Some IGF Jurors released a statement about AI usage
I am proud of my husband, Brendon Chung, for joining with other IGF jurors in signing a letter about AI usage. The signers each posted the letter individually on Bluesky, but here's the text:
This year's IGF entries have been incredible. We've been lucky to play games that surprise, connect, and challenge us, and we're excited to vote for our favorites.
Unfortunately, there has also been a significant increase in the number of submitted games developed with generative AI tools. This has set off some fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools, and at this point there is no universal consensus on what (if anything) is to be done.
The IGF has affirmed that we may cast our votes according to our own tastes and values. But we, a contingent of IGF jurors, feel that this trend and the games embracing it deserve stronger pushback than a vote in silence.
While IGF leadership has approved the release of this statement, it's important to note that we do not speak for IGF as an organization, or for all IGF jury members. Many jurors had differing perspectives and significant reservations about this statement. Some jurists additionally voiced concern about their ability to safely sign without professional blowback, and we do not intend this letter to serve as a censure of those who were unable to sign.
Above all: Our goal is to state solidarity with those who despair over the future of their art, their craft, and their industry—including those who have experimented with these tools in the past, but who now believe they are not in our best interest.
We know that change does not come at the individual level, but as independent developers, we also know firsthand the value of pushing back on what an industry has deemed "inevitable." As jurists, we feel a responsibility to push past defeatism and aspire to a higher ideal.
The future is not yet settled. You are not alone. We can stand together.
We, the undersigned IGF jury members, believe the following:
- That generative AI has these negative effects:
Ecological harms at community and planetary levels
Economic harms to working developers and artists
Cognitive and psychological harms to its users
Harm to the increasingly fragile information landscape
Harms to labor and worker power in creative fields
That these harms do not depend on what is generated, be it music or writing, art or VO, marketing assets or code.
That AI-generated code is not an exception to these harms. Programming is a creative discipline whose labour deserves the same respect we extend to any part of making a game. This extends to the past work used to train these models without the creators' consent.
Finally, that the use of these tools is neither a foregone conclusion in our industry nor that their adoption has been wholly voluntary. We stand in solidarity not only with those developers who have the freedom to unilaterally reject them, but also with those who have been compelled by their employers to adopt their use, those working to establish or improve their workplace policies, and especially with those in positions of precarity who are so often those most pressured to abandon their values.
For these reasons, this year we are declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity. We urge the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years that disallows games containing any AI-generated work.
19 people signed it!
This led to an evening of tumult which finally led to an IGF leak, and then an admission, that House House used LLM code generation on Big Walk. I also understand - because a ton of my friends were venting to me about it - that the Big Walk comment thread on the IGF judging website was a "The Greatest Thread in the History of Forums, Locked by a Moderator After 12,239 Pages of Heated Debate" type situation. I wasn't a judge, so I wasn't part of any of this, but I definitely heard from my friends how much the situation was bothering them and how frustrated they were that House House hadn't publicly admitted it.
House House immediately posted an update to their FAQ about AI. (Did they have it ready to go? Why not post it months ago??)
I'll say that they seem contrite and regretful for having used it, which is a plus, and that they insist they did not use it for much. However I'll also say that they were a very well funded studio even while this game was under development, and I suspect that they could have afforded to hire someone to help them fix this shit - particularly since they now seem to feel that using AI violated their own principles. They also admit that they had no AI policy at the studio at all, and that this is a key failing which led to this situation in the first place.
So I don't hate House House. I think they're probably well-intentioned people.
I also think that it's right for people to withhold award votes over stuff like this. Difficult, important fights always take place at the margins of an issue, where each side has powerful arguments and there is no settled, obvious answer. You should not expect arguments about LLM use to be clean, you should not expect the villains to all look evil, and you should, if your principles hold true, be willing to deny treats and accolades over stuff like this. You should not withhold criticism from a team just because they do other stuff that is good.
If Big Walk doesn't get an award, House House will be fine. They're rich. The only injuries they suffer are to their reputation and the trust some of their fans had in them. The harm that the LLM bubble (and its associated fascist project) is inflicting upon my friends every single day is a lot worse.
I'll say that I find this part of their FAQ disclosure extremely disingenuous:
This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal. We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalisation of this technology, or its treatment as “inevitable”.
I think an early disclosure that they used a chat bot and regretted it would have solved all this and I strongly suspect that they withheld the disclosure until the facts leaked because they knew their fans would be upset. I do not believe that a disclosure would have made AI use seem inevitable, because they would have had this highly specific experience of regretting it. They should have shared this regret.
A lot of people are equivocating about this specific issue by comparing the situation to Google search summaries. "If I use Google, do I have to disclose it??" "Will I get outlawed from the IGF if any of my tools were made with AI by other companies??" type shit. Come on: that isn't want happened here! House House has copped specifically to talking about a problem with a chat bot, "for research". This is something I'm extremely against, personally - one of my most crank-type opinions is that I think conversational interfaces are dangerous and should be heavily regulated. Just this week I had to tell a friend of mine to stop talking to a chat bot about his ideas if he wanted to work on a project with me. I feel completely justified in opposing this kind of stuff because conversational, "personal" relationships with chat bots are straight-up a public health hazard!
Finally: the dev communities I am in do not agree that turning to AI generated code was a necessary solution for this issue specifically, or even that the bug was a showstopper worth violating one's principles for. I have friends who work in Unity graphics engineering and QA who say that they could have even shipped with this bug if they really felt that strongly about not using generative AI - they would not have been the first game to ship with something like this. As Joe Wintergreen said today:
when you get to the point where the problem is so difficult you feel you have to reach for ai, ask yourself: what would i have done if this happened in 2019. problems did not just recently start being solved
Another post on the topic, from Damon Reece, points out: you control the buttons you press. Stop pressing the "fuck my friends, let it all burn" button if it bothers you so much! And if you regret pressing it, maybe talk about it before it becomes a zillion-post drama pressure cooker type situation. Regret is not an unusual experience! A lot of people are regretting this stuff right now!