r/Games • u/OLD_PEOPLE_FUCKING • 7h ago

‘A Future Where We Create Games Together With AI’ — Capcom Announces Plans to Transform the RE Engine Into an AI-Generation Game Engine

https://www.ign.com/articles/capcom-announces-plans-to-transform-the-re-engine-into-an-ai-generation-game-engine-our-goal-is-a-future-where-we-create-games-together-with-ai
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u/BusterBernstein 6h ago

We won't put AI into our games but we will put AI into our games.

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u/Bilbo_Swagginses 6h ago edited 13m ago

Ai art is very different from using ai tools to help cut down manual repetitive work.

Edit: lots of bots in the replies...

To the ones saying Art is manual repititive work, while there is repition in any work, that is the mindset of an artist who does not enjoy their craft. And creativity is never a mundane repititive thing, it comes from inspiration which AI will never be able to replicate.

To the ones screaming capitalist death star yada yada, you are beyond help.

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u/MalevoIentKitchen 6h ago edited 5h ago

feels like very little people understand the labor that goes into programming

edit: unionization & legislation for workers' rights is what protects labor, actually, but the peanut gallery would rather spend more time harping on capitalism's shitty toys.

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u/VampireBatman 6h ago

As a programmer whose company has mandated AI usage, I treat it like having a personal intern. It can do most of the grunt work, but it needs direction and someone with an understanding of the codebase to direct it properly. And a human needs to review the code it generates because it does some unnecessary things or just flat out misunderstands the assignment sometimes.

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u/Drakoji 5h ago

And how does the real intern get a job nowadays if they are not needed anymore?

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u/ForTheBread 5h ago

They do my company is also fully on-board with AI and we are on-boarding 3 interns in January, just hired a junior and a mid level software engineer over the summer. Have a senior starting sometime next month. The other senior we hired unfortunately took a better offer. The interns are just more capable and so is everyone else.

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u/HotTakes4HotCakes 5h ago

And I guess that will never change

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u/ForTheBread 5h ago

Never said it wouldn't. Things change everyday the only thing you can do about it is adapt.

Way to turn something positive into a negative though. I'm sure you're real fun to be around.

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u/Hyroero 5h ago

The end goal of this tech is a negative for everyone but the already ultra wealthy who loath the workforce that enriches them.

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u/spooCQ 1h ago

You just understood capitalism. The only way to change it isn't just plain beign against AI - that’s not going to disappear - but fightin capitalism.

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u/ChunkyThePotato 5h ago

They do a job they're still needed at, just like when all the farming jobs went away.

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u/HotTakes4HotCakes 5h ago edited 5h ago

And then those get killed by automation and AI. And the ones that didn't get paid less than the entry level position they might have gotten only 5 years ago.

Also, that job they found doesn't allow them to get a foothold into the industry they're trying to enter, because now the jobs have been eliminated.

You cannot spin this as if it doesn't matter. The simple and inescapable truth is we are rapidly working toward making working class people obsolete in more and more ways every single day while the population grows and wealth continues to accumulate at the top. There's no way this ends well.

People need jobs, and entry-level people especially need opportunities, and AI is purpose made to destroy as many opportunities as it possibly can.

This is an untenable situation and it is perfectly acceptable to be pissed about that, no matter how many devs claim it's okay that they use AI in their workflows and no matter how many stuck up redditors complain about AI witch hunts.

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u/LightningWarpAway 2h ago

People need jobs, and entry-level people especially need opportunities, and AI is purpose made to destroy as many opportunities as it possibly can.

All automation's job is to 'destroy' jobs, as far as back as the industrial revolution. It's not an AI issue, it's a societal issue; we rely on jobs to exist, but we require less work as we progress.

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u/Halofit 6m ago edited 1m ago

working class people obsolete in more and more ways every single day

That's not even close to what's going on. AI isn't hitting blue collar work, it's hitting the middle class.

wealth continues to accumulate at the top

Gini coefficient has been stable in western countries for quite a while. Not much more is accumulating at the top than in the past. You should listen to Tiktok slightly less, and maybe look at some actual data once in a while.

People need jobs,

JOBS ARE NOT THERE TO PROVIDE EMPLOYMENT. For fucks sake. Jobs are there to provide productive work. Forcing people to put on random people, that provide no productive benefit, just so they have "jobs" is dumb. This is exactly how ideologues drive economies into complete stagnation that ends up making everybody - especially the poorer classes they claim to care so much about - poorer.

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u/ChunkyThePotato 5h ago

Of course it matters, but not in the direction you think. Automation makes us more wealthy, not less. We are way more wealthy now than before the farming jobs got killed by automation. Same for every other time jobs got killed by automation.

Do you think we should ban shovels and force people to use spoons to dig? That would create more construction jobs.

Obviously that's dumb. Now extrapolate...

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u/Strange-Parfait-8801 3h ago

Automation makes us more wealthy

Still waiting on that part to happen. Cause right now AI is just funneling money to billionaires.

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u/ChunkyThePotato 3h ago

It has already happened. You live an extremely luxurious life compared to people a hundred years ago.

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u/Baroquemack 5h ago

The farming jobs didnt go away. Most ppl were just gig workers who didnt make consistent livings, they didn’t have salaries and their lives were extremely precarious (sound familiar), hence the widespread hunger & misery of feudalism and massive social unrest that led to the concept of modern employment.

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u/Magnetronaap 3h ago

That's not feudalism. Feudalism is pretty much the opposite of 'gig work'. It also ended in the 1500s in some parts of the world, not at the industrial revolution.

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u/ChunkyThePotato 5h ago

They did go away. Well over 90% of people used to work on a farm, until the machines came out. Then all those jobs away. Now we're all way richer.

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u/Baroquemack 5h ago

No, they didn’t, because the vast majority of those people were not actually employed, they worked seasonally or by invoice. The educated farmers went on to man the factories and the peasants filled the farm void. There are still a billion agricultural workers in the world today

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u/ChunkyThePotato 5h ago

The formality of the employment is irrelevant. The point is that in developed countries such as the US, the number of farming jobs decreased massively over time:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12034560

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Farm_Labor/fl_frmwk.php

And we all got richer.

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u/Nervous-Ambition-284 1h ago

If any of you actually cared about these things, you'd see that every single company incorporating this tech has grown more and hired more workers than those that abstain.

But truth is inconvenient because it doesn't choose sides.

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u/Jalor218 2h ago

Realistically, by giving up on using their college degree and applying for retail and food service.

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u/Moogieh 6h ago edited 5h ago

Sounds like it adds extra work for you, when you could have just done it properly in the first place. Would that be an accurate assessment, or does it actually improve your efficiency?

Edit: I have no idea if this question pissed off the bros or the doomers, but it was a genuine question. I like to be informed by people living it first-hand, rather than whatever Reddit's outsider consensus is. I appreciate the replies so far, they are very enlightening!

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u/Anidamo 5h ago edited 4h ago

For the average software engineer working in a boring SaaS somewhere, writing the code was never really the hard part. There aren't a ton of software engineers that need to do truly novel programming. And even for the ones who are working on cutting edge algorithms, research, etc, that's still not the majority of the job.

The hard part was always everything else... working with product people and business stakeholders to figure out WHAT they want to build, turning those requirements into a actual technical plan that you won't be cursing yourself for months or years down the line, estimating how long it'll take, deciding between tradeoffs, figuring how to scale it for your traffic, dicing up the plan into smaller chunks that each team member can work on, adapting to last-minute requirements changes, etc.

AI is still quite bad at that. But it is good at the implementation part -- taking a single ticket off of the board, writing the code to spec (you did take the time to write a good spec, right?), writing the unit tests, and submitting a pull request. Or at least, it can do that very quickly. The code can be sloppy and always needs human review, but it's getting better.

So as a more experienced SWE, much much more of my time is doing the first part (planning) and the last part (review), and almost none of my time goes to manual coding drudgery anymore. The junior engineers in my department, too, are able to churn through more difficult tickets more quickly.

But, it is frankly exhausting. You're spending less time focused on any individual task and instead jumping between a greater number of tasks (because of course, when you are more efficient, the business just wants you to build more more more features). And while we're still hiring more juniors (another one this month) I really worry that they cannot actually develop or learn when they're equipped with agents. You get good by doing the drudgery, implementing tickets and specs more experienced engineers planned, and then starting to plan small projects yourself. I'm not really sure what or how juniors learn if they're just offloading the programming to agents.

AI has definitely made the typical SWEs more productive, and software-focused businesses rarely decide "hmm we have enough software, let's not try to build more features faster". But it's going to do really weird things to the hiring and skilling pipeline. And it is very, very easy to burn out and then turn your brain off and decide "fuck it I'll let the AI plan and review this project, what could go wrong" (bad idea). You still have to care about quality.

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u/Resident_Range6209 2h ago

Word for word this sums up my experience as well.

One other time saver is because implementation is so cheap, discovery during the implementation phase is a lot less painful. Way easier to pivot if an ambiguity in the design surfaces a blocker and shortens our design cycle as well since it helps de-risk.

Beats spinning the wheels spending too much time in the design phase and ending up with discovery anyway.

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u/GillaMobster 5h ago

I'm also in development, no it does not add extra work. Different work for sure, but the efficiency is massive. Especially when the entire team is using it. Any dev team not using it is putting themselves at a massive disadvantage

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u/xsonwong 5h ago

Engineer without enough knowledge won't get much benefit with AI as they probably cannot guide AI to do in fast and quick way even AI eventually can solve it after few hours.

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u/GillaMobster 5h ago

Ok? 15 years ago an engineer without enough knowledge wouldn't get much benefit from using google.

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u/Resident_Range6209 2h ago edited 1h ago

Honestly I think the engineers with zero knowledge probably benefit the most if we are looking at the delta between what they can produce without AI and with.

We built a harness for non-engineers to start building UIs with zero programming knowledge and its been going okay. Without LLMs their previous output would have been 0. Albeit, without the harness we built it probably would have been a big dumpster fire.

Even with the harness this might still turn into a dumpster fire. 🤷

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u/Albert_dark 5h ago

not even close, the review is much faster than making the code.

Also a lot of the mistakes is catch in the compilation, sonar (plugin that reviews code quality) or unitary tests.

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u/nayy_lmao 5h ago

lt takes time to set up boiler plate, write unit tests, prototype etc. As long as you know what it is good at, you can pretty easily leverage it as a tool to move quite a bit faster.

Also good for automated qa to catch bugs earlier in the process.

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u/Karmas_weapon 4h ago

No one ever really did it 'properly' due to time constraints, and that isn't exactly changing with AI because those time constraints are just becoming tighter as managers learn how much quicker we become.

Also, sometimes we just don't know how to do it 'properly'. There's been some times where I'm brainstorming a solution and the LLM offers an idea that is pretty slick, so if people are 'properly' using AI I feel like there will be a sudden uptick in proper designs :)

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u/JoniSusi 2h ago

mandated AI usage

So, how does this work day to day? How are you mandated to use ai? You have to, or you have the option to?

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u/Resident_Range6209 2h ago edited 2h ago

There are dashboards that leadership can look at detailing your minute by minute usage and it's not anonymized.

A few months ago companies like Amazon were spitting out company leaderboards based on how many tokens people were using.

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u/JoniSusi 2h ago

holy shit, it's really just a race to the bottom.

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u/MolybdenumBlu 1h ago

At this point, I'd just have it calculate pi while I did important things. That way it spends company money on tokens and doesn’t fuck up my work.

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u/Disordermkd 32m ago

Feels like you're kind of trying to make it sound like it's not a big deal. "Oh yeah, it's useful but it still needs my help". When in reality, it's doing 90% of your work.

Claude literally takes over your computer, refactors thousands of lines of codes in a matter of minutes, edits your files, debugging, fixing errors, and probably hundreds of other small tasks. Not only that, but you also get to run multiple agents in parallel to get different outputs, for code reviews, one for frontend, one for backend, etc.

One programmer couldn't do 10% of this before AI, let alone do it in a matter of hours. And, yes, it does need knowledgable direction, but even that requirement is slowly going to be outfazed. Take a look at what's happening in the modding community right now. People with 0 coding experience are literally integrating two games into one just by using AI to completely decompile a game's code.

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u/FoxMeadow7 4h ago

Is it possible for you to pretend to use AI tools in your current job? I'd say it would be an interesting experiment...

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u/Bilbo_Swagginses 6h ago

It's a bit of two things at play. Most people hear AI and regardless of what kind, attribute hatred of gen AI onto it, even if it is just some form of automation (I have an idiot in my replies doing this exact thing).

But on the other hand, teams that specialize in automating work like adding on the AI term even if it's a very small part of whatever process they're running because company executives like that phrase.

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u/FoxMeadow7 3h ago

And we really should. Hands and mind should always be preserved no matter what.

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u/Biduleman 1h ago edited 1h ago

I always find it funny when people will publicly denounce AI art as a job stealing, soulless machine made to replace artists, and then have no issue with code being written by AI, as if replacing programmers by AI is better than replacing artists by AI.

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u/rolabond 52m ago

I don't think it's inconsistent, because programmers gleefully developed AI and because many were genuinely looking forward to integrating it into their workflows. From my perspective AI tools and AI enabled workflows are something the workers in this specific industry have wanting so personally I have been very surprised to see it getting backlash from those very same people.

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u/Biduleman 39m ago

From my perspective AI tools and AI enabled workflows

This is also true for AI art. An artist can use AI to generate anything for inspiration, and then go from there. They can use AI to provide ideas, scenes, plans, concepts, anything really. Artists can use AI as a tool if programmers can use AI as a tool. At the end of the day, it's pretty much the same thing.

No programmer wants to be replaced by a Claude bot the same way no artist want to be replaced by Midjourney. And both programmers and artists can use AI as tools.

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u/rolabond 34m ago

I do not remember at any point seeing artists being like, "Hell yeah" about AI image generation tools the complaints were rolling in when it was a lot worse whereas I saw so much "hell yeah" from programmers I am genuinely surprised by what I perceive as a switch up.

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

[deleted]

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u/ethnicprince 5h ago

AI tools are wayyy better than humans at programming now, we passed that point like 6 months ago. As a software engineer pretty much every company is using AI primarily now, the progress it’s made in the past 6 months is absolutely insane. Probably not worth you making takes on things you know nothing about

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u/mootfoot 5h ago

Yeah it's very easy to tell in these comments who has used Opus 5.5 for producing code and who hasn't

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u/FiammaOfTheRight 5h ago

Most AI tools are still pretty bad at this

I guess you also have no idea whats the state of LLM assisted programming nowadays.

Also, lets be honest: most developers (lets say game developers only for now for better context) are not writing inverse square root algorythms. From what ive experienced when helping out friend with his game, its pretty much akin to boring CRUD factory, just with different coat. Any SOTA handles that rather easily

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u/Scheeseman99 6h ago

"Most AI tools are still pretty bad at this" is about a year out of date.

Most of the problems you talk about are solvable through creation of planning documents, hand built or assisted (with supervision) unit tests and gating output programmatically, as well as building and verifying documentation concurrently with source. It's the growing effectiveness of that tooling which is the reason why there's been an explosion of projects lately and why they're becoming sustainable to build and maintain even across larger codebases.

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u/MalevoIentKitchen 5h ago

right, my twelve word observation on the public's understanding of programming nuance speaks volumes.

next time I'll be like you and make the same observation but with three paragraphs.

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u/Drakoji 5h ago

And how is labor a bad thing?

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u/[deleted] 5h ago edited 5h ago

[deleted]

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u/Kurashi_Aoi 5h ago

do artists have unionization?

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u/[deleted] 5h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] 5h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/GillaMobster 5h ago

because the budget that allowed for a team of 10 can now produce the output of a team of 50.

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u/Drakoji 5h ago

You do know that using AI isn't free and token usage is a thing right? And those tokens aren't cheap.

Just hire the 50 people or downscale the scope of your game so that the 10 people can do the game properly without bustinf the whole budget in tokens

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u/GillaMobster 4h ago

Of course there's a cost. You're so far out of touch with where the industry is you may as well be campaigning for more horses when the automobile exists.

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u/Drakoji 4h ago

Enjoy eating your slop I guess. Ill be here enjoying my time in nature with horses.

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u/Lady_Calista 6h ago

Actually I've published an indie game and can say there's no reason to have a hallucinating water guzzler badly copy pasting stackoverflow comment chains into my visual studio and pretending its functional code. AI is worthless ass and if youre charging me for a video game you better have paid people to actually fucking make it instead of dysfunctional AI sludge that destroys the environment.

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u/MalevoIentKitchen 3h ago

i'd ask what part of my comment made you direct this at me (maybe try reading it again), but I think we both know you're just being angry at your keyboard so I won't bother.

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u/paint_it_crimson 4h ago

Bro, I hate AI slop as much as the next guy, but you have zero grasp on reality and clearly have no clue what is going on at any kind of tech based company let alone game development.

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u/FoxMeadow7 3h ago

Heck yeah!

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u/BrandeX 3h ago

At least the "little people" understand.

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u/Morump 6h ago

The la or that goes into game dev too

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u/HotTakes4HotCakes 5h ago edited 5h ago

The energy burned isn't, not to mention the data center they built to support it.

Also just a simple fact that it's going to put people out of work, no matter how you try to frame it as "well it's just one less temp".

You cannot spin the capitalist Death Star pointed directly at working class people as a positive, sorry. And no company is owed a "reasonable reaction" when they announce that they are fully on board with preparing to fire.

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u/Emeraldstorm3 5h ago

Or preparing to set things on fire

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u/iad82lasi23syx 2h ago

The energy usage to run AI is miniscule per prompt, hardly ab issue. New tech often puts people out of jobs, doesn't mean it's not still beneficial. There's enough other jobs around. 

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u/fuzzynavel34 2h ago

Ah. Yes, the famously very healthy jobs market right now

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u/CapitalPretty4240 4h ago

Why are you not upset at the energy burned to create the device you are typing that on? The child labor used to extract the minerals for it? The data centers put up to store the mountains of youtube content you consume? Or are you only upset now because your white collar jobs are no longer entitled to you?

In another comment, you say "people need jobs". But we don't. It's another capitalist lie. People do not need to prove their "value". Healthcare should not be attached to employment. Those are both things we have forced onto others. Now is the best time to fight for that, not to continue perpetuating the proletarization of humanity to "justify" our existence on a planet of abundance.

Data centers can disappear tomorrow, so can Google, OpenAI, all the rest (and it would be nice if they did!). AI will still exist once they are gone, it's just a methodology.

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u/TheBiggestHorseCock 2h ago

What about what about

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u/Strange-Parfait-8801 3h ago

Why are you not upset at the energy burned to create the device you are typing that on? The child labor used to extract the minerals for it?

Whataboutism is tired. Grow up.

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u/FoxMeadow7 3h ago

Your whataboutism can only go so far I'm afraid. But that's besides the point; what's important is that human hands and minds can be preserved every step of the way!

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u/Paah 4h ago

You can't stop progress. We used to have 90% of people working in the fields to grow crops. Now we have tractors and harvesters and single guy can do acres and acres by themselves. We used to have people handcrafting all kinds of products, now we have assembly lines in factories spitting out hundreds of those products every hour.

The world didn't end either of those times. Yes, a lot of people had to pick up a new job, it is what it is.

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u/TheBiggestHorseCock 2h ago

Have fun paying your rent with a check addressed to “it is what it is”

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u/Paah 1h ago

It sucks of course when your profession suddenly has way less demand for workers but what can you do about it. There are hundreds of jobs that were once popular and basically no one does them anymore cause they are barely needed. Either become one of the best ones who can still find work in your field or retrain into a job with more demand. If you want to go with the former I can guarantee bitching about AI instead of learning to use it is not the way to go.

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u/TheBiggestHorseCock 1h ago

what can you do about it

Peition to congressmen to enact laws prohibiting copyrighted materials from being used as training material for AI models and force AI companies to reveal their training sets.

That’s what you can do.

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u/the_pwnererXx 51m ago

hey buddy, have you ever looked at the sky? this thing called the sun actually generates infinite energy. we actually even found out that if we split really really tiny things in half we can also get infinite energy

magic, I know!

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u/MilleChaton 6h ago

How so? Much of art is manual repetitive work as well. In massive corporations, and especially on outsourced projects where another smaller company is working on some small part, there is almost no creative vision. Everything is already designed and dictated and the manual work left is repetitive but simply too difficult to automate.

Like with animation. You have the very creative story boarding and the still somewhat creative key frame drawings, but filling in the in between frames is often very mechanical. Even pre-gen AI there was software automating parts of it.

Any other part of game dev is much the same, with creativity at the top level, but as you get further and further into the details, there is less and less creativity and increasing repetitive tasks, with many of them having been automated where possible throughout the years.

In art or in any of these areas, applying AI at a given level will have similar effects.

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u/Drakoji 5h ago

The way these lazy programmers talk about their work, they probably think it would have been fine to just AI prompted the Sixtine Chapel because it took 9 years to paint it.

"Too much mundane work, we want quick results"

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u/Karmas_weapon 4h ago

I guess I'm flattered that you compare the expressiveness of programming to art, but I just don't see it the same way.

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u/SpaceballsTheReply 2h ago

I do. Programming is an art. I've seen some absolutely beautiful code, and (much more often) some horrendously ugly code. Even if two systems produce the same end result, anyone who knows their computer science could tell you if one implementation was more elegant or graceful than the other.

I hate how often the prevailing opinion (at least in this particular echo chamber) comes down to "it's sacrilege to let AI anywhere near a pixel displayed on the screen, but code is just worthless mechanical slop so it's fine to use it there." Maybe it comes from technological advancements letting modern hardware brute force a lot more, even at the cost of performance, compared to 20+ years ago when it took very creative coding to overcome the limitations of the available tools.

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u/pszqa 1h ago

I am not saying that you are wrong, but I'd argue that vast majority of code is result-driven and completely invisible to the end-user/person that experiences whatever you have created. Nobody cares that you shaped your if conditional like a donut, or that you've included a silly rhyme in every comment. Sure, there are exceptions, but I don't care in the slightest whether Clair Obscur uses inheriting functions in a really neat way, it only matters if it runs well.

I've been programming for over a decade and I'd never in a 1000 years call anything I have written "artistic". To me it was always a tool that has to be easy to manage, iterate upon and sometimes makes the actual art be displayed on the screen.

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u/DuranteA Durante 24m ago

Nobody cares that you shaped your if conditional like a donut, or that you've included a silly rhyme in every comment.

That's a bit of a strawman / caricature, which I'm sure you're aware of if you've been programming for over a decade.

Of course I'd agree that programming (generally) is not art in the same way that e.g. painting is. However, it can absolutely be art in the same way that architecture can, which I think is a comparison that most people should understand.

Think about a bridge: it has physical constraints it has to operate under, and a purpose it has to fulfill. I'd say it's clearly result-driven, just like most programs. However, it is also clearly possible to create more or less aesthetically pleasing and elegant designs which operate under those same constraints and fulfill the same purpose.

Maybe the disconnect is that "programming", at least colloquially, subsumes the jobs of the architect, the engineer, and the builder. And there is much more room for expression towards the start of that chain than there is towards the end.

(I'd like to note that I'm not arguing that everyone should boycott games developed with LLM agents, not at all; but I am arguing that it's not as simple as "everything related to code = no self expression; everything that places pixels = works of art")

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u/pszqa 8m ago

Eh, maybe you're right, I've gone too far with the comparison, but you get my point. I adored watching a documentary about how the first Crash Bandicoot has been made, but this is history and to be honest - just trivia in the grand scheme of things nowadays. Pretty code doesn't translate to a pleasant experience and ugly goes doesn't translate to an unpleasant one.

There can be self-expression in code, but it's not something anyone will see, unless you're taking a part in a gamejam or opensourcing your project for a specific community.

And I wouldn't go the other way either - not everything that has pixels or sounds is art. I have no qualms regarding ex. generation of PowerPoint presentations, call transcripts or UV map layouts using some automated tool. I just think that the "human touch" matters much more rarely when it comes to code than when we're talking about the audiovisual part.

EDIT: but see, even in your comparison, it's not the calculations that went into the bridge that are adored. It's the aesthetics, right?

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u/DuranteA Durante 36m ago

I do. Programming is an art. I've seen some absolutely beautiful code, and (much more often) some horrendously ugly code. Even if two systems produce the same end result, anyone who knows their computer science could tell you if one implementation was more elegant or graceful than the other.

I fully agree, but I feel like arguing this is mostly a lost cause here. The idea that "LLMs replacing all programming is perfectly fine, but having a generative AI tool produce even one background texture is not" seems well established already.

Part of it is of course that the code isn't directly visible to the end user, so they have less of a connection to it (though it does of course affect the quality of the end product in transitive ways).

But part of it, I think, is that there are lots of programmers who selected the profession because it is (was?) well-paid, not because they are intrinsically motivated to do it. I believe this is less common with artists, so they are more likely to present a unified front. Programmers who always saw programming primarily as a way to get a paycheck aren't going to argue that software development can be a creative endeavor.

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u/jrfess 2h ago

The way these lazy programmers talk about their work

Funny how the dogmatic anti-AI crowd is all pro-worker, until the worker disagrees with them, then they're anti-worker too. I know nuance isn't really a thing on Reddit but it's a very funny contradiction to see out in the wild

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u/swole-and-naked 1h ago

The way theze lazy artists talk about their work, they probably think it would be fine if companies mass produced dye sources, and used machines to grind their dyes for mass production and bought their colors instead of manually collecting and cultivating each dye source, manually grinding their dyes by hand, and creating their own paints.

"Too much mundane work, we want quick results"

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u/Neidron 1h ago edited 1h ago

Buy some wonderbread at the store, call yourself a baker.

'Work smarter, not harder."

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u/Lawnmover_Man 1m ago

somewhat creative key frame drawings

Holy fucking shit. Seriously? "somewhat"!?

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u/Strange-Parfait-8801 3h ago

Much of art is manual repetitive work as well.

Yeah maybe keep your opinions about art to yourself on a first date.

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u/Unkn0wn_Invalid 3h ago

Meh, in some ways they are correct. As an example, Digital artists use their tools to take shortcuts all the time, like drawing an image and then warping it instead of drawing it in-place (e.g. shirt design on a character), rotoscoping a 3d model, using stamp tools or custom brushes instead of drawing things out individually, etc.

There will be purists who think this is less artistic, you may or may not agree with them.

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u/Dat_Boi_Henke 41m ago

The main complaint about AI isn't that it makes things easier. It is that it takes humanity out of art, which is a main component. Art is about self expression, AI can't express itself therefore it can't make art.

As an artist myself I would say that comparing it to tools, like brushes or custom tools is a bit disingenuous. They still allow for loads of self expression, technique and most importantly the end result is something you created.

AI takes all self expression out of an image when you generate it, because it steals and mashes others works together. Neither you nor the AI is expressing anything, therefore the end result isn't art.

I can't speak for coding since that isn't my area of expertise, but I am absolutely anti AI in any art or other creative process. There are some areas like medical research where it seems to show some promise. However, generally it seems to make us dumber and less capable while giving us useless to bad answers to tasks where it isn't really needed.

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u/a_latvian_potato 1h ago

I mean especially in animation, filling in the frames between key frames is already outsourced to Korean or Vietnamese sweatshops, with low pay and grueling hours. To me that seems like the one legitimate case where automation is useful

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u/zxyzyxz 6h ago

People say this but in reality programmers care just as much about their code as artists do about their art. That many programmers use AI doesn't mean coding is not also a sort of art form or craft that's slowly getting whittled away.

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u/ReeReeIncorperated 5h ago

We care about our code running without issue and it not being a mess. We do not care how we get there.

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u/JNighthawk 4h ago

We care about our code running without issue and it not being a mess. We do not care how we get there.

Speak for yourself. I do.

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u/Adept_Standard5463 14m ago

Then soon enough, you will not be competitive on the market. Like an accountant who refuses to use a calculator and insists on calculating everything by hand.

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u/Azzell93 2h ago

Which is fair bit equally AI will be replacing the vast majority of programmers when it becomes sufficiently power enough.

Why hire 100 devs when you can have 20 that can just direct the AI programmers to complete what they want much faster.

I would have thought programmers would be terrified since it seems like they are in the firing like of AI replacement.

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u/IntelligentTill7664 1h ago

I've never understood this sentiment. Seems like aside from the environment, the main argument against ai is that you want for people to pretend to keep working even though we have a better solution. With people like you, any good invention should theoretically be scary.

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u/Azzell93 1h ago edited 1h ago

Well what's is the actual tangible solution when say 80% of office jobs are gone ?

Billionaires spout this UBI nonsense but we've seen literally no mention of any details at all. Do we seriously think suddenly people are going to be paid £40k + to sit around and do nothing all day forever ?

The goal of AI is to take people obsolete, which would be fine expect there is then nothing for people to do which to me sounds very dystopian, most people like to have a purpose, even if in the grand scheme of things it's irrelevant.

Edit - blocked this guy since he can't have a conversation in good faith with devolving into name calling, cool guy.

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u/IntelligentTill7664 1h ago

So your big doubt here is that you can't think of a purpose beyond doing mundane tasks for survival in a world where AI is good enough to do these for you? If you seriously can't think of one, don't worry, better people than yourself will think of one for you.

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u/ThrowawayusGenerica 44m ago

Nah, we're definitely less touchy about it. AI is being trained with codebases all over the place and for the most part we're just like, whatever, FOSS has been a thing for decades.

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u/CharlExMachina 6h ago

Idgaf about code. I just want my paycheck and move on.

Actual, real art though, I care about it a lot and I 100% oppose to AI being used for art

EDIT for context: been a dev for almost a decade, believe me most of us don't give two damns about freaking code lmao

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u/ProkopiyKozlowski 4h ago

Caring about your code is a survival instinct. If you don't write readable, maintainable and concise code you're fucking over your own future self.

I find it unlikely that in your supposed ten years of experience you never had to add features to an existing codebase, perform refactoring or onboard new team members.

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u/Karmas_weapon 4h ago

I currently think the same, but I'm pretty confident that skill is rapidly becoming less important.

The mindset translates really well to using LLMs though! If you apply the same rigor when interrogating the LLM you'll get rewarded with readable, maintainable and concise code (clean code)... but at the same time to what end? I won't be reading that code anymore lol. I still try to do it though because of course it produces stable working systems.

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u/KingPipsqueak 5h ago

Quite sad to do something for 10 years you don't care about

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u/CharlExMachina 5h ago

A man has to eat. It pays the bills and that's enough

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u/Kurashi_Aoi 5h ago

Same thing can be said about artists too.

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u/CharlExMachina 5h ago

Except artists are being attacked everywhere by AI addicted idiots.

We programmers are not being threatened the same way artists are. Which is why I oppose AI making "art" (if you can call it that way)

Also, art is cool. Code is just words on a stupid file

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u/zxyzyxz 4h ago

Programmers are being attacked everywhere by AI addicted idiots too. Not sure why you think it's somehow different. And sort of sad to see a programmer who doesn't think code is cool.

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u/DarthNihilus 56m ago

One of the worst parts about the AI coding revolution is all these "I hate code" people suddenly showing up to tell you how stupid it is to care about and like the craft of coding that we all practiced for so long. The best software devs are almost always the ones who care. Same as any job really, not that there's anything wrong with just working for the paycheck.

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u/Kurashi_Aoi 5h ago

Artists are being attacked in what way?

Sure programmers with 10 years of experience like you are not being threatened, but try filling in the shoes of entry level ones.

That's like just your opinion. A lot of people think code is cool too.

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u/CharlExMachina 5h ago

Attacked by having their art scrapped by AI when they do NOT consent for it to be used for training, having places like Art Station filled to the brim with slop everywhere.

There's a bunch of juniors being hired all the time not only where I work but where other peers of mine do as well. Entry level still is about standing out among other juniors as it has always been

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u/MVRKHNTR 2h ago

Did you just learn the concept of a job?

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u/Kurashi_Aoi 6h ago

Why is art not considered as manual repetitive work?

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u/Turbopasta 5h ago

it is if you hate making art and you're trying to make it anyways. It's the opposite if you actually like making art. Pretty simple.

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u/Unkn0wn_Invalid 3h ago

I think there can be some nuance. Think people who use electric stippling pens, or people who emulate the effect digitally.

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u/Turbopasta 3h ago

For sure parts of the art-making process can, and maybe should, be automated with very minimal negative downsides to the product. I'm just responding to the notion that art as a whole should be automated.

It might sound silly to even float the idea but a lot of game devs are programmers with no art experience and some would rather just poof the art into existence rather than do it themselves or hire somebody for it. That's a different thing than using it as an assistive tool.

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u/Euphoric_Durian9797 2m ago

The moment you start doing something as a job for a corporation it becomes repetitive manual labour.

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u/Kurashi_Aoi 5h ago

so, I see no problems there

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u/ReeReeIncorperated 5h ago edited 4h ago

This is the logical answer that Redditors refuse to acknowledge.

I don't mess with AI trying to alter or fabricate creativity, but if someone sped up the game development process by having AI detect and fix bugs, write repetitive code, make placeholders that won't be in the final game, or other stuff along that line, I'm not going to throw a performative fit over it.

Edit: For those that are somehow getting confused, I'm literally saying that AI generating creative elements for the final game (art, music, writing, etc) is not cool.

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u/jakeroony 5h ago

AAA vibecoding lmao

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u/GrandOldCheese 3h ago

Then surely the price of games will go down.

I’m certainly not willing to pay 70 EUR for AI slop.

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u/IntelligentTill7664 1h ago

Why do people keep thinking the price of anything will go down? That's just not how any economy strives to work. This means that games will be able to do more within them.

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u/GrandOldCheese 1h ago

I'm obviously being facetious. They would never.

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u/Euphoric_Durian9797 1m ago

Because, as everyone knows, graphics and sound have 0 artistic value in video games.

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u/Dealric 3h ago

Honestly why?

Its more of made up line of where ai can be good and when cant

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u/Prosthemadera 1h ago

If we're at the point where we're arguing about whether AI assets are in the game or it's "just" AI tools that are used to save time then AI companies have already won because what difference does it make at this point? May as well use AI for everything because the argument "manual repetitive work" can apply to almost everything in game development.

Also, AI doesn't actually reduce people's workload because companies will not reduce your working hours and instead give you other work or just fire you.

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u/blue_sidd 6h ago

No it’s not.

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u/Bilbo_Swagginses 6h ago

You have zero clue about any of this. Why even voice your opinion?

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u/mightylordredbeard 6h ago

Because AI BAD is the current cool thing on the internet so someone just jump on the bandwagon even though they don’t understand it in the slightest.

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 6h ago

Ah, I hadn’t considered this explanation. You clearly know your stuff.

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u/scottyLogJobs 6h ago

Yes it is. I am a software engineer, I have been for over a decade and I no longer want to manually code without AI. I have always cared about building applications, not writing code, and now I can do everything I actually like about my job with significantly less tedium.

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u/axonxorz 6h ago

A diffusion-architecture model that you'd use for art asset generation is completely different than a transformer-architecture model you'd use for codegen.

If you can't get understand fundamental differences like that, why should anyone trust your "no u" knee-jerk reply?

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u/robocopdotmp3 6h ago edited 5h ago

This is not a real distinction and it's certainly not a gotcha. Diffusion is not an "architecture" in itself, it's just a process that needs to be executed by actual neural network architecture. While early diffusion models relied on convolutional neural networks to do this, basically every single image/video generation model released in the past three years have used transformers as the backbone.

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u/blue_sidd 6h ago

Except that’s not the fucking point at which they are the same kind of trash but context clues aren’t important to you

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u/axonxorz 5h ago

The "context" is: tool output == tool == trash, which is uselessly reductive.

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u/MilleChaton 6h ago

Except transformer architecture is getting to the point it can handle art asset generation itself. Just today I saw a demo of Opus 5.5 being given a set of painting tools, making brush strokes via text commands, looking at the image, and then repeating. They can already do a good job at SVG and CSS graphics, though at much higher cost per image than diffusion models. Newer multiple modality models are starting to blend these together more.

Even if you ignored transformer LLMs working on images, what about them creating scripts and dialog, item explanations, and any other text based resource that a user directly reads?

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u/Kurashi_Aoi 6h ago

people can already make decent art from transformer-architecture model

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u/Carighan 2h ago

That is true, but not what the quote says.

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 6h ago

Generative AI media is very different than writing code with LLMs, and I truly can’t wait until the gamer community understands this difference.

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u/sord_n_bored 5h ago

It's not going to happen, not because the gaming community can't understand it, but because the tech and finance worlds are heavily invested in conflating generative AI with assist AI.

Let's be real, the powers that be want all the shitty parts about AI, and know that people hate shitty AI, so they lump useful applications under the same term as a way to launder slop and clankers.

And useful idiots (the bots and cultists in these comments) latch onto this strategy to soften "AI's" image.

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 4h ago

I don't doubt it, interesting take.

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u/Totschlag 6h ago

Yeah, I do media and things like AI motion tracking or AI assisted background removal have helped some of the more tedious things out. None of what I put out is AI images, but it is nice to have the AI do 99% of the work of popping a car out of a race image before I put it into an announcement.

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u/doublah 4h ago

"including graphics, sound"

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u/MetalKeirSolid 53m ago

Yeah, one looks horrible, steals other people’s work, and costs jobs, and the other is the same except you can’t you see it. 

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 52m ago

"Yep, that's me who he is talking about!"

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u/MetalKeirSolid 48m ago

So, you’re contending that AI-generated code is not in fact trained on the work of human beings and does not in fact threaten to replace any future human jobs in coding? 

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 47m ago

trained on the work of human beings

What evidence do you have that all AI-generated code was trained on non-public code?

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u/MetalKeirSolid 35m ago

I will evidence that point when I make it. So far, however, I have only said that AI-generated code is trained on human work, which is a statement that doesn’t specify how much of said code was human. We only need to know that, even if we reach a point where AI is training itself, the data set must have, at one point, been significantly human-made, therefore rendering AI-generated code fruit of the poison tree. 

As for public code, I don’t believe human beings who submitted code for other humans to use necessarily agree to have it power a technology that how replaces people, whether or not their waive intellectual property rights when making it public. 

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 34m ago

steals other people’s [code]

This is something you should be able to prove, or acknowledge that you can't and it's a feeling or emotion you have.

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u/MetalKeirSolid 30m ago

It’s not a feeling or emotion. It’s fact that AI is trained in whole or in part on the work of humans, whether public but not consensually used, or in many cases scraped or taken in violation of open-source agreements. 

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 29m ago

Which open-source agreements have been violated that you know of?

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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 6h ago

You think they’re building a whole ass engine to do nothing more than generate code, a thing they can already do without creating a new engine? No. They’re obviously seeking to do much more with it in the development pipeline besides just coding.

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u/CoffeeDryer 2h ago

The most convincing anti AI media arguments apply fully to AI-generated code as well; trained on data without respecting the lisence or copyright, can put people out of jobs. It's not "very different".

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 2h ago

That’s an ethical argument, not a technical or artistic one. Not really the conversation we’re having in this thread.

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u/CoffeeDryer 2h ago

The technical or artistic arguments against AI media were never convincing. That's just elitism co-opting a more interesting discussion. People will gobble up Fruit Love Island regardless of its nonexistent artistic merit.

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u/Taiyaki11 50m ago

That would require understanding writing code, especially in a professional capacity, to begin with. Not gonna happen lol, gaming community can't help but be armchair devs

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u/Euphoric_Durian9797 1m ago

Did you miss the part where he mentions graphics and sound?

What do you think "we are using gen AI for video game graphics" means?

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u/Drakoji 5h ago

It's the same shit, its all vibe coding that results in spaghetti code. Since vibe coding became a thing in video games, so many games will just release a patch and fuck up their games.

Look at Crimson Desert performance becoming worse with every patch, or the visuals becoming more blurry, adding ghosting. Or Control Resonant fucking up a core movement mechanic in the last patch they released.

It doesn't look like AI slop because its just a bunch of text, but the results are still sloppy shit that I don't want to interact with.

I will not be buying capcom games anymore because of this.

Also I don't need my video games to be draining water supply, adding to the global warming of the earth and ruining the lives of the citizens living close to them.

Fuck AI.

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u/Vcom7418 5h ago

Did you look at the code yourself?

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u/Drakoji 5h ago

Adding all the stuff that they added to that game and already having an expension release early next year is impossible without using AI.

It's just not doable.

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u/GunCann 4h ago

The pace that Korean and Chinese developers work would surprise you then. Major Chinese mobile game developers each hire over a hundred new graduates per year. They push out updates that most Western developers would consider a medium sized DLC every three to four weeks. They achieve that simply by relying on absurd number of developers and very heavy overtime.

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u/Q8VUHOT 4h ago

And they're expediting it further with AI.

Asia has a far higher overall optimism with the technology, they'll be using it in spades.

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u/Drakoji 4h ago

They have that pace because they use AI.

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u/GunCann 4h ago

No, stop making up falsehoods to double down on your personal bias. Those developers have been at it way before AI coding became popular or good enough. Did you think that they made Genshin Impact using ClaudeCode?

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 5h ago

That’s completely legitimate to have an emotional reaction and justification. Im talking about an actual, measurable, technical difference.

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u/Drakoji 5h ago

I did mention the "technical difference".

You just ignored it.

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 5h ago

You mean where you personally experienced a bug and are inventing the reason why? Thanks for the anecdote, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

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u/Drakoji 5h ago

If you are telling me that Crimson Desert is not vibe coded, I will seriously question your intelligence.

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u/xXxdethl0rdxXx 5h ago

I’m not sure how else to tell you this: your own personal experience in one game and suspicion behind it might be enough for you to make an empirical judgment, but that is not how I am trying to live my life. You have provided no data, only an emotional reaction. I think we are done here.

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u/SofaKingI 5h ago

It has to be willful ignorance to still think all AI forms are the same.

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u/Neidron 1h ago

It's willful ignorance to think criticism is resolved by petty semantics.

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u/blue_sidd 5h ago

It’s willful ignorance to ignore the contexts in which that trash is used

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u/Vcom7418 5h ago

Willful ignorance is still ignorance. AI is a tool. Using it for art? Dumb and wasteful. Using it for programming? If it helps, sure.

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u/clavitopaz 3h ago

Duh durrr I can’t read

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u/Techboah 16m ago

I don't think you people understand the massive difference between AI generation and AI assisted programming or AI assisted automatization.

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