I liken the harms and social ills to factory farming, which is the single largest cause of pure suffering inflicted on any living being on the planet.

Factory farming is also killing the planet and its opposition (or at least advocation for severe moral regulations) is an ethical imperative.

Still, we cannot destroy it with a boycott, we cannot minimize its suffering through shame, and no amount of solidarity will remove its market presence.

It must be wretched from capital and seized for the people, and minimized or destroyed however that manifests.

I see a lot of this echoed in AI, in that anti AI advocacy that is dogmatic cannot work. It like many other industries must be put in the hands of the people before we can figure out what reeling it back looks like.

That's all in the future, and if we can agree that's what needs to happen, then we can hopefully engage in the discourse and material analysis dispassionately and with nuance, while also being kind to our fellow workers operating through the same unprecedented technology as the rest of us.

I don't disagree with this approach and especially the last bit, but I'm still not sure on the idea of using AI as a debugger having meaningfully infringed on the art.

There was once a time - think PS1, N64 - where you could not imagine making a game without accounting for extremely low framerates. Sub 20 FPS, what we might consider unplayable today. It was a technical limitation that bred creativity, as they all do, but it's also a limitation we've moved past and very very few developers would champion the artistic merit of making your audience motion sick. Had they the option, many of them would have pressed the magic 'higher framerate' button at the time.

Taking this into more of a hypothetical, if a specialized debugging LLM was developed that worked extremely efficiently at eliminating unintended game functions based on a developers prompt, I don't believe many developers would champion the artistic merit of manual debugging, either. And if we are to say that something in the artistic process was still lost at that stage, then I can't see that as anything but having arbitrary reverence for limits in software development.

It feels petty, but I genuinely do hope some suited big wig is seething. They had it locked down for a decent chunk of time, considering how close to the Switch 1 it is.

Wow, that's a scold. Damn good set of pipes behind that shout.

I find a lack of nuance is almost never actually good. We shouldn't feel proud for being dogmatic about anything

Pokopia is the one in my sights. If it runs OK on the steam deck I'll have a cozy few nights ahead.

What have they really done wrong here? The solution could have been delivered by Unity support eventually and it would likely be the same fix. They could have accidentally been presented snippets of code simply googling aspects of the bug, because google search automatically runs your search through their AI. They also could have not engaged with the LLM and shipped the game with the bug intact, or made other concessions, and the end result would have been lesser.

I am asking this in good faith despite how opinionated I already seem about it. I just don't 'get' the thought process and why we would expect a rational human being to behave differently in this situation. Solidarity and all that, yeah - but it's not like they're enthusiastic AI developers. They claim AI was used in no other part of development and what they produced was one of the most human and expressive video games out there.

So from where I'm standing, such resolute opposition just feels dogmatic, without really considering the current realities of software development. I'm half-way between 'this is an appropriate use of the technology, and surrounding market dynamics are the problem' and 'good boy developers get a little LLM as a treat'

and really the problem here isnt that they used ai. its that something they liked used ai, so its corrupted now. and they are a worse person for liking it because materialism isnt real and everything is based on morality, and if you have ever seen the claude logo you are ruined forever and we have to kill you.

I think this is poignant because Big Walk isn't just some run-of-the-mill popular indie game. It resonated heavily with a lot of people and built a very unique experience all around human connection. It's as 'art' as 'artsy games' can get and I think people feel the need to overcorrect when exceptions to the "AI is antithetical to art" appear.

Although that is being very charitable to the controversy, because of/c AI didn't have a hand in the formation of that experience, just the debugging process of development. Still as you say this is enough to taint the project and you can see it reflected in some of the commentary, ie, 'how can we trust that they didn't use AI in other parts of development?' As if they are somehow fundamentally worse now than they were before, even though you still don't really know anything about them on a personal level.

I don't disagree with the critique of the technology, though I think the realities of it are a lot less poetic. Under current property dynamics it's almost purely an extractive technology that has more or less stolen collective productivity and turned it into a slop machine, but the thing still exists and is capable of production. This is less of a 'cats out of the bag' appeal and more 'we're going to have to seize control of this technology just like everything else' line.

To that end, when I imagine an ideal possible scenario where this technology now has to exist alongside fundamentally different market dynamics, I have to imagine the application of local models in specialized fields would be one of the ways it sticks around.

And, I think, it will stick around - we have to meet people where they are at a certain point, and software devs range from vibe code addicts to professionals indulging in a powerful new tool. None of them want to give it up, I don't think.

Is debugging really an artistic endeavor?

Yes I do agree that an ideal scenario is local models tailored only for software development and used only by software developers, and I think that'd be the future of the technology in any just society. I don't know if the lines are fully drawn in the sand under our current market dynamics, though. From what I've seen the application of the LLM in the above story is almost standardized now, as in you could accidentally generate the solution to your problem by just Googling. I haven't spoken with someone in programming that hasn't remarked that it's everywhere in the workplace and I haven't seen a git project without a claude contribution in ages.

Lots of people are vocal about their stance on AI in development, but we're not seeing those principles in practice.

Am I too delusional to hope for OK performance if I got this running on the steam deck? Have to see if Fritchii even has a linux build first, but playing switch games on the deck just hits right.