Some Independent Games Festival (IGF) jurors released a statement yesterday saying they would not vote for games that use generative AI in “any capacity.” Shortly after, the developer of the indie hit Big Walk released a statement saying it used AI “moderately” in the “final stretch” of the game’s development to “help overcome difficult technical challenges and bugs.” According to the jury statement, while entries to this year’s IGF have been “incredible,” there has been “a significant increase” in the number of games “developed with generative AI tools,” leading to “pretty intense discussions and disagreements” without a “universal consensus.” The statement includes a list of beliefs, including that generative AI has “negative effects,” that AI-generated code “is no exception to these harms,” and that the use of AI tools “is not a foregone conclusion in our industry.” IGF jurors who signed include Telling Lies and Immortality creator Sam Barlow and Celeste composer Lena Raine. Jurors say the statement does not speak for the IGF as an organization or all IGF jurors, and noted that some expressed concern about being able to sign safely “without professional reactions.” One controversial title was apparently Big Walk, the cooperative adventure game from Untitled Goose Game developer House House. In a statement to Aftermath and posted on its website, House House said that “in some cases, fragments of LLM’s answers were copied as a starting point for modification in the game code; we estimate that much less than 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this use, and generative AI was not used in any other context when creating the game.” House House said its “primary use case” for LLMs was to “investigate, via chatbots, issues we found with third-party code,” including fixing an issue with shadows by modifying code suggested by LLM. House House noted that it turned to the “LLM chatbot” after researching the issue “extensively” and even speaking with a Unity engineer. The studio said it disclosed its use of AI as part of its submission to the IGF, although it has not disclosed the use of AI on Big Walk’s Steam page because “the platform does not request disclosure of code or use of the chatbot.” “This is not an endorsement or argument in favor of the use of AI tools, no matter how minimal,” House said. “We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this could contribute to the normalization of this technology, or its treatment as ‘inevitable’. We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm that generative AI is causing to video games and our world, and we apologize that Big Walk’s use of LLM may not meet their standards.” forward.”
