IGF jurors say they will not vote for games using generative AI

In short: Some Independent Games Festival jurors say they will not vote for any game that uses generative AI, and the developers of Big Walk say they used AI only a little to fix problems.

What's going on

A group of jurors for the Independent Games Festival, or IGF, published a statement saying they will not vote for games that use generative AI “in any capacity.” Generative AI means tools that can produce text, images, music, or computer code after being trained on lots of existing material (like a supercharged autocomplete).

In their statement, the jurors said there has been a “significant increase” in games submitted this year that were made with generative AI tools. They also said this has caused disagreement among judges and jurors, and that there is no shared view across the whole group.

The statement lists concerns about generative AI, including environmental costs, economic harm to working artists and developers, and the fact that training data may have been used without creators’ consent. The jurors also said AI-generated code should not be treated differently, since programming is creative work too.

Soon after, House House, the developer behind the co-op adventure game Big Walk, published its own statement. The studio said it used AI “sparingly” late in development to help deal with “difficult technical challenges and bugs.” It said that in some cases it copied small snippets from an LLM, or large language model (a text generating AI), as a starting point and then changed them, estimating it was well under 0.1% of the game’s code.

What to watch

This dispute could affect how future game awards handle AI use, including whether IGF adopts a formal rule. For now, the voting outcome may depend on which jurors take a hard line and how other jurors choose to weigh limited AI use.

Source: The Verge AI