So I'm assuming that you, dear reader, are aware of the Present Unpleasantness. But if not, a brief recap:
On Monday (November 9th), a group of IGF jurists published an open letter denouncing the harms of AI, pointing out that using LLMs for coding assistance is no different from other uses of the technology, and vowing not to nominate games made with AI for IGF awards.
At this point in time it was public knowledge that a great internecine fight had happened within IGF judging over the topic of AI, centering on a highly popular game having an AI disclosure. Shortly after those jurists released their statement, the information leaked that the game in question was House House's Big Walk. Multiple IGF judges confirmed this, quickly followed by House House themselves adding an entry to their FAQ that more or less repeats what was said to IGF judges about the LLM usage in the game.
Two things about this are frustrating to me—I mean, everything about this is frustrating to me, but two things I want to point out are frustrating. One is that discussion of Big Walk and its merits will now overshadow a broader discussion. Another is that a lot of the arguments that took place in the 600-post IGF judge thread about Big Walk are now playing out over social media, recapitulating many of the worst misinformed and disingenuous arguments.
In a lot of ways House House couldn't have created a nastier situation for IGF judges if they were deliberately trying; they used LLMs and disclosed their use, but they used them relatively little, and they phrased their disclosure in a way that made it easy for people to minimize the use even more so. They didn't use any generative AI that would have required a Steam disclosure, so their IGF disclosure was an unpleasant surprise for judges, many of whom had already played the game before the judging period even started.
Big Walk went into the IGF as a favorite for the grand prize and design awards; it is an extremely successful video game from a studio with a significant pedigree, while still being made by a small enough core team to justify an "indie" label.
Thus, the biggest game of the year, which a lot of people had very positive feelings about, was now also at the center of the debate around AI use; and the game had used AI in a way that enabled every dishonest argument about the issue, viz.:
- The argument that they used LLMs very little, so little it shouldn't count;
- The argument that their LLM usage was basically indistinguishable from reading a Google summary;
- The argument that it shouldn't matter because the game is very good;
- The argument that House House are good guys and we like them, therefore we should overlook this;
Some kind of reckoning about AI was inevitable this year. IGF being beholden to Informa, a company that has never seen a stupid tech fad it didn't want to jump aboard of, makes it politically difficult for the organization to resist the encroachment of slop. On the other hand, many judges and jurists feel very strongly about the issue. It's still unfortunate that it played out in the most annoying way imaginable.
Big Walk is not just popular, it's a game that people clearly have a lot of very strong feelings about owing to their very particular and intense experiences with it. I feel like this has led people to go to some extreme, almost delusional lengths to try to construct a moral universe in which House House didn't do anything they'd consider wrong.
The studio described to IGF judges a scenario where one or more persons at the studio opted to engage an LLM chatbot for coding assistance multiple times, to solve several problems over the course of production. In lot of social media discussion this has morphed into "House House had a showstopping bug that was going to ruin the game and they used Claude as a glorified search engine to solve it", which is just an alarming signal of how parasociality makes people jump to defend someone who isn't even trying that hard to defend themselves.
I don't think House House, themselves, are as invested in the idea that they are blameless as a lot of their social media shooters seem to be; to the extent that the discourse about this may now be actively harming their own ability to amend their behavior going forward.
I don't think House House were being deliberately dishonest in characterizing events—I think if anything that characterizing them at all shows a willingness to have a discussion—but I think a lot of people without subject matter knowledge are reading into their recounting of events a lot of things that just aren't so. Unity obviously dropped the ball in supporting House House (quelle fucking surprise), but many seem to read into that event the notion that the problem they ran into was utterly intractable.
Everything I know tells me that this wasn't the case, and using an LLM was an expedient, not a necessity. Unity being buggy and underdocumented is nothing new. House House could have worked around the issue (note that the worst case with the given issue was that the game was a bit frame-y for 20 seconds occasionally during play) or engaged the help of an actual human expert, many of whom they would have had access to just in their local scene around Melbourne. Many of these people are out of work right now.
House House, an already very successful studio with not insignificant resources, made a real choice to rely on a morally abhorrent software system rather than engage the help of real people—whether in the form of paid contracting or just friendly help. I want to say this not to try to exaggerate the scope of what they did but to make it absolutely clear that there is a real, material dimension to this, even if some want to characterize this issue as a purely abstract test of ritual purity.
It is, of course, also true that to use LLMs is to willingly participate in a noxious political project and to use the product of exploitative and morally unacceptable processes; and that objection is also real, material, and grounded. I do not trust the ethical instincts of people whose response to those objections is to wave them off and say "go yell at Sam Altman", dismissively pushing the site of struggle far away from anyone they might know or talk to. The reality is that many people in the industry have opened the door for the encroachment of tech corporations that want to do us (the professionals who actually work in this industry) harm, who want to do humanity harm, who want to do the planet harm. That matters. Other people's behavior matters. You are not powerless cogs in a capitalist machine that can't be held to account any more than the batteries in Mark Zuckerberg's Roomba.
I'm not going to try to argue that any and all LLM usage is equally bad, but either an ethical boundary exists or doesn't. And we are living in a moment where the urgency and necessity of this ethical boundary is enormous; vast resources have been marshaled to simply make everyone's lives worse in service of a vision of the future that serves nobody but five dudes who are already wealthy. Is arguing that people are taking it too seriously how you want to spend this time?
There are some ethical faults we generally expect people to not be 100% compliant with, of course; it's very difficult to live in society without wasting some amount of single-use plastic, eg.
But there are some ethical faults we think it's reasonable to expect people to never breach without sanction. I think using a completely optional set of highly subsidized SaaS products that did not exist two years ago is in the latter set. You might as well be talking about the "purity test" that a studio should credit 100% of their contractors and pay 100% of their invoices.
If you disagree, perhaps stop to think about how heavily you've been propagandized and how much you've mentally surrendered to the normalization of these systems. It is very possible to do things without using an LLM, even things that are hard; and if anything, one of the harms of the "AI" political project is the propaganda machine dedicated to making you feel stupid and helpless.
I don't want to go into another litany listing the harms of LLMs here, that's all been very thoroughly discussed at this point. But I feel like it needs to be absolutely clear that there is an ethical problem with using this technology, and this ethical problem is not reducible by scale (no ethical problem is, really). You either recognize this ethical problem or you don't; and if you do, using an LLM "just a little" is still crossing an ethical boundary (even if just a little) and it still merits being treated as the crossing of an ethical boundary.
In regards to IGF, of course, nobody is entitled to win an award or nomination. The vast majority of entrants win nothing, including some who submitted extremely high-quality work. An award like IGF is meant to elevate and promote excellence, and it's obvious to me that therefore we want winners to reflect the practices we want to see in the industry. Which means that using an LLM, even if "just a little", should indeed be disqualifying.
Excellence in this sense shouldn't just be some nebulous anointing of "quality"; there are plenty of other awards for that. Excellence should mean an aspirational sense of what the industry should be, and what the industry should be is not one where we prefer getting help from a corporate software product meant to make everyone else worse off rather than someone in our own community.
If we recognize this ethical boundary, then we recognize that Big Walk may be an enjoyable game or one that has valuable things to say but it's not excellent in the way that IGF demands. It should not win anything.
Another issue that is repeatedly posed is the question of "transparency" and "disclosure", namely that negative reactions to uses of AI will discourage people from disclosing that they used AI.
The problem here is, what exactly do you expect? What do you think should happen? Do you think that, eg, when Paolo Pedercini posted his self-pitying little blog post about using AI (much more egregiously than House House, mind) in Future? No Thanks, that people should have stroked his ego for being brave enough to admit it?
Like, has your ethical compass not advanced since kindergarten? Are you still in the "it's good that you admitted you did it" phase? Is the idea that something can be an ethical violation, and someone can admit to that ethical violation, but no one is allowed to be disappointed by the behavior that was admitted to? "You can't be mad at me because I was honest" is, frankly, just immature.
Those studios have done things that were disappointing. I don't think they need to be harassed or run out of the industry over it but people are allowed to be disappointed, wary, or unhappy about it.
Again, either an ethical boundary exists or it doesn't. If it exists, there is nothing you can do to make voluntary disclosure a desirable thing to do. People who believe they are bound by an ethical rule are bound to behave accordingly, and that means disapproving of violations of that rule! And therefore, people who are unscrupulous and willing to lie will always lie to avoid that disapproval.
This is, frankly, kind of just the nature of having ethics, so I sometimes wonder with no small amount of alarm if this is some persons' first time doing it. In order to actually have an ethical stance it has to bind your behavior, which means that if the ethical boundary exists then you have no choice but to create the situation in which disclosing is undesirable. We cannot escape the gravity of our convictions, other than by becoming totally amoral.
Many made the argument that if IGF judges refuse to vote for games made with LLMs, then studios will lie about using LLMs to avoid being snubbed by judges. This reasoning is morally backwards. I, as an IGF judge, have literally no choice but to vote against games with AI disclosures because once you tell me that you used an LLM to make the game, that information now binds my behavior. Because the alternative would be dishonesty; I'd have to pretend that a game which fails the criteria that I think are important in judging is somehow still valid on the merits.
Obviously I could do it, it's not like it's literally physically impossible. But it would feel bad, and other people who share in my stance would then be disappointed in me. I feel like I'm having to explain the very basics of ethics, as if to a six year old, here.
Possibly this is because some of you don't really believe in the ethical urgency of the moment and are just being carried along by trying not to offend those of us who do. Possibly this is because some of you don't really believe in the ethical urgency of anything. I don't know. Fix your hearts or die.
Ultimately, it is impossible for me to care about whether people feel "incentivized" to voluntarily disclose their ethical violations because it is impossible for me to affect their incentives, because doing so would require that I throw out the ethical stance in the first place. You're not locked in here with me; I'm locked in here with you, asshole.
As an actual practical matter, when we set forth a rule about behavior that goes on behind closed doors where we can't see it, we always know that cheating is a possibility and will happen. But this doesn't mean those rules are pointless.
They have value in communicating what a space is, what it is for, who is welcome, and what the values the space holds are. To some extent banning AI is just practical; it spares us from having to engage with the AI enthusiasm of AI boosters or having to spend too much time on the obvious low-effort slop—of which there was plenty this IGF, and the people who submitted these games would have been better off just shredding their entry fee instead.
They have value in removing the possibility of plausible deniability. When you ask for a disclosure, you then give someone a choice: You can not engage in the behavior at all; you can do it and disclose it; or you can lie. Lying has substantial social consequences if you get caught, and it has a cost if you don't—most people find it stressful to lie, especially if you have to sustain a significant lie over a long period of time against people you interact with regularly. You have to spend mental effort keeping track of what you've said to people. You may need to involve others in lying for you.
Conventional morality, ethics, and law are all full of rules that are "unenforceable" in that they sanction private behavior which is hard for enforcers to observe, yet those rules continue to exist anyway. They often inherently give an advantage to cheaters by creating arbitrage opportunities around lying; but it's worth noting that if a behavior is undesirable, you will not make it happen less by normalizing it.
It's also true that people who are willing to lie about one thing are generally willing to lie about others, and unscrupulous behavior tends to be generalized. Which is to say: up to a point, additional rules of behavior constrain scrupulous actors who want to follow the rules, but they also increase the lying burden on unscrupulous actors who are likely breaking other rules.
There are already numerous behaviors that game studios regularly engage in that we'd consider disqualifying (from an IGF, a purchase, talking positively about their game...) if we heard about them. Those forms of misbehavior are old—ancient, in some cases—and therefore the rules against them are ingrained.
Against the destructive advance of AI, principled people are laboring to create a standard of behavior, which is an odd situation that tends to bring out a lot of nonsensical concern. But fundamentally, we don't have to be hostages to other people's misbehavior. We don't need to immediately give up just because an opportunity for lying, cheating behavior exists. We do have the option of resisting and building sites of resistance, instead of simply resigning ourselves to believing in nothing. In fact, if we believe in something, we have no option but to demand better.
