AI is a waste of time, money, and resources. AI is a solution in search of a problem. AI is a thief that pilfers on a scale previously unthinkable, in broad daylight. AI drives up the price of hardware that many of us rely on for work and play. AI is a terrible blood altar on which the video game industry is being sacrificed. AI enriches the world’s worst people and immiserates everyone else. AI destroys communities, sans input from the people who live in them. AI is a dead end. We must reject it.
This is an effort at semi-comprehensively keeping track of every video game studio that refuses to make a deal with the generative AI devil, despite (thus far unproven) promises of greater “efficiency” or whatever else in the development process. As of this publishing, I’m sure there are many I don’t know of yet. If you run or work for one of them, feel free to get in touch! I plan to update this thing… forever, a commitment I’m sure I’ll never regret making.
In alphabetical order, here are the studios, alongside—in their own words—their rationale:
Abandoned Sheep
Games: Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar
“Our game Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar is gen AI-free, top to bottom. Our key art was variously accused of being gen AI last year, which was hilarious and depressing considering it was created by hand in 2022, predating genAI of that quality. We had another piece made by the same artist to refresh things; it too was accused erroneously.
“But to the point: we won’t ever use gen AI in our games, because we want to make something with a human connection. If someone can’t be bothered to create their art, why should anyone be bothered to care about it?”
Alien Fruit Games
Games: Dungeon Bodega Simulator
“I’m committed for the studio to divest itself from AI and actively avoid it wherever possible. Our game Dungeon Bodega Simulator was made without any gen AI, and I’m very proud of that! It’s also in my contracts with clients that gen AI isn’t used on projects that we work on. And similarly for contractors, [they] are vetted and sign an agreement that they won’t use gen AI.”
Apparition Games
Games: Pinball Spire, Micron
“There are many excellent reasons to avoid AI, but my main reason is that all of these models are trained on stolen data, scraped off the internet en masse. These tech companies have stolen—and continue to do so—the work of countless people without permission, without compensation, and without even giving attribution, and are using it to obscenely enrich themselves while the artists, writers, journalists, musicians, developers, and other creators whose work they stole are struggling more than ever to make ends meet. It’s grossly unethical, and I don’t think it can realistically be remedied. As the AI companies themselves have admitted, the mass theft is integral to the technology. It can’t exist without it. Therefore, I refuse to use AI.”
The Beauty Cult
Games: Nectarmancer
“We don’t use AI because it would result in making a permanent and risky change to our project which is a human-fueled labor of love. The changes may speed us up in some ways, but the complexity trade-offs, risk, and just ICKY nature of these disgusting planet-killing plagiarism machines is completely at odds with what we’re trying to achieve as artists in a medium that we care about.”
Blendo Games
Games: Skin Deep, Quadrilateral Cowboy, Thirty Flights Of Loving
“Blendo Games refuses to use AI! We are trying to set ourselves up so we can say ‘No, fuck off’ to genAI forever.”
Blue Bottle Games
Games: Neo Scavenger, Ostranauts
“We don’t [use gen AI]. We discussed it a couple times over the past several years, just to be pragmatic and ensure we weren’t simply bandwagoning. And we still came away with ‘no
AI’ as a rule.
Our reasons are as follows:
Business/Legal Reasons
- It is unclear who legally owns the copyright of AI output.
- It is unclear who is legally culpable for harm caused by AI output. (And at least [with] Germany, it appears it may be the entity publishing the output.)
- There is no guarantee AI output does not infringe copyrights/trademarks.
- Business processes outsourced to AI risk price gouging and service outages/cancellations by AI providers.
Practical/Quality Reasons
- AI output is not guaranteed to be accurate or to work.
- Verifying AI output requires human review time.
- Verifying AI output requires a level of expertise equal to or greater than that required to generate the output manually.
- AI output cannot be vetted by reputation, unlike a human, because AI output is not consistent enough from instance to instance.
Moral/Ethical Reasons
- Data used in training AI may not have been obtained legally.
- Data scraping to train AI burdens content hosts unfairly.
- Training and operating AI increases demand on fresh water.
- Training and operating AI increases demand on power.
- Training and operating AI increases demand on real estate.
- Training and operating AI increases demand on computer hardware.
- AI use is driving job loss for humans (even if only temporary).
- AI is a force multiplier for undesirable effects like: spam, robocalls, scams, fraud, militarization, and other forms of abuse.
- AI content submissions can outpace and drown out human content submissions in communities.
And last, but certainly not least:
- The whole point of going indie was because we like doing the work ourselves! We don’t want a machine doing all the fun parts.”
Can’t Get Enough Games
Games: Cold Calling, The Old Gentlemen
“We do not use AI for just about every reason imaginable, but particularly for the environmental harms of data centers and its effect of cheapening and degrading even the simplest forms of creativity like flyers and restaurant menus.”
Causeway Studios
Games: The Haunting Of Joni Evers, From The Deep
“Causeway Studios is staunchly anti-AI. We’re announcing our next game as part of PAX Rising. We only make 100% human-crafted games for human players.”
Chequered Ink
Games: Let Me Just Use This For A Second, Decadence, Monoquous 2
From Chequered Ink’s website:
“It doesn’t even work properly: AI chatbots and search tools provide wrong answers so often that almost all of them have now introduced a warning telling users to double-check the information it provides. Google was recently held legally responsible for misinformation spread by the AI overviews on their search engine. Some chatbot responses are even so dangerous that there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to deaths linked to chatbots.
AI data centres are being built undemocratically: AI data centres use lots of land, energy and water as we’ve already said. They have a huge impact on the local environment and on utility bills. Many of them are being built all around the world without the consent of local communities. Some communities are now fighting back to block them from being built.
It makes its users less intelligent: Early reports suggest that using AI chatbots could be having a negative impact on users’ intelligence. Offloading thinking skills onto AI means you’re exercising your brain less. Students who use AI to do schoolwork may not be learning the subject matter properly at all.”
cirqueSaw
Games: labRats, You Have Already Won, Void Main
“cirqueSaw doesn’t make games in the traditional sense. We make live performances at the intersection of games and theatre. We very proudly don’t use AI for any of our work, and our breakthrough project was an invective against AI as a concept. We go the opposite route: We don’t cut any corners at all and build all of our work inside a bespoke game engine running a programming language I created for the purpose.”
Daikon Games
Games: Chico’s Rebound, Chico And The Magic Orchards DX
From Daikon’s code of ethics:
“Daikon Games is firmly against the use of generative AI. Our stance is that it is an inherently unethical technology built on stolen work, undermining trust and democracy, and exacerbating environmental issues from water access to clean air to noise pollution.
As such, we pledge that no work produced, sold, and/or distributed by Daikon Games, has or will ever include the use of generative AI at any level. This means when you buy a Daikon Games product, you can be sure that the code, art, music, writing, and designs were all crafted by human beings.
We hold any external contractors such as artists or translators to the same standard. If we ever unknowingly ship something created with generative AI, we will take corrective action to remove that material.”
Daydream Gallery
Games: Trading Card Inspector, Dragon’s Egg: A Gourmet Fantasy
“We will never use generative AI for any part of the creative process for a few simple reasons, chief among them being: If we didn’t have fun making this, why would we bother? Using a lazy, sloppy tool to take the fun out of game dev sounds like a terrible way to go about creating memorable games that people will love. Games are an art form for us—not simply a ‘product’—and we want our games to reflect ourselves and not anyone/anything else.”
D-CELL Games
Games: Unbeatable
“Even if I’m just looking at this in the cold mercenary MBA freak way—the ‘I want to generate income as much as possible’ way—you can’t make a thing people want to buy if the thing you want to buy is the same thing everyone else has. And that’s what you fucking get with AI models. It’s definitionally part of how they work.
So all using [AI] will do is make you compete worse. You have to do laps on a hamster wheel to arrive at the opposite conclusion. Because the only way to actually make money on this shit besides a pump-and-dump is to be the guy selling the shovels. And even the shovels are starting to rust.
Even the stuff that sounds good or looks good for a given value of ‘good’ (i.e. it convincingly looks at a glance like it wasn’t generated with a machine, it’s ‘professional’) is only capable of spitting out inputs that existed before. You can feel it in the ‘choices’ it makes, because it doesn’t make choices; it chooses a value with a weight given by a model patched from every work at once on fast forward. The nutritional value of AI work is approximately identical to watching a 2000s horror movie trailer compilation at 4X speed while second-screening Maury transcriptions. It might be fun to look at, but it will kill you on the inside.”
Dhamster
Games: Mega Knockdown
“Even though I don’t have a publisher deal or a lot of money, I struck a partnership with a real comics illustrator, and he’s been my creative partner bringing the game to life visually with hand drawn art.
The AI ‘boom’ has made a lot of things worse. It’s polluted a lot of royalty free resources, turning them into a minefield of slop. It’s eroded player trust. Outside of the many general problems with AI usage (environmental destruction, theft, deskilling), I’ve never been interested in coding with AI. I get a lot of enjoyment out of solving problems in code, and AI generated visuals make me physically sick with how ugly they are. I don’t get any value of any process where I can’t see how the inputs connect to the outputs. I’ve taken every AI disclosed game off my wishlist; I wouldn’t want to subject my players to anything I can’t personally stand.
I see a lot of excuses from slop devs, but if I run into something beyond what I or my artist can do, my instinct is to just try and fucking figure it out, or at least adjust my expectations to something more within our wheelhouse.”
Digital Extremes
Games: Warframe, Soulframe
Via GameSpot:
“We are a very non-AI company, and it is all humans making Warframe and Soulframe. … Nothing in our games will be AI-generated. Ever.”
Dog in the Machine
Games: FriendOS
“We don’t use any AI whatsoever to build our game. From an art perspective, we’re pushing hard on the year-2000 abstract CG aesthetic, and generating any of that both feels incredibly icky and doesn’t really serve to bring us closer to our goals. From a programming and technical perspective, we’re building using Godot and haven’t had the need to generate any code. A lot of development time has gone towards building tooling to make authoring content easier, but writing gdscript (and cpp, where necessary) by hand has been more than flexible enough for our needs.”
Downstream Games
Games: Masque: A Trickster Tale
“Aside from the typical reason why people and studios shouldn’t use GenAI (environmental impact, cost, IP theft, privacy breaches, etc), we also believe that AI ‘art’ will never compare to the magic that comes from sentient creation. As is, machine learning algorithms can’t have the same explosive creativity that humans—and even animals—have. They can’t draw from their senses, blend their lived experiences together in weird and fascinating ways, or have moments of serendipity that elevate art beyond its parts. We have strict No-GenAI policies, and use of GenAI is grounds for termination.”
Eternal Skies
Games: Eternal Skies TCG
“[AI] is expensive, it’s not helpful, it makes you dumber and worse at your job, and it’s built on theft. There is no demonstrated business reason to use it, doubly no reason to pay for it, and it produces mediocre quality stuff. I’m making a TCG RPG that is an homage to the Game Boy-style card games. It’s not pretty, but it has a lot of uniqueness and flair. If I had used AI for art, it would be technically competent and extremely generic and not stand out in any way.”
Finji
Games: Usual June, Overland, Night In The Woods (published), Tunic (published), 868-Back (published)
“There are several reasons why we don’t [use AI]: Using generative AI is theft of the work of others, but it’s also anti-labor, destroys the environment, destroys communities, and defeats the purpose of making art at all. It removes the humanity from the creation of anything it touches.”
Funky Rhino Games
Games: Knight George
“Simply put, we reject gen AI because it is a huge theft machine trained on the stolen works (and lives) of billions, depriving many artists of their jobs, all the while exploiting poor people in the Global South to do the dirty work behind the scenes and worsening the environmental crisis with its datacenters. It is also a tool made to make the ultrarich richer, is massively used by fascists and to create naked deep fakes of women.
As a studio, we firmly reject gen AI from an ideological point of view. We make neo-retro games that pay tribute to older machines while still adding more modern elements (such as accessibility features), which only makes sense if humans are at the helm.”
Fuzzy Ghost
Games: Pebble Witch, Queer Man Peering Into A Rock Pool.jpg, Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (and a witch)
“We are resolutely against genAI. Reasons are pretty standard; we don’t want to use the theft machine. But also, our shit is queer and deeply ours. AI can’t regurgitate what hasn’t been made yet.”
Grey Alien Games
Games: Forbidden Solitaire, Regency Solitaire, Spooky Bonus
“Why [not use gen AI]?
- We enjoy creating and problem solving ourselves, so don’t want to relinquish that.
- We want to support other creatives, including artists and musicians involved in game development.”
Hawkward Studios
Games: Age Of The Deep
“I refuse to use Gen AI because I value artists. When you can tell a person made a piece, it feels valuable. Someone worked hard on that. When you ask AI to make you something, it’s like talking to yourself in a mirror. It assumes you are correct. It praises you. It only feeds you back your own thoughts.
When you work with an artist, there is an infinite number of things that has happened to that person, that is different than the things that happened to you. An artist can tell you when your idea doesn’t work. They can take your request and show you something you didn’t even think of. That’s a wonderful experience to have.
AI also cannot vouch for you. It cannot champion you to the masses. Inherently that also means that it cannot speak up when you abuse it. I find AI to be a shortcut that bypasses the trust-building process. I have to ask myself who would do such a thing? What kind of person is afraid to let another human being learn who they are? You see that quite often in the indie dev space, tea gets spilled. The truth comes out and it kills some projects. I know that when my game is finished and I finally launch it, that I will have dozens of creatives vouching for me. Because I took a chance on earning their trust and I treated them with respect.”
Hinterland Studio
Games: The Long Dark
From the opening of The Long Dark:
“Hinterland is a humans-first company. We believe in the primacy of human creativity, and in the dignity of all human creators. We will never use generative Al for any of our games, nor include any code or content in our games that wasn’t created purely by humans.
We are opposed to the widespread exploitation and abuse of human creativity, exploitation that underpins the business models of all generative Al companies. We believe that this fight is an existential fight for the soul of humanity, and we see games standing at the forefront of this fight. There is no ethical application of generative Al, as all commercial models are built on the industrial-scale theft and exploitation of workers, as well as the destruction of our environment, to the sole benefit of the billionaire-class.
We also do not consent to have any of our work added to any generative Al models, for training purposes or otherwise, and will use all legal means at our disposal to protect our creations and our intellectual property. We believe that our work, and the commitment to our players, demands this of us.”
Hybrid Fiction Games
Games: Stratagem Lost
“Despite only having two on staff, we’d rather do everything by hand.”
Impromptu Games
Games: Influx Redux, Stolen Steel VR
“’Cause it’s fucked.”
JoyFlow Games
Games: Star Spark
“1. RESPECT FOR THE AUDIENCE
We don’t just ‘consume’ art; we experience and feel it in different forms at different levels, and that’s why we say that art is human made. Art is a creative endeavor that connects with people in some way.
2. AUTHENTICITY
Part of that creative energy is authenticity, and it’s hard to be authentic when you’re relying on a machine to go through the creative process for you.
Someone who might’ve connected with a piece of art on some level likely won’t be able to when they can tell it’s slop that someone couldn’t be bothered with, or at the very least they’ll feel betrayed when they do notice.
It’s kinda like Kid Rock being known for his redneck/country boy stage persona, but then finding out that he grew up pretty wealthy.
People can tell when you’ve put time, effort, and love into something. People don’t like being deceived.
3. LOVE FOR THE CRAFT
I genuinely like making games. It’s fun for me. I like coding, tinkering, figuring things out, coming up with ideas, and reaching out to others for help. It’s so cool to be able to combine all these different forms of art and create an interactive experience.
That said, I can’t do it all, but that’s why I reach out to people.
I wanted the pixel for the characters in Star Spark to look a certain way, so I contracted out a friend to help me with those. I can do pixel art, but he’s way better at it than I am and faster at it. I wrote down what the main cast should look like and drew some small stick figures of them in certain poses. He ran with it and brought them to life.
Same thing with the music. I couldn’t write the music for this; it’d take too long and wouldn’t sound good to me, so I contracted it out to another friend and gave him some examples of what I wanted for certain parts of the game. He nailed it.
Sure, there have been times when I’ve gotten stuck, but figuring out how to move past those challenges is part of the creative process. It’s also how we grow as people.
4. IT FEELS WRONG
A lot of the data that different AIs have been trained on is stolen in some capacity. I don’t want my work stolen and I don’t want to associate my work with anything like that.
I want to make stuff that I can be proud of and that people might like and have fun with. I want my work associated with joy (hence the name).”
JuhrJuhr
Games: Deep Space Exploitation, Directory Dungeon
“I started doing this because I have a ton of ideas for games that I want to make, and because I’m at my happiest when I can just sit and code whatever I like. These two reasons are enough to make me object to using AI, but I think the main reasons I’m against it are that it’s destroying our planet and there are realistically zero upsides to it at all.”
Kalle And Lachlan MacDonald
Games: Butter Side Down, The Linda Society
“We categorically refuse to use AI for a bunch of reasons: the fact that it is plagiarism, the fact that it is bad for the environment, the fact that it funnels wealth to the ultra rich, and the fact that what it makes is not art!”
KO_OP
Games: Goodbye Volcano High, GNOG, Young Suns
“The why I think is primarily due to the way [AI has] been developed and shoved down our throats being deeply unethical, but also because it has zero use case for us. We love the collaborative process of pre-production and working together to think of ideas and develop our stories and world.”
Lunoland
Games: Dark Cards Of Candlewood
“I strongly oppose the big AI companies and the wide adoption of AI in society for a dozen different reasons: copyright, the erosion of authorship, de-skilling and devaluation of workers, consolidation of power by unelected tech oligarchs, gradual disempowerment, epistemic collapse, environmental concerns, automated warfare—the list goes on.
As a result, I don’t use AI at all in my process, and I’m effectively an AI vegan. That means no AI whatsoever; not for translation, not for research, and especially not for code. I actually enjoy my work as a game developer and I’m not interested in delegating that work to a machine.
Many developers, both publicly and in private, are now discussing their use of AI code while simultaneously agreeing that using AI for art, audio, or writing is unacceptable. This double standard is fueling a massive race to the bottom behind the scenes: the margins are so tight and the field is so wide that nobody wants to be left behind and everybody is looking for an edge.
We saw something similar happen with mobile and free-to-play, and we’re just barely dodging the same bullet with subscription services. The only way we get off this train is by coordinating across the industry and collaborating with players to oppose AI in games full-stop.”
Manzanita Interactive
Games: Dandelion Void
“We’re all big fans of Aftermath over here, not just for your stellar coverage but as fellow laid off workers creating a co-op, too. The dev side of games has become just as much a burning building as the journalism side, leaving us with little option but to carve out our own place and hopefully help others do the same.
As such, we’re predictably a staunchly anti-AI development studio for probably all the reasons you’ve heard from other indie devs: the stolen labor used to train the datasets; the legally precarious outputs of dubious quality; the environmental harm of data centers; and the devaluing of our art and our livelihood. As a studio of engineers, artists, and composers by trade, that last issue is especially poignant to us, as it would stick around even if all the other issues were magically innovated or regulated away.
But we’re keenly aware that just being opposed to AI and relying on consumer tastes to align isn’t enough to build something that lasts. Without an organized effort, people are eventually going to start liking the stuff, either out of exhaustion, or because they grew up with it, or because AI becomes more slyly integrated into all things and disappears from headlines. At that point, AI becomes purely a labor and automation issue, and to us that’s what it’s always been.
Manzanita’s extremely involved with the unionization movement in games, and we require in our Operating Agreement that all member-candidates must be members of United Videogame Workers-CWA. We’re helping our union create knowledge and support systems for others looking to start game co-ops, especially with layoffs leaving so many workers with no options besides going indie.
Resisting AI means rejecting the frameworks of inevitability and productivity and instead centering the well-being and power of workers. We need to collectively respond to the question of ‘How can you integrate AI with your process?’ with ‘Fuck you, make me.’ We don’t win against automation by acquiescing before even putting up a proper fight, and labor needs to be organized to even square up.”
Merlino Games
Games: No Sun To Worship, Under A Star Long Cold, It Comes In Waves
“[AI] is terrible ethically, environmentally, and artistically. Makes things in shit quality while destroying the world and destroying society.”
Necrosoft Games
Games: Demonschool, Hyper Gunsport, Gunhouse
“Necrosoft Games, maker of Demonschool, does not use AI in any capacity. We even switched from Google Suite to Proton for our emails/docs/storage, because Proton’s AI stuff is opt in and off by default, rather than on by default and constantly needling you.
We do actually keep up with the state of AI just to know what we’re up against, and what it means to take a stand against it. But yeah, it has no place in our pipeline, we don’t use it to take notes in meetings, nobody says ‘OK, Siri,’ and I would rather go bankrupt than use it in any part of the creative ideation process.
As far as reasons, it almost feels silly to list them. But there’s environmental concerns with the huge impact of data centers. There’s ethical concerns with AI data being used in drone attacks in Gaza, and AI companies being able to just take someone’s identity and sell it (I [Brandon Sheffield] was one of the journalists that [Grammarly] created a ‘review agent’ of, without my consultation, consent, or compensation). There’s straight capitalist and tools access concerns with how AI datacenters are raising the prices of RAM, storage, and chips in general. Like companies are seeing how AI is running roughshod over the rules and saying ‘Hey, we could price-fix while all this is going on.’ But over all of that, for me, as a person who works in a creative field, it just makes me sick to see the least creative people in the world attempt to assassinate the very concept of creative work. It’s brutal and gross and I won’t be part of it.”
Nightwell Games
Games: Deductopia, The Wolf Of Derevnya
“Nightwell Games doesn’t use AI for anything, including code, research, etc.”
No Goblin
Games: 100ft Robot Golf, Roundabout, Snap & Grab
“No Goblin will never use generative AI. We put a ‘made in an AI-free home’ [message] in our credits, and we won’t work with contractors who use generative AI. Games are an art form and every element is a deep expression of the people making it. It’s not a bunch of tech feature gruntwork to get a big autocomplete to fill in for you.”
Nonadecimal Creative
Games: Black Ice, Automata Empire
“Ironically, using AI slop would have been thematically appropriate for the corporate ads in [Black Ice] but, because we believe in supporting workers, we don’t use any AI. All the game’s art and hacker graffiti is commissioned from fantastic artists, and the corporate ads are artisanal slop made from good old-fashioned stock photos.”
Npckc
Games: True Love’s Curse, Marron’s Day, You’re Just Imagining It
“I make games with the composer Sdhizumi, and we both believe that generative AI cannot replace human creativity—neither in the final game that players see nor the concept and brainstorming process that brings the game into its final form.”
oldflowerGames
Games: Angel Clicker, Emblems: Sunless Vow
“We are strictly anti-genAI in all ways, and neither of us have even gone to chatGPT out of curiosity.
While the environmental + ethical + copyright concerns alone are rampantly destructive, and more than enough to reject it completely, GenAI is not compassionate. It is not conscious, empathetic, nor understanding in any way. And yet it simulates a ‘person’ so effectively. This is not only frightening, but incredibly dangerous, as so many people who are desperate for their pain to end will seek out its convincing ‘mercy.’
We do not support this conflation of humanity’s core of love and support with a corporate creation meant to sell and ravage.
Creatively, spiritually, there is so much to gain from going through the process of building things yourself, from letting the thing you’re trying to create take you on an unpredictable ride. We make games in silly and often inefficient ways, but from those honest methods, we feel that we arrive at a unique voice, and create experiences that we’re truly proud of. Experiences that are a result of our decades of unique toils, happinesses, and burned-out rotten feelings, all-told.”
Pedalboard Games
Games: Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 1 Re-Raptored, BIGGMAXXING
“We don’t use AI at any point in our process, because a) it’s tacky, b) I was laid off by Meta in 2023 and I don’t feel like lining their pockets, c) because the whole point of the company was to make games with the friends I made while starting Wheeljam, and d) it’s tacky.”
Pistol Shrimp Games
Games: Free Stars: Children of Infinity, Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters
We don’t use AI anything because AI makes people feel awful, collectively. If people feel awful then how will they do any good work? In my 20+ years of development experience I have never seen so many people feeling so absolutely worthless and like they have no value at all. Ignoring all of the serious ecological, copyright, de-skilling, and power-concentration issues with AI, I will happily concede that AI can ‘make stuff done faster,’ but that’s just an overdrive for what Bad Games Industry decisions have been making forever (work more, crunch more, get paid less, destroy your franchises, ship a sequel every year or die, etc). It’s a blunt instrument to do what makes a lot of money for some people, not what makes actually better, sustainable, more enjoyable products for the creators and the players.
To pull my own quote from our devlog: ‘To put a final, clear pin in it: AI sucks. No AI is used in the creation of this game. I have never willingly talked with a chatbot. AI and its slop can see itself out the door and never come back. If AI is just a tool, then it is a tool for hollowing out your own soul. It is Elric’s Stormbringer: it takes while it supposedly gives, and there is nothing left of you afterward. If AI is just a way of getting things done, then maybe we need to examine why we’re doing these things and what purpose they serve in the first place. We need to understand the disingenuous language being pushed in the name of profit and profit alone.’”
Pixel Prophecy
Games: Fine Sweeper
“We here at Pixel Prophecy make small games, videos, music, and art in general and don’t use GenAI. I feel that fun and fulfillment are inherent in the process, the journey of an artwork, not necessarily in the result. With no journey, there is no learning, no experience. It’s like cheating your way through an RPG and never gaining XP.”
Pressed Elephant
Games: Elfie: A Sand Plan
“Technically the core team is just me and the game’s composer. Early on when we started collaborating together, we established that we were both creatively driven and one of our goals is to be able to retain creative ownership and freedom over what we make. Consequently, the idea of relegating any parts of our work and creative process to generative AI is ridiculous to us. And I’m glad to see such initiative to actively push back against it.”
Red Team Games
Games: Cards And Castles, Cards And Castles 2, Cards And Castles Ultimate
“Why do we not use AI? Where do I even start:
I don’t use AI coding because:
- As an engineer, I want machines that do mechanistic, predictable, reliable tasks.
- I want to know what my code does.
- I want to keep my own skills sharp. Prompting could be a skill, but it’s not a defensible advantage. If something is so easy anyone can do it, its market value is very very low.
- I mostly do this for fun. We don’t even make money really. It’s a hobby.
I don’t use AI art because:
- It is gross.
- I don’t want to live in a world where human art has no value.
Also above all, I have an actual sense of self preservation. All of this is very clearly a capitalist project to devalue the human mind. I’m not going to be a participant in my own destruction.”
ReRolled Studio
Games: Pardon My French Toast, Best Day Ever
“We do not use AI for many reasons. We are convinced that games should be created by humans, for humans. We believe in the power of a team to envision ideas, iterate, and get the best out of everyone in our games. AI simply has no place in our team. Its development relies on the exploitation of artists. Its climate impact is devastating. The financial madness surrounding this technology is largely responsible for the crisis currently affecting the creative industries. People are losing their jobs. People are suffering. Their lives are being severely impacted. Creators shouldn’t have to go through this.”
Rho Labyrinths
Games: Mars Vice
“Our studio Rho Labyrinths is extremely against the use of AI in our works, to the point that during development of our main title, Mars Vice, when we found out that assets we’d paid for in advance were genAI, we simply took the loss of near-six grand and made sure none of those would get near a build.
“Even though, as a small indie studio, that was a major blow to the budget, like hell we’d add ’em. Our projects are made by humans—from code, art, blood, sweat, and tears.”
Seedy Eye Software
Games: Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore
“Generative AI operates on theft, both creatively and of our planet’s resources, in order to churn out uninspired garbage.
Arzette as a project, and by extension, Seedy Eye Software is by its nature extremely artist and human-creative driven. One of the main guiding ethos during Arzette’s development was to empower the artists, animators, designers, and writers to bring all of their creativity to the table. In many ways it is the polar, direct-opposite to generative AI content. It will never be touched by a ten-foot pole for any part of anything we ever make. Doing so would directly go against the entire purpose of the reason I develop video games.”
Spoiled Cat
Games: Helped port indie hits like Tunic and What The Golf? to various platforms
“Absolutely no AI allowed in this house whatsoever. Besides the absolute brain cell suicide that using AI would entail, I have to guarantee (to my studio and customers) that the ownership of all of the work produced is traced and known, and having the plagiarism machine spew out stolen code from who knows where under who knows what license or patent is basically throwing the whole business down the drain.
I did clean room porting for many years before games—basically reverse engineering existing libraries/apps/tools/engines from their external behavior with ever looking at their decompiled code or sources—to ensure that the resulting port would be clean, legal, and safe to use and that it did not infringe on patents or copyrights or licenses or anything. That requires keeping your brain absolutely squeaky clean of any potential accidental peeks at the original implementation.
I can’t even imagine trusting anyone these days to do that type of work, with AI tools gleefully spewing out proprietary code left and right for everyone to see. I carry that ethos to the game work I do.
People sign publishing and porting contracts all the time, and those contracts have clauses requiring that the ownership and copyright of everything in the game is known and assignable, but if they’ve used AI for anything, they cannot by definition abide by those clauses. Blows my mind that this isn’t being screamed out in every game dev + AI conversation with accompanying enormous flashing red lights.”
Strange Scaffold
Games: I Am Your Beast, El Paso Elsewhere, Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?!
“AI is a ‘can’ button, not a ‘should’ button, and for an industry that already struggles with intentionality, consistency, and sustainability, I refuse to let a tool that undermines all three be a part of our development processes. Strange Scaffold is an anti-AI studio.”
Superoverweeb
Games: The Lucid Box
“I despise AI for how utterly and brazenly destructive it is to the environment, labor, culture, society, education, computers, the internet and so on. These issues are brought up frequently, yet the wanton theft of it all I feel is somewhat under-discussed. I believe GenAI is designed from the ground up as a theft tool that alienates the user from its source(s) and methods so as to convince them that they aren’t stealing. Images, music, code etc is edited JUST enough so as to appear original and to make it hard to find the source. It’s not like sampling or photobashing; it’s unscrupulous lifting of other’s work lacking substantial transformation. It’s more akin to tracing and other kinds of plagiarism.”
Team KAIZEN
Games: Shattered Soul, Burst!
“For our games, all art and code in the game is handmade, and I usually talk with people in the communities I’m in about tech online to try and explain how Generative AI (at least, in its current usage) takes un-credited work from others.
When I talk to people about AI, I stress that I think in some scenarios it could be OK, just not in the way people like Altman, Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg want us to use it. For instance, if you’re handmaking a forest path in a game, using a small/focused AI tool to take trees you either personally made or bought/properly credited and automatically laying out the rest of the forest (the parts the player can see from a distance, but not actually enter) can be OK, but the whole point in that example is that the stuff the player experiences right in front of them is developer-made and placed, not RNG made, and proper credit/permission still applies.
Long story short, in very specific, small and controlled instances (like the trees, or enemy AI in a game) I think AI can sometimes be an OK tool in the toolbox, but it should NEVER be the whole damn carpenter, and I play games to experience human expression, not a computer pantomiming it. As a side note too, with these large cloud-based AI models, I don’t think people realize how expensive they are (and how people ‘paying’ for it ATM are getting a severely subsidized rate that can’t be sustainable), so anyone banking on being a game developer primarily via AI is setting themselves up for a rude awakening when the bills start coming due with these companies.”
Threshold Anomaly Games
Games: Gridhack
“I’m also the creator of a free open-source game template for Godot Engine 4 called COGITO. This project was originally hosted on GitHub and grew quite popular, but as soon as it received the first AI-generated/coded pull requests, I completely moved it off of GitHub onto a different platform (Codeberg), to avoid GenAI and stick to the projects’ (and my) principles.
Setting all ethical and legal issues aside, my main reasons for not using GenAI at all in any of my workflows is pretty simple: I started game dev to basically tinker, to see what I could make and to learn and grow my abilities while doing so. This process not only shapes my skills, but also the games itself and me as a person. GenAI basically removes all of that, and thus would completely erase the reason for making games for me.”
Turbo Button
Games: Floor Plan, Floor Plan 2, Along Together
“We don’t use generative AI for art, audio, code, or anything else. We’ve been pretty outspoken about our stance, like with the 200 pins we gave away at GDC this year or our studio Christmas cards where we paid artists to draw what they thought AI-generated cards from us would have looked like.
We have spent time evaluating/experimenting with tools so we feel informed and understand what they can do, but that just gives us more confidence about not using them in any part of our production or preproduction processes for any of our projects. Among our reasons:
- We care a ton about respecting our players’ time and attention, so if something isn’t worth our time to make, it’s not worth our players’ time to look at.
- It’s pretty important to have friction with iteration in creative processes. When ideas are cheap to try, they’re challenged and vetted less before the implementation. That’s going to lead to a lot of games fully realizing some half-baked ideas. We don’t want to be the studio that tries to figure out that process.
- Even the cases where gen AI quality might be good enough, it is not worth the toxic association. Our players are very clear that they don’t want it.
- We worked in VR for a decade. We’ve seen what happens when people make plans and change all their processes based on potential instead of focusing on the present. It usually doesn’t work out.”
Two-Headed Boy
Games: Academic Quest: Legend I
“I don’t use AI because I actually enjoy making games. The other day I was working on some pixel art, and, after much adding and deleting the same pixel, there, suddenly, was the guy I’d been trying to draw all along. It felt incredible. Why would I deprive myself of that feeling by talking at a pile of stolen work?”
UmaikiGames
Games: Skellboy Refractured, Nemizas Verdict, Project Zwilling
“Our reasons for not using generative AI are:
- Uncertainty of training data. Almost all data out there is used without permission.
- Its massive environmental impact.
- We love our work and don’t see a necessity for using this technology.”
It’s Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.