I think you will get stung either way here. Even explaining yourself, people will then move the fence posts and will then point to having co-pilot finish lines for you is the reason that they think the game feels weird or is disappointing.
If you want to use the technology I think you are going to have to take the good with the bad.
Perhaps for the target audience if you think the use of AI might be a sticking point. Just taking the extra 3-4 seconds to write the rest of the line yourself might be a better value proposition. Or just do like other people are doing in the industry and just lie that you don't use it.
Wow, I would have loved to see that Wheelsprung disclosure when preordering season 2.
On the topic, I personally don’t think more nuance than we have currently would change anything. If developers really want to explain the details they can always link to a longer text which would probably help a lot more than cramming it into a couple lines.
Creating an external page is extra effort on the developer's part and hiding it behind a link will decrease the amount of people seeing it considerably, I think.
Out of 3 posts who were negative about Ai use, one changed opinion due to my explanation of how it was used. I'm hopeful that it could make a difference
I do think this topic has some room for nuanced conversation, I am very against AI art, and all of the multi billion dollar tech companies that are stealing peoples’ labor to create tools to enable and even encourage companies to layoff their workers.
Despite this, I don’t see an huge issue with solo developers using co-pilot’s autocomplete. It’s one of those uses of AI that I feel is just here to stay due to it just speeding up existing workflows rather than trying to replace anything. I see it kind of like Adobe’s generative fill for removing an object from a photo, people were already using the healing brush and content aware fill, this method is just a bit quicker and occasionally better. I think for me, so long as the tool isn’t replacing but aiding in some of the slightly repetitive elements of creation I don’t really consider that “ai art” or ai generated work, and I don’t think using autocomplete removes the soul from your game or whatever is being implied in some of the posts above.
I definitely think it’s good and important that developers disclose the extent they use ai, but I can imagine fewer and fewer developers will disclose using AI for code assistance especially after seeing peoples’ reactions.
I am very pro regulation for AI in general however, I think tech companies should be required to financially compensate people whose work trains their models and scraping the internet+stealing literature/other works is highly unethical and shouldn’t be legal imo.
I also feel that platforms that intentionally create AI tools to replace workers just shouldn’t exist, we’re going to have mass layoffs as a result of these tech companies. Generative AI like ChatGPT is also creating all sorts of developmental problems for kids using it, as well as inducing psychiatric issues and delusions.
All in all, it’s not great but I’m not going to get mad at solo developers for ai correcting/autocompleting their code, that’s probably not even in my top 100 concerns when it comes to AI.
I think, generally speaking, that having more freeform text inputs in the metadata would be detrimental for searching & discovery in Catalog. Even the older fields, like Accessibility, could be more helpful if they could be searched or filtered on, and the same goes for genAI.
(By "filter" I mean both the possibility of a filtering option in Catalog at some point, but also just being manually able to quickly scan the important info at the bottom of the page. Having more arbitrary text makes that section a lot less legible.)
If you want to explain features or background of your game further, why not have it in the description? I understand where your 1-in-3 point comes from, but the vast majority of people in favour/against the use of genAI don't differentiate between how much you used it. Seeing that a lot of the arguments revolve around topics like climate/ethics etc, I'm skeptical that this kind of nuance is all that important here. I think the gains won't outweigh the losses in this case.
Also, I agree with @RDK that this should have been disclosed on the S2 page. Not really on you, but still disappointing to be honest.
It wouldn't have been possible for me to come as far as I've com on my game (it's 90% done... promise) without using ChatGPT and Gemini for code assistance and some of the graphics.
I had never written code in Lua, hadn't written any code for about 15 years. It was a massive help in the beginning, just as watching youtube videos or asking questions on this forum. One of the most useful things I did was ask it about SDK documentation conventions. those nested inside () did my head in.
What has become clear to me is that there's no way a chatbot could have coded a full game with just vibe coding. But as a way to get going, or to write a very clearly defined function I think t's a genuinely valuable tool.
I totally understand that it's difficult to stay on topic here, but the usefulness or ethics of using Ai are not being questioned here.
I think the summary of your story wrt this feature request is that if players would boycott games that use Ai, that it would impact people like you greatly to the point that they would stop or never start developing for playdate.
But what should Ai disclosure look like in your opinion?
Sorry for the derailment.
140 character freeform plus whats there today.
(I do think the ethics are at the core of this btw. Why else disclose the information at all?)
EDIT:
I think we are going about this all backwards. It's the classic XY Problem. The first question to ask is what the purpose of the AI label is. If the answer is to allow people to easily boycott games that have used so called AI in the development (and I'm guessing AI means LLM and or diffusion model in this case) then a binary is all it takes.