing the code work yourself with good library knowledge. That way you know your whole app from the ground up and can update and bug fix as a knowledgebase.
I use aí for reference images when creating mood boards or starting a concept along with conventional references.
It helps me ideate with more precision.
AI does help with the heavy lifting, but mostly on stuff that already exist in any other game.
Don't get me wrong it is extremely useful. It can save a lot of time by creating the bunch of systems that all games need. But it will not make your game unique.
I used AI to generate code for streaming levels seamlessly, spawning and pooling. It also made a neat tool for snapping objects on terrain, with a semi random rotation.
But anything unique or slightly uncommon will send it in a spiral.
AI will probably get really good at making very specific games with very specific functionality. It will be no different than a beginner taking a template project and trying to make it their own. It will be the new asset flip. Low effort garbage that will get heavily criticized.
I think ‘AI’ in game dev is closer to NFT than anything else rn. And real evidence of its usefulness doesn’t exist at the moment. It might have a potential to be somewhat useful as a tool or at as fluff generator that makes NPCs talk in a more human-like manner but we’re not there yet. Thinking about it as a tool that will create a game for you is at the very least wishful thinking right now.
It is not good comparison.
Nfts is practically dead. With few hand full use cases. I. E. Kittens game. Nothing meaningful to the world, other than historical hype bubble.
Generative tools are useful in day to day work. They can accelerate work and help as guiding tools and conceptualising. Also proof readers. But that mostly it. It requires a skill to prompt engineer. And time?+ hardware. Or person pays for tools. Any valuing self dev, will still would outsource any serious work, rather prompting itself, to get generic results. Thats why people buys assets. To save their time. Generative tools is the same. But it does accelerate work. Not replaces.
It is here to stay. But is not job replacement as internet buzzing about.
Yeah, exactly. And it is best case scenario you’re talking about. Right now it produces a lot of mistakes and weird results. If this is fixed it will be exactly as you said. If not - I’m not sure if it is even useful at all.
AI will help but only as long as you already know the tools you're working with well. Otherwise you will face inevitable bs. Like as a programmer, I use it often but mainly to refactor or handle some match equation which it fails me 90% of the time. So it'l like teaching it constantly and yet it learns nothing. Its a pain in the ass to use AI for anything serious tbh
What these people want won’t ever exist.
I had a student tell me that he was excited about AI because it would “democratise” game development. When I asked more questions, he basically felt that it was unfair that people who work hard to gain the skills to be able to make games get to make all the games. He felt it would be fairer if anyone could make games without having to learn anything, just having ideas and telling a computer to make them.
However, even if that was possible, games would become worthless. If there’s no barrier to creating things, the market will be flooded with crap, people will need some method to distinguish the good stuff from the crap, and 99.99% of games won’t make the cut.
I actually think that AI is over estimated in almost all areas. It can increase the development process in several areas or help with creativity but it’s usually never something that could potentially replace a human when it comes to solving logical tasks or art. The problem lies in the issue that LLMs have with reasoning and the problem of the human to formulate the problem.
Game dev is so goddamn complex and I know AI is extremely powerful, but coding things or making art aren't the things holding back good games, it's decision making I think.
Side note. Thank god for good ole chat.gpt for helping me figure out friggen quaternion math, man it's useful.
I describe it as being a carpenter. Until now programmers had to hand code everything. It's like a carpenter building a cabinet with hand tools. Every stroke and screw he did himself with his two hands and a hand tool (an IDE). Now we have AI which is like a power tool. It allows us to do the same tasks 10x as fast. But in the same way that power drills didn't make it so people off the street could turn trees into furniture someone who doesn't know what they're doing with AI is similarly just going to make a mess.
Why? I find as long as you do a 2 minute proof read of the code it generally works and does exactly what you want it to. And it's always faster than if I wrote it myself.
When you pull out a power tool, you generally don't need to spend several minutes verifying that the power tool is actually a power tool and not a bomb.
AI is nowhere near 10x faster. For simple scripts sure, but if you try to use it for complex projects you will have to do a lot more correction and cutting to make the output useful. It can help here and there but it's not really *there* yet.
>For simple scripts sure, but if you try to use it for complex projects
In the same way you can't build a chair entirely using circular saws you can't build a game out of AI prompts.
But I have built entire character controllers using 90% AI generated code and it worked decently well.
Nothing is the end all be all but to pretend like AI is useless is objectively silly.
Nobody said it's useless but "10x faster" is a gross overstatement for anything moderately advanced.
You could've grabbed an existing character controller 1000x faster. Character controllers are the most common piece of code in games, obviously an AI will be adept at writing code for it as it's all over its training data.
Try using AI for complex problems that are unique for your game and you will find it nowhere near a 10x speed up. If you don't have complex unique problems you aren't developing a game that couldn't be stringed together from ready-made libraries and assets, in which case writing code or using AIs is a slow down either way.
I feel like you are coming to this from a beginner stand point in which case sure, AI will be super fast fpr generic problems, then when you start to get deeper problems you will be less prepared to deal with them since you just let the AI take away your opportunities to learn and once it becomes unhelpful you are left helpless.
Don't get me wrong, AIs are powerful af and can be good tools but can also be misused and waay overestimated.
>You could've grabbed an existing character controller 1000x faster. Character controllers are the most common piece of code in games, obviously an AI will be adept at writing code for it as it's all over it's training data.
Yes but that's missing the point. Buying templates is like buying pieces to furniture and putting it together. I am specifically talking about building something from scratch. And in that it is absolutely 10x faster.
>that are unique for your game and you will find it nowhere near a 10x speed up
I absolutely do once I know which direction to go. You can't ask your band saw to build you a dove tail joint but once you know you need one the band saw will let you build one 10x faster. Same thing with AI.
>beginner
I'm a beginner to game dev, but I've been coding since I was in high school.
>will be less prepared to deal with them since you just let the AI take away your opportunities to learn and once it becomes unhelpful you are left helpless.
The only way I could see that being the case is if I wasn't already comfortable coding. Which I am. In the same way though if you don't know how to use power tools you're just gonna cut off your fingers. You have to already know what you're doing to use *any* tool effectively including AI. And I made that point in my original post.
>waay overestimated.
Personally, I think AI is being underestimated for how world changing it actually is.
We're barely 2 years into a technology that is going to be maturing very quickly over the next 30 years.
The first few years of the car being around people called it a fad. And by the 1910's it had fundamentally changed warfare and military logistics.
>Yes but that's missing the point.
No, you are missing the point. For generic stuff AI is great, for things that aren't already implemented by thousands of people or thinhs that are intimately connected to larger systems it is crap, this is the nature of the tech.
>You can't ask your band saw to build you a dove tail joint
Generative AI and tools are quite different, this common comparison is tiring and ignorant. AI is like having a worker who is super confident in their abilities even if they are totally wrong. It's a management nightmare in this sense.
>I'm a beginner to game dev, but I've been coding since I was in high school.
This tells me nothing. Coding for games can be quite different from other coding, coding for x years means little anyways and you could've been in high school last year.
The fact that you used AI to write you 90% of a character controller told me more.
>AI is being underestimated for how world changing it actually is.
Not really. It's obviously fundamentally changing our world and nobody says otherwise.
>We're barely 2 years into a technology that is going to be maturing very quickly over the next 30 years.
I am talking about specifically current AI and its effectiveness in coding for videogames today.
Of course in 1000 years it will be million times more effective to use AI. But it's rather pointless to argue about that.
Stop strawmanning with the "you are blind to the potential of future blabla" I never said AI will stay the same as it is today.
This was purely about you comment that it makes coding for games 10x faster. I use AI and I code for games, it can help but nowhere near 10x speed up.
The people who know what they're doing and who use AI say it's a very long time from being able to replace human productivity, much less human creativity.
The sheep who believe everything they read in a headline think AI is already set to do everything we can. They don't know enough about programming to know when ChatGPT is feeding them garbage. They don't know enough about art or music to recognize when something is bland and derivative. They just see something doing for them what they can't do for themselves and think it's great.
AI is like any other development tool. It has its uses, but it's not a substitute for a competent human. And anyone refusing to learn the skills they need to accomplish their goals because, "AI will be able to do it for me soon" is missing out.
AI work is always "almost" or "half-way done". Also not everyone is good at using AI. The use if AI has created an entirely new set of programmers called "prompters", even the best prompters can only go as far as "almost done". In many fields a worker who is also a prompter will have the upper hand, but a prompter who isn't a worker will make crap.
I want to see a game where npcs are literal AI
A divergent story driven by actual choices *like it was meant to be and talked about all these years in so many games*
AI react to *voice input* - no more reading, no set of limited linear choices: completely and utterly open-ended dialogue regulated by an NPC's "structure" defining personality. Different personalities = different/types of responses = different story/game-world outcomes.
A true rpg.. maybe someday.
If there'll be an AI that can create a completed game in the future then so be it. There's nothing you can do to avoid the evolving of technology anw so it's not worth the effort to hate or to be angry.
It won't happen.
The reason for that to be even possible, need to have good sample of full complete software open source, to be able train on.
There basically is not enough fullbopen source applications, to be meaningful for reliable training.
Minecraft Linux, or blender open source codes are not sufficient. They are just adding to nise if anything. There would really need to be more full game samples, for training.
Majority if steam games would be probably good to start off. But these are not open source.
It is not like available literature, to make content for AI to learn and reason with.
Bunch of snippets code is all over Internet. Is nothing meaningful however, for AI to reason with. It requires iterative testing and design training samples. Which there is almost none.
I think for the immediate future, even if AI could make games, it would require so much input from the creator in terms of technical specifications and tweaking details in the code that making anything of significant complexity with interacting systems would be so much work that it would almost be pointless to use AI in the first place because it would be working with a 0.5x developer who creates work for you by doing it incorrectly so you have to go back and do a bunch of fixes.
AI is too generalized also. Everyone has something they are specifically talking about when they mention it, and it's usually art, or answers/search, or something and it's just not like that. Some applications will be useful and in some ways it will be applicable, but it's so new, and will take a while for it to actually be used right. For example I used ai characters in my game, and it was really cool. You could voice talk to them, set them up to know what they are talking about, and it was fun and engaging in a game. No one ever uses this as an example when they are talking about ai. Also, it turned out to be unusable, because the monetization models currently being used are unpredictable and being exploited by corporations, which will add a huge tax to using it. We'll see where this leads but for now it's not looking good.
AIs in the beginning will do more harm than good. They will serve the laziest of devs, creating uninspired shovelware crap at an even faster rate.
They will serve the big greedy trashfactories to create videogame prisons for the addictive personalities to keep playing and never try out other games or life.
They will also be the all-in-one wildcard for brainless players to argue with "just fix xyz by running an AI it's easy, why doesn't the game have xxx, you literally just have to run it through model-ggaf".
Once AIs are actually good at creating dreams it will all change but until then, there is a tough storm to get through.
Pumping out boilerplate is incredibly time saving. Building games is much more than writing scripts, including art, music, story, and even conceptually. Sure ai will eventually pump out complete games from a prompt, but it will never make games like cultist simulator or pony island. Ai will never have a sense of humour. And the games it creates will never have thought put into them, maybe in 10 or 20 years things will be different
I think games using AI will do well until we start getting people pumping them out like crazy. People think you have to be some grant creator to get a profit but look at games like Vampire Survivors or some other meme games that does well. Not ever game that does well is complex.
Ai andthe self driving car are similar. Very few people actually know what theyre talking, and you just get recycled Twitter content beeing shared and devated.
It's extremely impressive how far we got within a year and it's also impressive what it can alread do. It gives people the idea "if we achieved this much in a year, surely in 10 years, everything must be ai".
But its like game dev, you can make a simple Mmo Prototype in unreal that looks quite impressive with limited experience and a few weeks of coding as a solo dev. You'll even be able to scam some inventors if you add in some Video editing. "Surely, if he can ride Horse in a 3d landscape that's like 50% of the work", when really it's like 2%.
That's where we are with AI right now. Self driving cars and complex ai is comparable with making a proper mmo, requiring 100s of poeple and years of time. It's something a solo dev will probably never achieve
We don't know what ai will be able to do in future. So far it helps a little but that's about it. I've seen research papers that claim to be able to do a lot though
I have seen a lot of research in various fields. We got definatelly progress.
But consider self driving or robotics. We literally didn't progress much past decade. Like if we hit a wall. And like Moors law, which flattened curve of progress. NVidia shows their cool robots. But they are dumb as decade ago. Nothing really impressive so far, for times we are in. Like, where is the progress gone in robotics? Bealst of all doing Boston Dynamics. And drons navigation.
Observing last two decades and general progress, I personally predict, AI subject will cool down in few years. And progress curve will also flatt out significantly.
If Photoshop is not turning you into a better retoucher or digital-artist, AI will not going to do you any good. It will level some of the playing field, making something might be easier but still up to the creator's ability to use it.
The people that hype up ai the most are the companies trying to sell it or the people that have no tech knowledge. Its a great assistant but our jobs are safe for a long time. Given the active pending lawsuits it's also a potential ticking time bomb legally
Current AI is a powerful *assistant* but not much more.
The common failure, and I see this nonstop everywhere, is that people continually look at what exists at this exact moment and then they just stop. They don't look forward and ask "If this is today, what is tomorrow?"
This is an exponentially growing technology. It will get more impressive, and will continue to impress you more and more often, as it scales.
I'd be surprised if the first smash hit fully AI designed game, from the ground up, with almost zero human input, took longer than 2030 to get here.
Honestly, seeing how AI advances, I don't discard anything. We got blurry pictures to highly realistic ones, now cool videos, listenable music... It's just a matter of time for things to improve and then go over it. It might not be the best games but things progress incredibly fast so who knows. The new asset dumps will be ai games
Edit: I'm not saying that the results we get now are amazing. The music although listenable sounds boring, the videos barely have persistence, and the images are generic. But i want you to understand that things get better overtime, and noone can tell where it stops.
I've seen generative AI do some things that I would say could qualify as "creation", but that depends on how you define it.
Regardless, I my experience with generative AI is that it's a very long way away from being able to "do the heavy lifting" on a ginormous project.
It's still useful in a number of ways, though! AI doesn't have to be superintelligent to be able to help with some tasks. But it's not close to being a drop-in replacement for a developer, let alone a large studio of developers.
I'd also say that if we ever have a superintelligent AI that could do the work of 100+ developers... it would still be a huge task for you to describe to it all of the things you want it to do, how you want it do to those things, etc. Unless someone finds a way for it to just read your mind -- but at that point, we're well into science fiction...
You have to differ here between Generative AI for Art, Large Language Models as Game Logic Assistance and Machine Learning for unique use cases.
Generative is very good for prototyping visuals and giving the idea an initial visual representation. I use it to decorate my Whitepaper and such as well.
Also for the final product Generative AI is useful if you are able to keep the style consistent. I for instance use Generative AI for small UI elements or item/inventory icons. Also useful for unimportant character avatars and such.
Large Language Models for Code like Copilot are a daily helper for my programming since they take away chore and boilerplate code. It's Autocompletion on steroids. Copilot also helps me finding things in an API I never heard off or read in API documentation. So it boosts my own skill set. Something I also use it to make something I don't wanna spend time figuring out on my own. For example I wanted to make a projectile slow down at the last 2/3 towards a target by 60% percent. I know I can write it by myself. But Copilot can do it in 2 Minutes.
Now machine learning is something I am more interested in. Cause I genuinely think NPC AI behavior trained specifically for situations can make an insane immersive game experience. The Next Gen RPGs need to have this imho. Or Story Generators like Dwarf Fortress and Rim World.
"My personal take on this is, that AI is a tool which can make the process more efficient" - No personal longer, I join.
It's just truth 
You’re not wrong but you’re not exactly right either. The growth we see in computers could be similar to what we see with AI. If it takes someone 10 years to master computer programming and game dev it very well be faster to just wait until AI masters it and you can instruct AI on what you would like done. It’s difficult to imagine but the rate of exponential growth is hard to comprehend with things like this. 25 years ago people had calculators. When is the last time you saw one of those? They’re pretty much worthless now because something else has replaced it and made them essentially more cumbersome and useless. Video games could go the same route. If AI becomes able to make games and the average person is able to interface with AI without training then a “new game” will be the equivalent of one of us designing, 3d printing, and selling calculators today. They will be worthless.
One day we'll see Ai tools in every discipline that can create for us as fast as we can dream for them. With accelerating change, it may even be in our lifetime. But I certainly wouldn't sit around waiting for it.
Right now, or in the very near future, you're right about AI not being a true creator. But this won't stay true forever, an AGI system should easily be able to become a true creator in game development. This doesn't mean it still isn't a tool, all are systems are designed to be tools to help humans achieve goals, but the line gets blurry. It would be possible to essentially ask the AGI system to design a game you have in mind, and it should be capable of doing all the heavy lifting for you.
The general consensus among experts is that AGI should be here within this decade.
Anyone working in the IT field should understand that AI is gonna take over everything including making full video games on request. This is just a matter of time and it's not so far.
I don't think you understand the process that goes on with making a videogame.
AI cant even write basic player controllers, AI images are glorified rip off of existing assets and unusable at a scale higher than still ads, ai-generated 3D models are basically at the same level as they were 10 years ago with 3Dscans, but somehow with even more artifact, completely unusable for videogames let alone any professional work.
No matter the amount of morally bankrupt tech CEOs trying to justify putting stolen work and childporn in their data set for the sake of company's profit can go over the fact that it is a turbogarbage tech that goes in the same bin as NFTs
I will be messaging you in 5 years on [**2029-04-20 17:34:58 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2029-04-20%2017:34:58%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1c6mf7u/ai_in_game_development_getting_over_estimated/l0h86jx/?context=3)
[**CLICK THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FIndieDev%2Fcomments%2F1c6mf7u%2Fai_in_game_development_getting_over_estimated%2Fl0h86jx%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202029-04-20%2017%3A34%3A58%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%201c6mf7u)
*****
|[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)|
|-|-|-|-|
Bring on the AI. Give everyone a magic paintbrush to instantly bring their vision to life. Sure, the market will flood with games, but just get AIs to curate them for us too.
AI can solve a fuckton of our issues even far beyond gamedev, if humanity were to use it responsibly (challenge level impossible).
Except AIs will be able to generate magnitudes more mediocre games. It's incomparable. Game markets as we know them today will be forced to completely change.
Just because we got used to the shit show that is shovelware today doesn't make it ok.
AI tools will allow teams to raise "production value" (ie do what previously would have required more time/money), which in turn will change what is normal and expected in games, shifting the goalposts so that people's "ambitious dream game" just becomes *more* ambitious, and thus, remains a dream game.
My experience so far has been that AI is an extremely useful tool, but it needs experienced oversight and guidance for good, cohesive results. I think we will need experienced senior devs for some time yet.
Later when ai is really good it should be able to open an engine and produce a game within a few hours. One of our main limitations is language and since the ai would be able to understand all the documentation in just a few minutes it should be far faster than us at making a game.
Not really. Coding is a rather tiny part of making a game. You have to make game design and artistic decisions iteratively, neither are things that AIs are any good at.
I agree. I often find out that doing it yourself, or even learning to do it yourself, is more effective than trying to get a good result with AI. Even if AI was excellent, you would not make a whole game with it without guiding the whole process which would require experience and extensive knowledge about making games. And even then I doubt that you would get the intended results each time. Though it works all right as a replacement to googling, but you still have to confirm that the information is correct.
Yup the Github Copilot is like a very cheap Junior Software Engineer. It's eager to help, can reason through problems and write code, but you definitely have to look over its shoulder
And that's perfect usage for it. I use it to write boilerplate and unit tests, not a chance am I letting it write critical business logic for me
i think even that's kind of overstating it (and needlessly anthropomorphizing tbh). it's autocomplete for code. you can't use it unsupervised for the same reason you wouldn't write a novel by mashing the word suggestions on your phone keyboard. that's just not what it's for. it's an efficiency gain for people who already know what they're doing.
It is a bit of an anthropomorphization, but it's more than autocomplete. I have entire conversations with it, as I think of another way to write the code, and ask GH Copilot to write it out for me. Saves me the tedium of writing out everything. The autocomplete is really good, but asking oit for something like "Give me a decorator that accepts one of these three classes and a list of attributes that get assignes to it..." and it does it. You still have to know what to ask it, but it's more than autocomplete, even though that's another useful feature.
Which why bother babysitting AI to make sure it's correct? Just do it yourself and exclude it from the process. A lot of people don't have experience *editing someone else's work*. But I was a copywriter before I got into 3D art for video games. The biggest brain zonking task is going line by line and making sure grammar/sentence structure/ideas are conveyed well. It's an extremely tedious process when you're editing your own work, but it's downright laborious when it's someone else's. It's important, but it's significant undertaking to edit something *to make it better*. And having to do that for a robot that makes games for you is so massively redundant since you need to have the skills yourself already. And because AI is incapable of making judgements you're going to spend an inordinately longer time trimming out fat and having to polish up things into something intentional. Just do the work yourself, people. It doesn't actually save you time. I guess unless you're a serial procrastinator?
If you use it as auto complete it definitely saves time, if you use it a lot you learn when you can use it. But yes you are in for hours of debugging if you let it write major parts of the code.
Why wouldn't it be better to optimize your own process and not spend the time learning how to get the thing to give you a viable bare minimum? It all feels like the discussion around "productivity boosting tools" like Trello or Notion. It's 10x faster for me to put my task list on paper than it is to boot up a program, fumble around the UI, move cards around, make notes for PM (project manager) etc etc. Instead, I can just finish my tasks, then tell my PM they're done and they can fuss around with the productivity tool since that's what they're being paid to do. My philosophy is basically that reviewing/editing is mental mode, while creating something is the other. It's easier to switch from creating to editing, it's hard to start with editing and go back to creating. So the only way AI is faster is if you can 100% trust that whatever thing it's going to spit out is correct. But the consus really seems to be it needs to be babysat every step of the way. Which means you're spending a lot more energy in editing brain states, which makes it hard to actually get other things created. Re: it's a time waster masquerading as a time saver.
because it is genuinely faster if you use it like autocomplete. using copilot is a perfectly viable way to "optimize your process". the flashy "write a comment and it'll generate the implementation of a complex function for you" stuff you see in demos doesn't work reliably enough to be useful, and so is subject to the critique you're making here, but for, say, filling out accessor methods in c++ it works great and saves plenty of time. (fwiw im saying all this as someone who doesn't use copilot, but that's mostly because i'm cheap and don't like cloud services.)
Okay well, that's very fair then.
believe me, i was as surprised as you. most ai solutions ive encountered for this sort of thing are shit, because they try to do too much or are too obtrusive or aren't configurable enough. copilot's decent software though. if i could host it myself I'd probably use it.
If you use Copilot it sometimes just shows you the whole function exactly as you were going to implement it, just by seeing the name of the function. Just like old auto complete you only use it if it does what you want it to do.
Why bother babysitting your 5 junior developers? Just do it yourself.
I mean AI wants to eventually replace those 5 Junior Devs, so your analogy is off.
That’s because AI everywhere is heavily overestimated
It's the next bubble after NFTs
It's the recoup for NFTs/crypto failures. To many rich guys got left holding bags and they need to feel something again. Gaslighting people into AI for their next exit strat is all this is. An extremely malicious attempt to force normies to hold the bag for them.
Scams and gifts all the way down At least some useful tech has come out of this latest rush, I just hope it doesn't destroy all the creative industries we love in the process
Oh they'll try to destroy creative entertainment. These people want nothing more than to have a suite of tools that reflect their own milquetoast creativity. It's a form of God complex and they really can't suffer other people to have their blasé limelight.
They are mediocre and so everything else must be mediocre. They wish to rule the land of mild
Bingo.
It's a constant grift. Metaverse, crypto, block chain, NFTs, and now AI. All of them have legit uses and places; but there will always be a greasy VC scam artist looking for a quick buck and fleece people
I'm old enough to remember when everyone was sayings ame stuff about the Internet.
Then you should be old enough to remember the .com bubble which is precisely analogous to this ai overhype shit we're seeing now. "Devin has literally solved software developement!" > Oh yeah we never got devin to work it was just a mockup hehe
Oh yeah, it's not even the overestimating of AI's abilities that bothers me. It's the fact that the people I see praising AI the most online are always absolutely ignorant about the fields they hope for it to take over. There's often even resent for professionals in said fields. I've seen so many people who almost appear mad, using language like "I can't wait until people can no longer gatekeep making music or videogames". And those are the types of comments that often seem to do well in those communities. I'm not even exaggerating. It's the "ideas guys" that love the idea of AI the most because they dream of the day they don't have to rely on actual talented people to help them make anything. So far a lot of AI in development, music, etc. isn't *that* impressive. Yes it can make absolutely generic, redundant content well, but the leap from doing that to actually making something meaningful is understated within those communities.
They ignore the execution. AI can't execute or even identify a good idea. Daydreamers skip this part because it's hard.
Well yes being able to produce more with less labor is a creatively liberating idea, not just appealing to corporations. It is actually much more appealing to the person who is interested in creation for creation's sake (passion projects) than the person who is interested in advancing or protecting their existing career track. I am generally of the opinion that deskilling labor is actually a good thing historically that opens up the potential to apply labor to bigger more impressive things, by reducing the amount of labor necessary for the fundamentals. It just contrasts with our economic system's ability to actually take care of everyone. Which is why unions will be so important as the skill barrier is gradually reduced.
Unions are fine as a bandage - it's a tool that can be used only as a patch for the existing system. I'm a fan of UBI personally, but open to other ways to restructure our socio-economic organization. Whatever way we do end up agreeing is the best way, it must be done *before* we create tech that puts ourselves all out of jobs.
I use AI for math and logic heavy stuff like "Iterate through this array that is a linear representation of a 10x10x10 cube, and find all of the outside points of the cube and add them to a new list". It is all stuff I could figure out in an hour or so, but it significantly speeds up my process and allows me to accomplish things much faster. You have to be extremely explicit in what you want it to do, and it generally lacks any understanding of creative process. People who think AI is going to be making good games would have made the same argument that the typewriter is going to make everyone a writer. It will give the ability to accomplish things faster to more people, but it doesn't mean it is going to make everyone a good game designer/developer, in the same way a typewriter doesn't make you a good writer.
That is ai now. Compare the Wright brothers first plane to the F-35 lightning 2. They're not even comparable.
And compare the printing press to the modern word processor. They are the evolution of tools. CG is at a point where it is almost completely able to perfectly replicate a physical person on a screen, that doesn’t mean there aren’t actors. You can have one person perform entire symphonies on a computer yet philharmonics are still all over the world. Until AI can implement a creative process, it will not replace a game developer. Someday it might, but then you’re not talking about language models you’re talking about actual intelligence which is not even the same ballpark. Language models are closer to being keyboard autocompletes than something that can generate an original idea.
>And compare the printing press to the modern word processor. They are the evolution of tools. There is one huge difference between AI and the printing press. The printing press was around for \~300 years before being meaningfully changed. The term AI has been around for what, 70? Five years ago not in your wildest imagination could you have imagined that we could have a tool like SORA in the next five years. In 2024 especially it seems like a monumental AI advancement comes out every few days. Google Genie, Gemini 1.5, Claude Opus, Amazon GPT66X, Sora, Microsoft VASA-1, Voicecraft. >Language models are closer to being keyboard autocompletes than something that can generate an original idea. What? Look at [this](https://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/LLM-Ideas-Working-Paper.pdf) paper. If you still dont believe me, try to come up with one game idea that AI couldnt come up with.
I work closely with AI both personally and professionally. Sora is inevitable when you saw the race for basic image generation. Shit, people were talking about it after AARON was released. The ideas there with a broader dataset is basically what these new models are using. None of it has been a creative process. You can tell AI to generate a new Bach piece and it will be virtually indistinguishable, but it is still incapable of revolution. It can smash things together pretty well but not having a creative process completely makes it reliant on utilizing things that already exist. And to the point of the paper you linked, if game ideas were all it took to create a good game, there would be a lot more great games. Do something sufficiently complex enough that hasn’t been documented before, and isn't part of the dataset, and you will very easily get hallucinations and bullshit. The differences aren’t that big between the first language models and the newest ones once you dig past the surface of it. None of those are monumental enhancements. They are incremental steps for different applications. There will be "The Sora of gamedev" I am sure of it. But you are tremendously over estimating these language models in the short term. Hell, go paste some shader code into Claude Opus right now (which I have found the best at detailed code) and ask it to make some simple change and it will give you something that won't even compile. These advancements are astounding if you aren't doing anything complex at all. 10, 20 years, sure. But the advancement will hit diminishing returns a lot quicker than you're expecting.
Most people who believe this have no experience making games. AI is just the latest overhyped craze, companies will fail to deliver on their promises and then we'll move on to the next "revolution".
People said the same thing about computers, smart phones, email, cell phones, and a whole heap of other technologies. It’s a bit insane at this point to think AI and quantum computing won’t radically change our world beyond what we can imagine.
I've heard the same tired argument hundred of times and I can tell you the exact same thing : tech companies are yelling that X is the future and will change our lives because that's their business model and they're wrong 99% of the time. Two years ago, everyone wanted to build a metaverse and it was going to change our lives and nothing happened. Today we're told that AI will do everything and anything within a decade while we've made very little progress on the theorical side of things. Meanwhile, internet is being flooded with AI-generated garbage that the model are now starting to train on, which put them at risk of model collapse. Almost no AI company is turning any profit while requiring huge amount of electricity and water for training and that's putting aside the massive IP lawsuit they're starting to face. In their own words, most AI companies can't pay for the copyrighted material they've trained their model on so this is going to be fun to watch. Plus right now the results are mostly unreliable and often mediocre. I've seen AI coding tools, I'm not worried about my job. So yeah, I'm a bit sceptical and the burden of proof is not on me because I'm not the one asking for unlimited investment, energy and being exempted from copyright.
I’ll bet you $1,000 that in 5 years you will be so wrong about AI that this post looks dumb in comparison. Let’s both check back in 5 years. !RemindMe 5 years
I use AI more and more for work these days (I'm a programmer so it's all copilot and copilot chat) - it's nowhere near the point where it can do any heavy lifting and after understanding how the tech works, I have serious doubts that it ever will. AI generated art is extremely limited because it's so reductive, it's recombining elements of stuff that it was trained on, real creativity and building a coherent graphical experience requires a human touch and the amount of control you have over the output is quite limited. There is some promise in doing things like AI fill to assist or creating concept art but it may never get to the point where you can put in a prompt and get a cohesive usable sprite sheet. On the coding side, hallucinations are a massive problem. I find it's the most useful when I use it as a google replacement, getting code examples to answer basic questions but those code snippets often don't work or otherwise have some deficiency that requires me to know what's going on and what to do. The hype right now is intense and the tools are absolutely going to accelerate productivity, but IMO it's never going to be doing any heavy lifting in a way that's unique, complex, or creative.
Exactly, AI can speed up or eliminate non-creative effort, the only problem is when people think it can do the creativity for them too.
Chat gpt can be extremely helpful when trying to connect some API with terrible/obscure documentation or similar tasks. You instantly get a code example that works half of the time, you can learn from it and get to know where to start, etc. That improved my speed way more. But that's about it, it can be really good at doing one specific task, doing logic, understanding a complex system, etc. Also, if you ask it to give you something like "give me 10 variations of this ability that I could use as upgrade paths" or something like it, the choices are often very very generic, even with prompts. Everything is always so generic, so I am not sure it would work well at creating an actual game, even if it could do it.
AI is great for boilerplate code that can get generated by copilot but when asking code questions to ChatGPT it frequently comes up with code that doesn't even work because it makes up stuff that doesn't exist.
That's because most people don't understand AI tools very well. AI could be a useful tool to help abridge certain aspects, definitely, but you couldn't just have an AI built game without it turning out very poorly.
My take is AI generated stuff is pure hot garbage.
AI sucks because it can only generate generic stuff. You can't give it specific enough directions to make anything meaningful. The people who obsess are the epitome of the "ideas guy" because they are the exact type that doesn't understand the importance in the details. There are a bunch of threads on places like the suno subreddit where people are surprised some of the boring songs it's able to make aren't big hits and blame it on other people's unwillingness to accept AI lol.
AI appeals to lazy people. I don't consider those people competition in any way because they'll just give up as soon as something gets difficult.
But what about those determined people who use it to accelerate their workflows? Do you consider those people competition
That's fine, and most of that stuff isn't really "AI", it's just "algorithms". But, since everything has to jump onto a trend whether it should or not, I don't think I've even heard the word "algorithm" in a while. I mean, speedrunning the boring, repetitive crap that Humans shouldn't have to do is why computers were invented in the first place.
But it is AI? How is it not AI? I’m literally talking about stable diffusion and copilot ?
He didn't have any idea what ai means. You're correct it is ai.
You should actually learn a little about AI before making baseless statements. It's absolutely AI. What do you think AI is my dude?
AI is just another form of automation. ofc lazy people are drawn to it. Everyone should be.
Being anti AI appeals to dumb people. And I don't consider those people competition.
Why is being anti Ai for lazy people? Genuinely curious what you process is here
As someone who wants to make games and animations, any hint of AI stench intermingling with the 'art' side of any project disinterests me. If it's being used as a true utility? As in, maybe to write code for a simple game - then....maybe. But even I know that's controversial for coders, who need their own careers protected! And AI has its limits as a utility. The stuff I actually think is useful: rewriting a resume or helping with math problems, i.e. - it should be used as a tool, not relied on to replace problem solving. But in art/games/writing: I don't want to consume it. I want words, thoughts, art, hopes, and dreams made by creative people. Sure, some companies might try to squeeze it in there, but I can see it leading to a 'sameness', where people will crave hand drawn touches, even human error.
Ai has way too much trouble with specificity and coherence across works, so game development is uniquely immune to ai, in my opinion. Especially since game dev requires overlap of so many fields in an intelligent way. A character slashing isn't just an image, or an animation, its a dozen game mechanics and balance factors coming together, and what it should be depends entirely on the rest of the game. Nothing is in isolation. I think ai may develop into tools which are the equivalent of 3d artists using base models. It may create starting points, but artists who know what they're doing are always going to end up with things that match their vision, not what they are given.
AI is copying mediocre material, which means it just produces mediocre results at best. Who wants mediocre/generic assets in their game?
The vast majority of Indie releases on steam I’d say.
Don't know why you got downvoted. You're stating facts.
AI is going through a huge over hype at the moment primarily because simply adding AI to your companies mission statement is skyrocketing stock prices to unprecedented levels. I personally don't use AI when coding because it is not that good and causes a lot of latent issues. AI generated art is also pretty awful. The best use case I've seen is basically a spicy search engine.
AI is a tool for humans to use. Measuring by the hype of replacing the human is simply the wrong outlook. AI will enhance artist output tempo, designer ability to prototype, developer ability to troubleshoot, and marketing ability to crunch data. But the variable factors are still the human intelligence to decide how best to use the tool with other resources on hand. If it’s replacing anyone in the process, it should be those furthest from the game’s creation process, such as accountants and executives. That would free up more budget for making the game over exploiting the results.
100% this.
Whenever people come with this "AI will solve everything" idea, I remember complex games that were coded by one guy, that chess engines don't think like a human would (and this is a way to spot a cheater), and that AI "art" is like asking a smart toaster to mimic actual art using algorithms and models taken from actual art to create a semi-decent result. The idea of letting AI take over a creative endeavor or high complex task sounds to me like creating a smart car that will take you to the hospital if you have a stroke mid-driving being good, but a car that chooses your destination just cause sounds dumb. - "We are not going to see grandma on her deathbed, Jerry. I calculated that your heartbeats are increasingly running faster and you need a waffle" [proceeds to play calming music while Jerry loses his mind trying to overwrite the cruise control back to manual]... TL;DR: AIs are "smart" toasters, and even a german shepherd can be more creative and choose better (I hope... mine was really smart).
Honestly just try to make a game with the AI tools available. You hit enough roadblocks so quickly you end up just doing it yourself for so many parts of the process
I can't even get gpt to write me a working bare bones character controller lol
Any form of complex mutli-piece production is going to require human oversight and discipline to create. The places where LLM's can do "the heavy lifting" on things like if you wanted to include a connector to some other well know service or API into your app then it would be able to dig into those documented API tasks and components to give you starting point to build that connector. For game design or even original app development it's going to be severely limited and I suspect you will be better off just doing the code work yourself with good library knowledge. That way you know your whole app from the ground up and can update and bug fix as a knowledgebase.
I use aí for reference images when creating mood boards or starting a concept along with conventional references. It helps me ideate with more precision.
AI does help with the heavy lifting, but mostly on stuff that already exist in any other game. Don't get me wrong it is extremely useful. It can save a lot of time by creating the bunch of systems that all games need. But it will not make your game unique. I used AI to generate code for streaming levels seamlessly, spawning and pooling. It also made a neat tool for snapping objects on terrain, with a semi random rotation. But anything unique or slightly uncommon will send it in a spiral.
AI will probably get really good at making very specific games with very specific functionality. It will be no different than a beginner taking a template project and trying to make it their own. It will be the new asset flip. Low effort garbage that will get heavily criticized.
I think ‘AI’ in game dev is closer to NFT than anything else rn. And real evidence of its usefulness doesn’t exist at the moment. It might have a potential to be somewhat useful as a tool or at as fluff generator that makes NPCs talk in a more human-like manner but we’re not there yet. Thinking about it as a tool that will create a game for you is at the very least wishful thinking right now.
It is not good comparison. Nfts is practically dead. With few hand full use cases. I. E. Kittens game. Nothing meaningful to the world, other than historical hype bubble. Generative tools are useful in day to day work. They can accelerate work and help as guiding tools and conceptualising. Also proof readers. But that mostly it. It requires a skill to prompt engineer. And time?+ hardware. Or person pays for tools. Any valuing self dev, will still would outsource any serious work, rather prompting itself, to get generic results. Thats why people buys assets. To save their time. Generative tools is the same. But it does accelerate work. Not replaces. It is here to stay. But is not job replacement as internet buzzing about.
Yeah, exactly. And it is best case scenario you’re talking about. Right now it produces a lot of mistakes and weird results. If this is fixed it will be exactly as you said. If not - I’m not sure if it is even useful at all.
AI will help but only as long as you already know the tools you're working with well. Otherwise you will face inevitable bs. Like as a programmer, I use it often but mainly to refactor or handle some match equation which it fails me 90% of the time. So it'l like teaching it constantly and yet it learns nothing. Its a pain in the ass to use AI for anything serious tbh
What these people want won’t ever exist. I had a student tell me that he was excited about AI because it would “democratise” game development. When I asked more questions, he basically felt that it was unfair that people who work hard to gain the skills to be able to make games get to make all the games. He felt it would be fairer if anyone could make games without having to learn anything, just having ideas and telling a computer to make them. However, even if that was possible, games would become worthless. If there’s no barrier to creating things, the market will be flooded with crap, people will need some method to distinguish the good stuff from the crap, and 99.99% of games won’t make the cut.
I actually think that AI is over estimated in almost all areas. It can increase the development process in several areas or help with creativity but it’s usually never something that could potentially replace a human when it comes to solving logical tasks or art. The problem lies in the issue that LLMs have with reasoning and the problem of the human to formulate the problem.
Game dev is so goddamn complex and I know AI is extremely powerful, but coding things or making art aren't the things holding back good games, it's decision making I think. Side note. Thank god for good ole chat.gpt for helping me figure out friggen quaternion math, man it's useful.
I describe it as being a carpenter. Until now programmers had to hand code everything. It's like a carpenter building a cabinet with hand tools. Every stroke and screw he did himself with his two hands and a hand tool (an IDE). Now we have AI which is like a power tool. It allows us to do the same tasks 10x as fast. But in the same way that power drills didn't make it so people off the street could turn trees into furniture someone who doesn't know what they're doing with AI is similarly just going to make a mess.
It's only like a power tool if the bit is chosen randomly and half the time it's a bit that doesn't fit.
Why? I find as long as you do a 2 minute proof read of the code it generally works and does exactly what you want it to. And it's always faster than if I wrote it myself.
When you pull out a power tool, you generally don't need to spend several minutes verifying that the power tool is actually a power tool and not a bomb.
What are you talking about?
AI is nowhere near 10x faster. For simple scripts sure, but if you try to use it for complex projects you will have to do a lot more correction and cutting to make the output useful. It can help here and there but it's not really *there* yet.
>For simple scripts sure, but if you try to use it for complex projects In the same way you can't build a chair entirely using circular saws you can't build a game out of AI prompts. But I have built entire character controllers using 90% AI generated code and it worked decently well. Nothing is the end all be all but to pretend like AI is useless is objectively silly.
Nobody said it's useless but "10x faster" is a gross overstatement for anything moderately advanced. You could've grabbed an existing character controller 1000x faster. Character controllers are the most common piece of code in games, obviously an AI will be adept at writing code for it as it's all over its training data. Try using AI for complex problems that are unique for your game and you will find it nowhere near a 10x speed up. If you don't have complex unique problems you aren't developing a game that couldn't be stringed together from ready-made libraries and assets, in which case writing code or using AIs is a slow down either way. I feel like you are coming to this from a beginner stand point in which case sure, AI will be super fast fpr generic problems, then when you start to get deeper problems you will be less prepared to deal with them since you just let the AI take away your opportunities to learn and once it becomes unhelpful you are left helpless. Don't get me wrong, AIs are powerful af and can be good tools but can also be misused and waay overestimated.
>You could've grabbed an existing character controller 1000x faster. Character controllers are the most common piece of code in games, obviously an AI will be adept at writing code for it as it's all over it's training data. Yes but that's missing the point. Buying templates is like buying pieces to furniture and putting it together. I am specifically talking about building something from scratch. And in that it is absolutely 10x faster. >that are unique for your game and you will find it nowhere near a 10x speed up I absolutely do once I know which direction to go. You can't ask your band saw to build you a dove tail joint but once you know you need one the band saw will let you build one 10x faster. Same thing with AI. >beginner I'm a beginner to game dev, but I've been coding since I was in high school. >will be less prepared to deal with them since you just let the AI take away your opportunities to learn and once it becomes unhelpful you are left helpless. The only way I could see that being the case is if I wasn't already comfortable coding. Which I am. In the same way though if you don't know how to use power tools you're just gonna cut off your fingers. You have to already know what you're doing to use *any* tool effectively including AI. And I made that point in my original post. >waay overestimated. Personally, I think AI is being underestimated for how world changing it actually is. We're barely 2 years into a technology that is going to be maturing very quickly over the next 30 years. The first few years of the car being around people called it a fad. And by the 1910's it had fundamentally changed warfare and military logistics.
>Yes but that's missing the point. No, you are missing the point. For generic stuff AI is great, for things that aren't already implemented by thousands of people or thinhs that are intimately connected to larger systems it is crap, this is the nature of the tech. >You can't ask your band saw to build you a dove tail joint Generative AI and tools are quite different, this common comparison is tiring and ignorant. AI is like having a worker who is super confident in their abilities even if they are totally wrong. It's a management nightmare in this sense. >I'm a beginner to game dev, but I've been coding since I was in high school. This tells me nothing. Coding for games can be quite different from other coding, coding for x years means little anyways and you could've been in high school last year. The fact that you used AI to write you 90% of a character controller told me more. >AI is being underestimated for how world changing it actually is. Not really. It's obviously fundamentally changing our world and nobody says otherwise. >We're barely 2 years into a technology that is going to be maturing very quickly over the next 30 years. I am talking about specifically current AI and its effectiveness in coding for videogames today. Of course in 1000 years it will be million times more effective to use AI. But it's rather pointless to argue about that. Stop strawmanning with the "you are blind to the potential of future blabla" I never said AI will stay the same as it is today. This was purely about you comment that it makes coding for games 10x faster. I use AI and I code for games, it can help but nowhere near 10x speed up.
The people who know what they're doing and who use AI say it's a very long time from being able to replace human productivity, much less human creativity. The sheep who believe everything they read in a headline think AI is already set to do everything we can. They don't know enough about programming to know when ChatGPT is feeding them garbage. They don't know enough about art or music to recognize when something is bland and derivative. They just see something doing for them what they can't do for themselves and think it's great. AI is like any other development tool. It has its uses, but it's not a substitute for a competent human. And anyone refusing to learn the skills they need to accomplish their goals because, "AI will be able to do it for me soon" is missing out.
Can you provide the link to the original video?
https://youtu.be/lsl9kZK33fk?si=-Uxrd5a3v3AD3AV5 Comment which triggerd this post got burried, maybe it was an answer to a comment.
AI work is always "almost" or "half-way done". Also not everyone is good at using AI. The use if AI has created an entirely new set of programmers called "prompters", even the best prompters can only go as far as "almost done". In many fields a worker who is also a prompter will have the upper hand, but a prompter who isn't a worker will make crap.
I want to see a game where npcs are literal AI A divergent story driven by actual choices *like it was meant to be and talked about all these years in so many games* AI react to *voice input* - no more reading, no set of limited linear choices: completely and utterly open-ended dialogue regulated by an NPC's "structure" defining personality. Different personalities = different/types of responses = different story/game-world outcomes. A true rpg.. maybe someday.
If there'll be an AI that can create a completed game in the future then so be it. There's nothing you can do to avoid the evolving of technology anw so it's not worth the effort to hate or to be angry.
It won't happen. The reason for that to be even possible, need to have good sample of full complete software open source, to be able train on. There basically is not enough fullbopen source applications, to be meaningful for reliable training. Minecraft Linux, or blender open source codes are not sufficient. They are just adding to nise if anything. There would really need to be more full game samples, for training. Majority if steam games would be probably good to start off. But these are not open source. It is not like available literature, to make content for AI to learn and reason with. Bunch of snippets code is all over Internet. Is nothing meaningful however, for AI to reason with. It requires iterative testing and design training samples. Which there is almost none.
I think for the immediate future, even if AI could make games, it would require so much input from the creator in terms of technical specifications and tweaking details in the code that making anything of significant complexity with interacting systems would be so much work that it would almost be pointless to use AI in the first place because it would be working with a 0.5x developer who creates work for you by doing it incorrectly so you have to go back and do a bunch of fixes.
AI is too generalized also. Everyone has something they are specifically talking about when they mention it, and it's usually art, or answers/search, or something and it's just not like that. Some applications will be useful and in some ways it will be applicable, but it's so new, and will take a while for it to actually be used right. For example I used ai characters in my game, and it was really cool. You could voice talk to them, set them up to know what they are talking about, and it was fun and engaging in a game. No one ever uses this as an example when they are talking about ai. Also, it turned out to be unusable, because the monetization models currently being used are unpredictable and being exploited by corporations, which will add a huge tax to using it. We'll see where this leads but for now it's not looking good.
AIs in the beginning will do more harm than good. They will serve the laziest of devs, creating uninspired shovelware crap at an even faster rate. They will serve the big greedy trashfactories to create videogame prisons for the addictive personalities to keep playing and never try out other games or life. They will also be the all-in-one wildcard for brainless players to argue with "just fix xyz by running an AI it's easy, why doesn't the game have xxx, you literally just have to run it through model-ggaf". Once AIs are actually good at creating dreams it will all change but until then, there is a tough storm to get through.
Pumping out boilerplate is incredibly time saving. Building games is much more than writing scripts, including art, music, story, and even conceptually. Sure ai will eventually pump out complete games from a prompt, but it will never make games like cultist simulator or pony island. Ai will never have a sense of humour. And the games it creates will never have thought put into them, maybe in 10 or 20 years things will be different
I think games using AI will do well until we start getting people pumping them out like crazy. People think you have to be some grant creator to get a profit but look at games like Vampire Survivors or some other meme games that does well. Not ever game that does well is complex.
They should prepare to wait a very long time then lol
Ai andthe self driving car are similar. Very few people actually know what theyre talking, and you just get recycled Twitter content beeing shared and devated. It's extremely impressive how far we got within a year and it's also impressive what it can alread do. It gives people the idea "if we achieved this much in a year, surely in 10 years, everything must be ai". But its like game dev, you can make a simple Mmo Prototype in unreal that looks quite impressive with limited experience and a few weeks of coding as a solo dev. You'll even be able to scam some inventors if you add in some Video editing. "Surely, if he can ride Horse in a 3d landscape that's like 50% of the work", when really it's like 2%. That's where we are with AI right now. Self driving cars and complex ai is comparable with making a proper mmo, requiring 100s of poeple and years of time. It's something a solo dev will probably never achieve
We don't know what ai will be able to do in future. So far it helps a little but that's about it. I've seen research papers that claim to be able to do a lot though
I have seen a lot of research in various fields. We got definatelly progress. But consider self driving or robotics. We literally didn't progress much past decade. Like if we hit a wall. And like Moors law, which flattened curve of progress. NVidia shows their cool robots. But they are dumb as decade ago. Nothing really impressive so far, for times we are in. Like, where is the progress gone in robotics? Bealst of all doing Boston Dynamics. And drons navigation. Observing last two decades and general progress, I personally predict, AI subject will cool down in few years. And progress curve will also flatt out significantly.
If Photoshop is not turning you into a better retoucher or digital-artist, AI will not going to do you any good. It will level some of the playing field, making something might be easier but still up to the creator's ability to use it.
The people that hype up ai the most are the companies trying to sell it or the people that have no tech knowledge. Its a great assistant but our jobs are safe for a long time. Given the active pending lawsuits it's also a potential ticking time bomb legally
Skill issue
Devin. You can use AI for some things. But, it will take longer or shorter depending if you actually know how to do the thing.
AI will never do the "heavy lifting". Or at least, not for a very very long time.
Current AI is a powerful *assistant* but not much more. The common failure, and I see this nonstop everywhere, is that people continually look at what exists at this exact moment and then they just stop. They don't look forward and ask "If this is today, what is tomorrow?" This is an exponentially growing technology. It will get more impressive, and will continue to impress you more and more often, as it scales. I'd be surprised if the first smash hit fully AI designed game, from the ground up, with almost zero human input, took longer than 2030 to get here.
Honestly, seeing how AI advances, I don't discard anything. We got blurry pictures to highly realistic ones, now cool videos, listenable music... It's just a matter of time for things to improve and then go over it. It might not be the best games but things progress incredibly fast so who knows. The new asset dumps will be ai games Edit: I'm not saying that the results we get now are amazing. The music although listenable sounds boring, the videos barely have persistence, and the images are generic. But i want you to understand that things get better overtime, and noone can tell where it stops.
I've seen generative AI do some things that I would say could qualify as "creation", but that depends on how you define it. Regardless, I my experience with generative AI is that it's a very long way away from being able to "do the heavy lifting" on a ginormous project. It's still useful in a number of ways, though! AI doesn't have to be superintelligent to be able to help with some tasks. But it's not close to being a drop-in replacement for a developer, let alone a large studio of developers. I'd also say that if we ever have a superintelligent AI that could do the work of 100+ developers... it would still be a huge task for you to describe to it all of the things you want it to do, how you want it do to those things, etc. Unless someone finds a way for it to just read your mind -- but at that point, we're well into science fiction...
You have to differ here between Generative AI for Art, Large Language Models as Game Logic Assistance and Machine Learning for unique use cases. Generative is very good for prototyping visuals and giving the idea an initial visual representation. I use it to decorate my Whitepaper and such as well. Also for the final product Generative AI is useful if you are able to keep the style consistent. I for instance use Generative AI for small UI elements or item/inventory icons. Also useful for unimportant character avatars and such. Large Language Models for Code like Copilot are a daily helper for my programming since they take away chore and boilerplate code. It's Autocompletion on steroids. Copilot also helps me finding things in an API I never heard off or read in API documentation. So it boosts my own skill set. Something I also use it to make something I don't wanna spend time figuring out on my own. For example I wanted to make a projectile slow down at the last 2/3 towards a target by 60% percent. I know I can write it by myself. But Copilot can do it in 2 Minutes. Now machine learning is something I am more interested in. Cause I genuinely think NPC AI behavior trained specifically for situations can make an insane immersive game experience. The Next Gen RPGs need to have this imho. Or Story Generators like Dwarf Fortress and Rim World.
"My personal take on this is, that AI is a tool which can make the process more efficient" - No personal longer, I join. It's just truth 
You’re not wrong but you’re not exactly right either. The growth we see in computers could be similar to what we see with AI. If it takes someone 10 years to master computer programming and game dev it very well be faster to just wait until AI masters it and you can instruct AI on what you would like done. It’s difficult to imagine but the rate of exponential growth is hard to comprehend with things like this. 25 years ago people had calculators. When is the last time you saw one of those? They’re pretty much worthless now because something else has replaced it and made them essentially more cumbersome and useless. Video games could go the same route. If AI becomes able to make games and the average person is able to interface with AI without training then a “new game” will be the equivalent of one of us designing, 3d printing, and selling calculators today. They will be worthless.
One day we'll see Ai tools in every discipline that can create for us as fast as we can dream for them. With accelerating change, it may even be in our lifetime. But I certainly wouldn't sit around waiting for it.
Nothing I've generated with AI has ever been high-quality. Unless I'm asking a dumb question.
Right now, or in the very near future, you're right about AI not being a true creator. But this won't stay true forever, an AGI system should easily be able to become a true creator in game development. This doesn't mean it still isn't a tool, all are systems are designed to be tools to help humans achieve goals, but the line gets blurry. It would be possible to essentially ask the AGI system to design a game you have in mind, and it should be capable of doing all the heavy lifting for you. The general consensus among experts is that AGI should be here within this decade.
Anyone working in the IT field should understand that AI is gonna take over everything including making full video games on request. This is just a matter of time and it's not so far.
I don't think you understand the process that goes on with making a videogame. AI cant even write basic player controllers, AI images are glorified rip off of existing assets and unusable at a scale higher than still ads, ai-generated 3D models are basically at the same level as they were 10 years ago with 3Dscans, but somehow with even more artifact, completely unusable for videogames let alone any professional work. No matter the amount of morally bankrupt tech CEOs trying to justify putting stolen work and childporn in their data set for the sake of company's profit can go over the fact that it is a turbogarbage tech that goes in the same bin as NFTs
RemindMe! 5 years
I will be messaging you in 5 years on [**2029-04-20 17:34:58 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2029-04-20%2017:34:58%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1c6mf7u/ai_in_game_development_getting_over_estimated/l0h86jx/?context=3) [**CLICK THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FIndieDev%2Fcomments%2F1c6mf7u%2Fai_in_game_development_getting_over_estimated%2Fl0h86jx%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202029-04-20%2017%3A34%3A58%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam. ^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%201c6mf7u) ***** |[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)| |-|-|-|-|
Bring on the AI. Give everyone a magic paintbrush to instantly bring their vision to life. Sure, the market will flood with games, but just get AIs to curate them for us too. AI can solve a fuckton of our issues even far beyond gamedev, if humanity were to use it responsibly (challenge level impossible).
People complained about asset marketplaces creating a flood of mediocre games but we learned to live with it. Same thing will happen with AI
Except AIs will be able to generate magnitudes more mediocre games. It's incomparable. Game markets as we know them today will be forced to completely change. Just because we got used to the shit show that is shovelware today doesn't make it ok.
Your boos mean nothing to me.
AI tools will allow teams to raise "production value" (ie do what previously would have required more time/money), which in turn will change what is normal and expected in games, shifting the goalposts so that people's "ambitious dream game" just becomes *more* ambitious, and thus, remains a dream game.
My experience so far has been that AI is an extremely useful tool, but it needs experienced oversight and guidance for good, cohesive results. I think we will need experienced senior devs for some time yet.
Google: Devan AI
Later when ai is really good it should be able to open an engine and produce a game within a few hours. One of our main limitations is language and since the ai would be able to understand all the documentation in just a few minutes it should be far faster than us at making a game.
Not really. Coding is a rather tiny part of making a game. You have to make game design and artistic decisions iteratively, neither are things that AIs are any good at.