Developer diary entry #10

Not going to pretend that i have any interesting development news to write about today, but that does not mean i have nothing else to write about.

There is a number of stances i have hinted at in a number of my microblog posts, but it is, obviously, impossible to properly express thoughts and opinions in a microblog. So why not use free developer diary entry to document them? 

On copyright and licenses

I shall not beat about the bush - i support radical freedom of information. I am aware that modern world is, perhaps, not really fit or ready for it, but that is the world's problem.

Were you to meet me five or about year ago, i would have shat on any restrictive license, obviously all the proprietary ones, but also GPL. You would find me supporting BSD, MIT or some balls like Unlicense. As for creative works, i would have favoured Public Domain.
Not that i changed my mind, in a perfect world everything will be Public Domain. But we live in a shit world.
Begrudgingly, i learned to love the genius of GPL and CC-BY-SA, which are, in fact, my preferred licenses today.

My music is CC-BY-SA, my game is CC-BY-SA... well, as much as i technically and legally have capacity to declare it CC-BY-SA.
I know Youtube allows me to declare my uploads as CC-BY-SA, but God knows if Itch allows me to set licenses. Like, you think i read Itch's ToS? Lmao, so to speak.

Another moment is that certain sounds i so happily downloaded from freesound, perhaps, require attribution or some other custom whatever. I simply never cared much for these stock-tier sounds.
Not that i am opposed to crediting people, but if i were to go and diligently attribute everything, i would not even remember where i downloaded most of it from or who was the author - and i would argue not all of it is even my fault, some things really are just reuploaded over and over. Well, any legit author were to come and demand that i credit them for that one car honk sound they recorded on 14th of march back in 2017 in their Honda Civic, i would. I also do credit people who directly help with the game, or with anything that is not stock-tier, so judge for yourself whether my behaviour is based or cringe.

I would gladly cut the "BY" out of "CC-BY-SA" myself. Even if someone were to shamelessly repost my game without any attributions, i know those who actually care would find their way back to the source. Attention economy conditions any independent creator to count every view, click and repost. This is terrible, this is one reason i have given up on any thoughts of making my creative hobbies into full-time jobs. Perhaps, the winning move here is not to play.

On artificial intelligence

Ever since i noticed the "AI disclosure" field, i was wondering:
> So, i never used AI output directly in my works. Neither did i "enhance" manually created images or audio, not a single asset is contaminated. But i cannot say that i am a certified luddite-approved anti-AI purist. In fact, i experimented with AI extensively. Also, there are few grey areas...

Unlike many creators these days, i do not feel any hatred towards AI. Not that i am blind to its problems, but all of them are either bigger than AI (economical and ecological implications), or simply artists being kind of silly (they train models on my art, how dare they???).

I have no ideological qualms about using AI in my creative process. Reasons i do not use it for generating or enhancing stuff are two-fold: poor quality and loss of agency.
AI is lobotomised by alignment training, its style is too recognisable, too generic. But even if AI were able to produce beautiful artworks, i would still be icky about using them. I would not be able to see them as my own, AI cannot access my vision. At most i would use those as references, which bring me to the ways i used AI during development, let me catalogue them for the record.

Prompting general stuff

> "How many timezones are in the world?"
> "What types of glass exist?"
> "Who invented walking?"

Cannot see how any of that is any different from usual googling. I know AI can hallucinate, normal people can as well. All search engines are specialised AI chatbots these days anyway.

Prompting specific stuff

> "Give me an overview of British education system"
> "What are the best ways to implement save system in a game?"
> "How to implement procedural weather?"

Again, cannot see how that is any different from usual googling, albeit stuff i ask more directly relates to the game.
So, as an example, weather generation. Without asking AI anything i immediately thought "Markov chains".
But i made it scout the web, and it found a bunch of Github repos. I checked few of them. And AI also suggested i use Markov chains.

Prompting random thoughts

Try putting any of your shower thoughts into AI. Doing so feels like looking into the black mirror.
It parrots back your thought mixed with collective consciousness of humanity... filtered through corporate fluff, unfortunately, but still interesting, helps to order scattered thoughts on occasion (mostly by you writing them down, though).

Mediocrity check

AI generates series of statistically most probable tokens, everyone and their Mama know the basics.
So, prompt your vague idea to a chatbot. Whatever it generates is the most generic way your idea can go. Adjust your vision accordingly.

Text rephasing and synonyms

I think even after AI bubble bursts, copywriting jobs will still be hopelessly dead. There are thing AI cannot do, rewriting and rephasing are not among them, for sure.
If you feel like your phrasing is off, you can prompt that phrase or paragraph to AI and ask it to rephrase, optionally in some specified style.
Never used it to "generate" lines, never copied "rephrased" lines in their entirety either. Would you count that as AI-assisted writing? Pretty nasty grey area, innit?

Prompting code snippets

Because no one wants to write a function to convert unix timestamp into day in a year by hand. Cannot see how that is any different from copy-pasting from stack overflow, especially when it is linked as one of the sources.

Prompting notes

I have lots of notes, a proper diary, even. I write down all the fleeting ideas, distilling them into TODO lists... read previous entries about all that. On multiple occasions i tried putting my notes into AI. I thought i could use those electric brains to either reorder unsorted notes, or to fart out a myriad of tiny lore details.

For example, i would ask the bot "What if historically Y happened instead of X? List the most notable historical alterations and chart the timeline until year ZZZZ".
Kind of useful, can give you feeling for time and scale. I never used it to fill in major plot points - these are my executive decisions. And for minor details i may use it as reference. Usually i skim through these walls of text and maybe write down a few notes. I hope using a random date AI thought up for some minor event does not count as "AI-generated writing".

With much less success i tried prompting it to expand character profiles or location profiles. Very generic, very meh.

Generating reference images from description

Indeed, i tried to do that with those image generators. Results usually were unsatisfactory.

Generating reference images from sketches

Same intent as above, but directly image-to-image, very old idea, actually - the very first AI showcases were of AI completing random scribbles.
Some time ago i was experimenting with krita-ai-diffusion thingamajig i found. It could be useful if my machine were able to handle generating even the tiniest images in real time. Did not bother with it any further.

Does all this warrant AI disclosure? I personally do not think it does, neither does Steam, for example, which only requires disclosure if in-game assets are AI-generated or AI-assisted, none of which are in British Wonderland. From Itch's description in "Edit Game" tab, i think Itch will be alright about it as well.

Overall, using AI content as "reference" does not seem to count as "AI-assisted". But i know radical anti-AI crowd would disapprove of one even looking in the general direction of AI tools.

P.S. if you successfully read through this wall fo text - congratulations, now go read the Addendum