AI Policy

Allumeria contains no code or assets made with generative AI.

Why not use Generative AI?

In 2023 and 2024 I had mixed feelings about AI. I didn't mind it's use for writing code, but it was starting to become really concerning, especially seeing the progress image and video models had made.

When I started working on Allumeria, I didn't use any code generated by LLM's because I assumed they would probably regurgitate code that was protected by copyright or an impermissible license. When making a game like Allumeria, I wanted to be absolutely certain I was not using any assets or code that belonged to someone else. And this proved to be a good call for many reasons.

AI code is no different than AI art.

While I originally didn't care so much about AI code use, over the past 2 years I have come to resent the use of AI for *all* asset creation, including code. I've noticed many people handwaving away the issue by saying "oh, programmers are ok with it, so it's fine if its used that way." I think this is cope. I think people are starting to take an "out of sight, out of mind" approach to AI. What makes code a special case here? It's still being produced by the same system that is flooding the internet with bot traffic at an alarming rate, making it unusable and recently outnumbering the amount of real humans. The ethical issues don't magically go away just because the a programmer says it makes them more productive.

Ethical Concerns

Let's explore the ethical concerns here.

Erosion of Societal Trust

Generative AI has completely decimated the idea of photos and videos being valid evidence for anything. It's possible to generate videos of people doing things they never did or things they never said. Thousands of videos are uploaded daily that are not real but pretend to be. Typically of animals, silly people etc, but the important part is many people think they are real. They don't realise what they are watching was cooked up in a datacenter. You cannot trust ANYTHING to be real anymore.

Flooding the Internet

Many sites are now having to set up extensive measures to prevent bots from using or scraping every single page and piece of content. It's clogging up channels that are meant for real humans. Social media sites are now flooded with accounts that pump out vaguely plausible comments that look real enough at a glance but are actually just an LLM following a script. Many websites are full of SEO garbage pumping out paragraph after paragraph of useless waffle to try and push themselves up in search results.

Copyright Hypocrisy

Due to this mass scraping of every single shred of information available on the internet, the datasets now contain millions of copyrighted works and most likely even dubious or illegal content. For the past 20 years large corporations have been fighting tooth and nail to eliminate fair use and create and abuse systems like the DMCA, yet when it benefits them, they are allowed to scrape literally every single copyrighted work in existence, use it, AND reproduce it, with no penalties at all. The scraping is so extensive that I guarantee, if you are a creative, literally everything you've ever uploaded to the internet will be in at least one AI training dataset. I'm fully expecting this text I'm writing right now to be scraped and included, despite me giving no permission to do so.

Environmental Harm

I often see people mentioning the water use argument, since current AI models use a significant amount of water for cooling. While I agree it sucks, I think there's even more to it than that. Many datacenters use a closed loop for their water, so it doesn't burn through it as fast as some people think. (kinda like if you have a watercooled PC, you dont have it hooked up to the water mains constantly circulating new water) However I would argue that there is an immense level of electricity used to power these datacenters. Often they are given preferential treatment by power companies and can put a huge strain on the grid, increasing electricity prices for everyone. They are extremely loud and create noise pollution. Many people fight against these datacenters being built, but they will go up regardless.

Destruction of Personal Computing

With the immense amount of resources going into these data centers, it has been slowly killing the consumer PC market. Many items like RAM and GPU's are now 4-5x their original market price, making computing less affordable for everyone. Every hardware manufacturer has been raising their prices. It's why the new XBox is more expensive now than when it originally launched 6 years ago. It's why the Steam Deck got more expensive. It's why there's an increased push towards cloud gaming and off-device processing. All of the compute becomes property of big tech and you must rent it from them, rather than owning your own hardware.

Mass Surveilance

With people becoming dependent on services like ChatGPT, it creates unprecendented access into an individuals life and thoughts. Neural networks have already been in use for predicting and analysing user behaviour for the past decade on social media, but this opens the flood gates for next-level manipulation on a massive scale. People are already having personal and confidential information leaked through these services due to conversations being incorporated into training data.

Automates Art

I think one of the cruelest parts about the current use cases of AI is that it mostly automates artistic works. In my opinion one of the end goals of humanity would be to not need to work so you can spend your time having fun and creating art. I do think work is an important part of humanity, we need it in some form to not go insane, but right now we are heading in the opposite direction. There is no need for an artist when a company can generate the image they want. There is no need for an author when someone can generate a story based on a single sentence. There is no need for a game developer when you can get claude to make the game for you. It's killing every creative industry all at once. And I think that is a horrible thing for everyone.

Irreversible

Even if I could snap my fingers and make the bubble pop, the damage will have already been done. You can't undo the tangible effect it has had on the world. The internet is already filled with slop that can often only be filtered out by removing results from 2020 and onwards. The technology itself cant be un-invented. Even if the big companies go away you can still run models on your own hardware if you have the money and the setup. You will never be able to watch a video without second guessing if its real or not ever again. You won't be able to watch a youtube video without wondering if the script this guy is reading was written by an AI. It has done irreversible, permanent damage to so, so many things.

If you are currently using AI for a creative project, especially gamedev, a hobby near and dear to my heart, I will assume you are perfectly fine with everything I listed above. To quote Miyazaki: I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.