this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Super weird take, honestly. Procedurally generated content gets no hate, despite it being janky dogshit, too.
EDIT: lol your downvotes don't make your opinion more consistent
You must be young. proc gen used to get tons of hate in the 2010 and such era, gamers complained about devs being lazy and not being willing to actually make levels/worlds/dungeons/whatever. This complaint was of course inconsistently applied.
These days people mostly just got used to it as normal. In 10 or 20 years, I'd wager the same will be true of gen ai.
I'm not and it's always been consistently praised.
I will concede that we have lived different experiences.
Totally valid, mutually conceded. I'd bet we can agree that the current climate of games generally praises procedurally generated content, regardless of how we experienced its history.
Agreed.
There’s more than one argument against generative AI being used in games, and they don’t all apply to proc gen content. It’s an apples to oranges comparison in most cases.
And yet you couldn't describe one aspect of the differences 🤔
Like procedural generation, generative assets that are done well will be either indistinguishable from hand work, likely because there will be some involved, or will be incorporated in a way that they mesh well with everything else.
Everyone hated the procedural generation in no man's sky, for example, until enough work was done to make that just a piece of the game.
No Man's Sky was one of the most hyped video games in history due to procedural generation. The fact that they botched it on release is not relevant.
I don't agree at all, the hype was evident, sure, but the procedural generation was largely the reason people didn't like the game.
You stated that procedural generation isn't hated, but 'botching' the usage of it at release is the piece that irrelevant. The people hated it because of the, admittably bad, procedural generation.
Ita because you are still putting in the work to license or produce the individual parts used in procedural generation rather than using people's work without pay or permpermission.
Love and hate are subjective opinions, so of course they're unfair.
And so are upvotes/downvotes.
Edit to clarify: what I meant was, if you don't understand why procedural generation is acceptable, and generative AI is not, you are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject. Leaving the original text for context.
If you don't know the difference between procedural generation and generative AI, you are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject
While your statement is objectively true, it does not pertain to the comment you replied to. Read it again, they were making a comparison. They did not claim that the two things were identical.
I feel like it does. theunknownmuncher thinks it's somehow inconsistent to be against generative AI while being ok with procedural generation, which implies that they think they're equivalent in some way. As if the reason people don't like generative AI is because it makes bad games.
Edit: throughout this discussion, my opinion has evolved somewhat. Procedural generation is fine, because it only uses things created by the developer, and it will necessarily generate a better product than a generative AI, because the developer is the one who tunes it. An AI will generate any text that might fit within the genre, with no consideration for what's canon to the work it's being inserted in.
both are used to produce more content with less effort. There's your equivalence.
What would actually add value to the conversation is discussing why a particular criticism of one may or may not apply to the other.
I actually disagree with the original premise, and explained why in another comment.
Sharing one thing in common does not make two things equivalent. You're welcome to try again though
you demanded an equivalence. I gave you one. If you don't like it then that's a you problem.
When did I demand an equivalence??? This is what using ChatGPT does yo your brain, it destroys your reading comprehension
You're projecting, and being an asshole. Pause a minute and collect yourself.
What am I projecting??? Why is it that now that I am asking you to explain things, you won't?
I'm willing to grant literally all of this. I have a deep-seated hatred of generative AI that clouds my ability to have productive discussions about it. It turns me into an asshole, specifically to people who defend it.
When did I demand an equivalence? That's what I asked 37 minutes ago, and what you've spent several replies now pivoting away from answering
Since you're being reasonable again, I'll answer.
Perhaps "demanded" was the wrong word to use. It got the wrong point across. You did not explicitly ask for it, but rather strongly implied that you wanted the other guy's argument to be a certain way. (your comment I am referring to is quoted below). Ultimately, you were right, as the plot has thickened over the past 2 hours. In another comment the other guy agreed with the explanation I provided, and used that to claim that proc gen and gen ai are effectively the same (a claim that I disputed in another another comment). So on this point, you win. It was I who misunderstood the other guy's argument.
Your previous comment proved my point, thanks
Bingo.
Nice, point proven. 😎 If it doesn't make games bad, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and developers cannot be faulted for using it. LOL
Point not proven.
There are many reasons why people in general actively dislike generative ai. Many of those reasons have to do with the creation of the ai (including environmental damage and harm to artists, and more besides), and are applicable regardless of the quality of the end product.
Furthermore, using generative ai does tend to make the end product worse, regardless of what that product is. This does not mean that it is impossible to make good shit with ai, nor does it mean that ai only makes good shit. There's nuance to the issue that is often ignored.
Furthermore again, there is bandwagonning happening in the hate of ai. However, just begause bandwagonning is a logical fallacy, does not automatically make the arguments wrong (see the fallacy fallacy).
Furthermore the third, developers absolutely can be held at fault for using generative ai. Valve demands ai use be disclosed, they didn't comply, ipso facto, devs are at fault. However, not all fault is equal. The example being discussed in the original post is much less egregious than most in my opinion. It's not like they ai generated the entire game asset by asset.
I had another point but already forgot what it was so I'll leave it at that for now.
"If slavery doesn't harm the economy, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and plantation owners cannot be faulted for using them. LOL"
I know Lemmings have a lot of trouble reading, so I'll get this out of the way now: no, I'm not saying that generative AI is slavery, nor am I saying they're equivalent. I'm drawing one similarity to make a point. That's called a simile. The point being, that one supposed criticism isn't valid doesn't mean that no criticisms are valid.
👀 SLAVERY??? Come on man. Outrageous.
It's genuinely wild that you wrote this and then minutes later tried to make a "comparison but totally NOT equivalency, guys" to SLAVERY. 🤦🤦🤦
EDIT: btw, not that it matters at this point, but that's not what a simile is. It is analogy, though, but a super flawed and shitty one
I like how l saw this repIy coming and accounted for it and pre-repIied to it, and you stiII Ieft it. Yeah, it would be outrageous to equate generative Al and slavery, that's why l didn't do that
Yes, of course I did, it would be gross of me to let that slide
So the reason behind that was to point out that, by your logic, slavery would be excusable. That's the argument you're making. The consumer won't notice the difference, therefore it's fine for the producer to use it.
I'm sorry, we're talking about the implementation of generated content in video games. That only works if it's EQUIVALENT to slavery, it's not (which you yourself said in an attempt to have it both ways lol), so "my logic" does not apply to slavery... Dude.
I was about to type out a whole response, but I need to learn when to cut it short.
Generative AI is demonic, using it offloads your creativity, humanity, and soul into an unthinking, unfeeling machine. Anything that uses generative AI is inherently worse because it was not made by someone with agency or creativity. You're advocating for putting artists and writers out of work.
Literally everything you just said applies to procedural generation, except that it is demonic because that's just silly
Damn, guess I'm writing a whole response anyway
Nope. Procedural generation requires a lot of creative and technical input on the part of the developer. It's not used to offload creative or intellectual work, it creates creative and intellectual work. The intellectual work is something I forgot to mention in that reply, but the loss of the intellectual effort is just as bad as the loss of the creativity.
Let's compare the topic of this discussion with the game I'm currently playing, Kerbal Space Program.
Contracts in Kerbal Space Program's career mode are (for the most part) procedurally generated. There are a few mission types, usually asking the player to bring a part or set of parts to a particular location and perform some action with them. Attach a part to a satellite in orbit around Duna, take pressure readings in flight over Kerbin, plant a flag on the Mun, etc. This is not offloading creativity onto the machine, this is using procedural generation to provide the player with an endless variety of objectives. Producing this system of procedurally generated missions required creativity and forethought from the developers. I don't work at Squad, but I imagine it took a number of manhours to set all of the parameters and limitations for the system, and to test it to make sure it works, and that it doesn't generate any missions that are impossible to complete.
Contrast that with the AI generated text that is the topic of this discussion. The creative input for that text up there was something along the lines of "generate some sci-fi technobabble that would fit in a starship's event log" and "do it again, but don't talk about the ship, just talk about astronomical data." I know this for certain, because I generated a nearly identical passage using those two prompts exactly. They could have gotten a freelance sci-fi author to write these few bits of text, or even just sat down for 10 minutes and wrote it themselves. It would cost them nearly nothing, and in exchange they would have a piece of text that fits within the world and was written by a human. Instead, they offloaded that creative work onto a machine. They didn't make more work for themselves like a developer that uses procedural generation, they made less work for themselves by asking a machine to do it instead.
I could make a similar contrast between this and basically any procedurally generated system in games. Minecraft, Daggerfall, Borderlands, FTL: Faster than Light, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, all of these games use procedural generation to complement the creative and technical work they put into the games, not to avoid having to do that work in the first place.
Ngl I stopped reading your comments after you equated generative AI to slavery and revealed that you are a troll arguing in bad faith
Didn't equate them. Also, you have been reading my responses since I pointed out that flaw in your argument. Makes me wonder if maybe you just don't have an adequate response to my comment, but you wanted to get the last word in anyway
LOL care to educate us on why a statistical model is unacceptable while a procedural model (also statistical 🙃) is acceptable, then? 🤔 I'll wait.
(reality: it's a minor implementation detail and has no relevance to the user)
There's a number of reasons, not least of which being that generative AI works by processing vast amounts of prior work (without their creators' consent) to make a facsimile of it, while procedural generation only manipulates assets the developer creates. Procedural generation isn't putting artists and writers out of business. Procedural generation isn't making Idiocracy a reality, with fucking English majors unable to read Dickens without asking OpenAI to interpret the text for them. "They do similar things" doesn't mean they're equivalent. My point being, it's not inconsistent to be okay with procedural generation and not okay with generative AI.
this is a fantastic point. well put.
If you think "AI" and a designed classic algrithm generating things are equivalent, no wonder you hail AI as good... because that is fucking clueless take.
It's literally just implementation and they're both statistical models, but 👍
If you disagree, explain how. I'll wait
When, exactly, did I? I called them both janky dogshit, but simply pointed out the very real hypocrisy of supporting procedural generation while hating generative AI.