A Valve artist has defended AI disclosures on storefronts like Steam, saying they only scare those with “low effort” products.
A Valve artist has defended AI disclosures on storefronts like Steam, saying they only scare those with “low effort” products.
You’re kind of right, in that it’s not a total solution right now and you probably won’t be able to vibe code a whole game (except a really simple one maybe) with no knowledge. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t lower the skill floor for someone. I’m assuming the person in my scenario would be also using an engine like Unity or Godot, maybe asking the AI to walk them through how to do what they want, write simple scripts and explain/suggest syntax. That shouldn’t have too much risk of generating inadvertent backdoors, and I think LLMs are pretty good at explaining basic code. Game engines already enforce the basic design structure, which will make it easier to avoid big unfixable mistakes and do everything in small pieces a LLM is less likely to fuck up.
The same is true with using it for art; you’re right that a lot of AI art on Steam is obvious and looks the same, but really good AI assisted art isn’t. The amount of skill and effort required for that is not zero, but is less than it might be otherwise. There are probably a lot of games out there where you just can’t tell, and because there’s so much fear of backlash it just isn’t disclosed.
No, it DOES. In fact, it RAISES the skill floor.
How is a dev supposed to be able to find an error in the code if they don’t know how to code?
As a programmer, most of your time isn’t actually spent writing code. It’s mostly spent debugging. An amateur programmer relying on AI is minimizing a task that takes a minority of their time while maximizing a task that takes the majority of their time.
For amateur programmers, AI isn’t an asset, it’s a liability.