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HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

I’m so sorry, Lex. Sending my love your way.

Just joining the choir of developers disavowing 👍🏻

In short: Why would we engage in the use of technology that does not work, is extremely expensive, has insurmountable ethical and legal concerns, makes us lazier and dumber, and causes us to lose our livelihood?

On top of everything, it is abundantly clear that players DO NOT like AI. If our audience – who we rely on to make our work in the first place – vehemently opposes the use of a technology, it is bad business for us to use it… and bad business means we can’t support our team and keep making art.

Our field has been making games without generative AI for over 50 years; it’s remarkably disingenuous to act as if we suddenly can’t do it anymore. We take pride in our craft, and knowing that everything players experience is totally hand-authored is a huge reward in itself.

To get back to the art of it all: It’s often said that AI will remove the busywork from development. Frankly, we LIKE doing the work. It’s fun to learn how to make new things, and it’s fun to get better at those that we already know how to do.

Then there’s the pollution created by data centers, directly inflicting harm upon rural populations… and we haven’t even gotten to the rampant waste of power and water these data centers facilitate. The usage of AI technology directly and exponentially accelerates all of these things becoming worse.

If that wasn’t enough, the ethical concerns are innumerable. You are likely aware of how much more expensive all forms of memory are compared to even just a year ago. This has made much of life worse, including it becoming prohibitively expensive for developers to acquire to actually MAKE games.

…it SHOULD matter to the developers who think that they’re producing amazing new games, and it will matter to the intellectual property lawyers who pick up all the pieces when this is over.

…it’s easy to imagine that games shipping with AI-generated content are in fact using swathes of protected property illegally. This doesn’t matter to the snake oil merchants peddling this technology — they only have to get far enough to make an IPO before they dip — BUT…

Then comes ownership. Who owns the output of AI generated content? It’s not really clear. When selling a commercial product (as our games are), you must know exactly who owns what. Considering that the major AI companies have admitted to scraping inconceivable amounts of data that they do not own…

In other words, the actual cost of using these agents is exponentially more expensive than what the end user pays. The people investing in these things are in the business of actually making money at some point, and spending more than you bring in is generally not a very good way of doing that.

…but this is only the case as AI cost is currently being subsidized by unfathomable amounts of investor money. Since every generation costs tokens irrespective of whether the result is actually shippable or not, to actually get a usable result out of AI tools often requires thousands of tokens.

It is commonly stated that AI agents will be the solution to rising costs in game development. In some twisted, roundabout way, this may be true to an extent in the current year of 2026; insofar as hiring less people and using AI output instead may go…

Uneducated guessing is not a correct or helpful way of producing work, and the erratic, destructive nature of AI’s guessing has disastrous consequences on any serious codebase. Don’t even get me started on visual assets.

Firstly, from a functional standpoint, the output of genAI tools is not acceptable. They are not capable of actually understanding anything thrown at them – only pretending to do so – and consequently, are only capable of hallucinating what their training data predicts might be the correct answer.

I’m no luddite. I find new technology to be incredibly fascinating, and I’m heavily driven by discovering the wacky ways in which it can enable our creativity. However, it’s clear that generative AI does not do this. In fact, we have found that it’s remarkably terrible at doing much of anything.

Also apartment hunting is killing my soul.

Color-coded velcro ties + painter’s tape and Sharpie to mark specific cables 🙂