Stephanie

TLDR on the Big Walk article. Some awards judges say they won’t vote for games that used gen AI during development. House House used a chatbot to help fix bugs. The studio says it didn’t use AI to make the game’s art. The example they gave was a bug in Unity’s graphics system. The game kept trying to draw shadows from objects way behind the player, so it ran about half as fast for a bit at sunrise and sunset. The devs dug through the code and even asked someone at Unity for help. A chatbot eventually suggested a workaround, which the devs had to change quite a bit to get working. The fix ended up being about 10 lines of code. This is where I wish people had a little more nuance. I’m all for calling out gen AI when it rips off artists. I also think asking a chatbot why your game runs like garbage at sunset is a different use from asking it to make the art players see. You can have concerns about how the chatbot was trained and still care about what the devs actually used it for. That detail matters to me. Everyone and their mother was singing Big Walk’s praises. Now I’m seeing people curse out and wish bad things on the same devs who made a game they were just having fun with. You’re allowed to enjoy a game and disagree with a choice the people making it made. I just think going after them personally over what sounds like a pretty minor use is a bit much. Like, can we at least get past the headline first?