I’ve been programming as a hobby since I was 9. It’s also my job so I rarely finish the hobby projects anymore, but still.
On my first computer (Apple II) I was able to make a complete game as a kid that I felt was comparable to some of the commercial ones we had.
In the 1990ies I was just a teenager busy with school but I could make software that was competitive with paid products. Published some things via magazines.
In the late 90ies I made web sites with a few friends from school. Made a lot of money in teenager terms. Huge head start for university.
In the 2000s for the first time I felt that I couldn’t get anywhere close to commercial games anymore. I’m good at programming but pretty much only at that. My art skills are still on the same level as when I was a kid. Last time I used my own hand drawn art professionally was in 2007.
Games continued becoming more and more complex. They now often have incredibly detailed 3D worlds or at least an insane amount of pixel art. Big games have huge custom sound tracks. I can’t do any of that. My graphics tablets and my piano are collecting dust.
In 2025 AI would theoretically give me options again. It can cover some of my weak areas. But people hate it, so there’s no point. Indy developers now require large teams to count as indy (according to this award); for a single person it’s difficult especially with limited time.
It’d be nice if the ethical issues could be fixed though. There are image models trained on proprietary data only, music models will get there too because of some recent legal settlements, but it’s not enough yet.
It’s been proven time and time again that a game doesnt need to compare to AA and AAA shit to be successful. You dont need a big game with a big world. There’s an endless list of simple indie games that had a captivating charm that are crazy successful, all without a single bit of AI used.
I fully agree with the ethical parts, but not with the bit of people hating it.
Reality is that people on platforms like Reddit or Lemmy (or the tech side of the Fediverse in general) can be incredibly fervent about their AI hate, but they don’t represent the average people, whose work has become ever so slightly more convenient thanks to AI - let that be due to meeting summarisation, or writing tools making complex emails easier, or maybe they’re software engineers whose workload has been reduced by AI too… I am a software engineer and I use our own Claude instance extensively because it’s really good at writing tests, KDoc, it’s super helpful at code discovery (our codebase is huge, and I mostly work on a very small subsegment on it, going outside of my domain I can either spend an hour doing manual discovery, or tell Claude to collate all the info I need and go for a coffee while it does so), or to write work item summaries, commit messages, and so on. It doesn’t even have to generate (production) code for it to be incredibly useful. And general sentiment within my co-workers is that it’s a great tool that means we can achieve targets quicker, and luckily our management realises that we do need the manpower to do things manually still, so it’s not like they’re reducing teams by expanding on AI. They’d rather take the improved performance, thus the improved revenue, than keep revenue stagnant-ish and reduce expenses.
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I’ve been programming as a hobby since I was 9. It’s also my job so I rarely finish the hobby projects anymore, but still.
On my first computer (Apple II) I was able to make a complete game as a kid that I felt was comparable to some of the commercial ones we had.
In the 1990ies I was just a teenager busy with school but I could make software that was competitive with paid products. Published some things via magazines.
In the late 90ies I made web sites with a few friends from school. Made a lot of money in teenager terms. Huge head start for university.
In the 2000s for the first time I felt that I couldn’t get anywhere close to commercial games anymore. I’m good at programming but pretty much only at that. My art skills are still on the same level as when I was a kid. Last time I used my own hand drawn art professionally was in 2007.
Games continued becoming more and more complex. They now often have incredibly detailed 3D worlds or at least an insane amount of pixel art. Big games have huge custom sound tracks. I can’t do any of that. My graphics tablets and my piano are collecting dust.
In 2025 AI would theoretically give me options again. It can cover some of my weak areas. But people hate it, so there’s no point. Indy developers now require large teams to count as indy (according to this award); for a single person it’s difficult especially with limited time.
It’d be nice if the ethical issues could be fixed though. There are image models trained on proprietary data only, music models will get there too because of some recent legal settlements, but it’s not enough yet.
It’s been proven time and time again that a game doesnt need to compare to AA and AAA shit to be successful. You dont need a big game with a big world. There’s an endless list of simple indie games that had a captivating charm that are crazy successful, all without a single bit of AI used.
I fully agree with the ethical parts, but not with the bit of people hating it.
Reality is that people on platforms like Reddit or Lemmy (or the tech side of the Fediverse in general) can be incredibly fervent about their AI hate, but they don’t represent the average people, whose work has become ever so slightly more convenient thanks to AI - let that be due to meeting summarisation, or writing tools making complex emails easier, or maybe they’re software engineers whose workload has been reduced by AI too… I am a software engineer and I use our own Claude instance extensively because it’s really good at writing tests, KDoc, it’s super helpful at code discovery (our codebase is huge, and I mostly work on a very small subsegment on it, going outside of my domain I can either spend an hour doing manual discovery, or tell Claude to collate all the info I need and go for a coffee while it does so), or to write work item summaries, commit messages, and so on. It doesn’t even have to generate (production) code for it to be incredibly useful. And general sentiment within my co-workers is that it’s a great tool that means we can achieve targets quicker, and luckily our management realises that we do need the manpower to do things manually still, so it’s not like they’re reducing teams by expanding on AI. They’d rather take the improved performance, thus the improved revenue, than keep revenue stagnant-ish and reduce expenses.
So yeah the sentiment isn’t all negative.