AI in video games are a confusing topic to me.

@TimSweeneyEpic recently got a lot of flak for pushing AI in game development.

There are opinion pieces left and right condemning AI use in game development.

Here I am, having worked for ~6 months on a game I released on Steam last week. And my sin, apparently, was using AI and disclosing it.

The comment section was pretty clear on that.

It's confusing to me. AI is a tool. IDE is a tool. A programming language is a tool. A graphics API is a tool. We're just using tools.

I've been writing software for about 3 decades now, I'd like to think that I know what I'm doing and am pretty good at it. I see AI as an incredible productivity booster.

It does some things that I pride myself on being good at, such as teasing out a math formula or optimizing an algorithm better than me most of the time (with a lot of handholding, granted), but for the most part it makes things I find tedious - fast.

As I software engineer, and a game maker, I take relatively little pride in knowing a programming language, or remembering 100 shortcuts in an IDE, or knowing a programming language spec by heart.

I remember the first time I needed to make an animated 3d model, almost 15 years ago now, and it took me about a week of full-time effort to get anywhere. I didn't feel particularly proud, I felt frustrated, I had a clear idea, but the tool and its complexity were getting in the way. Well, the tools are better now. Blender is better, animation tools are better, and there are AI models that keep improving at an incredible pace.

Ultimately, when I write a piece of software, or work on a game - I rarely think about the tools, they are a means to an end, not the point in itself.