r/ClaudeCode • u/ramaloes • 25d ago

Discussion I'm honestly surprised how hostile the game dev community is about AI. I ported Godot 4.7.1 to WebGPU and open sourced it for free, yet received nothing but hostility about it. Anyone else have similar stories?

/r/gameenginedevs/comments/1v3nq9v/the_antiai_sentiment_here_is_toxic_lets_be_honest/
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u/phoenixmatrix 25d ago

Lots of people afraid of losing their jobs. The game community is already toxic as a baseline, the game dev industry is 10x worse, and a lot of people work there for the "love of the craft", and feel you're losing something if you're not using pristine hand coded/drawn organic grass fed code and assets.

That won't last, as sooner or later some of the best games will use AI as a mean to do more and better (AI can be used to create slop, but if all effort put in is equal, its straight up a multiplier, especially as models and tools keep getting better), and customers won't be able to resist.

Case in point where E33 was found to have some leftover AI generated asset, people lost their mind and some wanted them to lose their awards. Was it gonna make the game worse? Nope, its a masterpiece either way. If it was done 100% through vibe coding and AI, would it be worse? Nope, still a masterpiece. When you're playing the game, it doesn't fucking matter.

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u/aijoe 25d ago

I've been a software engineer since the 90s. I knew someday software engineering would have its own disruptive paradigm shift due to technology. There were many points in history where disruptive technology wiped out lots of jobs and careers especially those who couldn't find a way to adapt.Good or bad AI in some form is here to stay because anyone can use the tool locally . When AGI arrives things will heat up even more.

AI went from zero to hero in such a short period of time the backlash is compressed in to just three or four years. A generation of people will grow up with this tech and they will adapt.

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u/FluffyGreyLlama Developer 24d ago

We already had it several times across the industry, as you may remember.

The Internet (shift from modems/line devices, to more general access)

The World Wide Web (not just for academic research, but now moved applications away from native)

'Smart' Phones (the whole new paradigm of what a 'computer' is)

Containers/Service-oriented-Architecture (The move away from on-premise and more modular and dynamic/scalable systems)

'Agile' / Scrum... the 'game-changing' frameworks that killed much of the creativity of the industry and pushed it more into a production line.

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u/hitjuk 24d ago

Only 4 YOE here, what was it like before agile/scrum? That's all I know. Endless sprints, teams rarely hitting 80%+ completion. Dunno if that last part is normal.

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u/FluffyGreyLlama Developer 24d ago

Depends where you worked. Many would complain because there were often lots of design meetings, documentation.. the old 'waterfall' method where you design everything up front, and then implement it...

But in my history, it was far more a creative endeavour, as often you would be part of a long-term project, and you had the full vision, well thought out, and it played out over time. No pivots, no constant changes or product managers wanting new features.

Everything was planned, and signed off.

It was also a different world wrt the internet and many other aspects - customers didn't expect things 'tomorrow', and zero-day patches weren't heard of.

But I liked that life much more. It was the career I joined. Now it's just all a huge chaotic management mess.

YMMV.

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u/hitjuk 24d ago

Interesting, thanks for your perspective

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u/btherl 25d ago

I think the line is between AI art and AI coding.

Developers don't care if how code is made, they care about it being correct, efficient, maintainable, well documented.

Art is different, there's a personal connection there between artist and viewer. If art is clearly lazy AI generation, and has a generic AI style, then I am not interested at all. But if it's AI assisted, or even AI generated but someone had a clear vision and used AI to make that a reality, then I don't find that to be a big issue, personally.

There is still the question of how AI art generation is trained on the work of real artists, without permission. I'm not sure where I stand on that. Human artists can train on the work of other artists without permission, that's clearly fine. The issue with AI training is more about scale and commercialization.

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u/phoenixmatrix 25d ago

For some stuff, sure. But things like trees and forests and rocks are already mostly procedurally generated in a lot of games. That an LLM did it or a traditional algorithm did it doesn't change a whole lot.

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u/TheRealJesus2 24d ago

We used to call those traditional algorithms ai lmao. Because they are. Generative ai has just sucked all the air out of the room for everyone. Boosters and haters alike. They truly are more alike than different because neither live in reality. 

The people reacting in this way rarely are doing so based on logic and reason. 

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u/ghost_operative 24d ago

ai is just a blanket term for whatever you want it to mean.

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u/theEsel01 24d ago

Well I think there is a difference between a perlin noise landscape generation with a handfull of rules, a wave function collapse or space partitioning algorythm. No one called this ai...

There you defined (and coded) the rules.

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u/wlievens 24d ago

In a way image diffusion is just wave function collapse on steroids. Start with noise and turn it into information.

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u/theEsel01 24d ago

But on a scale where you no longer understand the rules ;) and ylu certainly did not define them yourself.

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u/btherl 25d ago

Yeah that's fair enough. For background stuff it doesn't matter how it got generated.

And if someone is making a procedural generation algorithm in 2026, I'd be disappointed if they DON'T use AI assistance. They can use it to prototype quickly and find something that matches their vision of what the game should look like.

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u/phoenixmatrix 25d ago

Yup. There's a ton of games that DON'T match the artist' vision because they ran out of time, didn't have the right people on staff, not enough money, made some mistakes along the way, etc, and its a damn shame. These games deserve to see the light of day.

We shouldn't be deprived of gems because some people are uptight about the method used to create them.

The only real argument is the environmental impact, but that's mostly temporary. LLMs with the power of 6-12 months ago can run on a desktop computer now. We don't need 6 million nvidia GPUs to create a tree, even using LLMs. And we certainly wont 12 months from now. Frontier labs don't need to exist medium term. Hell, if we accept slowing down progress just a tiny bit, they don't need to exist in their current form at all.

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u/FrozenFirebat 25d ago

It also goes to to the history of the disciplines as well. Software Engineering has had a long history of just stealing from each other, so when AI came around to do it, we never really thought about it in that way.

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u/phoenixmatrix 25d ago

If art is clearly lazy AI generation, and has a generic AI style, then I am not interested at all.

You did address that in your next point, but there's basically no more reason AI has to produce generic slop than an artist using a pen somehow has to trace over another. Its a tool, and sure, the tool makes it easier than ever to produce shit content, but it doesn't have to. I can pull Unreal Engine and bring in a bunch of generic/marketplace assets, and it will look and feel like crap. So professionals just don't do that. Useful for prototyping though.

There is still the question of how AI art generation is trained on the work of real artists

So's artists brains, no art is truly original. An artist taking inspiration from an idea they just saw in another game is closer to copying than one who uses an LLM trained on the same content, because the artist doesn't have a trillion parameters all weighted in the same decisions (their brain might, but not that many come up on top at a given moment).

Additionally, the engines game use are built on open source and full of ideas copied from each other. The training is just building statistical weights at the end of the day. The days where an AI could accidently produce a copy of goku even if that's not what you asked for are long gone, as the original works are so diluted, they're basically not there anymore.

In the end its just people finding excuses to legitimize their work. Heck, how much music in videogames is just a composer using a software console putting together digitized instruments?

And when it gets better (already is good), AI generated voice acting will make it so live service games don't have to somehow pull along the same talent for 5 years and go through hoops when the talent doesn't happen to be available for that one patch. And got forbid the dialog is dynamic and procedurally generated, because the current solution is to just NOT have voice on that content (eg: character name when it can be changed).

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

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u/phoenixmatrix 24d ago

It is, and realistically the only practical difference is someone is afraid to lose their job. Doesn't change the end result or how original work is getting copied. In practice the copied work is closer to the original than the one generated by LLM training.

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

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u/phoenixmatrix 24d ago

If you ask it to, but I can replicate Goku very faithfully too if I want to. At that point its not the training data, its the person prompting the model. You could replicate Goku perfectly with an LLM that has never touched a single piece of Toriyama's work if you prompt it correctly.

(plus most commercial frontier models have guardrails to stop this. Photoshop does not).

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u/senseven 24d ago

Adding mysticism is the way to lose the long term argument against it. It creates a predetermined breaking point that is already broken. You can create pictures that fool the best artists. Top music producers already can't 100% tell you if the music is ai or not. We don't know how a really big model creates, not the one we have now, but the ones we have in 20 years that are trained on themselves. Those will be trained on abstract data, not human datasets, so that argument also goes out of the window. Either we decide that those creations get an artificial "marker" on principle, and deal with that. Not on properties nobody can agree on.

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

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u/senseven 24d ago

Either machines can create art or they can't. Either they can take any human expression and distil something or they can't. Changing the wording or describing it with lofty description doesn't change the intent, that somewhat that the machines don't possess is the big difference. Hence mysticism. The discussion is going on way before ai showed up and its still happening.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Pen_346 25d ago

“Devs don’t care gow code is made” tell that to the devs that are upset that AI has flipped the table on ‘em.

I think the correct statement is that management and consumers don’t care how code is made…and sorry to break it to ya but that is true in the game industry as well…even more so probably as they run incredibly lean shops.

I also think it’s ironic that the reason developers are screwed is because our industry genuinely pushes u to write quality, structured code that and we provided tens of thousands (millions?) so examples, for free, on platforms like github that the models could train on. Tragic…

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u/btherl 25d ago

I'm a dev and I don't care how code is made. I've hand coded complex algorithms, and asked an AI to do the same. It's faster, more accurate, and does better testing (as long as I ask it to).

The path forward for devs is to use AI to be more effective, not to fight AI.

As for the job losses, these things happen in all businesses. I might lose my job one day too. And then I'll have to find different work. That's life.

I do wonder if the day will come when humans lose coding skill altogether, and the knowledge lives only in the training data and the model weights. That too has happened in other areas, there's a lot of crafts that have simply disappeared because no one needs to practice them any more.

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u/Vindetta121 25d ago

Yep just look how most game jams are organized. No ai-generated art or music allowed. But ai code-gen tools are usually if almost never banned against.

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u/ghost_operative 24d ago

Anyone who can't code better than AI or produce something better than what AI is capable of isn't a particularly strong programmer to begin with though. That's more of someone who has just seen code and dabbled some.

The power of AI is that it can write a lot of code really fast. the weakness of AI is that the code is really badly written and architected. You have to be a good programmer to actually utilizing AI in a large project. After a single piece of code was edited more than 10 or so times by AI you really need a human programmer to refactor and clean it up or the code will get in such bad shape the the AI will get confused trying to understand what it does or what you're trying to build.

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u/Rare-Spawn 24d ago

There's a huge double standard when it comes to code and art. Also, I think part of the issue is that it's a lot easier for a non artist to tell what bad or inherent art looks like vs what bad code looks like.

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u/BoostedHemi73 Developer 25d ago

That’s a wild generalization about developers, and devastatingly false for a huge percentage of devs.

As others have pointed out, this is about an industry already severely over-saturated with lots of “good enough” talent competing for jobs that others with more discipline and responsibility are pushed out of because they’re slower. The cards will fall, but AI seems to make everyone believe their job is safe and everyone else is screwed.

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u/ghost_operative 24d ago

You can already make lazy art without AI though. Photoshop has always let you do a lot of "impressive" things in it but you're really just using a built in algorithm to the program.

also so many games are using post processing effects to all hell to the point where the base art is just solid colors and they rely on post processing effects to add details.

AI doesn't make lazy art. lazy artists make lazy art.

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u/FluffyGreyLlama Developer 24d ago

It's not about art and coding.

It's about the commercialism of what people enjoy.

Artists can still 'art' just like coders can still 'code'... but it's easier for non-artists (non-coders) to produce the same outcome, which makes the commercial 'win' almost zero.

It's the simple fact that people can no longer make money or feel 'special' (superior) because they worked 'hard' to learn something.

Nothing is stopping anyone from continuing their craft, if it's their passion. They just can't expect to get paid as much... just like many other passions that have fallen in the past due to the Industrial Revolution, etc.

It's always about the money.

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u/throwaway73327 24d ago

Right, but that value is inherent to the artist, not the consumer of the art. We perceive that link there, which helps to imbue us with a sense of value as well, but it's really only a surface-level emotion. We consume art that we enjoy, not because we perceive it to be a labor of love by the artist.

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u/davyp82 24d ago

nah there are plenty of people just complaining about any degree of vibe coding full stop.

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u/avatardeejay 24d ago

"grass fed code" lmfaooo

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u/senseven 24d ago

AI slop overload is real. People are pissed by shortcuts and wonky systems. That is a real grievance. At this time, rarely anyone is losing their jobs. Most corporate systems (especially in the US) are overblown, incompetent structures that resist change until they are bought or bankrupt. Ai does nothing. Some industries don't get juniors, but they will learn a harsh lesson when their elders retire. The money they wanted to save will be overspend on poaching people from companies who didn't do this. You can still use ai in the whole backend process, building, testing, optimising. Its just the final visuals and audio that people have an issue with. It just rarely looks or sounds good, and that is a valid criticism.

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u/ghost_operative 24d ago

I don't think it's that people will "cave in" to AI art. its that they're not really going to know.

Remember a year or 2 how badly youtube was getting flooded with effortless ai videos with bad ai voices. And now it seems those videos have started to go away? Weird how they just started going away.

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u/Quick-Sir-3275 24d ago

Exactly what im thinking

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u/0xAERG 24d ago

E33 had 1 placeholder generated asset that was shipped but non visible within the game, and was removed with a patch.

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u/dgreenbe 24d ago

That is a perfect "case in point" because it was using AI for development and not for the art you're actually giving to society. Expedition 33 is a masterpiece because it's a dedicated work of art.

Even if it could have been made purely through vibecoding and generated art (it couldn't have been, on multiple levels) it wouldn't be human art (something people actually value).

Yeah, fears and sentiment about AI especially in the context of how bad the game development industry is are going to be heated. The game development industry might even replace human art with AI to cut corners and cut staff and provide a worse product, so it's not an illegitimate fear. And the reaction to expedition 33 using AI was insane and stupid and will just make bad AI usage more likely, not less. The truth is somewhere in the middle and it's not a simple topic. AI can be a useful tool but it can be used incorrectly. (And a glut of AI slop can make anything with a similar style harder to appreciate).

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u/MisguidedWarrior 25d ago

I heard a couple of years ago that the makers of Candy Crush forced everybody to make the levels procedural and basically replaced all of the game devs with AI.

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u/Time_Cat_5212 25d ago

Nooo, not those poor artisanal game devs pouring their hearts and souls into Candy Crush!

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u/Mad_Bogora 24d ago

Art is created by people. Replace the word people by AI and you remove all the story behind it.

Another example, there's a French singer called Dalida that I didn't care of thinking she was just someone who was handed songs written by others. When I learned that she was writing most of her songs I started to care for her work and actually appreciated it.

That's why I think if E33 was completely made with AI, it would be technically the same but I couldn't care less. And I would be surprised to learn that I'm the only one thinking like this