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Comment by cautiouscat | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of studios use it for code already, and I also don’t think that’s the contentious part.

Games are art, and the people who make them are by and large: artists. Why would artists want to use generative AI?

Many artworks (across mediums) have parts where the artist isn't directing their creative decision-making so much as reaching for the nearest stock asset / procgen tool, or googling "leather texture photoshop trick" instead of carefully studying the usage-appropriate types of leather and looking up authentic period nubuck references and hand-painting it to get it just right, etc. Some "art" assets really are utilitarian and fungible subunits in the context of the full artwork they're used in, just like the code one would LLM. And many games are sprawling works, with that much more room for such.

Going whole-hog on artistic intentionality for every little detail is just bikeshedding.

Strong evidence for this: the cottage industry of reusable gadgets in every creative field. Presets and sample packs in music[0], brushes and textures for illustration, models and rigs and so on for 3D. You could go on forever listing it.

[0] And library music for games, which I'm getting into making: https://clubhouse.kyefox.com/posts/2016-2026-162342979

Sometimes the sense of satisfaction in creating a piece of art is that it exists at all as an identifiable representation of the original intention. I don't buy these purity tests that disqualify art based on arbitrary measures of craft. That went down the urinal with Duchamp's Fountain.

That is orthogonal to the issue of game developers exploiting technology to disenfranchise labor and produce a shoddy product. There certainly should be economic breathing room in the richest societies on the planet in the wealthiest era of human history for artists to spend time crafting work how they like.

There are lots of artists using generative ai in the same way there are artists using photoshop. It’s about control and intent, and it only gets weird with gen ai because you can give away both and still get results. Many people do take the role of a non creative manager, but that doesn’t meant you have to.

Game code is also art, it defines the game as much as the assets. I don't know why the game industry has such a contempt for the coding side.

The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about. It's possible to write two functions that look different but have identical properties for anything that ends up being perceived by the player. For assets, the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.

Adding to the fact that people who write code are in general much better compensated in most industries than people who produce art, having software replace artists feels like "punching down" in a way that having software replace people who write software doesn't. As a software engineer, Ilif I use AI to write a bunch of code for myself, I'm much better able to understand the tradeoffs to my future employment in a much more visceral way than I ever could for what using AI-generated art might mean for an artist. Even with all of the recent proclamations that code is "solved" and fearful predictions that programming jobs are going to stop being so cushy, the job market for the average software engineer is probably at least an order of magnitude better than it is for the average artist in terms of compensation and job security, and AI or not, I don't see that changing any time soon.

That's not true though. Bad code will manifest in a lot of ways. Affecting players and how they perceive the game. See Cyberpunk 2077, the art is pretty good, but the game is extremely buggy. I stopped playing because of that

Sure, I don't disagree with bugs being problematic. As your example indicates though, games that came out well before LLM coding was a thing still could have buggy code. My point is that the actual behavior of the game's code is what players care about, not the code itself. The code is a process rather than the output, and players care about the output rather than the process used to produce it. Art assets are the output the player looks at directly, so it's not crazy that they might care more about it.

> The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about

I don't think that's true, I could mention a few examples, the cliché of the Unreal Engine hair style or lights and on the other side of the spectrum, the custom made engine which made TinyGlade what it is.

Game development iterates with what's brought from the coding side.

My point is that the code only affects the experience indirectly because they interact with the output of it rather than looking at it directly. The assets aren't as much of a process as the output themselves.

I'd say the same about the assets then personally? They just interact with the output (3d mesh) and not with the process (modeling).

I'm still not seeing how these are comparable. As a developer, I can come up with the exact details of the behavior I think players should experience and manually write code for it, or someone with no development skills can come up with the exact details they want players to experience independent of the code and have an LLM do it.

For art assets, I would not be able to express the exact details of what it should look like up front to the LLM; I'd either need to implement it manually, or I'd need to let the LLM decide the details of the actual user-facing experience rather than just the implementation of the experience I've defined myself (and manually tested to ensure it's identical). That seems like a fundamental difference in terms of code and art assets; the actual user-facing experience of the output of code is further downstream of the way it's produced than the user-facing experience of the output of art assets.

> the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.

But a line of buggy code will be substantially more impactful than a poorly drawn model. An extra finger on a model doesn’t cause your save to be corrupted or a quest to hard lock.

Buggy code, yes, but that's not what I said. Players never look at the code directly, only the end product, whereas they do look directly at the assets. My point is that the scrutiny likely is (and should be, IMO) on the direct player experience, and that ends up meaning that the code itself being sloppy is only indirectly relevant, compared to the assets that they see directly. The comparable output of the code is the behavior, which is possible to scrutinize more directly in most cases.

But the comparison to code isn’t dead code (that would be akin to what? Idk, maybe excess triangles in a mesh that didn’t need them).

But I disagree with your premise, players ABSOLUTELY look at the output of both the code and the visual art. The code is the thing putting it on screen. It doesn’t matter how many fingers a model has, if your engine incorrectly renders it.

The scrutiny here, and the pushback against it, is actually not even about the result, it’s about the process. Even if the AI art was perfect and could not be distinguished from human art, a large fraction of people would oppose it simply because it was generated by an AI.

A standard mind you that very few hold the code to.

> But I disagree with your premise, players ABSOLUTELY look at the output of both the code and the visual art. The code is the thing putting it on screen. It doesn’t matter how many fingers a model has, if your engine incorrectly renders it.

That sounds identical to what I was saying; the output is what matters to players, not the process.

> The scrutiny here, and the pushback against it, is actually not even about the result, it’s about the process. Even if the AI art was perfect and could not be distinguished from human art, a large fraction of people would oppose it simply because it was generated by an AI.

Yes, and that's what the entire second paragraph (which is much larger) in my first comment in this thread was talking about.

I’d go a step further. The game code is the game. Everything else is there in service of the interactive experience.

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