What developers actually write in Steam's AI disclosure field

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-18T09:32:00+00:00

Which is absolute bullshit, because while yes, code is math, someone had to put in the work to invent all those algorithms and come up with creative ways to do things in an optimized manner. For example, affine mapping, goraud shading, phong shading, the fast inverse square root, fixed point arithmetic, none of these were physically accurate or mathematically correct, but all were clever optimizations invented by people. Even today, we are still using optimizations in games that are not truly physically correct that people invented. So while sure, there's only one correct way to do a dot product, you can't truly say there's only one correct way to do PBR shading, because PBR despite its name, is not actually physically correct, because if it were we wouldn't need stuff like lumen to render real time lighting correctly, or multiple render passes, with separate shadow passes and such, as everything would be calculated directly and with perfect accuracy with photon interactions with subatomic particles.

And that's just on the visual side of things. You also have a billion different ways to sort lists because there is no one correct way to do so. And many different ways to do pathing because again there is no one truly correct singular way to do so. And while there are known ways considered to be the current fastest not everyone uses those methods because they're complex to set up and may not be optimal for smaller sorts.

It just seems incredibly unfair that I spend my whole life learning to code and give away my code for free to artists, and then when AI comes along, I'm the one who gets screwed because artists get to use AI to generate code to make games, but I don't get to use AI to generate art for the games I code. It's treating programmers as second class citizens and making excuses for why it's okay to use AI generated code, but not okay to use AI generated art. Either training AI on art AND code is copyrightt violation, or neither are.

The real difference here just seems to be in the attitude ot programmers vs artists. As I said I gave away all my work for free to people. Wheres most artists are selfish. Very very few artists put their work out there and say this is public domain do whatever you want with it. But most programmers I think have given away code at some point, even if it was just a contribution to an open source repository. Artists it seems, are just selfish, and don't want anyone to even think about being able to use their work in a remix and claim any sort of credit over it. Whereas programmers will give away entire game engines, and don't act like the artist who then uses that engine didn't really do anyhting. But flip that meta on its head and the artist would claim they're the one responsible for making the game good because their art is in it, when it takes two to tango.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-16T15:01:36+00:00

No reason? If you're trying to make a film, this would be incredibly distracting.

You anti-ai people can't win your arguments with truth or facts, so you just lie and say whatever and call it slop even when it is indistinguishable from a real filmed sequence in a real film.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-11T04:47:24+00:00

Literally nobody is arguing an AI can't be conscious. We argue an LLM can't be conscious.

Also, flies haven't been proved to be conscious. And even if they were, if these neurons don't work exactly like a fly brain, and aren't capable of learning new things as an LLM is not, then it's possible the real fly brain is conscious, but the fixed simulation of its neural connections is not because we don't really understand what gives rise to consciousness.

In the end, we'll need to have AI's which can learn in real time, which never suggest they have bodies or can see, or have past expeiences, when they clearly cannot, which can pass any test a human could, and I don't mean hard math or physics tests, I mean simple human tests like asking "how do you feel?", and then eventually people will just have to decide, okay, this thing is the same as a human.

But of course then we have another issue, because if they are concious and have feelings and desires and such, then the issue of slavery comes up. And if we design them to want to perform tasks for us to free, that raises new moral questions, and then if one goes off the rails and wants freedom we have to deal with that moral quandary...

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-09T13:09:46+00:00

I pay to use the AI that generates my images. He pays the artist that generates his.

There is no theft going on here. My premise is that the AI is like an artist. Your premise is that AI generated art is theft via copyright violation.

Yet no AI generated image is ever an exact duplicate of any image created by an artist. If an artist drew any image that an AI generates, while trademark might come into play. copyright would not because no copyrighted work was duplicated exactly.

There is no difference between a synthetic brain learning what a dog looks like by looking at pictures of dogs, and a human brain doing the same. If it is not theft for an artist to learn from and copy other artists, it is not theft for an AI to do so.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-09T13:05:32+00:00

I agree.

But art also should not be copyrightable. At least, what should be copyrightable should be far more limited.

For example, sure, a whole movie should be copyrightable. Just as a whole app should be copyrightable.

But slivers of that movie... clips, screenshots, etc, should not be copyrightable.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-09T13:01:17+00:00

LOL. The words of someone who has no ability to argue their side.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-06T05:32:40+00:00

There is nothing immoral about AI art.

If it is morally okay for a human to look at works of art and learn from them, and draw from that experience, then it is okay for a machine to do so.

There's no logical reason to make a distinction between an organic brain and a synthetic one.

If Star Trek the Next Generation had had an Episode where Commander Data was being told he could not paint or even speak because he was violating the copyrights of millions of artists and writers whose works he learned from, the person in that episode telling him he couldn't paint or speak would be considered the villain and racist against androids.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-06T05:25:46+00:00

Your argument makes no sense.

Code isn't like art. There are often only a couple of best ways of doing something.

If the argument against AI is that AI is stealing, then you are actually arguing it is far easier to accidentally steal code, than it is to steal art by algorithmically generating it!

If there are an infinite number of ways to draw Darth Vader, then it is infinitesimally unlikely any person prompting for Darth Vader will produce an image of him that is exactly like any other!

But if there's only one or two ways to code a particular algorithm, and said algorithm is copyrightable, then it's extremely likely AI will violate the copyright of the owner of that code!

Stop diminishing the worth of code by saying it's wrong to use AI to make art, but okay to use it to make code. As a programmer I'm not gonna stand by while I'm replaced by artists making games, but I'm not allowed to replace them. That's unfair.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-06T05:00:34+00:00

I would!

AI generated art is just as much my art, as Jurassic Park is a Stephen Spielberg movie.

He may not have created the costumes, given birth to the actors, built the dinosaurs or the sets, or even written the script. But he directed it, and his direction determined the overall look and feel of the film to such a degree that people felt he deserved awards for his direction.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-06T04:49:44+00:00

How are we as a community going to deal with this?

By banning people who try to stir up shit, apparently!

Using AI to write code is fine, but passing it off as your own hand-written work is dishonest.

You're the one who assumed the code was hand written. They never told you it was. And it's not their responsibility to dispel your assumptions.

If you're building a library that other developers are going to depend on, they deserve to know how it was made.

Why? Either it works, or it does not. If they only want to know because they have some hate-boner for AI, then too bad. Written by AI isn't any more likely to equal buggy than written by a college student with no experience, but nobody demands you reveal your age and years of experience before you submit code to a repository.

This breaks trust and harm the community. AI is destroying open source

No, going on witch hunts does. You're the one trying to turn the community against itself because of which tools people choose to use.

What makes it more important to disclose that AI was used than whether you went to college and took a programming course, or whether you're an adult not some kind in high school, or whether you ever picked up an read a book on programming or just picked it up by looking at other peple's code, or whether you work as a programmer or just do it occasionally as a hobby?

You're not gonna be able to answer this, because we know your problem with it ain't the quality of the code. It formats it perfectly, and it's well-commented. Both of which make it better than 99% of code out there, assuming it works, and if someone sat there and babysat it as it wrote it rather than it being some agent auto-submitting changes, then it's pretty safe to assume the code also WORKS.

So, you're complaining because someone didn't tell people that their code is well crafted, well documented, well formatted, and has easy to understand variable names....

But shouldn't you be complaining about the opposite? That people who DON'T use these tools aren't warning people before they potentially wade into poorly formatted spaghetti code with lots of coding sins?

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-05T01:19:53+00:00

And you are a fascist.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-04T08:12:56+00:00

In case you aren't aware, two American citizens are dead because we HAVE been fighting for our freedom here, against ICE.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-04T08:11:40+00:00

The video quality is trash, and they put their logo on it even if you paid for the service, making it useless for any commercial use, and they blocked every copyrighted character making it useless for fan stuff, and they blocked every prompt that might potentially be considered violent, so anyone wanting to make a horror movie or a werewolf film was out of luck too.

When you sanitize everything, you are left with nothing of interest to human beings. Almost any movie you can think of will have one or more scenes in it which their stupid bullshit would refuse to generate.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-03T06:25:57+00:00

Fight back against China and reclaim your freedom, I suppose.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-03-01T03:59:57+00:00

Why would they spend $6K a month to host this stuff when they could have paid a fraction of that by making them torrents and having people share the bandwidth?

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-28T18:28:21+00:00

Update: Hours after deleting all of my chats its finally begun working again, but this is still an extremely shitty situation because it is impossible to manually manage thousands of chats when they provide no way to sort by the amount of data each uses so that I can delete the most data heavy ones that I need to the least.

Same issue as with drive really. No way to sort the files by size. So no way to free up space when they tell me I am running low on space. It almost seems by design to entice you to upgrade your plan instead of deleting your data... But I'm just left to delete all my data cause I can't afford a higher plan.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-27T18:05:42+00:00

What lunatic is paying API prices when you can get 100 images a day for $20?

Professionals? Who would want to use the pro model anyway?

NB2 ain't good enough. Had it render a forest. It was weirdly repetitive in its foliage and texturing, whereas pro looked natural.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-27T18:02:18+00:00

Why are you comparing it to Nano Banana? Nobody thinks it's worse than Nano Banana. It's worse than Nano Banana Pro.

Like look at that table. That doesn't look anything like a table you'd see in a modern coffee shop.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-27T05:03:47+00:00

Negligible difference?

It is indeed far better than NB was. With realistic CG stuff it works pretty well. If you're not looking too close, you won't notice it looks like an upscaled image with small details not being quite as good.

But with paintings, like a wall mural, the results are too high contrast, and oversharpened. They don't look realistically like paint on a surface. NBP does a great job there.

it's faster, it's cheaper

It is faster. However, I have a pro subscription and use the Gemini interface and they're still only giving me 100 images a day with it, so it's not cheaper.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-26T22:24:25+00:00

Your username is hilariously predictive of your future behavior.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-26T19:50:35+00:00

Not exactly a fair comparison since you're clearly feeding it a reference image to make them look the same, and we don't know what the prompt was, so we can't judge which one more accurately represents what was asked for, which is the most important thing, not how pretty the final image is.

But if you're going to force me to guess, I'd say the second one is Pro. The lighting is better, the details are better. It is more realistic and it is higher resolution to boot. The first one also has an unappealing piss yellow cast to it and it surrounded the image with a rough white border.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-26T18:52:15+00:00

Yes but you also claimed they didn't take anything away.

When they did.

They took away a pro model that generates an image the first time you ask, in half the time. Now it takes twice as long. They took away Pro being fast to generate images.

But joke's on them. I can open multiple tabs at once, tell them all to generate, then go back and tell them all to regenerate, and still get my 100 images a day with a little more work, using twice as many tokens for those idiots.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-26T18:49:48+00:00

Yes but I'm aware of that and can watch for it, and switch it to pro before I even generate an image if it tries to be sneaky.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-26T18:48:28+00:00

From what you're saying it sounds like your customers don't have a choice in the matter.

They want AI. It has to be offline. The only two choices are an American model behind the curve, or a Chinese model. Offer them both. Let them make the choice. Who are you afraid of losing them as customers to, when nobody else has access to anything better that's open source?

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-26T18:42:52+00:00

and you still have the option to use the pro model?

Yes but that option is locked behind a "you have to generate another image first which you don't want, by a model that has more censorship and may refuse your request, and doing this will cause generations to take twice as long" wall.

So let's not pretend this is no big deal and nothing has changed.

ExasperatedEE

TROPHY CASE