As a developer, I really think the reactionary response to AI is muddying the waters. Their stated use-case seems perfectly reasonable, as their options were “shit optimization with even the unity devs clueless” or fixing the bug. AI makes a great tool for some applications. No, it should not be used to vibecode entire apps alone, but it does have the power to search and aggregate sources far, far better than humans can. It will likely take some tweaking afterwards, because their output must not be trusted, but using AI as a research tool for solving esoteric dev problems seems perfectly reasonable to me. I would much prefer we not punish the people that are fully disclosing their (very limited) use, when many of the competitors simply aren’t disclosing.
Big Walk Used AI In 'The Final Stretch' Of Development, Kicking Off Intense Awards Debate
Submitted 2 hours ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://aftermath.site/big-walk-ai-igf-jurors-controversy/
Comments
erin@piefed.blahaj.zone 49 minutes ago
PonyOfWar@pawb.social 2 hours ago
Developers House House told Aftermath via email that “LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs”, and that they “estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage”.
Meh, if that were enough to exclude a game from GotY awards, you’d end up with a very short list of mostly unknown games, half of which probably did use LLMs for those sorts of tasks and are just lying about it.
And honestly, if AI-debugging can replace having to spend days of horrible crunchtime fixing those bugs, I’m all for it.
chloroken@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
“Everyone who says they hate AI is actually using it and embarrassed” is THE biggest cope I’ve ever read.
PonyOfWar@pawb.social 52 minutes ago
I guess so, but I’m not sure where you’ve read it because I sure haven’t written it.
Jeffdude@piefed.social 1 hour ago
“Difficult technical challenges and bugs” is what I find AI is the worst at in my experience.
PonyOfWar@pawb.social 26 minutes ago
I think the example cases they’ve provided are pretty good example of where an LLM can actually be useful. For example, if you need to find and fix a bug in third-party code, it can be an absolute pain, as just getting a basic understanding of an unknown codebase by yourself could take days or weeks. An LLM can analyze the code in seconds and if not fix the bug, at the very least point out locations where to look for it. It’s not necessarily about telling the LLM to overcome the technical challenge by itself, but it can definitely assist in it.
Ferrous@lemmy.ml 55 minutes ago
I’d challenge the AI purists by asking where they draw the line. What if your developer uses AI to create every single texture and mesh? What if the entire codebase was built with AI assistance? What if the developer used AI to fix one single gremlin of a bug? What if they create all of their regression tests with AI? What if the developer needed a refresher on some basic C code syntax and got an AI summary from Google - where AI never touched the code?
Are all of these really equally heinous?
Kirp123@lemmy.world 15 minutes ago
While I wouldn’t consider myself an AI purist I do have different views when it comes to using AI for coding compared to using it for art or music.
I feel that expecting a game to be completely AI free when it comes to coding is pretty much an impossible task. Now matter how much you try at some point a developer will have to use a tool or library or whatever that were developed with the use of AI. Expecting them to audit everything they use would mean spending more time on that than coding the actual game or spending time developing non-AI alternatives. The genie is out of the bottle for coding and there’s no putting it back.
Now when it comes to art, music and music I personally am less accepting. AI has been trained on the art of millions of people around the world without their permission or offering them any compensation. That is unacceptable to me. It also feels very weird that people are trying to replace art with something generated by a machine, it feels soulless, each piece of human art no matter how simple has some meaning to the artist. AI just mashes it together with no rhyme or reason.
Now some people are going to say that I’m a hypocrite and coding AI has also been trained on the code of millions of people without them getting compensation or asking for approval. While that is true I think that for coding it’s different just for the simple fact that at the end of the day it’s just a set of instructions. There is code that could be considered art? I would say there definitely is but the vast majority of it is just telling the computer to do a thing in just slightly different ways. This is just how I see it and no doubt people are going to disagree.
Gonzako@lemmy.world 37 minutes ago
I draw the line at using it personally. I can’t control everyone else using it but I’ll gladly prioritize the work of someone who put the sweat in over one that simply prompted a model.
To me the AI use has become tantamount to endorsing and accepting the problems it is creating. Once we solve the problems it has created, I’ll feel fine using it again.
neversaydie@programming.dev 2 hours ago
hooray, insane witch hunts and even more insane mental gymnastics galore!
lime@feddit.nu 2 hours ago
this sounds like they used it as a search engine rather than as an assistant. it’s one of those weird gray areas that come up with how integrated it is now. like, if you try to find something with a search engine and you get the “ai result” thing, is that “ai use”? the tokens were used anyway, and you read it even if you then click a link.
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 hour ago
it’s disappointing but i get it. these tools are meant to be alluring and addictive. i’d be lying if i said i didn’t give in to the temptation a few times, as much as i hate to admit it.
i still think it should be disqualifying for a game awards ceremony. if not, i worry that this could be used as a foot in the door by slopbros to further normalize ai use in games (and, in turn, elsewhere)
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
The primary use case for House House’s use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code. If you’re technically-minded, and curious, here’s an example. We needed to cull shadow casters by distance from the camera, but Unity URP only allows culling shadow casters by distance in camera forwards, so shadow casters behind the player were being rendered at an infinite distance. This made our game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. We researched the problem extensively, and we looked at the URP code ourselves, but we couldn’t find a way. Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasn’t possible. Finally, we posed the question to an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix, and while we had to modify the suggestion extensively, it worked. This fix represented about 10 lines of code inside URP.
“Temptation” is one way to put it, I suppose, when the human experts tell you it’s impossible. This award’s criteria was already decided, and they’re entitled to their definition, but this is just information that was surfaced to them rather than work done for them.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 39 minutes ago
I’m not sure this is a great policy. You can tell the difference between using ai for debugging and a whole game made ai slop. Nobody in that second category will be just sneaking by unnoticed.
But using ai in the final stretch to squash some bugs, that’s pretty hard to notice from the outside. If you outlaw the use of ai entirely, what do you get? People still use it for the little things, but don’t admit to it. Is that better?
warm@kbin.earth 2 hours ago
They used AI for this??? Its like the most basic game ever.
PonyOfWar@pawb.social 1 hour ago
It’s really not. A multiplayer open-world game is inherently complex to develop, even with modern engines.
chloroken@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
You can make an open-world, online game in a day in Godot or Unity. It is not difficult anymore to make simple online games. You’re just saying things and hoping they’re true.
warm@kbin.earth 1 hour ago
It is. If they were gonna use AI, they could have at least used it on the voice chat system, as it was fucking shit.
deadcream@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
Perfect for ai then
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 4 minutes ago
They don’t have an Ai disclosure on the Steam page: store.steampowered.com/app/1478500/Big_Walk/ Isn’t this against Steams rules?