It let's users decide for themselves what they want to support, and of course Valve is happy to get that 30% cut regardless of how it was made. Epic trying to obfuscate that shit is 3000% horse shit.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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A company that wants to build AI tools for game asset generation into their engine doesn't want devs to have to disclose when they use AI tools for game asset generation, and is trying to frame forced disclosure as a bad thing? How curious, I wonder why. Oh, wait... It's money again, isn't it?
Which like, what's the plan here? Flood the zone? Doesnt sound like a winning strategy.
The plan here (for Epic) is games will be easier to make if you don't have to do the work, so more people will pay for the engine, and via licensing, give more royalties to Epic. Doesn't matter to them if it's 5 games that sell 5 million copies, or 5 million games that sell 5 copies.
The big AI advocates keep trying to hide that AI is being used instead of standing proudly behind it to show people how much better they believe it to be than human only output.
Why do they try to hide it like they are ashamed instead of standing behind their work to win people over to the supremacy of AI?
I mean I think it depends. I have some AI projects that I put in big letters "SLOP ONLY, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK" but its like an app to replace dark souls board game character sheets and a rain world mod I didnt even publish. But people trying to make games, looking at you Claire Obscure 33, do indeed try to hide it. I personally dont give a fuck if your test assets are generated but you better not generate the real art.
And of course tim Sweeny is throwing a tantrum because his biggest reveal lately is his entire game engine is gonna be ai slop.
Meaning people are going to call it out on steam and its going to hurt Tims sales.
Won't someone please think of tim Sweeny
Tim Sweeney
He just wants to use AI and hide it from the users. Simple.
I don't have a hate boner for AI, but I like to be informed. Epic seems like an anticonsumer cesspool
I would separate AI coding and AI assets to own tags. I can live with AI generated human reviewed code, but AI generated assets are just painful. Some people might see differently, but that's why there should be two.
I could use ai to make art assets you would never know was ai, but yea it takes post processing and editing anyways so still a ton of time.
You’re just describing slop.
What about ai generated gameplay?
I think they already don't care about LLMs, at least I've seen one YouTube vid claiming that. Anyone with a better legal knowledge on the subject could clarify.
If GenAI art is unacceptable, then so is code. Some programmers may have been gaslit into believing in a complete lack of creativity being required in code, but especially in games, it’s not actually true.
How would you define use of AI assets?
Should using them in the prototyping phase of development require a tag? I don't want AI-generated assets in the final product, but I think I'm okay with them being used in test builds.
For me, as long as I can't spot its use in a publicly available release, then it doesn't really matter to me if it's used for either code or assets.
If AI assets were used at any point in development, there's no telling what else they cut corners on. If it's not immediately noticeable, that's worse, not better.
For prototyping you usually use any assets you have lying around, using AI for that is not cutting corners it's more expensive and labor intensive but gives you a better feel for what you're trying to build. Usually prototypes are done with either plain colors or just assets you downloaded from random sources or have from previous games, it's just to get an idea whether the gameplay is fun enough to build the entire thing.
So it's more expensive, wastes more time and fucks up the environment. That's not the flex you think it is.
Tell me you've never worked on a game without telling me you've never worked on a game.
Sometimes (and by that I mean 99% of the times) you just don't have the funds or time to make assets for a prototype, you need a fast iteration cycle to nail the core mechanics. You need to learn as soon as possible if the game works or not, and while doable with Mario and Pikachu sprites it's much better if you can get a feeling for the atmosphere as well to see if it matches. This is the first hours of game development, after the initial GDD and before you even consider the full scope of the game.
But I don't expect someone who sees in black and white to be able to understand the many scales of grey there are in this. Using assets without copyright for them is also wrong, yet that's a daily occurrence in prototyping, because you're not going to spend time and money building assets for an idea to check if it's worth investing time and money into, that defeats the purpose.
Using assets without copyright for them is also wrong
Yeah, okay, we're done with this discussion. Pro AI and pro copyright? I pity whatever projects you were allowed to contribute to.
You're delusional. 99% of game makers care very much about copyright.
Pray tell, how can an indie game dev enforce copyright? The system is designed in favor of corporations with army of lawyers, specifically to fuck over smaller creators.
If it‘s so easy why don’t we see a myriad of copyright/trademark violations by large companies?
Because you aren't looking
Can you share some examples?
Whatever the fuck Nintendo is doing, for one
You may not like it, but their claims have a legitimate foundation. They could not release a game called „Hades“ because no army of lawyers could turn that case, that’s what you initially suggested.
I'm not pro AI, I'm fairly against it in most uses, but I do recognize it has some applications, and trying to close your eyes to it and day it's all bad is just not productive to any sort of serious discussion about it.
As for copyright, yes, I'm in favor that some form of copyright should exist, although companies abuse that right and that shouldn't be allowed.
It has some applications. None of them are in software development.
Well, first of all the majority of the discussion was around assets which are not what most people have in mind when they talk about software development. But also LLMs work great for their intended purpose of auto completion, even a local model running on your own machine is miles ahead of the snippet libraries we used to use until recently. Also they can spot errors in your code much better than you yourself can, as they're essentially impartial and looking for patterns that have previously been reported as causing issues statistically, while you are biased towards the mistakes you usually make.
I wouldn't trust anything it outputs any more than what I would trust something written by an 8 year old on heavy doses of stimulant drugs, but in reduced scope and limited capacity they're quite useful, and can help in some tricky situations like memory corruption or threading issues.
That being said I strongly support that vibe code is not trustworthy and anyone who does that is essentially gambling with that code.
You want to kill indie devs?
Because truly indie game development didn't exist until AI slop graced us
I sorta agree with you in that I don't care about AI assets being used for prototyping, mood boards or similar. I think that that's the right way to use LLMs, because those are assets you wouldn't generate anyways, it would either be a solid color or more likely a random asset you grabbed online.
However I don't think the argument should be that if I can't spot them it's fine, as you might not be able to spot some AI assets in the final build. I think that "no AI assets in the final product" is what I expect the no AI to mean, I don't see using AI as a stepping stone on things you wouldn't hire someone to do anyways problematic.
Just fyi, llms can not generate images. Llms call a diffusion image generation model as a tool to create images.
I thought difussion algorithms were essentially Markov chains applied to images instead of text, so they would be an LLM with the language being images. But honestly never cared to look to deep into it so I'll take your word for it that they're different.