I recently used one of the heavier ChatGPT models to make a mod pack for Minecraft, fixing some of the things that prevent me from playing the game (usually I lose interest quickly after starting a new world). I had it stitch a bunch of pre-existing mods together and test that they didn’t conflict or make the game too easy. And I had it make a new mod which added custom villagers to villages who point you to destinations full of tough scary monsters guarding a prize that’s needed to beat a final boss. The villagers only give directions if you use one of the expanded food mods to cook a complex recipe for them. If you defeat the bosses scattered around the world, there’s a distant Mordor-style volcano you can then travel to and defeat the final boss. And the biomes are arranged in a spiral with the size of the biomes increasing the further you get away from spawn. I also had it leave tips and instructions around loot chests around the map to teach me how to use the mods and remind me how to build automated farms. This combination of conditions actually motivates me to play the game because there’s a real goal now and a progression that keeps the game engaging all the way through. I don’t plan on releasing it anywhere because I’ve heard a lot of anecdotes from people who made mods with AI and got yelled at for it. Still cool that I can ask for a complex custom mod pack one evening and start actively playing it the next morning.

If you make more mods using AI, I would definitely recommend utilizing one of the heavier GPT or Claude models to limit the amount of rework. I did give it full access to a laptop I have dedicated to AI agent use so it could test and iterate things without my involvement. Completely understandable to not want to give an AI model that level of control. I have to imagine that if I were running the tests myself, I would have had to hand-hold it quite a lot more than I did. Your mileage may vary.

It’s not a loophole. It is the actual intent of the AI disclosure rule. Generative AI uses inference to produce visuals. I am using AI to create procedural code that draws lines in the way I want them drawn. Using the curves and styles I have defined. You can argue that you want AI usage in backend code to be disclosed as well, which I would probably agree with. But I don’t agree that building logic to define how 2D lines get rendered is the same as prompting an AI for an image and using that image as an asset in a game. They are completely different ways of producing graphics and look entirely different from one another. I do not want to make a game where the art style looks AI-generated. And mine does not look that way, because the art is not made by AI. Still, I respect and appreciate your opinion on the topic and would be interested in hearing further feedback on the process I’m using.

It’s about context. I’m working on a game right now, an idea I’ve had for decades but has always been out of reach. AI has helped me a lot to develop it quickly while also working a full time job. And I’m also working hard to avoid disclosing the AI use - not because I don’t want people to know but because of the deserved stigma around AI slop.

Steam’s current stance (last time I checked) is that if the AI makes assets the player sees, hears, reads or otherwise experiences first-hand, then you must disclose it. But if the AI is used as a tool to produce the code that runs the game, it does not require disclosure. I personally agree with this and have tried to adhere to these rules.

In practice, it means that rather than having some generative tool make my in-game textures, I instead had AI create code that procedurally looks at 3D assets and defines how an artist would draw lines to represent that object if they saw it in real life. And when it comes to audio, I’m doing my own Foley work. For all of the dialogue in the game, I’m writing it myself, which is going to amount to hundreds of hours of work.

But it’s worth it to produce a game with a human touch to it, which doesn’t need to disclose use of AI-created assets. If there was a requirement to disclose use of an LLM in producing the backend code, I gladly would. AI has saved me countless hours by writing the game’s source code, which would easily have taken a year or more for me to write and debug by hand. I just don’t want my game to be lumped in with games that are churned out from an AI without an eye for quality, completeness, or a unique look and feel to the assets. I’ve put too much work into this game for someone to take one look at an AI tag and decide that it’s low-quality slop.