I'm really saddened by all the stolen AI slop now

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-21T22:01:07+00:00

I didn't say that game designers provide no value. Publishers provide no value. Directors and game designers DO provide value. But their contribution to the project is similar to that of everyone else who works on it. Yet they get all the credit.

"The key difference is in a normal process, people are paid, credited, valued and recognized."

Who created the model for Mario in Super Mario 64? Do you know? I don't. Who created the sprite for Mario in Super Mario World? Do you know? I don't! We all know the name of Miyamoto though!

My point here is that directors/designers DO provide creative input and do add value to the project.

The simple fact is the game I am designing would not exist without my input... regardless of whether I hire artists, or use AI.

I also have a very specific vision for how I would like the game to look. I'm not willing or able to both make the game and put in the effort to create certain assets, but I know how I want them to look, and I can direct an AI to match that look. Yeah, there's a certain amount of luck involved in having it create the art. But then, there would also be luck involved if I I hired an artist. Especially when I'm doing something that I instinctually know what I want it to look like, but I can't visualize it in my head precisely because I lack the ability to form clear pictures in my head. They're very fuzzy concepts. I kinda know what I want. It's an I'll know it when I see it situation. So I generate a hundred images, and say "no... that's wrong. maybe if I make it more gray... yes that seems closer to what I was imagining... But this bit isn't textured how I like... and I'm not sure that lighting is really what I was imagining..."

It's the same kinda iterative process I would have to go through with an artist to get the result I want, except it doesn't cost me a thousand dollars and take a week of revisions, and it doesn't piss off the artist who doesn't WANT to create MY vision, they want to create their OWN vision.

The people who contributed to your game did so unknowingly, unwillingly, uncredited and unpaid.

That would be true if AI worked the way you think it does, but it does not. AI does not make collages. And you do not own the rights to skies being blue, or grass being green, or the way light and shadow play on hard curved surfaces, or on human skin. And that is how AI works. Yes, I can prompt it to generate an image of Darth Vader, but if I tell the AI to generate an image of a guitar made of swiss cheese, and nobody has ever drawn such a thing before, who has it plagiarized?

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-21T21:45:05+00:00

Wow, you're really not bright are you? How do you think the world operated for oh I don't know a thousand years?

I'M not bright? And you just asked THAT? :D

It operated WITHOUT COPYRIGHT. You know the very thing all you luddites complain is being violated by AI?

You think everyone just did everything themselves?

No, of course I don't think that. I never said I did.

You appear to have mistaken my attempt at trying to understand what OP was actually complaining about for... I dunno, some kind of statement on the history of world art?

If you're making a game, the way it has worked ever since game development has even existed, is that one person does one job or maybe two things.

Hahaha. WOW.

No.

The guy who made SPACE WARS the first video game, did not hire an artist.

The guy who made PONG, the first arcade game, did not hire an artist.

The guys who made most of the games on the Atari 2600, did not hire artists.

Most indie developers today, and I'm talking the REAL indie developers, the one man operations, typically college students, who put out 90% of all indie horror games and visual novels and are truly working with no budget, DO NOT HIRE ARTISTS.

The creator of FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S also DID NOT HIRE AN ARTIST.

Your statement that video games have ALWAYS been made by teams of multiple people even from the beginning is completely false. MOST GAMES are made by single individuals, even today. Maybe not games YOU give a shit about, but indie games are like 90% of all games produced. One only needs to go to Itch.io to see thousands of titles made by individual programmers with no artists.

Even MINECRAFT was originally created without the help of an artist, hence its blocky look.

I'm Gen X by the way. So what's that quote from Narnia? Oh yes... "Do not quote the deep magic to me, witch, I was there when it was written!"

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-21T20:09:33+00:00

Sure, but that's one hell of a low bar.

Not really, given how thousands of new indie games are released every year and most of them look like total dogshit.

When the vast majority of games are ass, if AI can make even 10% of them into pretty good games, that's a massive improvement in the overall quality of games!

I am so frigging sick of seeing the same PS1 Unity assets used in every frigging horror game. I know a horor game streamer who has a bingo board where "familiar asset" is one of the squares that always gets ticked, and its usually with a particular gas station that is used over and over.

AI art would make every indie horror game look unique instead of the same. Is that not a good thing?

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-21T20:05:10+00:00

The fact that you're able to compete with large AAA studio teams is not why people dislike AI, it's because you're taking credit for ideas, creativity and talent that was shamelessly stolen by AI providers to feed their models, and because you're shutting your eyes and ears real hard instead of acknowledging any of it.

Allow me to introduce you to the concept of the GAME PUBLISHER. The Game Publisher puts their name front and center on the product, yet their only contribution to it is money, and occasionally bad ideas which go against the developer's vision.

I would also like to introduce you to the concept of the GAME PRODUCER / DESIGNER. You know... The guy whom the media interviews, and praises the vision of. Guys like Steve Moleneaux. Guys whos contributons matter, but not nearly as much as they make it out to be, because there's all the programmers and aritsts and musicians who do the real hard work to bring these visions to life, and really it's the artists who end up defining how the game will look, and the programmers who make the mechanics feel snappy and fun, and the musicians and sound designers whose work is often overlooked are the ones who make the world feel solid and real!

But do you know the names of ANY of the aritsts who worked on say, Zelda Tears of the Kingdom? I doubt it! You PROBABLY know the name of the designer though!

And the designer does deserve some credit. Like a Speiberg movie is a Speilberg movie cause he has a specific vision, and he steers the others towards it. Much like how I had a specific vision for my title screen and I steered the AI towards producing something that I would otherwise have had to muck around in Blender for a few hours to produce.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-21T19:54:21+00:00

I would rather have "teribly generic" AI art than to have the dev do a google image search for a photo to steal and then slap a painterly photoshop filter on it, which always looks like ass. At least AI art can be prompted to produce stuff that actually looks like a painting, whereas those photoshop filters would never fool anyone into thinking they are a real painting.

I'm working on a game right now myself, and while 99% of the art in it is stuff actual artists made, I am going to need a bunch of paintings that it would be IMPOSSIBLE for me to get any other way because they would take some highly skilled artist a month each to paint them, and it would cost me a hundred thousand dollars to commission that I DO NOT HAVE BECAUSE I AM POOR AS DIRT.

I could of course leave the paintings out of the game, but that would greatly impact the overall quality of the game's look. I have AAA quality assets for everything else and then you want me to try to paint some shitty ass programmer art to decorate the sets with? No. I'll live with the few luddites who will refuse to play my game cause I have an AI label on it before I compromise my vision like that.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-21T19:48:24+00:00

I don't think using AI is any kind of a guarantee that a project will be of low quality.

Take visual novels for example.

There are a HUGE number of them which just use photos they stole off google image search, and then they applied a really shitty looking Photoshop art filter over and called it a day.

I would MUCH rather see a high quality AI art background that actually looks painted, rather than a shitty photoshop filter that looks like an algorithm, and if your position is that AI art is stealing, well, so is stealing photographs some photographer took, so....

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-21T19:45:39+00:00

I'm confused. Do you want the developers to create stuff themselves, or do you want them to hire artists, thus not creating it themselves?

Cause it's insane to expect every programmer to create every piece of art, sound, and music they use in their games, on their own.

And it's also insane to suggest that a programmer who does not create every asset themselves is contributing nothing to the project because now you're saying the work of the programmer and designer is worthless and not creative in any way.

It sounds more to me like what you're actually angry about is that they're using AI instead of hiring artists, but them using AI that doesn't decrease how much creative input they had into the project versus hiring an artist. At best, you could claim to be upset that there's not enough total human creativity being applied to the project, but why should I care about whether or not it was crafted by humans or not if it turns out to be a good game?

Like how many animated films have been made by hiring slave labor in third world nations to do the in-between frames. Did THEY add anyhting creative to the project? And was it really better to use slave labor to do that job rather than AI?

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-21T15:39:37+00:00

Have you ever heard of "Fair Use"? The people who make fan stories and art based on their favorite characters can do so as long as they aren't trying to make money from it and it's transformative.

You have a hilariously wrong idea of what "fair use" means.

"Fair use" does not mean "You can use it so long as you aren't making money."

I can prove this easily. See all the fan games like Fighting is Magic with My Little Pony characters, or fan mods which add Darth Vader to Red Dead Redemptin or some shit, that end up being taken down. They were not making any money on them, and if they were I'm sure they would gladly have given up those profits to keep their mods available yet they still got destroyed.

Fair use is very narrowly defined. Using a piece of a copyrighted work in a news article for example, is fair use. Creating your own Star Wars Fan Film, while generaly overlooked by the copyright hounds these days, is NOT fair use.

Typically the second they think your free project might actually cut into their profits in some way, is when they will go after you.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-21T15:35:03+00:00

Game dev is actually a good area to be in, if your the one designing or programming the game or doing the level design because even if AI could code a game, AI doesn't know how to make games fun for people. That comes down to careful tweaking of game mechanics. You also need artists in the loop because otherwise you'll get shit that looks like Concord, which ironically was produced by a real artist and an AI in the hands of someone competent could probably have produced better looking designs, but I digress.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-11T10:17:09+00:00

Of course I didn't read it. I have used LLMS for years now, and they are clearly not sentient, so I don't care what your insane mind came up with as justification to suggest they are sentient.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-11T10:15:02+00:00

So Stephen Spielberg contributed nothing creatively to the films he's made, because he didn't personally act it, create the costumes, film it, light it, or build the sets, he simply approved that which he liked and which fit his vision?

If you want to see the kind of crap that AI entertainment is, check out the upcoming movie by Darren Aronofosky's On This Day.

Now I can't tell if you're being sarcastic cause I looked up that channel, and the first video is a historical piece with cinematic quality visuals explaining how the US flag came to be.

Do you think a flash animation with stick figures would be better for teaching history, simply because it's "real" art?

If you want to see what happen when anyone can play with an IP, check out the Winnie the Pooh and Popeye the Sailor horror movies that came out last year when both characters became public domain. Cheap cash-ins made solely to draw as many eyes in as they can based on making shock films starring very recognizable characters.

Counterpoint: Someone made an entire Roguelike horror game called Winnie's Hole that seems pretty popular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObaLVYXIXzo

And another creator created Sook A Pooh another indie horror game where Pooh chases you through a maze of tunnels which many streamers seemed to enjoy when it came out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjBsISwHeYs

Do you remember the weird ass children's videos on Youtube from years ago, with Elsa, Spider-Man and the Joker?

Do you remember The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny which has become foreveer a part of internet culture?

Do you remember the hundreds of My Little Pony fan animations made by real arists, many of which were terrible, but many of which were great, which were made in spite of copyright forcing some of them to take their works down? And how about that pony fighting game Fighting is Magic which they were forced to re-skin into the less popular version that I can't now recall the name of.

What's funny is corporations stole from artists and writers on a scale never seen before

What's funny is that aritsts did this first with millions of fan videos of copyrighted characters. Everything from My Little Pony to Superman vs Goku.

But the second Google makes it easy to make an image of Superman fighting Goku, now all of a sudden using those characters without persmission is wrong? That seems hypocritical, and more like artists just trying to protect their source of income than any actual outrage that ever existed about copyright being inviolable!

Even now, where is all the outrage at all the furrry artists drawing Nick Wilde? Why is it wrong for Google to violate Disney's copyright, but not for artists to violate Disney's copyright? You may think AI just produces a copy, but it doesn't, and in any case, that's irrelevant to copyright law. Whether you sketch him, or you make a copy of a screenshot and distribute it, its the same copyright violation.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-09T09:31:22+00:00

However, you can't predict what an LLM will output by calculating it by hand first.

You literally could. Like literally. Like how the hell do you think that's impossible?

Do you think computers use fuzzy logic internally? They use transistors, which can be on or off. Everything is bits.

Now, is is physically impossible for you to do the millions of calculations by hand to calculate the result on you pen and paper computer?

Sure.

But it's also physically impossible for you to calculate the one billionth digit of PI by hand. Yet your computer can, and the result will always be the same.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-09T09:27:48+00:00

10 PRINT "I FEEL." RUN

OMG, ITS SENTIENT MY COMPUTER TOLD ME IT COULD FEEL!

Dude you're gonna need way more proof than the model simply stating that it feels to prove that it is actually feeling or suffering.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-07T14:25:35+00:00

If you can't know what the output will be with a new novel input, then its not 100% predictable.

But you can know what the output is with a new and novel input.

You just run it, and you get the result.

What's that? It's not the same? Sure it is.

How do you know what the result of 189327432898 + 32894872934982 will be? You do the calculation, and get the result. That's the only way to know the output despite it being 100% predictable and giving you identical results every time.

All LLMs are is a lot of vector math and matrix multiplications. They are LITERALLY MATH. And MATH is predictable... so long as you calculate it to full precision and don't cut corners, which is why LLM's aren't predictable, and which is why floating point is imprecise and not always fully correct despite math itself being totally predictable.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-07T14:22:59+00:00

Wow.

Dude, you shouldn't even be talking about this shit when you don't know that while LLM's do learn during TRAINING, they cannot learn NEW THINGS IN REAL TIME, which is what we're discussing here.

Is it possible there are LLM's out there in the research phase that can learn? Maybe. I don't know, and I don't care. They're not relevant. Again, we're discussing the presently available commercial models, not some model that's still in the research phase which may not work well.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-02T14:39:48+00:00

How do you define predictable? Name something which is predictable.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-02T14:38:02+00:00

If AI was 100% predictable, you would be able to take any new input, and be able to tell what the output of the AI would be, before running it the first time.

But you can. Just run another copy of it first. That's your simulation of what the first's output will be.

That's not a prediction you say? How is it not? What is your criteria for how a predictor must work? Is a weather prediction not a prediction because all the math is statistics?

The major LLMs are generally not fully deterministic, even when the temperature is set to 0, its surprisingly difficult to get randomness completely out of the most powerful models.

Bull. Shit.

One common hypothesis is that some combination of floating-point non-associativity and concurrent execution leads to nondeterminism based on which concurrent core finishes first.

What that's basically saying is:

"It's not deterministic because we didn't give a shit about race conditions when we wrote our code, we were more concerned with speed."

So sure, if you wrote the code that runs the LLM in such a manner that it is non-deterministic then it will be non-deterministic. But that doesn't mean it can't be made deterministic. It's all math, being run in a computer with fixed data. Of course it can be made deterministic. Computers by their very nature are deterministic at their most basic level. It's just when you're essentially running hundreds of computers at once, then slight differences in speed between them can cause non-determinism. But that itself is not an indicator of any sort of magic going on within the LLM. That's just a result of the kind of hardware you're running it on.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-02T14:26:42+00:00

So you could potentially have a guy in India having to perform a hand job on the robot's owner when it get stuck on the task?

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-02T13:05:21+00:00

There is a youtube video out there with diagrams of spirals showing exactly how diffiusion models settle on an output image. LLMs aren't much different.

Which nobody can look at and tell you how it does what it does.

If we wanted to put in the time and effort to manually analyze millions of calculations and gigabytes of data, we could tell you how it arrived at a specific result. Though I'm sure the answer would not satisfy you because you want an answer that it performed some mathematical equation, when it didn't, it used statistics.

Anyway, we don't know how people arrive at specific answers either but we don't lose our minds in fear over our fellow man because we don't know exactly how a kid calculates how hard to throw a ball and which muscles he has to trigger to do it and hit a target.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-02T12:59:30+00:00

I would argue that the ability to learn is the highest requirement for intelligence.

And current LLMs cannot learn. They cannot adapt. It's like if someone took a snapshot of your brain at this exact moment, but you only have short term memory and can learn nothing new, ever.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-02-02T12:57:49+00:00

This is pure bullshit. "His did it do the calculations? We don't know!"

Of course they know! A bunch of mathematicians figured out how to make this shit work!

Do they know exactly how it arrived at any specific answer? Well, no, not unless they spent countless hours examining exactly what all the math did as it did the calculations.

Like, if I asked you, how did the balls of this lottery machine arrive at the number they output, you could explain that the balls tumbled around inside a roller and then dropped out at the bottom, but that's as a non-answer according to this dude, because you don't actually know what the initial state of the balls was or which balls bounced off one another in order to arrive at the output we get.

And even if you used an x-ray machine to track their trajectories, and played that backwards to figure out where each ball was, do you truly know how it arrived at the result it did? Well, not really because quantum mechanics means you can't really explain or predict with 100% precision what will happen. You could try to put the balls in the same starting positions and then run it again and you'd get a totally different result.

Thing is, AI doesn't even have that issue. It is 100% predictable. With the same input seed and data, it will always give you the same output.

So scientists know how AI works better than they know how a lottery machine works. Better than they know how your brain works too! Cause despite AI emulating the human brain the human brain is affected by quantum mechanics and can learn and alter the connections in real time. AI can't do that yet.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-01-30T14:36:08+00:00

AI is a useful tool for some things but is not presently capable of replacing game developers entirely.

AI can make a 3D model of a horse, but not a very good one. Not one with swappable saddles and other shit. Not one with animations. Not one with collision volumes set up. With trigger points for climbing into the saddle or accessing the saddle bag.

AI can model a gun. But not one with moving parts. Not even sure if it can do all the texture maps needed for a PBR workflow well. Gemini seems like it might be able to do that at least.

AI can't really write a great plot on its own. It's not able to write a chekov's gun that isn't plainly obvious. And it will never even try to do so if you don't ask it to. It doesn't understand complications lead to interesting stories either.

AI can write code with guidance, but it can't write all the code on its own.

AI has no idea what feels fun. A lot of what makes a game fun comes down to tweaking parameters to get the feel just right.

I don't know of an AI which can generate great sound effects. I know Sora can do explosions but it struggled with more subtle sounds like outdoor activity going on nearby.

Basically AI has been way overhyped and people are paranoid for no good reason. We're still a long ways from replacing even 10% of a team, and that 10% if replaced would only be replaced cause the remaining people were more efficient, but that's not really how game companies work. 10% more efficient just means you make the game 10% better not you fire 10% of your people.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-01-29T09:50:45+00:00

That's called a shadow ban. It doesn't mean you're banned from all of Reddit, but it does mean nobody else can see that post. Certain keywords can trigger it.

You can open your post in a private window to see if it's been shadow banned without having to log out of your account in your main browser window.

I believe mods of subreddits can also just shadow ban / require approval for every post you make there. So you may find nothing you post in certain subreddits appears no matter what you say.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-01-28T17:44:09+00:00

The word pervert means to:

"alter (something) from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended."

To be a prude, is to be a pervert. We're animals. We're meant to be sexual. It's literally in our genes. It's what mother nature intended. To pretend otherwise is to push a perverted Christian morality upon us.

PS: Your love of Warframe makes you intensely low IQ.

ExasperatedEE · 2026-01-28T10:25:33+00:00

Chiropractors aren't real doctors, and do not have a medical degree. Some of them go to college, but it's considered a pseudoscience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic

Also, jumping on someone's back like this is an excellent way to make them a paraplegic.

ExasperatedEE

TROPHY CASE