You just don’t fuckin’ need generative AI, man

Just recently, Sega announced that it would be bringing back the beloved Crazy Taxi series with a new entry: Crazy Taxi World Tour. Hooray! Then they went and put a somewhat-ambiguous generative AI disclosure on their Steam page. Boo! I’m going to be absolutely clear and completely fuckin’ up-front here: I will not be buying Crazy Taxi World Tour. I will not be knowingly supporting games that have been created using generative AI. MoeGamer will not be giving any coverage to games that, at the time I play them and write about them, have been created using generative AI, whether it’s just an ickle-wickle bit for some of that oh-so difficult concept art, or something more egregious like completely replacing a cast of actual voice actors with robots. I’m sure I will make mistakes in this process! I’m sure there are developers who are out there using generative AI and not disclosing it! That sucks! But this is something I’m standing hard and fast with to the best of my ability. Let’s talk a little more about that after the jump. “The genie is out of the bottle”, the AI boosters say. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but every coder is using AI tools these days.” Are they? Are they though? Because I find that difficult to believe. The year is 2026, 55 years after Computer Space, the first commercially released video game. For the vast majority of that time, people have been making games without the use of AI tools. When I was growing up, I learned how to program in Atari BASIC using nothing more than some books, some magazines and a willingness to experiment. I personally didn’t take things any further, but there are countless stories of teenage “bedroom programmer” who shot to prominence through their ability to program — often using “bare metal” approaches such as machine code to wring the maximum possible performance out of the devices they were programming for. With the complexity of today’s video games, such an approach is impractical, at least partly due to the size of the teams who are working on most projects. But those teams have expertise; individual members all have their own specialisms, and by working together, they can assemble something wonderful. Know how I know that? Because it’s been happening for a lot longer than this generative AI shit has been around. The most fucking irritating thing about all this generative AI shit is the number of people who have been way too willing to just throw their hands up in the air, go “thank God I don’t have to develop and nurture any specialist skills and knowledge any more” and just let Claude fucking Code write something for them. “It’s democratising development,” they’ll say. Except it fucking isn’t, is it? Because you have to pay for Claude Code, and this is going to become a particular problem now that more and more generative AI providers are moving to token-based billing. A few weeks of that and it will suddenly look a lot more desirable to have human programmers who actually know what they’re doing. Because Claude Code and its ilk, while certainly quick to churn things out, are demonstrably making so many projects worse, creating more work for people who have to debug and reorganise the unoptimised garbage spewed out by the plagiarism robots. Just ask the open-source community, who are grappling with this right now — or look at the absolute state of vibe-coded shit from Google, Microsoft, Bluesky and countless others right now. And then what happens when — not if — the bubble pops and all this generative AI crap becomes completely unsustainable? What are all these Claude-reliant programmers going to do then? The world of programming moves at an incredible pace, and if these people have spent several years specifically not engaging with the concept of being able to do the job themselves, their skills are going to atrophy, leaving us with teams of supposedly “senior” programmers who actually don’t know how to program any more. That seems… sub-optimal. And art! We have artists! There are lots of artists out there, many of whom would like some work! If you’re looking for “concepts” for your new game, hire a fucking artist! Their specialism is in conjuring up things out of their head and getting them down onto paper! To direct the slop machine to just steal some garbage from the Internet and then tell your art team to “just do that, but make it a bit different” is the height of disrespect towards people whose very specialism is concept art. They don’t want their process to be more “efficient”! They want to do a good job! Actors! We have actors! A significant proportion of them do a way better job than a robot! Oh, what’s that, you paid the actors the robot voices are based on? Then why not pay them to get in a fucking recording booth and get it done properly? It costs a bit more? Tough shit, people need to make ends meet. And again, as more and more AI platforms move to token-based billing, it’s not going to be very long at all before the human approach is going to be the more affordable, desirable one. And even if you think you have counter-arguments to all of the above (spoiler: you don’t) the fact is that the output of generative AI consistently fucking sucks. Art all looks the same and is riddled with technical inaccuracies that a professional human would never make. Voice acting lacks any human nuance. Code quickly becomes spaghetti. And, it should be abundantly fucking clear at this point, the general public absolutely fucking hates this shit and thinks you are a cunt if you use it. I should be clear: I absolutely fucking hate this shit and think you are a cunt if you use it. You just don’t fuckin’ need generative AI, man. I’m sad that I won’t be able to enjoy a new Crazy Taxi when it comes out as the project is now forever tainted, but the originals haven’t stopped existing. And those were not made using the lake-boiling plagiarism machine. Maybe have a think about that for a bit. Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee. Did you know you can subscribe to MoeGamer as a newsletter and get new posts delivered right to you? Just pop your email address in below and subscribe for free. Your address will not be used for anything else. Type your email… Subscribe