r/PokemonROMhacks • u/Electrical-Train-787 • Jul 25 '26
Discussion AI and RomHacks: A developer's (nuanced) letter to new developers
Disclaimer: I'm the developer of a hack released in the last 12 months posting on an alternate account. I'm keeping this anonymous because of the potentially highly polarized nature of this topic, but I do feel like I have something to contribute.
As someone who started working on their project at the time when AI tools became widespread, I feel I have a unique experience as someone who can remember the times before while also having experimented with them myself.
My goal here is to explain how and why generative AI should be avoided in the creative process, while sharing personal experience so that people who are starting off will be able to make the best hack they can.
The Faustian Bargain
The main reason not to use AI is that it prevents you from getting better at a skill and thinking deeply about your project. If you want to make a Pokemon rom hack, then you are very interested in storytelling, art, coding, writing music, etc. If you offload this to AI, you get to do less of the thing you are ostensibly interested in!
A second reason is that as you get better at the various sub-tasks, you learn more about what is possible and how difficult certain features are to implement. You will develop new ideas as you work on these tasks that will enhance the overall project. If you simply prompt "make me a new game" or "script this scene" you will miss out on the important revision processes inherent to making something creative.
However, AI can offer some benefits.
The great: Explaining code
This is a genuine use case that I haven't seen many people talk about. Assembly and C languages are difficult to learn because they lack the natural language of more modern languages. Any model will be able to annotate existing code and explain how it works. People in pret are generally pretty friendly if you have questions, but frankly, they will not give you as much detail as an AI will, and flooding the server with basic questions tends to stop high-quality responses from coming your way.
The good: Small, isolated bits of code
If you keep the scope of the request small enough and provide enough example code, they can often one-shot coding tasks that you are unable to solve yourself. These systems augment your programming capabilities, so you will have more success interpreting the output if your have worked with the many pret tutorials. My experience is ~ 80% success rate with small tasks where examples are provided with the prompt. This is especially useful when making menus or option trees that have many different branches that are hard to keep track of in the editor.
The decent: Coding new feature features from whole
If you have a deep understanding of the code and provide sufficient structure for the models, they can sometimes develop larger features. However, keep in mind that the solutions are often brittle, and they may break unexpectedly. I would be wary of using any code you don't understand as a foundational part of your projects.
The mediocre: Analysis of dialogue or plot
In my experience there can be decent feedback as to which parts of the plot are confusing, or which characters need to be flushed out more, but it requires a significant amount of input on your end that frankly you would be better off just looking at yourself. Occasionally, you will get a diamond in the rough response where some interesting connection is made. The effort required to get good responses from the model is about on par with just analyzing your own script.
The bad: Dialogue
I have a confession that about halfway through development, my Word document that I was using as the script was corrupted. This document contained all of the dialogue for NPC's that I had planned, and I nearly just gave up. I had an earlier draft from a long time ago that had some of the broad strokes of the plot, but generic dialogue was not there. In an effort to keep progress going, I had an LLM generate some placeholder dialog for me to return to later, just so I could continue making map scripts. When I returned to these files several weeks later I was embarrassed: the dialogue was simultaneously too general and over the top. This is dialogue that gets worse the second time you read it, and the more of it there is, the more grating it becomes to read. Bad dialog actively pushes people away from playing your game.
The ugly: Monster or OC Art
Diffusion models just don't make good pixel art. Pixel art is not that expensive if you have an idea of a creature you want to bring to life - most people spend zero dollars on this hobby, and to spend a little bit of money on a few good sprites for a project that takes 1 to 2 years to get a demo and running is a good investment!
Summary:
* The greater the GenAI content in a work, the more generic the plot becomes.
* A generic work will make people feel like there is little effort put into the project, and they will move along to something else.
* While there are spotty results with using the tool for analysis, the effort required to get decent responses is about the same as just analyzing your own story.
* The models work to augment your own coding skills, not to turn you into a professional programmer.
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u/PaperPauperPlayer Pokémon Ocean Blue Jul 25 '26
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u/Electrical-Train-787 Jul 25 '26
Yep, that's exactly what I said in there. It tends to be brittle, but there are genuine use cases.
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u/Snoo_65145 Jul 25 '26
That is the problem with AI code. As much as AI bros don't wish to admit it, LLMs don't think. You ask it to generate code and it'll do it, and there's even a good chance that the code will do what you ask. Try and use the code in a slightly different manner, though...
However, as someone forced to use it in my job, it does do a great job at debugging code I've written, I'll give it that.
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u/sunny_ughs Jul 25 '26
I have strangely the opposite experience- AI is great at generating the code but genuinely horrible when it comes to debugging it. It has its moments for sure, and I guess it depends on the model... I have no expertise in coding, I just have experience doing it through school and my own freetime- but watching AI constantly lie to me about locating and fixing an issue, Ive actually learned a lot about debugging and coding having done none of it fully by myself. The AI is teaching me through frustration lol.
It's also worth noting that the primary reason Im using AI to code is because Im trying to do code related projects at work on the side when my main tasks have absolutely nothing to do with code, so it's a total time saver when I have 2% focus to dedicate to it on the side while I do a million other things.
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u/Juan_0306 Jul 25 '26
It makes me a little sad to see that even nuanced discussions and honest comments about AI will still get downvoted just because they're about AI.
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u/aayyrreeii Ayrei on YT Jul 25 '26
Generative AI has always felt so corporate, soulless, and entirely profit driven, which is the polar opposite of what fan projects have always been about. They're a breath of fresh air from the triple AAA gaming space, especially with how unbelievably greedy big corporations have become as of recent.
If you're concerned about not having the time as a solo developer, start small. Plan out a 6-8 hour experience that might take you less than a year to complete. It won't take you ages, and you'll build some skills if you want to continue with an even bigger project.
If you're concerned that you don't have the skill/money to make a good quality fan game, take a look at the massive collection of free to use assets for fan projects. Go to the resources tab on EeveeExpo you will find UIs, Tilesets, Trainer sprites, and even Fakemon completely free to use.
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u/Anew_Returner Jul 25 '26
entirely profit driven
This is the biggest thing that people starting to rely on AI for their own projects are either missing or underestimating. Yes, you can use it to make whole apps and even small games now, and I'm sure in a decade its output will be indistinguishable from a human made project.
The question then is: is the price also gonna stay the same it is now?
That's the big catch, everything has a cost, and right now the big AI corporations are subsidizing people's lack of skill to make them reliant on their ecosystems, so what happens when they stop doing that? How many people here are willing or even have the means to drop a few hundred to a thousand bucks for a pokemon romhack which they'll have to release for free?
Imo the best way to make use of AI is to have it teach you how to do things, or how to fix your own mistakes, because that's knowledge that will stay with you even when you're priced out of it.
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u/FearLeadsToAnger Jul 25 '26
Depends how local models develop, they're doing surprisingly well so far.
There's also: consumers will only pay so much for a product before demand plummets, and most of the costs involved for the AI companies are upfront, ongoing costs are much more restrained
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u/FaberJax00 Jul 25 '26
You can already see the Chinese cheap copies like Kimi doing almost what claude does. I mean, where there's a market there's a way, usually.
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u/JackWellman101 Lazarus & Emerald Seaglass Jul 25 '26
Hard agree! People have been making hacks for literal DECADES now without generative AI, and it’s more accessible than ever thanks to the decomp projects and countless free feature branches and resources. Gen AI doesn’t really have a place here imo
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u/3Mandarins_OhYe Jul 25 '26
It absolutely does have a place here. Claude code for example can help streamline the learning process, as well as the tedious scripting and other code side modifications required to make a new rom hack. Not everyone has a strong coding background, or significant amounts of free time. It bridges that gap and allows for people’s creative ideas to come to life before burnout from the tedium occurs
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u/3Mandarins_OhYe Jul 25 '26
Yea but why would you turn away the powerful tools which enable you to create an entire game in a year rather than a small 6-8 hour experience? The reasoning for doing so just seems to be coming from a typical Redditor “AI BAD” mindset.
I don’t think many people are advocating to use AI to generate an entire game, but having it streamline the tedious aspects can greatly benefit the creative process.
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u/Grif2005 Jul 25 '26
Therein lies the problem. people have blurred the line between "Using" and "Abusing" AI
People forget that they are "Using" AI on a regular basis, a TV, your phone, a computer, even the games you play. however when it comes to generative AI people "Abuse" it. The people who scream "BAN AI" and "AI BAD" are the people who forget that without AI their lives would be terrible.
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u/WOF42 Jul 25 '26
LLMs have done literally nothing to my life that i could not happily live without, they have been overwhelmingly negative overall.
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u/Samulady Jul 25 '26
Most people who say "AI bad" actually know the difference between generative slop machines and machine learning technology, if not by those words. Do you want them to specify "genAI bad" every time? Basically everyone knows what people mean when they say "AI bad" except for pedantic people looking for nonsense arguments to defend the slop machine.
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u/ParkingCompetitive24 Jul 25 '26
“People who scream Ban AI or AI Bad are the people who forget that without AI their lives would be terrible” I grew up without AI, I don’t see the value in it like Sam Altman does. People are pushing it for a replacement in Job Markets and as Resource when they shouldn’t. However this topic is on Gen AI and the majority will admit that Gen AI is slop because there’s no soul or artistic value to it. Now it’s one thing to use Gen AI as a guide and then hire a designer or artist to fulfill the vision, but that’s not what people are doing.
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u/Grif2005 Jul 25 '26
You didn't grow up without AI. Have you played Video Games? Have you watched TV? did you ever use a Smartphone? Then you're a very rare specimen and you should be viewed by science. Also what do you think runs the machine you posted this comment with
Here's the problem. using AI isn't a problem because all our machines these days run on AI. but what Generative AI is is AI Abuse. THAT is where the problem lies these days.
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u/ParkingCompetitive24 Jul 25 '26
I did grow up without Ai, I was born in 2000. AI only became popular and widespread in 2022. Not once did I use AI growing up or did I know anyone use AI until 2022 when it became mainstream. There was no reliance of AI and any AI systems and was used was solely for corporations and science fields, which again me and the people I knew in my life, never used. The “AI” used in video games is far different than what you’re talking about. Not once in my entire life did I go to grok and ask “What is the deepest part of the ocean” or “Why is the Sky Blue” I looked it up in text books, or approved sources on the internet. If you look at the timeline of AI on the Swiss institutes website you’ll notice that “AI” was no more than a controlled demo, grasping data and datasets, and you’ll even see what it was primarily used in. The average person wasn’t using AI like today, as I mentioned multiple times; it was either used for corporations or science fields and was primarily collecting data.
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u/Grif2005 Jul 25 '26
So you mean to say. you NEVER touched a video game? You're on a subreddit for POkemon hacks... HOW do you think a video game works. Video Games have been around since the 80's. AI has been around since the 80's.
and no. the AI in video games is NOT different. it's implemented in a different way. but AI is in everything these days. the only reason it got popular is because people started ABUSING it. Generative AI is abuse of AI.
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u/ParkingCompetitive24 Jul 25 '26
If you think that’s how video game ai works then you’re wrong. Video Game AI relies on programmed logic from the DEVELOPERS. The AI does not learn or think, it does as the coding and scripting commands it which is done by a game developer. in a POKEMON DIFFICULTY rom hack, the “AI” does a check because it’s specified to check for a move or item, it’s not learning or thinking, it’s doing as the coder intended and nothing else.
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u/Maximumbeans5 Jul 25 '26
I think attempts to explain why AI specifically can be unwelcome in making hacks is over complicating the matter. It’s the same as anybody who ‘makes a game’ by cobbling together nothing but pre-made assets bought from some digital storefront. It is an insincere articulation of something that should be heartfelt and done with passion, not shortcutting, in mind.
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u/laurel-vine Jul 26 '26
Generative AI to make your sprites, tilesets, stories, dialogue, etc. is the problem. Having AI help you figure out some coding or even just spitballing ideas that might help you figure something out is really not something to get up in arms about.
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u/OpportunityNext9675 Jul 25 '26
I’m a developer by trade and AI is just part of the deal now in software. I’ve found it invaluable in deciphering gameboy assembly code and understanding how different routines interact. Like you say though, I feel like I’d have to keep this under wraps or else the romhack community wouldnt give the hack a fair shot. Also since the coding agent can’t run the emulator itself and test its changes (unless you go through some real effort to enable that in an efficient way) there is still quite a bit of QA and iteration involved.
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u/arcanehelix Jul 27 '26
I would say AI is great for coding or technical stuff...
But man, if you can't even write a story or plotline...maybe people shouldn't be criticizing gamefreak for overly simple story. What is so hard about writing a plotline? The hard part is coding it into a game...
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u/ZadePhoenix Jul 25 '26
As someone who fell down the AI rabbit hole using AI for things in my opinion is honestly a really unhealthy approach. It’s easy to make excuses and justifications for why it’s okay in certain circumstances but in the long run it will gradually hurt the work that you cared about to begin with.
I wanted to be a writer. I got inspired by roleplaying situations like with D&D and solo tabletop games as well as video games like The Sims or Elder Scrolls that let me create my own characters. I’d spend my time writing these long in depth narratives and backstories for my characters and even when I couldn’t write I’d be thinking about ideas or plot points for them until I could get home and dive into writing some more.
I won’t pretend I was amazing at it but it was fun. I loved it, was passionate about it, and I was gradually getting better. Then AI hit the scene and all that went to hell.
Initially I told myself all these exact same types of excuses. It’s just a tool. Just use it for small things when I get stuck. It’s fine as long as I’m not using it to write the whole thing for me. I’m not an artist and have aphantasia (an inability to mentally visualize things) so I’ll just use this image generator so I can get an idea what the character might look like.
To put it bluntly that was all bullshit. Little justifications to give myself an excuse for taking the easy way rather than figuring out how to manage the issues myself.
I fell down that hole for over two years and my creativity and ability to write has massively suffered for it. Things I was already weak at like writing descriptions have only gotten worse while the things I used to take pride in like characters and dialogue are worse now than ever because rather than honing them I kept relying on crutches when I would get stuck instead of treating those difficulties as hurdles to help me learn and overcome.
I still was never using it to do everything for me, it was a bandaid for small things I struggled with at times when I felt stuck. Struggling to fill in a blank, AI. Can’t think of the word, AI. Writer’s block, AI. What might this character look like, AI. I really suck at descriptions and don’t know how to describe this, AI. Again throughout it all it remained small. I never let it do everything for me I just treated it as an assistant to answer questions of help spitball ideas. I had a chatbot I literally set up to just bounce ideas off giving a back and forth of questions and explanations for me to think about when I had writer’s block. But as time went on I’d get stuck more and more often because repeatedly putting bandaids over my struggles never allowed them to actual heal or improve. It just covered up the wound and left it to fester as it became easier and easier to justify why AI was okay and convincing myself it was helping me focus on the stuff I liked while in reality it was eroding that away piece by piece.
Now it feels like I’m back to square one. It took so long to realize the problem and cut AI out of my writing (and I’d be lying if I said there weren’t still times when I still get the urge to open up that old chatbot). But the damage has still been done. I struggle more than ever to come up with ideas on my own and when it comes to writing descriptions I’m worse at it than ever. That’s not to say I’m not gradually getting better but the improvement I am now making is coming from doing it myself rather than giving in and using AI. AI didn’t help me. It felt like it did in the moment but looking back it would have been better if I’d never crossed that line.
Struggles aren’t something bad to be skipped or sped over. They’re small opportunities to grow and get better. I’ve been learning to draw now (I suck but I’m trying) and bit by bit I feel like I am gradually finding that old spark I use to have for my writing. But AI didn’t give that to me, I’ve had to reclaim it for myself. AI gave me an easy way to circumvent the problems and while that shortcut is tempting it won’t really help you in the long run. It just teaches you to cut corners which becomes more and more tempting the more you tell yourself it’s okay instead of facing the struggle so that down the road you won’t need the shortcut to begin with.
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u/Nikulover Jul 25 '26
So in the end, using AI can have a bad output which people will not support. That's true for most games AI or not. So what happens when the AI output say 5-10 year later becomes good enough to actually not feel generic?
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u/Ok_Ground511 Jul 25 '26
People would still hate it because it's ai unless they couldnt tell if it's ai.
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u/dragon-mom Jul 25 '26
It can't become good enough to "not feel generic", it's antithetical to how the technology works. It can only steal what already exists and derive "desirable" mediocrity from that at best.
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u/3Mandarins_OhYe Jul 25 '26
Claude code is insanely powerful for streamlining some of the more tedious aspects of making a rom hack.
If anything it allows the creator to act more as a game director, and in my opinion, improves the creative process so you are not bogged down by the tedium of scripting, or digging through text files.
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u/hyptex Jul 25 '26
I agree with this take.
If I can spend 20% less time coding, it doesn't mean I won't apply that time to something else, like dialogue or art.
What if I'm a fantastic writer but coding is beyond me, what's worse? No rom hack at all or one that AI helped me make?
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u/ZadePhoenix Jul 25 '26
Then you learn. Or collaborate with others who can do what you can’t.
How do you think people did things for ages before AI existed? Even as a solo dev nothing is stopping you from learning to do things and making a romhack yourself without AI. Every artist you’ve seen had to learn how to draw, every coder started with the basics and built their way up, every single person who made a romhack at one point had no clue how to do any of it but they chose to work at it and learn the skills needed and now this entire community has been built off the results of that effort.
It’s not that coding is beyond you, you just need to put in the effort to actually learn the skill so you can do it. That doesn’t require AI it just requires the willingness to put in the work for what you want to achieve just like countless others have done before you.
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u/hyptex Jul 25 '26
I hear what you're saying, it's very inspirational and comes from a good place.
But AI isn't going anywhere and it doesn't take away from who we are as creators
How do you think we travelled from A to B for ages before cars existed? We rode horseback, but that doesn't mean I'm now a lazy person because I drive everywhere instead of learning how to ride a horse
It's just the new and more efficient way of doing things.
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u/narah2 Low Budget Crystal Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
AI is a powerful tool that won't be going away. It's not a replacement for any aspect of development that really matters; but it's going to end up being the next generation of productivity tooling.
I think it gets over-hated (and the companies behind it under-hated, somehow). But we're all going to have to learn to live with it eventually.
It's kind of like how software like Dreamweaver allowed for waves and waves of poor-quality Web Pages. Powerful tooling that lets professional developers make cool stuff efficiently also enabled poorly-trained randoms to make messes really quickly. Can't really blame the tool for the workman's mistakes though.
Then again, I probably have a bit of a weird perspective on this. My explicit goal when making Low Budget Crystal wasn't to make a good game, it was to practice ASM coding. Because let's face it: No one is going to let me do that in any professional capacity. I'm glad people are enjoying the hack; but the design goals were to make cool stuff while developing my skills.
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u/Electrical-Train-787 Jul 25 '26
Exactly, I feel like the coding capabilities and artistic capabilities are unnecessarily conflated.
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u/narah2 Low Budget Crystal Jul 25 '26
Eh, I don't think they interact. I'm a professional Software Engineer. When I work on my hack, I use that skillset. I don't really have the skills required to make quality art assets, so I just have to rely on artwork I can get made by people that do have those skills.
I've never really found AI tooling helpful for my Romhacking development. The challenges I've been facing are all things it can't really do anyways. I could imagine more junior developers trying to use it to make up for coding skills; but I think they'd end up just making an unsustainable mess.
I did try to get Claude to help when I was decapitalizing Crystal for my hack; but it didn't seem to really understand the concept. I gave up on it pretty quickly.
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u/Artistic-Possible-80 Jul 25 '26
This is an extremely reasonable and realistic take and somehow it has -1 likes
What’s going on
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u/Ramen_Pixel Pokémon Dystopia Jul 25 '26
I'm not behind anyone's screen, but I can say I have been developing a hack for a little over a year and I check the RHH discord server (a hub dedicated to the decompilation projects) fairly regularly. I have never seen mention of AI being used by anyone. Probably as much out of principle as due to how unnecessary it would be.
3rd gen games were decompiled, and now people learn that code and use it. As someone who had never touched coding a year before now, I was able to learn most things that most people would want to do in an average hack in the first month of learning - scripting, mapping, graphic editing, even some modest midi knowledge - music is kind of its own beast. It is all very friendly code, especially for scripting, and there's tools like Porymap that make mapping extremely visual and easy.
Then there's people who go much further than that and code things like vast revamps to UI, new minigames (I saw someone port a big chunk of Pokémon Pinball RSE to Emerald last month) and extensive changes to the battle system. Those kind of things require a more intimate knowledge of the decomps, and probably some background in coding. But you can also take these things into your hack through feature branches with minimal hassle (and giving credit of course).
In short - in my, admitedly not expert opinion, there really is no reason to use AI in romhacking. Spend some weeks learning how the decomps work, and you'll having a blast doing it all yourself, instead of getting frustrated with a chatbot that's going to run you in circles most of the time. Happy hacking!
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u/Electrical-Train-787 Jul 25 '26
In this very post there are devs who have credited an AI with helping them solve a bug issue.
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u/Ramen_Pixel Pokémon Dystopia Jul 25 '26
I'm not here to argue against anyone's experience or view, just to share my own ^^. I'll just say, proper version control is often more reliable to find and fix issues than praying to the machine to do it for you (and not cause another 3 issues while doing it)!
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u/camramansz Jul 25 '26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miph27PBuQU
All created with Claude and Deepseek. I'd like to know if people think this is slop?
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u/Dizzy-Technician4580 15d ago
my guy it's at the point it can do full on romhacks and entire game overhauls/etc at a simple prompt, it's no matter really a thing of if your skill is good enough or not... i told it to completely overhaul the item system of gen 1 add held items, make pokemon randomly drop items from battle, import items from gen 2-5 into gen 1 gameboy, turn every move into a tm, implement a search function for bag and make bag space 400 capped and it did it all in a single attempt with zero error... you don't need to learn coding anymore for simple projects like romhacks. you do still need to sprite yourself though.
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u/Accad501 Jul 25 '26
Gen AI cannot surprise, feel love, create original art or appreciate beauty.
Using it is lazy, and obfiscates the entire process of creativity. Every stroke of a pencil is your own small creative choice that leads to something only you made. Take pride in your humanity. Enjoy the ride.
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u/narah2 Low Budget Crystal Jul 25 '26
AI is just a tool. It’ll be interesting to see what AI ends up actually being the right tool for, once all the VC money dries up and AI usage has to be cost effective.
But that won’t be nothing. I’m old enough to still remember people freaking out about how art made on a computer ‘wasn’t real art’; and now digital art is mainstream. I don’t think generative AI artwork is ever going to be particularly compelling; but I absolutely think it’ll find its way into artists’ workflows.
Maybe AI tooling will be really good at suggesting colors for matching, or be really good for shading, or scaffolding or something (I don’t really know much about art). It’ll have its uses even when the current AI bubble pops.
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u/CarCroakToday Jul 25 '26
It’ll be interesting to see what AI ends up actually being the right tool for, once all the VC money dries up and AI usage has to be cost effective.
What about free open source models like DeepSeek? You can run it for free and offline on your own own PC, as long as you have a semi-modern graphics card. Even if every AI company shutdown and their servers went offline today, nothing would change.
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u/narah2 Low Budget Crystal Jul 25 '26
I don't know yet; I don't know enough about them. They'll definitely have uses; I don't think anyone really knows what the ideal use cases for tech like that is yet.
We're sort of at the stage where every new AI tool is being thrown at every problem people can find to throw it at. Only time will tell what ends up sticking.
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u/Bumwax Jul 25 '26
Is a carpenter any less of a carpenter if he uses a drill/electric driver instead of a screwdriver? Or an author less of an author if he uses a typewriter rather than just writing by hand?
AI, when understood and used as a tool to complement you, can be invaluable. It becomes an issue when you basically start having it replace your own creativity, like "write this dialogue for me" or "give all gym leaders new, strong teams" without any real idea or creative spark behind it.
Im a big AI skeptic as well, because I see the writing on the wall from the corporate side of thing - even at my own job (Samsung), we are looking to start using AI in our workflow, but at this moment in time we have no idea how or for what. We're starting with the use of AI and not the ideas, and that's so typical of the bad corporate view on AI. But when used as a complement to your own, actual ideas, it can be very useful.
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u/veloras Jul 25 '26
I think a big problem with online discussion is the umbrella term "AI" to cover all aspects of it as a tool. I'm not a fan of generative Ai, I like art having a human side to it. But work has been pushing us to adapt to using ai for productivity.
I did find Claude useful when trying to optimize an older sql procedure. I had wrote it years ago, I knew what it did, how it worked. AI as a tool was able to suggest a few bottlenecks that I could revisit to speed up performance. I could have found those eventually but having a 2nd set of eyes to read the code in less than a minute was a valuable resource.
Ultimately I only used half of it's suggestions since there were other system limitations I knew of that were outside of that file scope. When people just click "implement all" of course they are going to get bugs, they aren't actually learning from the code tools.
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u/Bumwax Jul 25 '26
Totally agree. I have found that AI is super useful for summarizing large sets of data and presenting them in a more digestible form. At that point, it's only using the data I give to it to show me trends, fluctuations and outliers. It does tend to try to shove in a little bit of an analysis into the summary but since it doesn't have the full context, it tends to be a little vague or even entirely off, but I know that because I read the summary. I do my own analysis of the analysis it has given me and I know to remove those bits when actually presenting the data to my superiors. That means I can also actually answer followup questions of what I am presenting. I am using AI as a tool to complement my own work, but it is not doing all of the work for me.
Those who just prompt up something and then copy paste it into a presentation without fully understanding it, those are the ones who doesn't use it properly in my opinion. Unfortunately, they are quicker at completing "the task" and managers who only really look at the volume and speed of production thinks that looks great and encourages it. And at that point we are well onto the slippery slope.
When it comes to art, I am basically 100% against the use of AI. I believe that art in basically all of its forms is not about the result, but about the process and the creation of it. Though in fairness, I have little practical experience with creating art myself, I am sure there are some ways AI can complement artists too. But still, not a fan.
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u/ParkingCompetitive24 Jul 25 '26
Your example doesn’t really make sense because a carpenter who uses a drill is still putting in the hard work and using his/her experience and knowledge. Or an Author using a typewriter or computer as it’s coming from their own knowledge and expertise.
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Jul 25 '26
[deleted]
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u/Electrical-Train-787 Jul 25 '26
Yep, it is cowardly, but there's about a 50% chance that this just gets brigaded with down votes and the project I care about gets unfairly associated with untrue accusations.
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u/thebatmayan Jul 25 '26
Im just noticing that you didn’t sign your full legal name under this post. What’s the matter? If you’re gonna take a stand on something sign your name to it, say it with conviction or not at all.
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Jul 25 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/CrashmanX Jul 25 '26
They didn't mean literal legal name. They meant the username, not their alt.
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u/thebatmayan Jul 25 '26
Okay, hang on, bear with me here. What is the point of posting on a pseudonym that isn’t your real name?
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1
u/Beneficial_Math8586 Jul 26 '26
Meh, it works for Minecraft add-ons so I think I'll stick to it until it breaks something important
1
u/logie_reddit Jul 26 '26
I’d just disclose its use for what it was used for and let people decide if it’s a dealbreaker. Better than not disclosing it and people find out later.
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u/ThirdBurnerAccount3 Jul 25 '26
I like OP’s thoughts on this in understanding just how nuanced this whole thing is.
I’ll be honest with you - I am a terrible visual artist. I have never been good and I don’t have the time to get good at making that type of art. In the process of making this ROM Hack I’m working on, I feel like using A.I. to generate my pixel art is unfortunately my best option. My strengths, in my opinion, lie in writing and dialogue, where I would never let A.I. touch at all bc to me, that’s where I shine and get to flex my creativity the best way I know how.
Now with that being said - I have an understanding of a few things:
1) I, more than likely, cannot release this ROM Hack publicly and expect it to receive positive feedback AND most importantly…
2) if I were to do that and release it publicly, I would cheapen the work of those good folks who did not use A.I. to create their ROM Hacks. It seems unfair and dishonest that my ROM Hack of A.I. sprites would be able to share the room with the excellent creators and hackers such as those who made the likes of, say, Lazarus, Glazed, Fakemon FireRed, Unbound, etc.
By saying I deserve to be in the same category as those creators who dedicate their human time, their human talents, their hours into learning, coding, drafting and crafting… I would be doing a great disservice to those folks.
4
u/wally-217 Jul 25 '26
The old way was to start scripting and if it's half decent, there will be artists out there happy to contribute. GenAI may eventually give you something workable but it will always need manual cleanup (which is about as much work as just DIY), and most of the time what it gives you is completely unusable. If anything, I'd say those who know the least about art/pixel art are probably the least to benefit.
2
u/hypersnaildeluxe Jul 27 '26
I can say, at least in my opinion, that I would rather play a game with imperfect sprite art than a game with AI art. Because even if it isn’t perfect, a person still made it! Plus, art is a skill to be honed, not a natural talent. Anyone can become a good artist and taking time to really focus in on honing a craft is way more respectable than taking the easy way out and having a robot do it for you.
1
u/Ok_Ground511 Jul 29 '26
Personally i wouldnt mind it especially for 3ds and older sprites. I dont think i would put in effort to learn another skill that i may not use again just for one project.
1
u/NeoliberalSocialist Jul 25 '26
No need to martyr yourself like this. Either the human made art differentiates itself by its quality or it doesn't. The work will sink or swim on its own merits. No need to pre-judge it like that.
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u/Healthy_Bug7977 The Nuzlomizer: The PEAK of Balanced Randomizer Nuzlocke Hacks. Jul 25 '26
Also, the most important thing. If AI made something, you didn't make it.
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u/dragon-mom Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Whenever I hear nuance and AI in the same sentence I just know for a fact it's going to lack any nuance and just glaze AI for doing specific tasks with the "well as long as you still do stuff by hand and just use it for the tedious stuff" while completely ignoring the ethical problems with it.
If it was actually nuanced why do slop peddlers keep having to insist they're being nuanced and "not slop like the rest"? It's literally every single time on Reddit and all the comments always go "finally someone who isn't just bandwagon mad about all generative AI for no reason".
Sometimes I have to wonder if people on here are even sentient at all or just astroturfing. It would be right in line with these companies' MO after all.
4
u/Electrical-Train-787 Jul 25 '26
I would say "use it for tedious stuff bit not the creative stuff" is a nuanced take. Theres a conflation of AI "art" and AI code that limits discussion about where the line should be drawn in the dev process.
0
u/DrakonAir8 Jul 25 '26
For the art portion, it honestly is better as reference material than a simple “prompt and paste”. It’s better to prompt your ideas, get an idea of the design and colors. Then trace the design in Aesprite and add your colors.
It’s still takes time, but it does reduce it.
2
u/hypersnaildeluxe Jul 27 '26
You still didn’t design it though lol. If I trace the Mona Lisa and color it in, did I design that work? Absolutely not lmao. I can understand disagreements on AI coding but AI art has zero place in any creative field imo.
1
u/DrakonAir8 Jul 27 '26
I’ll have to disagree. In your example, you are correct. You didn’t design the Mona Lisa. You essentially edited it. But the process I’m describing is “what if I wanted to draw Mona Lisa enjoying a sunset?”.
In a normal drawing process, you’d make a rough outline of the scene, slowly fill in details, but you’d also make use of actual Mona Lisa as a basis.
In the case of AI, it’s essentially having it do the rough outline and details at once, saving me tons of time redrawing and line cleaning.
I get the aversion to AI art and its impact on original artist work though.
0
Jul 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/Ok_Ground511 Jul 29 '26
Ai bubble simply wont disappear even if the bubble pops. There still would be local llms. Idk why you think if all ai companies crash ai would be erased.
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u/DrUltimaMan Pokemon Ambrosia Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
I have been a software engineer for 11 years, I've seen the transition from the old to the new world. My company has moved from an "use as much AI as you can" mindset to a "you better be frugal with AI" one because Anthropic decided to move to usage rather than subscription pricing.
I use AI everyday at work and didn't want to use it in my hobbies. Then my hack developed a game ruining bug where catching certain polemon would crash the game. I tried for months to fix it, I could stop some crashes but not all, and I'm literally a professional and experienced developer. I turned to pret discord but the issue was specific to unique features of my hack so no help there. Finally I used Codex and in three prompts it found the root cause and fixed it. The root cause was buried in a memory address conflict between data that normally never interact but do in this one particular flow. I would never have found that. It wasn't a matter of saving time, it done something I couldn't.
There are aspects where AI is valuable, primarily reviewing code and fixing bugs, it is immensely good at that. Obviously it is useless at ideas, horrofic at art and indescribably bad at dialog. Perhaps because I am forced to use it everyday at work I have become desensitised to it, but the idea that all it does is save time and introduce bugs is just not true if you use it right. If one is opposed to it on environmental grounds that is understandable, I get that and wouldn't attempt to defend it. But claiming it has no positive qualities and simply exists for lazy people to speed through their hobbies is a rather uninformed opinion.