Indie game developers here with zero financial means to hire professional audio/visual creators…
We opted to use A.I. generated music and images in our last two games with Godot Engine v4.x.x.
We posted test HTML5 builds to NewGrounds, and the players went insane over the above.
Why is there such hatred towards A.I. generated audio/visual video game resources?
We are using Suno for music and Canva for images.
The music produced by current v5 of Suno is borderline incredible.
Canva is fairly good at this point but needs improvement.
As time progresses, jobs will be replaced.
Not sure why people don’t realize the above?
It consumes tons of power, raising electricity prices for anyone who lives near a data center.
It consumes tons of water, and tons of power, both of which are very impactful of the environment.
It takes away jobs. Video game players are aware of this and want to protect the video game industry.
LLMs are trained on stolen copyrighted content. Suno is currently being sued for doing that.
It is replacing the jobs of creatives. Boycotting is a way to protect jobs. Soon LLMs will be able to create full games with Suno-style music and AI-generated art. How will you feel about competing financially against LLMs who can make the same game you do in a few minutes, when it takes you months to do the same?
People can see AI slop in pictures. There’s a homongenous effect that takes over much AI art. It is much harder to detect AI music. (According to studies, 95-97% of people cannot tell the difference.) It becomes much easier to detect AI music when you use lyrics with acronyms, homonyms, or multiple singers. (Suno is really bad at letting you pick who sings what.)
And while people realize jobs will be replaced, that doesn’t mean they like it. It’s similar in some ways to the Luddite movement in the early 1800s when industrialization was being introduced, putting people out of work.
It is a highly subsidized loss-leader. Which means that even when people charge you to use it, the cost to them to run it is MUCH more than what they are charging users. They are losing money, and relying on investors to pay the difference - betting that later it will become cheaper and they can raise prices once they’ve hooked people on using it.
That’s INSANE! sooo many people are fooled by these poo poo slop.
Today, electricity consumption from data centres is estimated to amount to around 415 terawatt hours (TWh), or about 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2024 - international energy agency
A large AI data center or hyperscale facility can consume 10 megawatts (MW) or more of power. This translates to over 240,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per day, which is enough to power roughly 8,000–10,000 average US homes daily. – Gemini the sloppy A.I
A Single Freaking A.I DATA center consumes same POWER as 10000+ homes?!
Have you played my game Skele-Tom? If not, just click the link and press the play button and watch the opening splash screens. I made that game for a jam that allowed AI music, and I told everyone about it, then played 150 games to get 70 reviews and find out people’s reactions to it. My conclusion, which I wrote in my Post-Jam Wrap-Up (after voting was complete) was that if you were honest with people and your music was good, and the gameplay was good, people would forgive you. People actually really liked the music in that game.
I agree, I have reached the limit of my potential(no offense taken)
Players on NewGrounds were giving zero star reviews just because of the A.I. music?
The entire game runs completely with GDScript source code only.
The source code is not A.I. generated - I typed it with help from others.
To me, this right here is the heart of the issue. It’s the difference between people who see art and people who see products. I am currently trying to create a game, by myself, with basically no knowledge of coding or game creation. I can draw and make music, and thats because i have spent years learning those things, because i have a passion for artistic expression and now im trying to do that in a new medium which is video games. The metric for my success in this is whether or not i end up with a final result that feels like my expression. If I was going to use AI to fill in the gaps where i cant bother learning a new skill, I might as well not do it in the first place.
You say AI music is incredible. Frankly I dont have a nicer way of saying this: you dont know what art is. You have never experienced it.
Art is, by definition, human expression. When I look at a painting or listen to a song, I’m not just consuming content, I am communicating with the artist’s emotions. Everything is purposeful, put there by a human, for a purpose. And I get to think about why they made that choice, what are they communicating? Or i can just let it invoke whatever emotion it does, and even then I only feel those emotions because i know the art was made with purpose.
If I see a piece of ai “art” it may well evoke feelings in me, it is after all an imitation of real art. But i only feel those feelings if I think it was made by a human. All those thoughts, “oh thats interesting, what does it mean, what is it communicating?” disappear the moment i learn it was made by a computer, because the answer to all of it is just: It means nothing. There is no reason. We just put a bunch of paintings in a blender and this came out.
People respond that way because they want art. And the fact that I’m living in a time where this is a concept you have to explain to people makes me feel insane.
I don’t know. I find it a bit arrogant to claim you shouldn’t do gamedev unless you do all parts of it. I remember reading about this coding wizz that had some of his physics code adopted by NASA because it was better than what they had at the time. I dont think shrieking “abandon gamedev unless you also learn how to make below average 3D-models and below average sound effects” to him would have made anyone a service.
Art is art but a simple 3D model of a pot or chair is not that. It is kind of arrogant to claim that others “can not understand art” for choosing to not model their own spoon i.m.o. Not everyone wants to be a jack of all trades and typically jack of all trades are not the ones who carry a field forward.
I agree with this. It used to be a clear delineator of why LLM-created things were NOT art. Then I played a game jam game with a cool Russian-language rap video in the end credits. He had a link to Suno, where he had created this song. So I decided to try it out.
Suno also shows you the music that other people make, and I started listening to it. The majority was crap. But once in a while, I would come across a song that, despite myself, I enjoyed. I started noticing that - very ironically - many of these people were putting copyright notices on their lyrics. Because they had spent time and effort writing their lyrics, and they used Suno to put their poetry to music.
It got me thinking about what defines art, when the tools can do more than we are used to? We all know what AI slop looks like. But when someone writes about heartbreak, or the death of a loved one, or new love, or even just the joy of going to the club - and then they use a tool to put it to music. A tool that they tweak, and edit. A tool that they refine until they get something that expresses their poetic, artistic vision . . . is it still art?
What about musicians in music forums who were discussing how they wrote a song on their piano and guitar, and uploaded it to Suno so they could visualize it with a full band arrangement? Is that still AI slop?
I spent months of listening to these creations on Suno, and using Suno to create some intro songs with lyrics to set the mood for game jam games. (Jams that allowed AI, and that I disclosed and discussed my moral qualms in devlogs: Eternal Echoes Post Mortem; Prisoner 42 Post Mortem.) I decided to do an experiment.
Suno had just come out with a new feature, called covers. It allowed you to cover a song. I was doing a Halloween game jam, and they did not forbid the use of AI, as long as it was disclosed. I decided to do an experiment. I set about designing a game. Once I knew who the character was, and the gameplay, and the plot, I used Suno to create a theme song.
I gave Suno a lyric prompt based on the game’s plot, and the phrase, “Skele-Tom, Skele-Tom, sneaky and sly, steals your candy while you cry.” I wanted a sing-song nursery-rhyme feel. It generated two options. I took the one I liked the cadence of the most and put it in Notepad. Then I re-wrote the entire thing. The reason I had Suno create the lyrics though, is I had noticed that if you do that, it will generate the right number of syllables and give you a structure to fit your own lyrics into. And sometimes I’ll like a turn of phrase and steal it (though it often ends up in a different part of the song). I had learned this by making Fallout Parody Commercial Jingles for fun. This is the lyrics I created for Skele-Tom’s Candy Caper:
Skele-Tom's Candy Caper Lyrics
[Verse]
Out in the dark where the pumpkins glow
Skele-Tom creeps where the cold winds blow
Rattle and clatter on the cobblestones
He’s got a sack and tricks of his own
[Chorus]
Skele-Tom Skele-Tom sneaky and sly
Steals your candy while you cry
Tricking not treating he’s the king of fright
If you hear bones rattle, run into the night
[Verse 2]
Gumdrops tumble from his bony hands
Licorice ropes like sinister strands
You scream “hey that’s mine”, but Skele-Tom just grins
Halloween’s his game - and he always wins
[Bridge]
Clackity-clack on his skeleton feet
A sugar rush thief you’ll never defeat
Behind every mask behind every door
Skele-Tom’s laughing and stealing some more
[Chorus]
Skele-Tom Skele-Tom sneaky and sly
Steals your candy while you cry
Tricking not treating he’s the king of fright
If you hear bones rattle, run into the night
[Outro]
When the moon is high and the streets are bare
Check your bag he’s been everywhere
Rattle your bones but don’t lose your head
Skele-Tom’s candy heist goes on till you’re in bed
I then gave it this guidance: “80s chiptune song with a sing-song, creepy deep male vocals like something out of Nightmare Before Christmas, Xylophone, church bells” It generated a few options, and I really liked one: Skele-Tom's Candy Caper by Dragonforge Dev | Suno
Next, I made some chiptune covers and deleted the lyrics:
As I was making the game, which switches perspective based on candy you eat, I decided to make a first-person perspective level. (Most of the game is third person.) I thought it would be fun to have Skele-Tom humming and singing his own theme song to himself. So I made a third cover.
I replaced most of the lyrics with “hm”, matching the syllables of the original. It took a bunch of tries, and changing prompts, and it wasn’t perfect because I couldn’t get rid of the chorus completely. A clear drawback of LLM-generated music is that you don’t have complete control.
My final prompt was: “Acapella single deep creepy and scratchy male voice like something out of Nightmare Before Christmas, percussion with bones being tapped together and grinding, only one singer, no other instruments or accompaniment, No harmonized vocals, ‑instruments” I finally had to say good enough and move on. The song was good, just not what I had envisioned: Skele-Tom's Candy Caper (Hummed) by Dragonforge Dev | Suno
[Chorus]
Skele-Tom Skele-Tom sneaky and sly
I’ll steal your candy while you cry
Tricking not treating I’m the king of fright
If you hear m’bones rattle, run into the night
[Verse 2]
Hm-hm hm-hm hm hm hm-hm hmm
Hm-hm-hm hm hm hm-hm-hm hmm
Hm hm “hey that’s mine”, hm hm-hm-hm hm hm
Halloween’s my game - and I always win
Halloween’s my game - and I always win
[Chorus]
Skele-Tom Skele-Tom sneaky and sly
I’ll steal your candy while you cry
Tricking not treating I’m the king of fright
If you hear m’bones rattle, run into the night
[Outro]
When the moon is high and the streets are bare
Check your bag I’ve been everywhere
Hm-hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm
Skele-Tom hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm
[Outro 2 - Whispered]
“Halloween’s my game - and I always win”
After the game jam was completed, I was playing with Suno personas, and I decided to make a K-Pop cover of the song. I added a rap break, a second outro, and some spoken, whispered words at the top and bottom of the song to make it feel like some sort of B-side collaborative cover. Skele-Tom's Candy Caper by @dragonforgedev | Suno
Skele-Tom's Candy Caper (K-Pop Cover)
[Whisper]
“Hey, what’s that?”
[Verse]
Out in the dark where the pumpkins glow
Skele-Tom creeps where the cold winds blow
Rattle and clatter on the cobblestones
He’s got a sack and tricks of his own
[Chorus]
Skele-Tom Skele-Tom sneaky and sly
Steals your candy while you cry
Tricking not treating he’s the king of fright
If you hear em bones rattle, run into the night
[Vocalization]
[Verse 2]
Gumdrops tumble from his bony hands
Licorice ropes like sinister strands
You scream “Hey that’s mine!”, but Skele-Tom just grins
Halloween’s his game - and he always wins
[Bridge]
Clackity-clack on his skeleton feet
A sugar rush thief you’ll never defeat
Behind every mask behind every door
Skele-Tom’s laughing and stealing some more
[Chorus]
Skele-Tom Skele-Tom sneaky and sly
Steals your candy while you cry
Tricking not treating he’s the king of fright
If you hear em bones rattle, run into the night
[Verse 3]
La la la la la la la-la laa
Lala-La la la la la la laa
La-la la la-la la la la-la-laaa
La la la la la la la la la
[Chorus]
Skele-Tom Skele-Tom sneaky and sly
Steals your candy while you cry
Tricking not treating he’s the king of fright
If you hear em bones rattle, run into the night
[Beat Drops]
[Rap Break]
Click-clack bones on the moonlit street
Skele-Tom’s got a mission so sweet
Pumpkin grins fade
Footsteps retreat
He’s the king of the candy beat
Candy corn loot
Chocolate gold
His sack holds
A treasure untold
Wrappers rustle
Stories unfold
Stealing candy
Never gets old!
[Chorus]
Skele-Tom Skele-Tom sneaky and sly
Steals your candy while you cry
Tricking not treating he’s the king of fright
If you hear em bones rattle, run into the night
[Outro]
When the moon is high and the streets are bare
Check your bag he’s been everywhere
Rattle your bones but don’t lose your head
Skele-Tom’s candy heist goes on till you’re in bed
So now the question is, do you think what I created was art?
To be honest, I don’t really care. I’m proud of the music I made for a free game that I only had a week to make. I’m proud of the final product because the game was fun, it was complete, and a number of people really liked the soundtrack. (In fact, I made the playlist for them because it was requested in the game jam comments.) It also generated a lot of really interesting discussion.
Is a paint-by-numbers painting done at a wine and painting event art? Is a framed assembled 10,000 piece puzzle on the wall art? Is a drawing made by following a step-by-step drawing book art?
Art is in the eye of the beholder. And while there’s a lot of AI slop out there, I personally don’t know that it means art cannot be made with LLMs as tools. Art is human expression. If you use an LLM as a tool to express yourself, is it still art?
Thats all fair questions, and of course, if you have something that is a mixture of stuff generated by ai, but that you also did put thought and effort into, it’s not as black and white. But my definition of art still fully applies.
So Suno generated a structure and syllable count, which you then wrote over. I guess you still wrote, but like… that’s a giant part of the creative process of making a song, that you outsourced to a robot. All of that stuff that you skipped doing just to get your lyrics, was art you didnt make. And all of that stuff is slop. It’s a lot of slop, and little bit of you. I can try to appreciate the part thats you, but it’s buried under slop.
There’s a big distinction to be made between other tools used to create art and LLM:s / other AI tech. With any other tool, the artist is in full control of how they use it. And the piece of art they create with it is a culmination of all inspiration theyve experienced, all art theyve consumed, all of their experiences. A lifetime of experience has created a person, who channels that experience into their expression. It doesn’t matter how trivial or unserious the piece of art may be, this is still true for it.
I do not honestly think that anyone believes prompt-engineering to be comparable to that. You have a vague notion in your mind, which you reduce into a few lines of text, input them into a black box of technology and out comes the most generic, soulless version of whatever you had in mind.
You say people do this until they get something that expresses their artistic vision, but frankly, if they had a real artistic vision, one they actually cared about, they would make it. Like for real.
In the early days of image generation i was playing around with it lots much like everyone, and i quickly noticed something: It was only fun if I was bored and uninspired. If I actually had some vision, the ai could never even come close to satisfying me, because there isnt a way to reduce an inspired idea into an AI prompt. So I dont really think people are using AI to meet their vision, I think they have vague ideas of what they want and they click a button to see what comes out. No matter how many iterations you do, your “expression” is a miniscule part of how the outcome is produced.
None of these are comparable, because the paint by numbers book, puzzle, drawing instructions are all in themselves pieces of art created by people. Ai art isnt art just because you arent personally responsible for each element, its not art because no one is responsible for it.
And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be. Clearly the game as a whole is absolutely art, based on your vision and created through your ability and expression. And you still put some thought and effort into the music, and that counts too. But I do have to stress- you didnt write those songs, any more than if you told some guy “hey write a song like this” and they went and did it for you. Just in this case, we can’t even enjoy that guy’s expression because that guy is a rock.
A lucky coincidences of creativity are meaningful, because they are the result of a human’s creativity. Intention isnt the only thing that gives art meaning, sometimes the untintentional mistakes are the most meaningful part because someone still expressedthem.
I dont really know, and frankly it doesnt matter, because no one does that or will ever do that, other than maybe as a philosophical excercise. I guess if you literally made every piece of art yourself, and coded the ai yourself, yeah the output would be a part of your expression. But thats not happening.
Getting creatively stuck is a part of creating. Not being inspired is a part of life. Ai cant help you, because it is definitionally not creative and not inspired.
If you need inspiration to write music, go listen to music!
A simple 3D model of a pot is art by definition. One of my favourite parts of playing triple-A games is that since they do have the resources, you can stop anytime in like, the castle in resident evil village and just marvel at the density of talent and effort thats gone into every inch of it.
I didn’t. I said he can’t understand art because he said music made by suno is amazing, missing the entire point of music. He doesn’t know why ai generated music is meaningless. He can’t understand why people would be angry at ai generated content. Pretty fair to say, he doesnt understand art.
this doesnt have anything to do with what anyone here is talking about
Yeah. Not everyone wants to learn how to play every instrument in a band. So if they want to play with a band… they should probably join one?
This whole thought process around ai content baffles me. Its suddenly somehow controversial to suggest that maybe making art should be left to people who care about making art? “Just cause I can’t do a thing, and don’t wan’t to learn how to do it, youre saying I shouldnt be using a robot to make slop and claim its equivalent to the real thing?” Well yeah, I am saying that.
If you want to make games by yourself, you should learn how to make games. If you want to make full games but only want to code, do it with other people or get free assets online. If you dont want to make games, i dunno, dont?
Remember that no idea is fully original, everything you make is influenced by something. It’s how you put it together that makes it yours.
Yeah, using ai to get over a tiny bump in the road isnt necessarily a big deal, but also, when you outsource thinking to a robot, thats an opportunity to learn that you passed up for yourself.
Something I like to do for inspiration with music specifially, though you could use it for other things too, is if there’s a song I find really inspiring and I want to write something similar but not copy the original outright, is write down what i specifically find inspiring about it. This effect on the guitar, this kind of chord progression, this kind of structure etc. Then I put that away somewhere and forget about it and about the song. Then, months later when I need inspiration, I’ll see what I’ve written down and use it as a jumping off point.
There are many reasons, many of them valid, why some folk don’t want anything to do with AI. Some of these reasons I may well have some sympathy for, such as ‘it puts folk out of work’, or ‘it uses so much energy’. Way, way down the list, for me, however, is the spurious notion of ‘art’. As an entrenched Philistine, I have little or no appreciation of what ‘art’ claims to be, mostly by artists. All creations by humans, spiders, desert wind (the list is long…) are creations; not all is created by or for Humans. If a machine can do something (Plough a field..? Grind corn..? Knit a jumper..?) it’s got its own intrinsic value, and whether or not it’s ‘art’ is, to me, not even a question. Defending ‘art’, then, is, to me, something of a Don Quixote idea. It’s not offensive, just irrelevant. Is it ‘art’..? My reply is often enough : ‘Whatever’ (sigh…).
Right, but you only know that because I told you that. One of the problems I see in this type of discussion is that it discourages transparency. Other people will read your reply and think, “Ok, people will like my stuff if I hide that I used an LLM, but if I tell them then I’ll be derided.” That black and white thinking pushes an unspoken narrative that the only way to succeed with an LLM is to hide its use.
If I’d copied the meter and rhyme scheme of an existing song, which is how people learn anyway, would that have been more artistic? I’ve written songs from scratch before, plucking them out on my guitar and writing them down. I personally think your outrage rings hollow. I get the impression if I’d used a Google search instead you wouldn’t me so judgmental. It’s about the tool for you and using it is black and white bad for you it appears.
Sure. I have a set of 32 gel ink pens I use for inking drawings. I’m in control of the lines I draw, but I am not in control of what the colors look like. Those were chosen by Papermate. I have to make a decision of color based on the options available to me. I can’t mix colors like I can when I paint.
Yup. I mentioned before I made a bunch of humorous Fallout ad songs. I like jazz, and I started re-playing Fallout 4, so I started making new music to listen to for fun. It was good enough and I enjoyed it. I put time into the lyrics because they amused me, and it was a way to play with Suno. The bossa nova song took a while and was made with the help of my music producer brother. He was able to get things out of the tool that I could not. And so his experience, knowledge, and everything that made hi, him, allowed him to get a result that I could not get out of the tool.
Again, your rejection seems more moral than experiential. Which is fine.
You clearly do not know how a song on Suno is made. You seem to believe it’s the same as a ChatGPT prompt. And I get the impression that you don’t want to be dissuaded from this opinion, which is fine. It come with two editing suites, you can pull stems, remix, and download the songs for editing in Audacity or other programs. (Which I have done with some songs.)
The fact that you’ve said it’s generic and soulless indicates to me that you haven’t actually listened to any of the songs I’ve posted. (Supported by the fact that the forum shows me a count of the number of people who have visited the links and no one has clicked on them.) Instead, you seem to have made a decision and are arguing from the decision you already made, as opposed to being open to examining your beliefs.
So, I don’t know that the words I say are really for you, they’re just for other people reading our discussion.
Ok. I used to make games from scratch, including writing drivers in C++. Tools like Godot make it too easy for ignorant people who aren’t real programmers to make games. They aren’t real engineers. If they had real architectural vision, they would make it all from scratch. Like for real. Instead, they make sloppily programmed balls of spaghetti code. The fact that they sell these games, or that people like them does not make them real games.
Then again, if people like something and it has value to them, what do I know?
As a side note, it irritates the crap out of me that you keep calling LLMs “AI”. Calling LLMs “AI” is a marketing term, and the fact that you are buying into it is really frustrating from a technical perspective. LLMs are not Artificial Intelligence. LLMs are spicy random content generators. Which honestly, is a better argument for what you’re trying to say than calling them “AI”.
In psychology, that’s called “projection”. You project your own thoughts or motivations onto other people without understanding what’s going on in their mind. You’re welcome to whatever world view that makes you happy, but assuming everyone is motivated the same as you seems a bit myopic IMO.
Interesting argument. But what if they were created by an LLM and you didn’t know it . . . and couldn’t tell?
As for no one being responsible for it, all that data the LLM harvested was art that someone created. Most likely it was illegally harvested. (Though we will have to see what the courts decide.) Sure, it’s being squirt out through an LLM tube into something else, but there is real art in the DNA. You cannot make something from nothing.
What is promising is the landmark case where a US court ruled that LLM-generated content could not be copyrighted because it was not made by a human. It’ll be interesting to see if future decisions become more nuanced. In that case, the guy did just write a prompt and create slop. But he was also doing this thing, including the lawsuit, as an experiement.
Yes, but I also realize that. However lots of people feel that prompt creation is an artistic form of expression. And while I get where you’re coming from, I wonder if in a generation if many people will feel that way.
Ok, but this discussion is only happening because I admitted to using AI, and described my use in great detail. While I get what you’re saying, there are lots of people out there who do not have the same world view.
This article is an interesting read on the affect AI influencers are having on the multi-billion dollar creator/influencer economy. This article talks about how future generations might view their relationship to truth.
The problem with puritanism is that the contemporary puritans typically look only a single step back and believe that that is the default. In practice, puritanism would very quickly lead from “the link between a visual artist and his photoshop is unbreakable” to “the link between a visual artist and his brush is unbreakable” to “the link between an artist and his mixture of egg white, urine and iron saturated sediments is unbreakable”. Humans are very good at perceiving the reality from their formative years as the default, as proven by the recorded history of humanity. It has often been said about science for example that one of the main obstacles to progress are the experts of the previous generations of a field.
I agree with many of the criticisms against AI. I think dragonforgedev gave many good examples. But i dont really get the “use generic and hastily made stock 3D-models - it is holy because it was made by a human using tools i find acceptable”. And no i dont use AI-assets nor intend to. Neither do i want to download someone else’s 3D-models.
