The idea that people who use game engines are at all equivalent to AI art prompters is ridiculous. What you’re doing is being like a painter who says “real painters mix their own pigments”. It’s unnecessary gatekeeping.
I would call both gatekeeping. All forms of creation; using AI, CSP or paint to make art, or using ChatGPT, a game engine or no game engine to make games, are all valid, with different restrictions and advantages.
Sometimes gatekeeping is necessary. None of the AI driven "make a game with a prompt" projects I've seen posted here (which would be the AI equivalent of a "game engine") have been capable of making a game worth playing, despite technically being "games", so I'll have to disagree with you on at least that point for now.
I specifically said complaining about game devs who use engines is unnecessary gatekeeping. On the other hand, complaining about artists (or game devs!) who exclusively use AI seems like a valid use of gatekeeping to me.
If you meet someone at a party who self-describes as a carpenter, and you say, “oh that's awesome, I've been trying to add onto my deck by myself with no prior knowledge of carpentry and I'm running into trouble, can you give me some pointers?” and he replies, “oh I don't actually know anything at all about carpentry, I've never done carpentry before, I just design mass-produced wooden products in CAD software”, then you'd probably ask, “okay, well why do you self-describe as a carpenter, then?”
If the term used to describe a craftsman of a given craft grows to include people who don't actually know anything about said craft other than engaging with higher-level abstractions over core practices of said craft, then what value does the term continue to have?
The idea that “gatekeeping” is always a bad word (for ill-defined wishy-washy reasons) is asinine, and the sooner we recognize this, the better.
I didn’t say gatekeeping was always a bad word, in fact I think some gatekeeping is often justified when it comes to AI art.
As far as the carpenter stuff, I feel like your metaphor is once again going much too far. Someone can be a carpenter whether they buy their wood at home depot or grow the trees themselves… but it would be foolish to say that the person who buys the wood pre-grown is not a real carpenter.
We are talking about game developers, not engine developers. If someone wants to be a game dev, they have to have developed the game, but not the underlying engine. I don’t see how this is controversial.
It's only “controversial” because you're thinking in framing terms that don't necessarily reflect reality—“making a game” and “making a game engine” don't need to be distinct, disparate things.
When Ska Studios (a husband and wife) made Salt and Sanctuary, they just made a game using a library, and a framework that they've evolved over many years of using XNA and then later FNA (both libraries, not engines!), to make their games. They don't “do engine programming” and then “do game programming” as separate acts done by separate people of separate disciplines—they're one and the same!
The whole point I've been getting at in my posts here is that “game engine programming and game development are necessarily distinct, practically unrelated disciplines” is a false premise that people have recently come to believe, and one that I believe deserves significant pushback.
My carpenter metaphor was just fine, you're the one making it more convoluted—when has “carpenter” ever been defined to include “one who grows his own lumber” in its definition, at any point in human history? That was never the case—“carpentry” is the practice of crafting things out of wood, and a “carpenter” is one who engages in and has knowledge of the practice of “carpentry”.
Thus, one who uses CAD software to design products that a factory will mass-produce using wood as a material could be technically referred to as a “carpenter”, because “crafting things out of wood” is, in an abstract sense, what they are doing. But it's clearly disingenuous for such a person, who lacks any knowledge or experience in “traditional” “carpentry”, to self-describe as such, precisely because he lacks the domain knowledge and experience that is expected of someone of such a self-description.
But if an actual carpenter, with actual carpentry knowledge and experience, then goes on to design mass-produced wooden products with CAD software, and he self-describes as a “carpenter” when you meet him at a party, you may think his self-description is a bit odd given what he does for a living—but at least he will in fact be able to give you some pointers about building your deck—thus proving his self-description to be meaningful on some level.
It'll vary for now, but AI isn't quite in that league. It's in the same theory space where I'm sure you CAN make a decently enjoyable NFT game. BUt the concept is unproven as of now and if we're being honest: the scene is full of a lot of grifters.
That isn't' a dismisal nor comparison of AI to other tools. But we don't live in a vacuum, sadly. curent cultural and political issues will affect the reputation of the tools in question.