All I’m really taking from this controversy is that I don’t think the IGF awards are aligned with what I think is important about games and I probably won’t pay attention to their awards because...
All I’m really taking from this controversy is that I don’t think the IGF awards are aligned with what I think is important about games and I probably won’t pay attention to their awards because they probably won’t be surfacing or platforming the best games. They’ll be awarding the best people can manage to do with a lot of effort for the sake of effort. Which is fine — people have a right to want only the finest artisanal bits and bytes made by free range programmers, but I’m not super interested in that personally.
No offense, but I'm getting the impression you haven't read the article. Which I can understand given the length and all, don't get me wrong! It's just that there's a great many sections pertinent...
No offense, but I'm getting the impression you haven't read the article. Which I can understand given the length and all, don't get me wrong! It's just that there's a great many sections pertinent to your comment here, and which might change your stance.
Again, I'd post them here, but I'd practically be tearing the article apart into little shreds to do it. Suffice to say that "best games" involves many things, that the IGF jurors care a lot about games, and that their reasoning is very nuanced.
EDIT: Actually, this one section might be enough, if only to highlight how important reading the article is:
At this point in time it was public knowledge that a great internecine fight had happened within IGF judging over the topic of AI, centering on a highly popular game having an AI disclosure. Shortly after those jurists released their statement, the information leaked that the game in question was House House's Big Walk. [...]
Two things about this are frustrating to me—I mean, everything about this is frustrating to me, but two things I want to point out are frustrating. One is that discussion of Big Walk and its merits will now overshadow a broader discussion. Another is that a lot of the arguments that took place in the 600-post IGF judge thread about Big Walk are now playing out over social media, recapitulating many of the worst misinformed and disingenuous arguments.
Also, just in case it should be mentioned: IGF judges/jurors do not actually control IGF itself. That's run by Informa, who invites them in turn.
No, I read the whole screed. I get it, the author hates AI and thinks that the existence of it is a “noxious political project” and any use of it at all crosses an “ethical boundary” so obvious...
No, I read the whole screed. I get it, the author hates AI and thinks that the existence of it is a “noxious political project” and any use of it at all crosses an “ethical boundary” so obvious even a 6-year old should understand. Users of AI are “unscrupulous actors” doing the moral equivalent of “lying” and “cheating” — anyone who doesn’t align with this belief should “fix their hearts”.
The screed never says AI users are unscrupulous actors, nor does it say that it’s the moral equivalent of lying and cheating. The “unscrupulous actors” quote is describing people who lie about...
The screed never says AI users are unscrupulous actors, nor does it say that it’s the moral equivalent of lying and cheating. The “unscrupulous actors” quote is describing people who lie about breaking a rule, or cheat behind closed doors. If anything the author is rebuking the argument that AI users will just lie about not using it:
Many made the argument that if IGF judges refuse to vote for games made with LLMs, then studios will lie about using LLMs to avoid being snubbed by judges. This reasoning is morally backwards.
An inaccurate summary of the article is a little too on the nose, don’t you think?
I dunno. Seems to me like @unkz hit the nail on the head. I wish the comment thread disputing their interpretation didn’t lead me to read it just to confirm.
Everything I know tells me that this wasn't the case, and using an LLM was an expedient, not a necessity. Unity being buggy and underdocumented is nothing new. House House could have worked around the issue (note that the worst case with the given issue was that the game was a bit frame-y for 20 seconds occasionally during play) or engaged the help of an actual human expert, many of whom they would have had access to just in their local scene around Melbourne. Many of these people are out of work right now.
House House, an already very successful studio with not insignificant resources, made a real choice to rely on a morally abhorrent software system rather than engage the help of real people—whether in the form of paid contracting or just friendly help. I want to say this not to try to exaggerate the scope of what they did but to make it absolutely clear that there is a real, material dimension to this, even if some want to characterize this issue as a purely abstract test of ritual purity.
I dunno. Seems to me like @unkz hit the nail on the head. I wish the comment thread disputing their interpretation didn’t lead me to read it just to confirm.
Right before your quote: Almost right after your quote: This is why I wanted people to read the article. Incidentally, I am curious why you only chose to check one quote, and why of them all you...
Right before your quote:
I don't think House House were being deliberately dishonest in characterizing events—I think if anything that characterizing them at all shows a willingness to have a discussion—but I think a lot of people without subject matter knowledge are reading into their recounting of events a lot of things that just aren't so. Unity obviously dropped the ball in supporting House House (quelle fucking surprise), but many seem to read into that event the notion that the problem they ran into was utterly intractable.
Almost right after your quote:
I'm not going to try to argue that any and all LLM usage is equally bad, but either an ethical boundary exists or doesn't. And we are living in a moment where the urgency and necessity of this ethical boundary is enormous; vast resources have been marshaled to simply make everyone's lives worse in service of a vision of the future that serves nobody but five dudes who are already wealthy. Is arguing that people are taking it too seriously how you want to spend this time?
This is why I wanted people to read the article.
Incidentally, I am curious why you only chose to check one quote, and why of them all you picked one @ogre didn't even mention.
I picked a quote that made it clear Unkz had an accurate read on the tone. The two extracts you have here don’t really change that. We can reproduce extracts until we’ve got the entire article in...
I picked a quote that made it clear Unkz had an accurate read on the tone. The two extracts you have here don’t really change that. We can reproduce extracts until we’ve got the entire article in these comments but ultimately it is a very one-sided screed with a very puritanical argument about LLM use, as was said.
I feel we must have very divergent points of view somewhere to consider the tone of this article so differently. If greater context won't do, maybe this comment of mine would explain it better.
I feel we must have very divergent points of view somewhere to consider the tone of this article so differently. If greater context won't do, maybe this comment of mine would explain it better.
...alright, I guess if we're tearing the article to shreds anyway, let's add some context to those quotes: In a collapsible, since it's long [...] [...] I hope it's clear now why I didn't provide...
...alright, I guess if we're tearing the article to shreds anyway, let's add some context to those quotes:
In a collapsible, since it's long
I don't think House House were being deliberately dishonest in characterizing events—I think if anything that characterizing them at all shows a willingness to have a discussion—but I think a lot of people without subject matter knowledge are reading into their recounting of events a lot of things that just aren't so. [...] Everything I know tells me that this wasn't the case, and using an LLM was an expedient, not a necessity. [...]
House House, an already very successful studio with not insignificant resources, made a real choice to rely on a morally abhorrent software system rather than engage the help of real people—whether in the form of paid contracting or just friendly help. I want to say this not to try to exaggerate the scope of what they did but to make it absolutely clear that there is a real, material dimension to this, even if some want to characterize this issue as a purely abstract test of ritual purity.
It is, of course, also true that to use LLMs is to willingly participate in a noxious political project and to use the product of exploitative and morally unacceptable processes; and that objection is also real, material, and grounded. [...]
I'm not going to try to argue that any and all LLM usage is equally bad, but either an ethical boundary exists or doesn't. And we are living in a moment where the urgency and necessity of this ethical boundary is enormous; vast resources have been marshaled to simply make everyone's lives worse in service of a vision of the future that serves nobody but five dudes who are already wealthy. Is arguing that people are taking it too seriously how you want to spend this time?
Another issue that is repeatedly posed is the question of "transparency" and "disclosure", namely that negative reactions to uses of AI will discourage people from disclosing that they used AI.
[...]
It's also true that people who are willing to lie about one thing are generally willing to lie about others, and unscrupulous behavior tends to be generalized. Which is to say: up to a point, additional rules of behavior constrain scrupulous actors who want to follow the rules, but they also increase the lying burden on unscrupulous actors who are likely breaking other rules.
There are already numerous behaviors that game studios regularly engage in that we'd consider disqualifying (from an IGF, a purchase, talking positively about their game...) if we heard about them. Those forms of misbehavior are old—ancient, in some cases—and therefore the rules against them are ingrained.
Many made the argument that if IGF judges refuse to vote for games made with LLMs, then studios will lie about using LLMs to avoid being snubbed by judges. This reasoning is morally backwards. I, as an IGF judge, have literally no choice but to vote against games with AI disclosures because once you tell me that you used an LLM to make the game, that information now binds my behavior. Because the alternative would be dishonesty; I'd have to pretend that a game which fails the criteria that I think are important in judging is somehow still valid on the merits.
[...]
Possibly this is because some of you don't really believe in the ethical urgency of the moment and are just being carried along by trying not to offend those of us who do. Possibly this is because some of you don't really believe in the ethical urgency of anything. I don't know. Fix your hearts or die.
I hope it's clear now why I didn't provide snippets to begin with, given just how much I had to skip over and rearrange things to properly provide context to this.
With that said, I also want to make it clear that I consider your description a very bad-faith mischaracterization of the article, which I strongly resent given how much care the author put into writing it.
I mean… unless I’m really missing something, your quotes seem to mesh with what @unkz said above? You guys disagree with each other, that’s clear, but I don’t see any bad faith or any...
I mean… unless I’m really missing something, your quotes seem to mesh with what @unkz said above?
You guys disagree with each other, that’s clear, but I don’t see any bad faith or any mischaracterisation on either side? The article takes a pretty clear stance that AI use of any kind is inherently unethical, and moreover seems to be written from a point of view where that’s seen as self evident and the topic at hand is how far we can tolerate people indulging in this obviously unethical behaviour.
Fair enough, it sounds like you come from a similar perspective and enjoyed the article, I can see a shared understanding there. But I’d hope you can also see it’s loudly and forcefully pushing that particular perspective, and (a) acknowledging the article is doing so, and (b) rejecting the base premise, are actually pretty legitimate alternative perspectives to take?
I'll try again, then: unkz' comment gives the impression that the author is a bonfire-burning zealot seeking to burn people at the stake for any and all AI use. It also suggests the author...
I'll try again, then: unkz' comment gives the impression that the author is a bonfire-burning zealot seeking to burn people at the stake for any and all AI use. It also suggests the author believes in a false dichotomy wherein all AI use is equally bad, such that House House being functionally equivalent to OpenAI itself. Neither of these are true.
This is added on to by total misrepresentations of the third quote onwards; "unscrupulous actors" referred to people who lied about AI use, not all AI users. The same goes for "lying" "cheaters," while "fix your hearts" has to do only with hypothetical people who "don't really believe in the ethical urgency of anything."
I guess I have to grant that viewpoint must be an important factor here, given the thread's reception. But the above is still a very uncharitable read of the article.
Yeah, I thought the other article was at least interesting enough as a philosophical argument for what IGF should be about. This felt more like - well your use of the word "screed" in the other...
Yeah, I thought the other article was at least interesting enough as a philosophical argument for what IGF should be about. This felt more like - well your use of the word "screed" in the other comment feels very accurate.
I think the are some interesting and difficult moral and aesthetic discussions to be had around LLMs. Many of those discussions are also intertwined with questions about our economic system and how we reward labour.
But at the same time, I think there's also a group of people that have made LLMs into a symbol of all that is currently wrong with the world, and I find it increasingly difficult to follow their arguments or understand their approach. And this feels like that sort of article. LLMs are simply bad, there can be no discussion or nuance, any attempt to touch them or interact with them in any way taints everything that you do, and if you do dare break rank, then you deserve everything you get. And I guess fair enough, if that's how the author feels, then they and their peers can judge this award however they like. But that's not where I'm at.
Firstly, people who are against LLM usage disagree that the effort is pointless (see recent stories about Humble Bundle's vibe coded redesign nightmare and the Proton CEO sabotaging his own...
Firstly, people who are against LLM usage disagree that the effort is pointless (see recent stories about Humble Bundle's vibe coded redesign nightmare and the Proton CEO sabotaging his own company through AI psychosis for examples).
Secondly, you're probably right that IGF awards are misaligned with whatever you thought they were. But that was already discoverable before any of this controversy. See this from their about page:
This independent review, finalist, and winner voting process is reflective of our own independent spirit that drives us to find and honor the incredible talent at the forefront of redefining what video games can be.
They're interested in awarding talent. Someone who codes an impressive game without LLMs is clearly demonstrating way more of that than a vibe coder who's just chatting with a bot to make theirs, no matter how the end products compare.
But we're not talking here about vibe coding. There's a guy I used to follow on Bluesky who got fully into vibe coding, vibe video making, vibe gaming, the lot, and the end result was mostly slop...
But we're not talking here about vibe coding. There's a guy I used to follow on Bluesky who got fully into vibe coding, vibe video making, vibe gaming, the lot, and the end result was mostly slop with no kind of effort or talent visible. Like, it was a cool showcase of what an LLM can do, but it wasn't interesting beyond that.
But here, people have been clearly been using their talent and their skill to build something that does in many ways redefine what a video game can be. They've created a game that showcases and emphasises human connection, and is filled with moments designed - with great skill - to emotionally resonate in different ways. Clearly a lot of talent has gone into this game.
But at some point in development they ran into a specific coding issue, spent time and effort - and talent - understanding that issue, and in addition asked an LLM for help. That then continued to spend that time, effort, and talent to understand and apply the answer. And now that step in the middle - plugging the problem into an LLM - is overshadowing all the rest of their clear demonstration of talent. And if that's the case, then that's the point at which this award stops being useful to me. Because clearly there is a tremendous amount of talent on display, but what's more important than that is talent plus never ever having ever touched an LLM, and I'm afraid I don't really care so much about the second half of that criteria if the first half is clearly present.
I guess you can look at it as a spectrum. The more you rely on LLMs in the production of anything, the less talent is required. That's one of the main selling points of LLMs—now anyone can code or...
I guess you can look at it as a spectrum. The more you rely on LLMs in the production of anything, the less talent is required. That's one of the main selling points of LLMs—now anyone can code or make art or music or whatever where previously only people who had talent could do those things.
If your goal is to award talent, it doesn't seem outrageous to me to exclude projects that used LLMs in any capacity, just for the sole reason that it's an easy line to draw in the sand. Otherwise you have to quantify AI usage and then assess each disclosed usage by each project to measure whether they exceed whatever threshold you've defined as "acceptable." It would be messy and annoying and subjective and cause even more controversy than we're seeing right now.
I don't think it is always a spectrum like that, no. LLMs generally require talent to use effectively. If you understand a subject matter well, they are essentially a force multiplier, they make...
I don't think it is always a spectrum like that, no. LLMs generally require talent to use effectively. If you understand a subject matter well, they are essentially a force multiplier, they make it easier to go further. They don't have to replace talent, they can augment it instead.
In this case, unless the talent you're specifically looking for is recall of the best ways to work around arbitrary Unity bugs, I find it very difficult to see why House House have demonstrated any less talent than they would have if they'd not used an LLM.
For me the question is why AI is being singled out versus the many other labor-saving tools that game developers could use. This isn’t like journalism where manipulating photos in Photoshop could...
For me the question is why AI is being singled out versus the many other labor-saving tools that game developers could use. This isn’t like journalism where manipulating photos in Photoshop could misrepresent the truth. It’s also not like a sports event where everyone agrees on artificial limitations to make the competition interesting. There isn’t even a performance aspect to it, like in music where sometimes we’re interested in what musicians can do by actually playing their instruments.
You should be able to use all the computer graphics you want when making a game, using any tool, just like you can use whatever trickery or special effects you like when making a movie. it’s mostly fake anyway and the “talent” is how good you are with whatever tools you like to use, not what you could do unaided.
Hard hard disagree. Satoru Iwata's whole mystique was his ability to do exactly these kinds of things with limited technology, like implementing a full movement algorithm in the limited SNES space...
There isn’t even a performance aspect to it, like in music where sometimes we’re interested in what musicians can do by actually playing their instruments.
Hard hard disagree. Satoru Iwata's whole mystique was his ability to do exactly these kinds of things with limited technology, like implementing a full movement algorithm in the limited SNES space simply to be able to deliver a pizza on any screen within Earthbound, or unfucking Game Freak's work on Pokemon Gold/Silver to the point they were able to fit Kanto on the cartridge and help create probably the single biggest shock moment of the series. As a modern example, Billy Basso could have shipped Animal Well - which released on the PS5 - on a medium-size DS cartridge if he wanted. And that's a game about uncovering the depths of what's in plain sight! It's technical wizardry. Code is art.
That said - much like electronic music, sampling, FL Studio, what have you, I think tools do not necessarily cheapen the ability to get a feeling across in a finished product. I still find myself personally unconcerned that House House used an LLM to fix a bug despite this article.
I (yes, hello, me again, I can't seem to shut up about this topic) find this article to be very vitriolic in the worst possible way. First, even if the author didn't intend this to be the case,...
I (yes, hello, me again, I can't seem to shut up about this topic) find this article to be very vitriolic in the worst possible way. First, even if the author didn't intend this to be the case, it's quite presumptuous to the point where it borders on arrogance to assert that "House House couldn't have created a nastier situation for IGF judges if they were deliberately trying". Even if you hedge your bets by saying that they didn't do this intentionally, it still makes me think like the author believes that House House should have please thought of the IGF judges! Will somebody think of the independent volunteer judges that manage an art contest with medium influence?
I also have to point out that this article tries, to a farcical extent, to preach to the choir. The dichotomy between "moral lines it's okay to cross", like single use plastics or, maybe if you're so inclined, driving a gas car, eating meat, not voting blue in a deeply red state, and "moral lines it is never okay to cross" which somehow includes even cursory LLM use on the basis that they are "completely optional" and "didn't exist a few years ago" is so weirdly pointed that I need to interrogate this.
And I did, just in the last sentence. I made an escalating series of assertions that you, dear reader, may or may not have agreed with. Eating mass produced meat products is, by all counts, also entirely optional these days. As is driving a combustion car. Or not voting when statistically you know you're outvoted fifty times over in your county. All of these could, in the mind of the right or wrong person, also be a moral line it is imperative to never cross. And the same thing applies, thus, to LLMs. Some people think it's fine to use them despite their moral ramifications (and I'm really, really not saying that those are meaningless).
[ Warning: Emotional tangent ahead, proceed with caution ]
It speaks volumes to the perceived maturity of the author that they treat this issue with a level of importance usually reserved for employee abuse or embezzling scandals in the industry. To quote,
Possibly this is because some of you don't really believe in the ethical urgency of the moment and are just being carried along by trying not to offend those of us who do. Possibly this is because some of you don't really believe in the ethical urgency of anything. I don't know. Fix your hearts or die.
Pardon my fucking C++, but excuse me? Who died and made you the arbiter of morals and ethics in technology? I'm supposed to fix my heart, after the IGF made this internal discussion suddenly everyone else's problem and poisoned the well of nuanced discussion to the point that even gas chromatography won't be able to identify the constituent opinions? And for what, for the opinion that "AI has no place in development", something the rest of the commercial software industry has discussed and conceded months ago?
I'm personally so sick of the discussion at hand here, because it's all hypocritical nonsense. Not just in part because I am convinced, after reading @teaearlgraycold's thoughts on the matter, that there's far more actual damage done in the collateral wake of game development and promotion that merit more investigation. At the end of the day, the people in question do not like AI use. That's fine, you can believe that. There's plenty of criticisms that AI rightly deserves and that must be examined in one way or another before the debt it incurs becomes so large we all pay for it. This, however, is an incredibly minor and in my opinion inauthentic hill to die on. Just say it gets under your skin. Just say it disgusts you. That's fine. But know that you're standing in moving water.
To be honest all else being equal I’d rather install an application made with assistance from an LLM than have one be made in Electron. Now THAT disgusts me.
To be honest all else being equal I’d rather install an application made with assistance from an LLM than have one be made in Electron. Now THAT disgusts me.
I want to disagree with most of what you've said here, but with the way this thread has been going, I'm honestly just happy to know you read the article. I feel like a number of comments here...
I want to disagree with most of what you've said here, but with the way this thread has been going, I'm honestly just happy to know you read the article.
I feel like a number of comments here haven't been doing that.
I'm interested in having a conversation, and that includes challenging my perceived notions by reading articles I end up disagreeing with. I think it's good that you posted it. It just hasn't...
I'm interested in having a conversation, and that includes challenging my perceived notions by reading articles I end up disagreeing with. I think it's good that you posted it. It just hasn't convinced me of the point it's desperately trying to make.
This is another long article on the current IGF/House House discussion going on, which I felt was worth posting given its quality and effort. This one comes from Bruno Dias, who's an IGF judge —...
This is another long article on the current IGF/House House discussion going on, which I felt was worth posting given its quality and effort. This one comes from Bruno Dias, who's an IGF judge — not a juror, to be clear. ≈250 to 300 judges turn submissions into nominations, while ≈50 jurors turn nominations into finalists into winners. The letter signed recently came from 19 of the latter group.
I recommend reading this one from end to end, as it's both very well written and covers a lot of ground. A consequence of that is that I can't really provide snippets or summaries here very well without misrepresenting the article by leaving too much out. It is split into two chunks though, so don't get too intimidated by the page length!
I hadn't realized that there was such a strong feeling in parts of the community around the ethics of LLMs. I hadn't much considered it myself only because I just don't really like them full stop,...
I hadn't realized that there was such a strong feeling in parts of the community around the ethics of LLMs. I hadn't much considered it myself only because I just don't really like them full stop, as in I have a distaste for using them, and avoid it if I can. So seeing arguments against using it at all from an ethical angle is a little newer to me than it might be to others.
I do wonder if there's a bit of a clash going on, with people on one side with ethical concerns as their primary focus, and people who dislike the quality of the output as their primary concern - it does seem like it.
I'll have to think about what this post is saying, but if anyone has a good link/article that goes over the ethical concerns in details, I'd appreciate it in the meantime, the OP sort of assumes the knowledge.
It's not a thorough exploration of the concerns themselves, but this BlueSky thread by Daniel Fedor lists off the various reasons his studio has opted to never use AI, and that list might still...
It's not a thorough exploration of the concerns themselves, but this BlueSky thread by Daniel Fedor lists off the various reasons his studio has opted to never use AI, and that list might still give a good starting point.
Thanks for sharing - both were a good read, and I agree with a lot of the ethical issues that are raised that need to be addressed. (I'm adding the below in an aim to comfort you a bit, feel free...
Thanks for sharing - both were a good read, and I agree with a lot of the ethical issues that are raised that need to be addressed.
(I'm adding the below in an aim to comfort you a bit, feel free to take it or leave it as suits your needs)
For what its worth, the fact that there's pushback from people not agreeing with this post shouldn't discourage you - I think having conversations like this with people who see things from different perspectives is exactly why small communities like this are the only viable form of social media. I'd hate to see this place turn into another reddit where you agree or you leave. Please keep posting insightful and interesting things. I think it does everyone good to learn more diverse perspectives on topics.
I've been putting a lot of effort into taking it in stride, but it's true the thread has been a bit exhausting. So I very much do appreciate the kind words, it means a lot! I just wish I...
I've been putting a lot of effort into taking it in stride, but it's true the thread has been a bit exhausting. So I very much do appreciate the kind words, it means a lot!
I just wish I understood what others must be seeing in the article that I'm not. Personally, I'm wondering if it's just the article being polarizing, combined with artificial intelligence possibly being on many blacklists among those who dislike AI. If the tag weren't so blacklisted, maybe this thread would be more balanced?
I dunno if that'd have been for the best though. If this post truly reads this differently based on existing opinion, then that might've just caused this thread to devolve into chaotic two-sided bickering.
If you'll forgive a small web link, a blog I follow recently outlined their reasons for avoiding media post-2022 due to often undisclosed AI use and explained their reasoning/ethical concerns...
Thank you! It's a reasonable stance to take in my opinion. I've been avoiding most films, TV shows and music - save for a rare few that seem to be good quality - for even longer. My only reasoning...
Thank you! It's a reasonable stance to take in my opinion. I've been avoiding most films, TV shows and music - save for a rare few that seem to be good quality - for even longer. My only reasoning was that it was generally not worth my time, so doing the same for ethical reasons makes perfect sense.
Clearly using LLMs is a black-and-white moral issue for the author, but that's rare amongst software developers. I would be very surprised if there aren't other indie dev teams that were a little...
Clearly using LLMs is a black-and-white moral issue for the author, but that's rare amongst software developers. I would be very surprised if there aren't other indie dev teams that were a little less forthcoming about using chatbots in the development process. You'd need a very strict policy with all employees in total agreement, ban using the biggest search engines that spit out an AI overview....
I used to spend a significant amount of my time as a developer searching the web for solutions to weird bugs. I think it's fair to say search engines were an indispensable tool for software development. In the past few years, the amount of AI slop on the web has made using search engines sans-AI to solve technical issues almost impossible. I used to get results from dev forums, now 90% of the results are slop articles. This isn't a problem for companies like Google, who want you to use their LLM instead. AI has created the disease and provided the cure: chatbots are incredibly good at finding answers to technical problems, often in a single query.
Is it possible to write software without talking to a chatbot? Yes of course, just like it was possible to write software without search engines in the past. It just reduces your efficiency in a way that businesses are unlikely to support.
So it's not as simple as "just write software like you used to, pre-LLM". Saying "they could have hired an expert" also feels a bit naïve. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I can't imagine a company approving a new hire to solve a bug.
I don't know, maybe I'm just soothing my own cognitive dissonance. I'm a dev who is doesn't like AI but is forced to use it for my job. I'm happy that House House made their game mostly without AI. That's better than most software nowadays.
From the article "The argument that it shouldn't matter because the game is very good" this point in the article summarizes everything I feel about this and issue. The game is good and IGF is...
From the article "The argument that it shouldn't matter because the game is very good" this point in the article summarizes everything I feel about this and issue. The game is good and IGF is supposed to represent that, since it can't, IGF no longer has credibility.
By this logic, awards shows also shouldn't care about, say, games on consoles made from attack drone metal. Or games made by neofascist governments. I take issue with the implication that a "good...
Correct, they shouldn't. Unless the category is specifically best game, or whatever, that isn't played on a console made of drone parts or best game not created by some Nazis.
Correct, they shouldn't.
Unless the category is specifically best game, or whatever, that isn't played on a console made of drone parts or best game not created by some Nazis.
It's just an alloy. Maybe people could have been reasonably upset about the branding with Anduril since Anduril makes weapons, but ModRetro itself is founded by Palmer Luckey (the Anduril...
attack drone metal
It's just an alloy. Maybe people could have been reasonably upset about the branding with Anduril since Anduril makes weapons, but ModRetro itself is founded by Palmer Luckey (the Anduril founder), so it's hypocritical as fuck to buy a ModRetro device if you feel so strongly against Anduril. Shoot, I'd love to know what the people who hate Anduril for being a weapons manufacturer think Ukraine should do about its Russia problem.
EDIT: after looking online, it looks like the outrage was well overblown. Modern journalism is finding a few angry tweets and then frame it as "people are saying".
The argument is that morality is a valid consideration for what makes something good. I don't see how the technicality of a metaphor causes that to crumble. Let's put it this way: If the IGF did...
The argument is that morality is a valid consideration for what makes something good. I don't see how the technicality of a metaphor causes that to crumble.
Let's put it this way: If the IGF did somehow give an award to one of Trump's "games," would you be okay with it?
At the risk of terminating this thought, the past few weeks have shown me that the values of the IGF clearly don't align with mine, so I can't say I would care one way or the other. More to the...
At the risk of terminating this thought, the past few weeks have shown me that the values of the IGF clearly don't align with mine, so I can't say I would care one way or the other.
More to the point though, I can't say that the products in question merit discussion because, like all products made by fascists, they exist in a space of hate and violence, which means that they will not be very good. Call it a lack of love. A lack of authenticity. Even someone who's not a juror will pick up on this. Fascists are miserable, we know this.
Fascists have produced quite a bit of media with powerful cultural impacts. We’ve got Wagner, Leni Riefenstahl, Birth of a Nation, Heidegger, 300. Compelling aesthetic products are some of the...
More to the point though, I can't say that the products in question merit discussion because, like all products made by fascists, they exist in a space of hate and violence, which means that they will not be very good.
Fascists have produced quite a bit of media with powerful cultural impacts. We’ve got Wagner, Leni Riefenstahl, Birth of a Nation, Heidegger, 300. Compelling aesthetic products are some of the only things they CAN do right.
It’s just the modern iterations of them are especially clownish because they’re a weird atavism of theater kids LARPing as fascists who were themselves LARPing as Teutonic warrior knights. It’s a copy of a copy so of course everything is garish and exaggerated.
That's fine! I took issue with NOD's reasoning, not the mere disagreement itself. At any rate, we obviously agree on the nature of fascism. But I still think this is a bit hung up on the examples...
At the risk of terminating this thought, the past few weeks have shown me that the values of the IGF clearly don't align with mine, so I can't say I would care one way or the other.
That's fine! I took issue with NOD's reasoning, not the mere disagreement itself.
At any rate, we obviously agree on the nature of fascism. But I still think this is a bit hung up on the examples I gave, when the point of it all is that it'd be completely reasonable to disqualify a game based on ethical concerns alone. People can naturally disagree on if the thing in question is an ethical concern at all, that's fair — but to me, suggesting outright irrelevance feels akin to asking games' reviewers to produce "objective reviews." It's an arbitrary separation that lacks understanding of the nuance in art.
Maybe this is my privilege speaking, but I think even unethical art can and must be considered on its artistic merits. I don't have a direct example for this, I grant you, but for example an art...
Maybe this is my privilege speaking, but I think even unethical art can and must be considered on its artistic merits. I don't have a direct example for this, I grant you, but for example an art installation that... has for instance industrial meat production and the cruelty of it as its subject and then uses the explicit and violent torture of animals to make that point is for certain unethical, but this shouldn't disqualify it from discussion. In fact, quite the opposite.
Discussion is one thing, awards are another. Discussion can have a carefully considered time and place that is appropriate to the nature of that which is discussed, arranged to ensure that even if...
Discussion is one thing, awards are another. Discussion can have a carefully considered time and place that is appropriate to the nature of that which is discussed, arranged to ensure that even if the topic in question is abhorrent, it can be talked about without harm.
Awards grant prestige though. That's a valuable currency. I don't think unethical art deserves that.
I have the ability to separate the art from the artist. It doesn't mean I have to choose to play it. For example, I've boycotted Blizzard and EA Games for 20+ years. There are good games by EA "it...
I have the ability to separate the art from the artist. It doesn't mean I have to choose to play it. For example, I've boycotted Blizzard and EA Games for 20+ years. There are good games by EA "it takes two" comes to mind. I don't have to play but I am capable of judging that something is a good game. Those are two are separate categories. So to your point, if some neonazi fascist government designed game won, I would not be upset if the game was actually good.
If you boycott Blizzard and EA, then you understand that purchasing from them has material impact on the world. You understand that impact to be bad, so you ensure that you don't reward them....
If you boycott Blizzard and EA, then you understand that purchasing from them has material impact on the world. You understand that impact to be bad, so you ensure that you don't reward them. That's good and I agree.
The part I don't get is where you think the same is not true of awards shows. Do you think publicity doesn't count? That getting an award has no impact on the bottom line of an organization? Because I can tell you right now that if a fascist developer ever did win an award of any sort, they would parade it around like proof they were right about everything. It would be political propaganda in an instant. And it would get them more money, even besides the literal cash prize attached.
I’ve seen Trump’s games, so if they were given an award for being a great game then I would not be ok with it because the games are low quality racist trash. That would go against my idea of what...
I’ve seen Trump’s games, so if they were given an award for being a great game then I would not be ok with it because the games are low quality racist trash. That would go against my idea of what a great game is. But, if it turned out that Trump owned Bethesda, for instance, I wouldn’t stop liking Fallout.
That's fine. You appreciating a piece of art, by itself, does not enable bad actors to damage the world. But that's not the scenario we're talking about, and it doesn't involve any awards.
That's fine. You appreciating a piece of art, by itself, does not enable bad actors to damage the world. But that's not the scenario we're talking about, and it doesn't involve any awards.
I have no background knowledge of IGF, this award, or the game in question, I will check it out now that apparently it's very good. As far as LLM or AI use, in the software space: it is already a...
I have no background knowledge of IGF, this award, or the game in question, I will check it out now that apparently it's very good.
As far as LLM or AI use, in the software space: it is already a foregone conclusion. You are probably worse off if you don't use it. Obviously, it can enable bad behavior or bad work without due diligence of course, but it is simply too capable to avoid using entirely: they clearly used it effectively if the product is good.
Whatever complaints people may have about labor rights or art or ethics or capitalism doesn't seem relevant to whether the product that I purchase as a consumer I want to be good, I don't really care how that was achieved. Speaking personally whether I think my job is in danger from AI it definitely is, but I'd also be worse at my job if I didn't use it. Same as if I wanted to write every spreadsheet by hand. I think the ship has sailed and virtue signaling like this is tilting at windmills. Maybe people want to rail against it and have awards that will have endless debate over whether such and such used it or didn't use it and nauseum. That's not important to me, at least
Just because something lets you get things done faster or cheaper doesn't automatically make that thing a foregone conclusion, or mean that we should lay down and accept its inevitability. Imagine...
Just because something lets you get things done faster or cheaper doesn't automatically make that thing a foregone conclusion, or mean that we should lay down and accept its inevitability.
Imagine if we took that stance on sweatshops or child labor or indentured servitude. Ethics and morality matter and no amount of hype or boosterism can negate that. You can certainly choose to ignore it and say that the only thing that matters is that the end product is good, regardless of how it was arrived at, but you shouldn't be surprised when others strongly disagree with that.
The entire discipline of software development exists to make things faster and cheaper by doing with computers what used to be done by hand or human effort. That’s literally why it came into...
The entire discipline of software development exists to make things faster and cheaper by doing with computers what used to be done by hand or human effort.
That’s literally why it came into being. That is its purpose. Software developers have been annihilating entire industries and career paths for going on 3 decades now without a second thought, but when the bell tolls for them suddenly it’s a four-alarm ethical fire?
There’s certainly ethical implications with its use, the IP standards around it, the degradation in quality and lack of consideration in its outputs, the hardening of biases embedded in training data in opaque ways that can’t be audited or interrogated.
But none of those considerations are served by treating LLM use like it’s analogous to using conflict minerals or something. That’s just the sort of change aversion grasping at shadows of ethical concerns to justify sticking our heads in the sand and hoping it goes away.
Not long ago I was looking into an interesting job offer for a well-known company. I quickly found out that their job application process mandated a LinkedIn profile. I closed the tab and moved...
Not long ago I was looking into an interesting job offer for a well-known company. I quickly found out that their job application process mandated a LinkedIn profile. I closed the tab and moved on, because I've deleted my LinkedIn profile some time ago and have no intention of creating another one.
Those of you who have read some of the things I wrote in the past know I'm a believer in acting ethically. I boycott corporations on a regular basis (sometimes for many years) and make choices that are inconvenient to me for the sake of doing my part to make the world an infinitesimally better place (maybe). I also argue for others to do the same. It profoundly irritates me that, for so many people - including unfortunately some here on Tildes - their carefully constructed belief systems and long-winded arguments somehow work out to them never having to do anything inconvenient. Must Be Nice.
Plus, while I use it on occasion, I don't very much like "AI," the bundle of technologies being marketed by certain technology companies. I've argued against uses of it right here on Tildes. I don't think people should be feeding generative AI output to other people, and I find it insane that it should replace anyone's job. I certainly don't think AI is better at my job than I am; people who believe their ability to do their job depends strictly on the availability of AI tools are probably not the best at their job to begin with. If I'm forced to use it, I'll be unhappy about it.
Which is why I hate that this article puts me in a position of having to defend the technology. I understand that the author is connected to an industry where this technology has had a negative impact on a lot of people's livelihoods, which I sympathize with, and in their ability to fund certain kinds of projects, but this uncompromising stance reads extremely condescending and reeks of luddism.
Technology in itself has no intent. It doesn't think or will - not even "AI." The work that led to the current bleeding edge of language prediction or image diffusion or whatever did not materialize out of the blue. Like all technology, it's built on an unbroken chain of prior advancements and discoveries that humankind has happily over the years, decades and centuries made use of to empower our ability to accomplish. It wasn't airdropped by evil aliens intent on our destruction, though evil people may attempt to make use of it as a tool for nefarious purposes.
Much in the same way, a knife can be used to hurt someone or a lighter can set a building on fire, yet that doesn't make me feel the need to take a radical, fanatical, uncompromising ethical stance against such unthinking tools. There is no word of God here, no forbidden fruit of good and evil, no magical boundary drawn in glorious mystical light. Instead, I humbly posit that we should, indeed, use our heads, consider each situation, and be reasonable about it. The writer is a judge for the IGF awards, but what good is a judge when conclusions are predetermined from dogma?
I'm not defending House House here specifically, so don't bother accusing me of whatever the author is accusing others of. Not do I argue that the IGF Awards have to judge by standards other than their own. I take issue more with the tone of the argument than the specifics of this situation. Some of you may recall that my brother is a senior developer in the videogame industry. I know from his grumbling that Engines Suck (exactly as the author admits), way more than the majority of gamers are aware of. At one time, perhaps it might have been possible to research and resolve the never-ending issues developers encounter without this "technology that did not exist two years ago," but now? The Internet is drowning in AI-generated garbage. The cat is out of the bag. Fire has been discovered, and knives have been forged. We live in a world of knives; we can't go back to using clubs, unless we're arguing that videogame developers should cloister themselves in monasteries and live in purity and isolation from the rest of the world.
I think there are a lot of sensible choices we can make to engage with this technology ethically. We should certainly not do what the Sam Altmans and Anthropics of the world want; we shouldn't play into their harmful plans, and we shouldn't contribute to their power and wealth. Perhaps it's the millions of people investing in these larger AI companies that should rethink what they do with their money, rather than the smallish development studios that employ real developers and artists. We should also not pass the work of AI off as our own, as indeed House House didn't. We can work toward improving legislation around the technology, both with regard to true ownership, privacy and safety. This is not the kind of argument I see the author making. Rather, the author repeatedly makes absolute claims regarding "LLMs," a technology that, one way or another, isn't going away.
I don't think you disagree with the author so much as you may think. Technology has no inherent "good" or "evil" quality to it, no — but the people, organizations and corporations who use it can...
I don't think you disagree with the author so much as you may think.
Technology has no inherent "good" or "evil" quality to it, no — but the people, organizations and corporations who use it can do good and evil things with it. They are who have the will and intent. And when and how they wield it is where the results come from; from here, the technology itself only determines how easy it is to do one or the other in the environment in which it exists.
I think this is central to understanding the author's argument, as it's this fact that is what enables AI to be an ethical issue to use. I've said before that I believe that AI could've been good if it had been invented differently; perhaps something open-source and free, niche and needing to prove itself, rather than a corporate thing spreading like wildfire among the executive class and promising them a world without the common man.
We just didn't get the good option. What we have is a world where AI is furthering many harms. Some of this may be encouraged by the nature of the tool – it is one that lends itself better to firing and replacing people than to curing world hunger, after all – but this isn't the core reason it's a problem. That core is a consequence of how AI was invented and who has been the primary controller of its effects since then.
This doesn't mean we can't ever get to the good option. That's still a possibility. It just means the control has to change hands, such that the tool is no longer being turned to shit ends so often. It means things like Sam Altman shutting up and doing something else, it means Donald Trump not caring about it anymore. It means the bubble popping, so that the suits leading companies stop believing in the mass delusion that causes them to believe AI will let them fire everyone and do everything faster and better and also discover unicorns hidden in Scotland.
In order to get that pop, though, the people responsible for this all need to actually stop believing in the technology, or they'll keep chasing it. Some things have already caused it to happen in some places, but we still face the problem.
This is where the ethical issue of using the technology, as it stands now, comes up.
Because this belief that AI is the ultimate solution for every problem, that it'll drive us to a golden age of free money, is propped up in part by usage metrics. By people's belief and agreement that AI is useful, or even indispensable. Even if they knew and understood the climate issues fully, or the deskilling issues, or the code decoherence, it often won't matter — if OpenAI can claim big user numbers, or even just generate positive sentiment about any AI at all, they can then use that to sell themselves for longer.
And this same problem is part of why those above-mentioned climate issues et al are so big of a deal, too, because it prevents them from being fixed. Google, Meta, Microsoft, none of them are worried about climate change or AI dependency – shit, they'd love dependency – but without them in the picture, AI as a technology can have its path directed by people who do care.
We need those people, because those problems are disgustingly nasty, and getting ever so slightly worse with each additional user. The sooner the careless and exploitative companies of today make way for more responsible stewards, the better.
The technology is not necessarily evil in all forms. It's just evil in how it is now.
All I’m really taking from this controversy is that I don’t think the IGF awards are aligned with what I think is important about games and I probably won’t pay attention to their awards because they probably won’t be surfacing or platforming the best games. They’ll be awarding the best people can manage to do with a lot of effort for the sake of effort. Which is fine — people have a right to want only the finest artisanal bits and bytes made by free range programmers, but I’m not super interested in that personally.
No offense, but I'm getting the impression you haven't read the article. Which I can understand given the length and all, don't get me wrong! It's just that there's a great many sections pertinent to your comment here, and which might change your stance.
Again, I'd post them here, but I'd practically be tearing the article apart into little shreds to do it. Suffice to say that "best games" involves many things, that the IGF jurors care a lot about games, and that their reasoning is very nuanced.
EDIT: Actually, this one section might be enough, if only to highlight how important reading the article is:
Also, just in case it should be mentioned: IGF judges/jurors do not actually control IGF itself. That's run by Informa, who invites them in turn.
No, I read the whole screed. I get it, the author hates AI and thinks that the existence of it is a “noxious political project” and any use of it at all crosses an “ethical boundary” so obvious even a 6-year old should understand. Users of AI are “unscrupulous actors” doing the moral equivalent of “lying” and “cheating” — anyone who doesn’t align with this belief should “fix their hearts”.
I broadly disagree.
The screed never says AI users are unscrupulous actors, nor does it say that it’s the moral equivalent of lying and cheating. The “unscrupulous actors” quote is describing people who lie about breaking a rule, or cheat behind closed doors. If anything the author is rebuking the argument that AI users will just lie about not using it:
An inaccurate summary of the article is a little too on the nose, don’t you think?
I dunno. Seems to me like @unkz hit the nail on the head. I wish the comment thread disputing their interpretation didn’t lead me to read it just to confirm.
Right before your quote:
Almost right after your quote:
This is why I wanted people to read the article.
Incidentally, I am curious why you only chose to check one quote, and why of them all you picked one @ogre didn't even mention.
I picked a quote that made it clear Unkz had an accurate read on the tone. The two extracts you have here don’t really change that. We can reproduce extracts until we’ve got the entire article in these comments but ultimately it is a very one-sided screed with a very puritanical argument about LLM use, as was said.
I feel we must have very divergent points of view somewhere to consider the tone of this article so differently. If greater context won't do, maybe this comment of mine would explain it better.
...alright, I guess if we're tearing the article to shreds anyway, let's add some context to those quotes:
In a collapsible, since it's long
[...]
[...]
I hope it's clear now why I didn't provide snippets to begin with, given just how much I had to skip over and rearrange things to properly provide context to this.
With that said, I also want to make it clear that I consider your description a very bad-faith mischaracterization of the article, which I strongly resent given how much care the author put into writing it.
I mean… unless I’m really missing something, your quotes seem to mesh with what @unkz said above?
You guys disagree with each other, that’s clear, but I don’t see any bad faith or any mischaracterisation on either side? The article takes a pretty clear stance that AI use of any kind is inherently unethical, and moreover seems to be written from a point of view where that’s seen as self evident and the topic at hand is how far we can tolerate people indulging in this obviously unethical behaviour.
Fair enough, it sounds like you come from a similar perspective and enjoyed the article, I can see a shared understanding there. But I’d hope you can also see it’s loudly and forcefully pushing that particular perspective, and (a) acknowledging the article is doing so, and (b) rejecting the base premise, are actually pretty legitimate alternative perspectives to take?
I'll try again, then: unkz' comment gives the impression that the author is a bonfire-burning zealot seeking to burn people at the stake for any and all AI use. It also suggests the author believes in a false dichotomy wherein all AI use is equally bad, such that House House being functionally equivalent to OpenAI itself. Neither of these are true.
This is added on to by total misrepresentations of the third quote onwards; "unscrupulous actors" referred to people who lied about AI use, not all AI users. The same goes for "lying" "cheaters," while "fix your hearts" has to do only with hypothetical people who "don't really believe in the ethical urgency of anything."
I guess I have to grant that viewpoint must be an important factor here, given the thread's reception. But the above is still a very uncharitable read of the article.
On the contrary, I find that your expanded context only drives the point in better and in more detail. I don’t think I misrepresented a single word.
Yeah, I thought the other article was at least interesting enough as a philosophical argument for what IGF should be about. This felt more like - well your use of the word "screed" in the other comment feels very accurate.
I think the are some interesting and difficult moral and aesthetic discussions to be had around LLMs. Many of those discussions are also intertwined with questions about our economic system and how we reward labour.
But at the same time, I think there's also a group of people that have made LLMs into a symbol of all that is currently wrong with the world, and I find it increasingly difficult to follow their arguments or understand their approach. And this feels like that sort of article. LLMs are simply bad, there can be no discussion or nuance, any attempt to touch them or interact with them in any way taints everything that you do, and if you do dare break rank, then you deserve everything you get. And I guess fair enough, if that's how the author feels, then they and their peers can judge this award however they like. But that's not where I'm at.
Firstly, people who are against LLM usage disagree that the effort is pointless (see recent stories about Humble Bundle's vibe coded redesign nightmare and the Proton CEO sabotaging his own company through AI psychosis for examples).
Secondly, you're probably right that IGF awards are misaligned with whatever you thought they were. But that was already discoverable before any of this controversy. See this from their about page:
They're interested in awarding talent. Someone who codes an impressive game without LLMs is clearly demonstrating way more of that than a vibe coder who's just chatting with a bot to make theirs, no matter how the end products compare.
But we're not talking here about vibe coding. There's a guy I used to follow on Bluesky who got fully into vibe coding, vibe video making, vibe gaming, the lot, and the end result was mostly slop with no kind of effort or talent visible. Like, it was a cool showcase of what an LLM can do, but it wasn't interesting beyond that.
But here, people have been clearly been using their talent and their skill to build something that does in many ways redefine what a video game can be. They've created a game that showcases and emphasises human connection, and is filled with moments designed - with great skill - to emotionally resonate in different ways. Clearly a lot of talent has gone into this game.
But at some point in development they ran into a specific coding issue, spent time and effort - and talent - understanding that issue, and in addition asked an LLM for help. That then continued to spend that time, effort, and talent to understand and apply the answer. And now that step in the middle - plugging the problem into an LLM - is overshadowing all the rest of their clear demonstration of talent. And if that's the case, then that's the point at which this award stops being useful to me. Because clearly there is a tremendous amount of talent on display, but what's more important than that is talent plus never ever having ever touched an LLM, and I'm afraid I don't really care so much about the second half of that criteria if the first half is clearly present.
I guess you can look at it as a spectrum. The more you rely on LLMs in the production of anything, the less talent is required. That's one of the main selling points of LLMs—now anyone can code or make art or music or whatever where previously only people who had talent could do those things.
If your goal is to award talent, it doesn't seem outrageous to me to exclude projects that used LLMs in any capacity, just for the sole reason that it's an easy line to draw in the sand. Otherwise you have to quantify AI usage and then assess each disclosed usage by each project to measure whether they exceed whatever threshold you've defined as "acceptable." It would be messy and annoying and subjective and cause even more controversy than we're seeing right now.
I don't think it is always a spectrum like that, no. LLMs generally require talent to use effectively. If you understand a subject matter well, they are essentially a force multiplier, they make it easier to go further. They don't have to replace talent, they can augment it instead.
In this case, unless the talent you're specifically looking for is recall of the best ways to work around arbitrary Unity bugs, I find it very difficult to see why House House have demonstrated any less talent than they would have if they'd not used an LLM.
For me the question is why AI is being singled out versus the many other labor-saving tools that game developers could use. This isn’t like journalism where manipulating photos in Photoshop could misrepresent the truth. It’s also not like a sports event where everyone agrees on artificial limitations to make the competition interesting. There isn’t even a performance aspect to it, like in music where sometimes we’re interested in what musicians can do by actually playing their instruments.
You should be able to use all the computer graphics you want when making a game, using any tool, just like you can use whatever trickery or special effects you like when making a movie. it’s mostly fake anyway and the “talent” is how good you are with whatever tools you like to use, not what you could do unaided.
Hard hard disagree. Satoru Iwata's whole mystique was his ability to do exactly these kinds of things with limited technology, like implementing a full movement algorithm in the limited SNES space simply to be able to deliver a pizza on any screen within Earthbound, or unfucking Game Freak's work on Pokemon Gold/Silver to the point they were able to fit Kanto on the cartridge and help create probably the single biggest shock moment of the series. As a modern example, Billy Basso could have shipped Animal Well - which released on the PS5 - on a medium-size DS cartridge if he wanted. And that's a game about uncovering the depths of what's in plain sight! It's technical wizardry. Code is art.
That said - much like electronic music, sampling, FL Studio, what have you, I think tools do not necessarily cheapen the ability to get a feeling across in a finished product. I still find myself personally unconcerned that House House used an LLM to fix a bug despite this article.
I (yes, hello, me again, I can't seem to shut up about this topic) find this article to be very vitriolic in the worst possible way. First, even if the author didn't intend this to be the case, it's quite presumptuous to the point where it borders on arrogance to assert that "House House couldn't have created a nastier situation for IGF judges if they were deliberately trying". Even if you hedge your bets by saying that they didn't do this intentionally, it still makes me think like the author believes that House House should have please thought of the IGF judges! Will somebody think of the independent volunteer judges that manage an art contest with medium influence?
I also have to point out that this article tries, to a farcical extent, to preach to the choir. The dichotomy between "moral lines it's okay to cross", like single use plastics or, maybe if you're so inclined, driving a gas car, eating meat, not voting blue in a deeply red state, and "moral lines it is never okay to cross" which somehow includes even cursory LLM use on the basis that they are "completely optional" and "didn't exist a few years ago" is so weirdly pointed that I need to interrogate this.
And I did, just in the last sentence. I made an escalating series of assertions that you, dear reader, may or may not have agreed with. Eating mass produced meat products is, by all counts, also entirely optional these days. As is driving a combustion car. Or not voting when statistically you know you're outvoted fifty times over in your county. All of these could, in the mind of the right or wrong person, also be a moral line it is imperative to never cross. And the same thing applies, thus, to LLMs. Some people think it's fine to use them despite their moral ramifications (and I'm really, really not saying that those are meaningless).
[ Warning: Emotional tangent ahead, proceed with caution ]
It speaks volumes to the perceived maturity of the author that they treat this issue with a level of importance usually reserved for employee abuse or embezzling scandals in the industry. To quote,
Pardon my fucking C++, but excuse me? Who died and made you the arbiter of morals and ethics in technology? I'm supposed to fix my heart, after the IGF made this internal discussion suddenly everyone else's problem and poisoned the well of nuanced discussion to the point that even gas chromatography won't be able to identify the constituent opinions? And for what, for the opinion that "AI has no place in development", something the rest of the commercial software industry has discussed and conceded months ago?
I'm personally so sick of the discussion at hand here, because it's all hypocritical nonsense. Not just in part because I am convinced, after reading @teaearlgraycold's thoughts on the matter, that there's far more actual damage done in the collateral wake of game development and promotion that merit more investigation. At the end of the day, the people in question do not like AI use. That's fine, you can believe that. There's plenty of criticisms that AI rightly deserves and that must be examined in one way or another before the debt it incurs becomes so large we all pay for it. This, however, is an incredibly minor and in my opinion inauthentic hill to die on. Just say it gets under your skin. Just say it disgusts you. That's fine. But know that you're standing in moving water.
To be honest all else being equal I’d rather install an application made with assistance from an LLM than have one be made in Electron. Now THAT disgusts me.
I do firmly believe that slop has existed in any given field long before AI.
I want to disagree with most of what you've said here, but with the way this thread has been going, I'm honestly just happy to know you read the article.
I feel like a number of comments here haven't been doing that.
I'm interested in having a conversation, and that includes challenging my perceived notions by reading articles I end up disagreeing with. I think it's good that you posted it. It just hasn't convinced me of the point it's desperately trying to make.
This is another long article on the current IGF/House House discussion going on, which I felt was worth posting given its quality and effort. This one comes from Bruno Dias, who's an IGF judge — not a juror, to be clear. ≈250 to 300 judges turn submissions into nominations, while ≈50 jurors turn nominations into finalists into winners. The letter signed recently came from 19 of the latter group.
I recommend reading this one from end to end, as it's both very well written and covers a lot of ground. A consequence of that is that I can't really provide snippets or summaries here very well without misrepresenting the article by leaving too much out. It is split into two chunks though, so don't get too intimidated by the page length!
I hadn't realized that there was such a strong feeling in parts of the community around the ethics of LLMs. I hadn't much considered it myself only because I just don't really like them full stop, as in I have a distaste for using them, and avoid it if I can. So seeing arguments against using it at all from an ethical angle is a little newer to me than it might be to others.
I do wonder if there's a bit of a clash going on, with people on one side with ethical concerns as their primary focus, and people who dislike the quality of the output as their primary concern - it does seem like it.
I'll have to think about what this post is saying, but if anyone has a good link/article that goes over the ethical concerns in details, I'd appreciate it in the meantime, the OP sort of assumes the knowledge.
It's not a thorough exploration of the concerns themselves, but this BlueSky thread by Daniel Fedor lists off the various reasons his studio has opted to never use AI, and that list might still give a good starting point.
You might also be interested in this essay by Cory Doctorow.
Thanks for sharing - both were a good read, and I agree with a lot of the ethical issues that are raised that need to be addressed.
(I'm adding the below in an aim to comfort you a bit, feel free to take it or leave it as suits your needs)
For what its worth, the fact that there's pushback from people not agreeing with this post shouldn't discourage you - I think having conversations like this with people who see things from different perspectives is exactly why small communities like this are the only viable form of social media. I'd hate to see this place turn into another reddit where you agree or you leave. Please keep posting insightful and interesting things. I think it does everyone good to learn more diverse perspectives on topics.
I've been putting a lot of effort into taking it in stride, but it's true the thread has been a bit exhausting. So I very much do appreciate the kind words, it means a lot!
I just wish I understood what others must be seeing in the article that I'm not. Personally, I'm wondering if it's just the article being polarizing, combined with
artificial intelligencepossibly being on many blacklists among those who dislike AI. If the tag weren't so blacklisted, maybe this thread would be more balanced?I dunno if that'd have been for the best though. If this post truly reads this differently based on existing opinion, then that might've just caused this thread to devolve into chaotic two-sided bickering.
If you'll forgive a small web link, a blog I follow recently outlined their reasons for avoiding media post-2022 due to often undisclosed AI use and explained their reasoning/ethical concerns quite well.
Thank you! It's a reasonable stance to take in my opinion. I've been avoiding most films, TV shows and music - save for a rare few that seem to be good quality - for even longer. My only reasoning was that it was generally not worth my time, so doing the same for ethical reasons makes perfect sense.
Clearly using LLMs is a black-and-white moral issue for the author, but that's rare amongst software developers. I would be very surprised if there aren't other indie dev teams that were a little less forthcoming about using chatbots in the development process. You'd need a very strict policy with all employees in total agreement, ban using the biggest search engines that spit out an AI overview....
I used to spend a significant amount of my time as a developer searching the web for solutions to weird bugs. I think it's fair to say search engines were an indispensable tool for software development. In the past few years, the amount of AI slop on the web has made using search engines sans-AI to solve technical issues almost impossible. I used to get results from dev forums, now 90% of the results are slop articles. This isn't a problem for companies like Google, who want you to use their LLM instead. AI has created the disease and provided the cure: chatbots are incredibly good at finding answers to technical problems, often in a single query.
Is it possible to write software without talking to a chatbot? Yes of course, just like it was possible to write software without search engines in the past. It just reduces your efficiency in a way that businesses are unlikely to support.
So it's not as simple as "just write software like you used to, pre-LLM". Saying "they could have hired an expert" also feels a bit naïve. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I can't imagine a company approving a new hire to solve a bug.
I don't know, maybe I'm just soothing my own cognitive dissonance. I'm a dev who is doesn't like AI but is forced to use it for my job. I'm happy that House House made their game mostly without AI. That's better than most software nowadays.
From the article "The argument that it shouldn't matter because the game is very good" this point in the article summarizes everything I feel about this and issue. The game is good and IGF is supposed to represent that, since it can't, IGF no longer has credibility.
By this logic, awards shows also shouldn't care about, say, games on consoles made from attack drone metal.
Or games made by neofascist governments.
I take issue with the implication that a "good game" is a definition that somehow has no room for ethics.
Correct, they shouldn't.
Unless the category is specifically best game, or whatever, that isn't played on a console made of drone parts or best game not created by some Nazis.
I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about ethics.
It's just an alloy. Maybe people could have been reasonably upset about the branding with Anduril since Anduril makes weapons, but ModRetro itself is founded by Palmer Luckey (the Anduril founder), so it's hypocritical as fuck to buy a ModRetro device if you feel so strongly against Anduril. Shoot, I'd love to know what the people who hate Anduril for being a weapons manufacturer think Ukraine should do about its Russia problem.
EDIT: after looking online, it looks like the outrage was well overblown. Modern journalism is finding a few angry tweets and then frame it as "people are saying".
The argument falls apart because neither of those two things have ever or would ever win an award based on their artistic merits alone.
The argument is that morality is a valid consideration for what makes something good. I don't see how the technicality of a metaphor causes that to crumble.
Let's put it this way: If the IGF did somehow give an award to one of Trump's "games," would you be okay with it?
At the risk of terminating this thought, the past few weeks have shown me that the values of the IGF clearly don't align with mine, so I can't say I would care one way or the other.
More to the point though, I can't say that the products in question merit discussion because, like all products made by fascists, they exist in a space of hate and violence, which means that they will not be very good. Call it a lack of love. A lack of authenticity. Even someone who's not a juror will pick up on this. Fascists are miserable, we know this.
Fascists have produced quite a bit of media with powerful cultural impacts. We’ve got Wagner, Leni Riefenstahl, Birth of a Nation, Heidegger, 300. Compelling aesthetic products are some of the only things they CAN do right.
It’s just the modern iterations of them are especially clownish because they’re a weird atavism of theater kids LARPing as fascists who were themselves LARPing as Teutonic warrior knights. It’s a copy of a copy so of course everything is garish and exaggerated.
That's fine! I took issue with NOD's reasoning, not the mere disagreement itself.
At any rate, we obviously agree on the nature of fascism. But I still think this is a bit hung up on the examples I gave, when the point of it all is that it'd be completely reasonable to disqualify a game based on ethical concerns alone. People can naturally disagree on if the thing in question is an ethical concern at all, that's fair — but to me, suggesting outright irrelevance feels akin to asking games' reviewers to produce "objective reviews." It's an arbitrary separation that lacks understanding of the nuance in art.
Maybe this is my privilege speaking, but I think even unethical art can and must be considered on its artistic merits. I don't have a direct example for this, I grant you, but for example an art installation that... has for instance industrial meat production and the cruelty of it as its subject and then uses the explicit and violent torture of animals to make that point is for certain unethical, but this shouldn't disqualify it from discussion. In fact, quite the opposite.
Discussion is one thing, awards are another. Discussion can have a carefully considered time and place that is appropriate to the nature of that which is discussed, arranged to ensure that even if the topic in question is abhorrent, it can be talked about without harm.
Awards grant prestige though. That's a valuable currency. I don't think unethical art deserves that.
I have the ability to separate the art from the artist. It doesn't mean I have to choose to play it. For example, I've boycotted Blizzard and EA Games for 20+ years. There are good games by EA "it takes two" comes to mind. I don't have to play but I am capable of judging that something is a good game. Those are two are separate categories. So to your point, if some neonazi fascist government designed game won, I would not be upset if the game was actually good.
Do I have to buy it and play it? No.
If you boycott Blizzard and EA, then you understand that purchasing from them has material impact on the world. You understand that impact to be bad, so you ensure that you don't reward them. That's good and I agree.
The part I don't get is where you think the same is not true of awards shows. Do you think publicity doesn't count? That getting an award has no impact on the bottom line of an organization? Because I can tell you right now that if a fascist developer ever did win an award of any sort, they would parade it around like proof they were right about everything. It would be political propaganda in an instant. And it would get them more money, even besides the literal cash prize attached.
I’ve seen Trump’s games, so if they were given an award for being a great game then I would not be ok with it because the games are low quality racist trash. That would go against my idea of what a great game is. But, if it turned out that Trump owned Bethesda, for instance, I wouldn’t stop liking Fallout.
That's fine. You appreciating a piece of art, by itself, does not enable bad actors to damage the world. But that's not the scenario we're talking about, and it doesn't involve any awards.
I have no background knowledge of IGF, this award, or the game in question, I will check it out now that apparently it's very good.
As far as LLM or AI use, in the software space: it is already a foregone conclusion. You are probably worse off if you don't use it. Obviously, it can enable bad behavior or bad work without due diligence of course, but it is simply too capable to avoid using entirely: they clearly used it effectively if the product is good.
Whatever complaints people may have about labor rights or art or ethics or capitalism doesn't seem relevant to whether the product that I purchase as a consumer I want to be good, I don't really care how that was achieved. Speaking personally whether I think my job is in danger from AI it definitely is, but I'd also be worse at my job if I didn't use it. Same as if I wanted to write every spreadsheet by hand. I think the ship has sailed and virtue signaling like this is tilting at windmills. Maybe people want to rail against it and have awards that will have endless debate over whether such and such used it or didn't use it and nauseum. That's not important to me, at least
Just because something lets you get things done faster or cheaper doesn't automatically make that thing a foregone conclusion, or mean that we should lay down and accept its inevitability.
Imagine if we took that stance on sweatshops or child labor or indentured servitude. Ethics and morality matter and no amount of hype or boosterism can negate that. You can certainly choose to ignore it and say that the only thing that matters is that the end product is good, regardless of how it was arrived at, but you shouldn't be surprised when others strongly disagree with that.
The entire discipline of software development exists to make things faster and cheaper by doing with computers what used to be done by hand or human effort.
That’s literally why it came into being. That is its purpose. Software developers have been annihilating entire industries and career paths for going on 3 decades now without a second thought, but when the bell tolls for them suddenly it’s a four-alarm ethical fire?
There’s certainly ethical implications with its use, the IP standards around it, the degradation in quality and lack of consideration in its outputs, the hardening of biases embedded in training data in opaque ways that can’t be audited or interrogated.
But none of those considerations are served by treating LLM use like it’s analogous to using conflict minerals or something. That’s just the sort of change aversion grasping at shadows of ethical concerns to justify sticking our heads in the sand and hoping it goes away.
Not long ago I was looking into an interesting job offer for a well-known company. I quickly found out that their job application process mandated a LinkedIn profile. I closed the tab and moved on, because I've deleted my LinkedIn profile some time ago and have no intention of creating another one.
Those of you who have read some of the things I wrote in the past know I'm a believer in acting ethically. I boycott corporations on a regular basis (sometimes for many years) and make choices that are inconvenient to me for the sake of doing my part to make the world an infinitesimally better place (maybe). I also argue for others to do the same. It profoundly irritates me that, for so many people - including unfortunately some here on Tildes - their carefully constructed belief systems and long-winded arguments somehow work out to them never having to do anything inconvenient. Must Be Nice.
Plus, while I use it on occasion, I don't very much like "AI," the bundle of technologies being marketed by certain technology companies. I've argued against uses of it right here on Tildes. I don't think people should be feeding generative AI output to other people, and I find it insane that it should replace anyone's job. I certainly don't think AI is better at my job than I am; people who believe their ability to do their job depends strictly on the availability of AI tools are probably not the best at their job to begin with. If I'm forced to use it, I'll be unhappy about it.
Which is why I hate that this article puts me in a position of having to defend the technology. I understand that the author is connected to an industry where this technology has had a negative impact on a lot of people's livelihoods, which I sympathize with, and in their ability to fund certain kinds of projects, but this uncompromising stance reads extremely condescending and reeks of luddism.
Technology in itself has no intent. It doesn't think or will - not even "AI." The work that led to the current bleeding edge of language prediction or image diffusion or whatever did not materialize out of the blue. Like all technology, it's built on an unbroken chain of prior advancements and discoveries that humankind has happily over the years, decades and centuries made use of to empower our ability to accomplish. It wasn't airdropped by evil aliens intent on our destruction, though evil people may attempt to make use of it as a tool for nefarious purposes.
Much in the same way, a knife can be used to hurt someone or a lighter can set a building on fire, yet that doesn't make me feel the need to take a radical, fanatical, uncompromising ethical stance against such unthinking tools. There is no word of God here, no forbidden fruit of good and evil, no magical boundary drawn in glorious mystical light. Instead, I humbly posit that we should, indeed, use our heads, consider each situation, and be reasonable about it. The writer is a judge for the IGF awards, but what good is a judge when conclusions are predetermined from dogma?
I'm not defending House House here specifically, so don't bother accusing me of whatever the author is accusing others of. Not do I argue that the IGF Awards have to judge by standards other than their own. I take issue more with the tone of the argument than the specifics of this situation. Some of you may recall that my brother is a senior developer in the videogame industry. I know from his grumbling that Engines Suck (exactly as the author admits), way more than the majority of gamers are aware of. At one time, perhaps it might have been possible to research and resolve the never-ending issues developers encounter without this "technology that did not exist two years ago," but now? The Internet is drowning in AI-generated garbage. The cat is out of the bag. Fire has been discovered, and knives have been forged. We live in a world of knives; we can't go back to using clubs, unless we're arguing that videogame developers should cloister themselves in monasteries and live in purity and isolation from the rest of the world.
I think there are a lot of sensible choices we can make to engage with this technology ethically. We should certainly not do what the Sam Altmans and Anthropics of the world want; we shouldn't play into their harmful plans, and we shouldn't contribute to their power and wealth. Perhaps it's the millions of people investing in these larger AI companies that should rethink what they do with their money, rather than the smallish development studios that employ real developers and artists. We should also not pass the work of AI off as our own, as indeed House House didn't. We can work toward improving legislation around the technology, both with regard to true ownership, privacy and safety. This is not the kind of argument I see the author making. Rather, the author repeatedly makes absolute claims regarding "LLMs," a technology that, one way or another, isn't going away.
I don't think you disagree with the author so much as you may think.
Technology has no inherent "good" or "evil" quality to it, no — but the people, organizations and corporations who use it can do good and evil things with it. They are who have the will and intent. And when and how they wield it is where the results come from; from here, the technology itself only determines how easy it is to do one or the other in the environment in which it exists.
I think this is central to understanding the author's argument, as it's this fact that is what enables AI to be an ethical issue to use. I've said before that I believe that AI could've been good if it had been invented differently; perhaps something open-source and free, niche and needing to prove itself, rather than a corporate thing spreading like wildfire among the executive class and promising them a world without the common man.
We just didn't get the good option. What we have is a world where AI is furthering many harms. Some of this may be encouraged by the nature of the tool – it is one that lends itself better to firing and replacing people than to curing world hunger, after all – but this isn't the core reason it's a problem. That core is a consequence of how AI was invented and who has been the primary controller of its effects since then.
This doesn't mean we can't ever get to the good option. That's still a possibility. It just means the control has to change hands, such that the tool is no longer being turned to shit ends so often. It means things like Sam Altman shutting up and doing something else, it means Donald Trump not caring about it anymore. It means the bubble popping, so that the suits leading companies stop believing in the mass delusion that causes them to believe AI will let them fire everyone and do everything faster and better and also discover unicorns hidden in Scotland.
In order to get that pop, though, the people responsible for this all need to actually stop believing in the technology, or they'll keep chasing it. Some things have already caused it to happen in some places, but we still face the problem.
This is where the ethical issue of using the technology, as it stands now, comes up.
Because this belief that AI is the ultimate solution for every problem, that it'll drive us to a golden age of free money, is propped up in part by usage metrics. By people's belief and agreement that AI is useful, or even indispensable. Even if they knew and understood the climate issues fully, or the deskilling issues, or the code decoherence, it often won't matter — if OpenAI can claim big user numbers, or even just generate positive sentiment about any AI at all, they can then use that to sell themselves for longer.
And this same problem is part of why those above-mentioned climate issues et al are so big of a deal, too, because it prevents them from being fixed. Google, Meta, Microsoft, none of them are worried about climate change or AI dependency – shit, they'd love dependency – but without them in the picture, AI as a technology can have its path directed by people who do care.
We need those people, because those problems are disgustingly nasty, and getting ever so slightly worse with each additional user. The sooner the careless and exploitative companies of today make way for more responsible stewards, the better.
The technology is not necessarily evil in all forms. It's just evil in how it is now.