I was working on a collaboration between a new indie game dev and Best Music Coach for the composers in my community. This was going to be a really cool opportunity to get their music into games, and I was going to be able to get like 15 composers in on this. That would be so many composers with their first, second, third, or fourth game credit. This is a great step up.
Then I found out the game used AI in the coding process.
While Steam has updated their terms of service so that if coding uses AI, it actually does not need to be declared as AI…that does not change or shift the culture and the brand reputation that could potentially fall onto a composer around the fact that AI was used at all in the project.
So, to protect this company’s and our composers’ current and future brand, I declined the opportunity, because we’re not sure where this whole AI thing will go in terms of the indie music scene.
It may be, as we’ve seen, a slow crawl year over year. It gets more and more accepted and does not need to be labeled in terms of backend stuff like coding, as Steam has already shown it to do.
However, if we look at other hubs of developers, gamers, and indie game enthusiasts like Godot, for example, any AI used at any part of the process on Godot needs to be declared and, by and large, is met with disgust, distaste, and a “heck no”. We can also look at recent additions of AI coding tools and game engine software that have received a tremendous amount of backlash.
Until the dust settles around how this whole thing works out, I’m not gonna be bringing the composers I work with opportunities that involve AI.
What does the dust settling look like?
Well, that may look like people using local models that don’t require giant data centers, and the local models were not trained off of intellectual property theft…and the indie community as a whole comes to an agreement on what can and can’t, and should and should not have AI in it.
After all, I keep finding myself questioning algorithms that have existed for years…at what point is it AI?
Let’s go on this journey together with open hearts and minds and TRUE empathy for our fellow humans even when they disagree with us.
Keep reading
- How do you find indie game developers to work with?
- Should You Go to Music School or Build a Game Music Portfolio From Home?
- The Gamer Music Creator Guild
Gamer Music Creator Guild Results
- Guild members who have released music
- 25
- Total Guild member releases
- 114
- Average days to first release
- 67.2
- Guild soundtracks in progress
- 4
The average covers members who have reached a first release. See the releases and stories.