Yesterday it came out that Big Walk used LLMs in its development. In House House's response (archived here), they stated that the use was small and largely consultative rather than generative, although some amount of LLM-generated code was used as the basis for code that shipped.

Big Walk was developed without an internal AI usage policy in place, and we consider that lack of policy a failure. We will work to have a more comprehensive policy going forwards.

Reading between the lines, this final paragraph suggests that LLM usage was not a matter of company policy but rather one or a few engineers making individual decisions about their workflows. It also implies that they will institute a policy against this in the future, but leaves open the possibility that the policy they settle on will allow some amount of LLM usage.

I'm sure there's a tremendous amount of bickering about this happening on social media; I'm no longer in that particular torment nexus, so I don't know the details. I do know that this news will affect how I think about Big Walk going forward, so I think it's worth taking the time to revise my review and describe how and why my feelings have changed. In doing so, I hope to articulate my position on LLM usage more broadly.

I loved my time with Big Walk. I don't hand out five-star reviews lightly, but I was confident this game would earn one as soon as I began to understand just how cleverly it created new forms of play and puzzle solving between friends. It was clearly a work of masterful artistry, painted with the palette of real human interaction which is tremendously difficult to master but intensely rewarding to experience. That artistry was real, and it is still present regardless of the tools used.

At the same time, no piece of art exists in isolation. All art is in conversation with the culture that created it, with the art that surrounded and preceded it, with the economic conditions under which it was produced. If history is driven by material contradictions, as Marx and Engels taught, then we can expect to see aspects of that contradictory tension in the artifacts produced during that history. Within Big Walk, an artifact of impressive artistry, we see the use of a tool whose very existence is inimical to art as a discipline, a tool built from the work of artists and craftspeople over their vehement objections, a tool whose creators depend on the immiseration of workers for their own success, a tool whose effects on the physical world are profoundly detrimental.

Knowing that LLMs were used doesn't remove the artistry from Big Walk, but it changes everything about its conversation with the culture around it. Big Walk is now, indelibly, in some part an attack on the artistry of all the games that came before it and on the very possibility of all the games that could come after. Even House House's response gestures at this:

We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalisation of this technology, or its treatment as “inevitable”. We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world, and apologise that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards.

Of course, the best way not to contribute to the normalization of LLMs is not to use them at all. But I suspect by the time any discussions were being had at a company-wide level, the horses had fled the stable and locking the door would do no good. I truly do not envy them the position of knowing people would view all their work as tainted by a few decisions made in the heat of debugging, and that there was no real way to undo the results of those decisions.

Some may sympathize so much with this dilemma that they take it as a sign that people are speaking out too harshly against LLMs. I could not disagree more with this position. On the contrary, we must do everything we can to make the use of LLMs culturally radioactive, such any use in a cultural product is treated as putting that product in conflict with human culture as a whole. It doesn't need to be black or white—we can acknowledge that Big Walk is far less in conflict than in the mountains of steamslop that continue to pile up around us—but we need to be clear that the only amount of LLM use that's truly acceptable is none. While we can grant some grace to those who don't yet realize that this is a conflict and there are sides, we must in the final accounting recognize that works on the wrong side do real harm that we cannot paper over.

Others may point out that condemning all use of LLMs incentivizes lying about whether a game uses them, to which I reply: good! If someone is going to do something broadly (not specifically) harmful, they should hide it in shame and fear that the world might one day know. It can be hard to remember in the brazen 2020s, but shame works as a deterrent. Forcing undesirable behaviors underground mitigates their spread! We've all seen this happening in reverse: as it became more feasible for trans people to exist in public over the last few decades, an explosion of people realized they could transition too. We can and must harness this power to drive LLM use into the shadows. Responsible creators will disclose the use when asked even if it stands to harm them, as House House did. And irresponsible ones will be forced to balance whatever they think they stand to gain by standing on the necks of artists against the very concrete cost of scandal if it comes to light.

In most of the world today, the people don't exercise political power. Good work is being done to try and change that, but it will not change tomorrow nor will it change next year. But we can exercise power through culture because, despite capitalist attempts to capture it completely, part of culture is the people. When enough of us speak in one voice and say "this is not what we want art to be", the world will listen.