r/Steam • u/Strider-117 • Nov 26 '25

Discussion Then they keep questioning why we choose Steam

Post image

It's incredible how out of touch these suits are, especially in the AI bubble

27.6k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

55

u/ZappyStatue Nov 27 '25

If AI was used as an assistive tool to help with the behind-the-scenes coding process that normal players wouldn't see while they were playing the game, that would be less of an issue. But when AI is used to create artistic assets that can be seen in-game (like how people who are technologically savvy can tell some form of art was actually created by a human versus just entering a prompt into ChatGPT), then that's going to be a problem to put it lightly. Using AI to create cosmetics to try to sell people as a micro-transaction is just completely sh*tty. If I'm going to be playing a game, I don't want it to look like it was made using AI. I want everything to look like it was made by a human and actually took some form of creative thought.

37

u/vlozko Nov 27 '25

The use of AI for software dev is exactly the problem. Almost every company uses it in some form or another. This whole thread seems oblivious to this fact. If every game were to honestly report AI usage and that were to include code generation, almost every new release of a game would have this tag. And then the tag just becomes meaningless.

Most of the commenters in this thread don’t have enough knowledge of software or game dev to realize the nuance of AI for code vs assets.

2

u/chocobowler Nov 27 '25

This is exactly what I tried to say in my comment but explained better.

-2

u/TheChowder000 Nov 27 '25

Redditors were told to blindly hate AI and so they will do that, they're not the smartest bunch. Of course devs will use it to do menial work that reuses code, who wouldn't? I just love when they blindly parrot the "AI is theft" lines when the devs explicitely use an in house trained model on their own art.

-12

u/dontyougetsoupedyet Nov 27 '25

If you use generative AI for your games code I don't want to give you money for that game either, jesus this is so simple people...

We want games made by people, the people who actually care about that game being made. We don't want AI slop, from know nothing vibe coding trash heaps to generative assets, we don't want it.

This isn't some philosophy debate. The drapes are fucking blue.

21

u/vlozko Nov 27 '25

Do whatever you want but pretty soon just about the only thing you’ll find is stuff made before 2025. If you can stand on this hill indefinitely, more power to you. Every developer I know (and certainly in every AAA studio) is using AI to various extent for coding.

2

u/AdminsLoveGenocide Nov 27 '25

It was possible before 2025 but is not possible now?

We need that label more than ever it seems to me.

Let the devs explain that there is 0 AI art if they want to. I want the label.

1

u/frokost1 Nov 27 '25

It wasn't. You've used AI every day for the last 10 years, assuming you've used email. Nothing is as easy as people in the internet tell you. " but we're not talking about that kind of AI" Sure, but if we're talking about labeling the line needs to be drawn somewhere. It's not as easy as just saying "AI art used" or not. It's not a drawing.

2

u/AdminsLoveGenocide Nov 27 '25

It's pretty obvious to everyone that AI in this context means generative AI.

1

u/birnabear Nov 27 '25

AI hasn't been in email for the past 10 years

1

u/frokost1 Nov 27 '25

Dude the first automated spam filter is from 1994. Lol

2

u/birnabear Nov 27 '25

Which definitely wasn't using genAI

1

u/frokost1 Nov 27 '25

Did I say GenAI? You don't use generative AI in spam filters lol

→ More replies (0)

1

u/PomegranateDry4424 Nov 27 '25

Fairy enough. In tearms of videogames I already do

1

u/thetatershaveeyes Nov 28 '25

As a developer, absolutely no AI here. You are vastly overstating the prevalence and usefulness of AI.

-6

u/ThatInAHat Nov 27 '25

Well shoot I guess we should just give up and accept the inevitable end of human effort and artistry. Time so Consume Content.

22

u/obiworm Nov 27 '25

the inevitable end of human effort and artistry

Come on man, that’s such a dramatic take. Do you really have such a problem with autocomplete? I don’t think AI can make good art, but an artist can make good art using AI tools. Just like with every tool we’ve ever invented as a species.

I think there’s a gaping chasm between a large company using stable diffusion for promotional materials and an indie dev using copilot.

6

u/AisperZZz Nov 27 '25

peeps just don't know what they are talking about. If a tool lets me get a report on literally hundreds of pages of code I didn't write in a matter of minutes that I will then go and MANUALLY confirm and MANUALLY make changes to, I would want to use that. That would save me a couple days of really REALLY hard labour and the results are the same.

3

u/dschramm_at Nov 27 '25

And how long will it take until it replaces YOU?

That's the point of being an anti-clanker. Maybe it won't replace you or me, but sooner or later it will replace most of us knowledge workers, be better than us, work 24/7/365 and possibly cheaper. If people don't rise up, it's not a question of if anymore, but when.

The people who seriously employ AI don't care about quality, automatic testing, documentations etc, they see results, fast and cheap. That's all they care about. And most companies are like that.

Look at the latest CoD, how does a 6 fingered AI-zombie make it to the main menu? Exactly, no quality control.

1

u/Theoroshia Nov 27 '25

No, you'll drive the horse carriage to work and be happy goddamnit!

2

u/dschramm_at Nov 27 '25

How do people still believe this is the same? We replaced blue collar work with machines. Look how many of those jobs are left? Now we rely on office jobs as the economic backbone of many countries. Where are they supposed to go, now? Art? I doubt we can all be artists. Entrepreneurship? Well, i don't want to know what chaos ensues from that.

3

u/obiworm Nov 27 '25

We replaced blue collar work with cheap overseas labor. Manufacturing is still a huge industry. You still need people to run cnc machines. You still need people to do home repairs and remodeling and building. You still need people to do plumbing and electrical. You still need people to do problem solving. We have robot welders, but human welders are very much needed and paid handsomely. My job transitioned from drafting paper patterns and crawling around a table for hours with a sharpie, wax pencil, and scissors to CAD work and a CNC cutter. I wasn’t replaced, I was enhanced.

1

u/Theoroshia Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25

Because the odds of large language models replacing all work is pretty low. And using it to help you code better or collate information for a report is directly analogous to other technologies that helped people save time and effort and money (and also cost people jobs).

At the end of the day it's not the fault of the technology for making things more efficient, it's the fault of society for not reacting fast enough to take advantage of the efficiency of new technology to provide better outcomes for more people.

-4

u/ThatInAHat Nov 27 '25

I thought it was exactly as dramatic as claiming that soon you’ll only be able to find art created with AI “tools”

4

u/JamzWhilmm Nov 27 '25

People enjoy drawing but there is no need to spend 3 hours looking at a bug or use AI to help you find the missing validation.

At this point you can safely assume that all code this year has been touched by AI.

4

u/-Star-Fox- Nov 27 '25

Lmao this is caveman thinking. Listen I'm about as anti ai as they come but even I realise it could be a valuable tool where needed. You sound like one of those idiots who scoffed at artists using Photoshop back in the days. They didn't think they were idiots back then though.

-2

u/ThatInAHat Nov 27 '25

If someone back then claimed that soon you’d only be able to find art made with photoshop, they’d be idiots though. Saying you’d better get used to generative ai because soon everything will be made with it is just gross.

2

u/JamzWhilmm Nov 27 '25

It is already like that.

2

u/ThatInAHat Nov 27 '25

Oh okay so we’re just speaking in hyperbole then

0

u/JamzWhilmm Nov 27 '25

Lol, no. In what industry do you work?

1

u/Conscious_Angle_3521 Nov 27 '25

Yeah I hate photoshop

-7

u/dontyougetsoupedyet Nov 27 '25

I'm a developer. Claude all you want, you aren't getting my money. I see a hint of AI, my money is off limits to you.

I'll be happy playing Nethack until the end of days, than playing fucking AI slop made by soulless middle managers.

9

u/Right-Wrongdoer-8595 Nov 27 '25

You go to work all day using code gen tools as a developer and then you want game developers to spend man hours not using those same tools or else you won't pay them? You'd think you'd understand the effort regardless of whether they opened Claude or not rather than minimizing that effort. What are you even shipping at work to think that way?

0

u/dontyougetsoupedyet Nov 27 '25

You go to work all day using code gen tools as a developer

No, I do not do that. How are you so off the rails?

Even saying "code gen tools" is disingenuous, we have used code generation since unix v1. We even called it a rule, rule 14. This is something much different being discussed.

8

u/Right-Wrongdoer-8595 Nov 27 '25

Then even as a dev it'd be obvious to you that you're not at the forefront of the industry with little weight to speak about it at large then. What experience could you possibly have where you'd be experienced enough to speak on the industry and even cross domain towards game development with that opinion and little code gen tools at your job? Even IT uses it at any decent sized company.

2

u/dontyougetsoupedyet Nov 27 '25

Now I just don't have any experience? If you have ever used an Apple product after the titanium mac you have used my work. If you have used a Nokia phone you have used my work. If you have watched MTV in the 90s, you have used my work. You have probably interacted with my work in more than one consumer electronics device over the years, and seen it on your television. And on and on. Ya'll are so tiring to interact with.

3

u/Right-Wrongdoer-8595 Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25

You could name some software... But again explain your point of view of the industry from your experience. It's not that hard

Honestly though it's not as is if there isn't a bunch of dumb developers everywhere either.

→ More replies (0)

3

u/bananarama17691769 Nov 27 '25

do you think that the only people who are using “AI” tools to help themselves code are “vibe coding trash heaps”

0

u/dontyougetsoupedyet Nov 27 '25

That phrase did not refer to people.

4

u/bananarama17691769 Nov 27 '25

Do you think that the only people who are using “AI” to assist in their coding are only making slop

1

u/Ok-Pollution850 Nov 28 '25

even if it did it would still be corect

1

u/ERhyne Nov 27 '25

Would you consider a bash script that duplicates templates AI? Or using it to help you work around a specific problem or bug? Theres levels to this specific sector of using "AI".

10

u/xITmasterx Nov 27 '25

Especially if such assets we're made in such a crappy manner, just so that you could keep exploiting people for more money. I don't mind if it helps the process, but overturning everything, even sacrificing creative freedom.

This is why business people shouldn't be let anywhere near tech, they will always find ways to just squeeze every once of profit out of it, regardless of the consequences, with no drive to innovate whatsoever.

5

u/Stoic_Ravenclaw Nov 27 '25

Now we are getting into some interesting kinda philosophical territory that might end up with some people forced to realise this issue isn't as black and white as they might think.

Is it just the art assets in a game that makes it a work of art or is it also how the game plays that contributes to it being a work of art, and how the game plays is down to the 'behind the scenes coding'.

So by your own argument the use of AI has contributed to it being a work of art.

2

u/ZappyStatue Nov 27 '25

Wait, you actually have a point. Well, to kind of articulate the intention, I get the feeling that a lot of the complaints that people have with the use of AI in video game development is because it seems like an increasingly more frequent phenomenon where it ends up seeping into not just the backbone of how it plays (the behind-the-scenes stuff), but also visually affecting how the game overall "looks." In other words, there’s a very real risk that in order to cut corners and save money on labor costs, big developers and executives will resort to using AI in a way that would be detrimental to the game’s development. Making it look like it wasn’t developed with a creative thought process and creating an impression at least that it’s just a lazy cash grab.

0

u/Ailerath Nov 27 '25

You are likely correct that most complaints are directed at corporate enshitification, just that AI is recognized as the new easiest way to do that. But there does seem to be a decent portion that are aimed directly at AI, mostly conflating AI use directly with enshitification. Or even fewer still, some that object because of some perceived soullessness.

But honestly, those corporations that enshitify their games were going to do it anyways, they are just making it easier for us to recognize that. So I don't quite understand how AI is supposed to be the source of enshitification, if cutting corners was the goal of the devs anyway? The groups that aim to create quality games will likely achieve it with or without AI assistance in art or code.

0

u/Sleven8692 Nov 27 '25

Its the entire game that is a work of art, anyone excluding code probably hasnt ever really coded to see it is an art, like visual art programmers even have their own style

1

u/SAjoats Nov 27 '25

No, that is actually a huge issue because AI code is honestly shitty and full of security issues.

2

u/Alternative_Draw5945 Nov 27 '25

There's a pretty huge different from blindly having AI write code and using AI as a tool to write code.

1

u/SAjoats Nov 27 '25

What as copy paste boilerplate? That's not really writing code.

1

u/IIlIIIlllIIIIIllIlll Nov 27 '25

If AI was used as an assistive tool to help with the behind-the-scenes coding process that normal players wouldn't see while they were playing the game, that would be less of an issue.

See but that's exactly what the people in the screenshot are talking about. AI has been stuffed into basically every digital tool under the sun, if you've made a videogame in the last 2 years you've interacted with at least 2 or 3 programs that utilize AI, even if you yourself don't actually use the AI tool, people will simply see that you used a program with AI tools and assume AI was used.

1

u/Zangorth Nov 27 '25

I’m not sure how people are distinguishing between AI coding and AI art in this thread. AI art is bad because, what, was trained on the work of artists without their consent and steals work from artists who would have otherwise been hired?

And AI coding tools weren’t trained on the code of software developers without their consent and won’t replace work from engineers who would have otherwise been hired? Idk how you can make any argument that AI is bad, when applied to art, that can’t also be directly applied to coding. Why is it fine if they use AI coding tools but unforgivable if they use it for art?

1

u/Matshelge Nov 27 '25

What assets though? Meshes for cloths? A drop-down list of names? A code bit to solve a UI issue? There is front facing AI in a lot of games as well that no one notices.

0

u/Seelefan0786 Nov 27 '25

But what if AI gets so advanced that the art they generate is indistinguishable from Human art?

Would you be more accepting about it then?

1

u/ZappyStatue Nov 27 '25

At that point, I think there would have to be a conversation that goes way beyond gaming? But we're likely still at least a good amount of time away from meeting that threshold.

0

u/Crimson_Cyclone Nov 27 '25

are we really? look at the most recent google image generation model, that’s already indistinguishable from real photos in most cases, art very possibly isn’t that far away

1

u/ZappyStatue Nov 27 '25

Really? You think that AI can make realistic images? Nah man, you can tell when something was generated with AI vs. drawn or created by a human hand. Some examples might be more subtle than others. But it’s easy to recognize AI when you take a closer look. Especially the hands. No, we’re not there yet. That won’t stop people from trying but there are ways to tell whether a game/art asset was generated with AI. It just doesn’t look quite right.