Why I Don't Use AI for Games

A question I see come up a lot in the Software and Game Development category on Twitch is “why are you not using AI to make the game more quickly?”

This is a broad topic and there’s lots of different ways to interpret it, but I’m going to specifically focus on using AI to write code.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic (probably too much); I’m going to put aside any moral / ethical discussion and instead approach this with logic.

Prompting is Decompression

When you ask a large language model to generate some code, the code almost certainly has more entropy than the prompt. This means generating code can be viewed as lossy decompression. Okay, sure, but why does that matter?

It matters because games are designed by making lots of small decisions. A bad designer may not realize they are making these decisions, but a good one certainly should. When you use a model to write code, you are delegating lots of these decisions to the model. Regardless of what you may have included in the prompt (“You are a senior game designer for the best game studio in the world”), the model is not thinking critically about all of these micro-decisions within the context of your game. Even if it were, can you really call it your design at that point?

If you are a proponent of generative AI, you might argue with this. “My prompts are high entropy! I still make all of the decisions, just in English.” Sure, that’s probably possible. However, as someone who has already spent a good chunk of their life learning formal symbolism, I’ll stick with that for this type of work.