AI "assisted" Code is still generative AI and it's weird how people try to justify that it's not

Last week I wrote at length about how much I was enjoying the Spirit Crossing playtest, a life sim MMO being built by the team that made Cozy Grove.

One of the first things I did before loading up the game was check to see if the Steam page had an AI use disclosure because in the back of my head, I worried that given the financial status of the studio (TLDR: was indie, got bought by Netflix, bought itself back from Netflix, is now indie again) there might be so called "cost-cutting" measures like AI in use. Obviously I'd hoped not, but that's an ever-present concern; I do this for every game on Steam at this point.¹

Thankfully there were no AI disclosures on the game's Steam page so I went into it with open eyes and heart and, well, I've gotten trampled on a bit.

Yesterday, Duck AI Slop, a sort of watchdog resource for keeping track of AI use posted an update that a Spry Fox employee made a statement in the Spirit Crossing discord indicating the engineers and designers use Claude:

Chedd: Hi folks, sorry, I've been AFK with family in town today and only just noticing this AI conversation now, right before I was planning to go to bed! Our designers and engineers are using Claude to make their lives easier; for example, designers will use Claude to help them make a change they want to make by editing dozens of config files quickly instead of painstakingly editing each file by hand. We do not use any form of genAI in any way to create content in Spirit Crossing. All the art, music, etc, is 100% human created. And will continue to be.
I personally also frequently use AI to research various topics online.

(Emphasis mine)

The second screenshot:

Chedd: It is a complex and emotionally charged topic, for many very good reasons. I am grateful that many of you care about this. FWIW, when I spun Spry Fox out of Netflix, I chose to pay myself $20k/year and give the majority of the studio's equity to all the other employees because I care deeply about all the other employees. Our very limited usage of AI is the same: I have allowed it to the extent that it helps my studio's employees hopefully be able to maintain decent work life balance and not grind themselves into paste trying to make this big, complicated MMO with our limited indie studio resources.

For context, Chedd is the Spirit Crossing discord username of Spry Fox co-founder David Edery

This message set off a firestorm in the Spirit Crossing discord, spinning out an entire thread of what is / isn't justified AI use, how because it wasn't art it's "ok", because we live in a society and complaining about this on Claude-coded BlueSky is hypocritical, how other larger companies use AI and aren't held to this standard etc etc.

Then I saw this post from Sky where she shared screenshots from a support ticket she'd opened with Spry Fox (notably before the AI statement from David) expressing concern about some things in-game that felt potentially generated by AI, and here's the response from Fern, the Spry Fox Community lead:

Sky: Hey, I don't want to ask this question as an accusation - but I keep seeing the sparkles emoji a fair bit in the game (playing the playtest atm) and in places that don't make too much sense. Does the game use generative Al at all? I know the sparkles emoji doesn't just mean that, used to love the emoji myself. But seeing it so much in this is putting me on edge a lil

SpryFern: hey, thanks for asking, but want to assure you that's not how we come up with the canned expressions / dialogue. those are all bespoke and put together by the team members working on design and UI (in fact, there's a couple goofy emoji-based ones in there that I've recommended) we really enjoy emoji usage like this for ease of expression - especially for a game that will have a variety of players on both PC and mobile, some finding it harder to type as quickly as others, or some just not quite as talkative. so it's definitely a shame that's how some emojis are associated now because we're a team that enjoys our sparkle emojis and our em dashes. but rest assured, we're adding those sparkles manually and with intent.

(Again, emphasis mine) Because that wasn't a definitive no for its use elsewhere, Sky continued:

Sky: also wanted to ask, you say genAl wasn't used for canned expressions/dialogue, but was it used for anything else?

SpryFern: it is not, just wanted to make sure answered your question directly (and am also deeply multi-tasking on this busy morning, apologies)

So we have Fern telling someone that Generative AI was not used in the game's development, directly at odds with what the co-founder would say shortly after. There's kind of only three potential takeaways from the above:

1. Fern did not know that AI was used by other teams
2. Fern actively lied about AI use
3. Fern and the Spry Fox team somehow did not consider designers and engineers using Claude as "generative AI"

The first is excusable, and totally possible. I've worked for companies in a support role and answered things I believed were true that turned out were not.

The second two though - intentional mislead OR willful ignorance of the AI's impact, man that's a horrible look.

Right now there's a sort of prevalence of what can only be described as "AI use in my field is abhorrent....but it's ok for use in these other fields I'm not personally invested in" disconnects. We see this with musicians saying "for music it's bad, but it's ok for generating album art", or how game developers proudly say they don't use it for code but are fine with it being used for language translation, etc etc.

This obviously extends to "We did not use it for any art or writing" as (paraphrasing) David and Fern said above - but somehow it's totally fine to use for coding? As if coding is not also art? Or intellectual property? And the theft models used to create Claude (speaking of, Anthropic are currently facing a 1.5 BILLION dollar lawsuit for unauthorized ingestion of book authors IP into their Claude models) are totally fine?

One of David's points is that Claude is a way to give work-life balance to the engineers at the studio so the company can be financially stable in a time where their financial future is in doubt. Ultimately, I get that I can say this because I'm not the one who will lose a house if Spry Fox goes under, but it needs to be repeated that myth of AI productivity increases are just that - a myth and we've talked on this very blog about how it results in forever work instead. There's also the whole "if you can't afford to make this big, complicated MMO without AI, then you really can't afford to make this big, complicated MMO period" but again, that's a conversation for another day.

I had a really pleasant Email exchange with David last week after I'd read Fern's blog post about the financial roadmap for the game. Again, because the whole "worker owned small studio, underdog trying to survive after being freed from a corporate owner" thing I legitimately want this company to survive, so I asked their contact form how a fan of the game could financially support them right now while it's not yet for sale. I got a response from David of all people that was surprising and entirely focused on the well-being of the workers so I can almost see how he gets here: someone says "hey can I use Claude for this task it'll speed me up I think" and then it spirals.² But down the road, the token costs will only go up and the company will end up dependent on this "cost cutting tool" in order to survive until that inevitable bubble bursts.

(Why more people don't view AI code as radioactive to their codebase is beyond me but again, I'm meandering a bit)

At this point, David is being incredibly normal over being asked to place an AI disclosure on Steam:

Denying anyone at the company said they didn't use AI:

It's possible Fern is not an employee but c'mon

Doubling down on the "we are making something too big without Netflix funds, we had to do this" which, again, is an indication the project should have been shelved until proceeds from the Cozy Grove sequel came in:

And trying to appeal to people's humanity as if this wasn't entirely a self-own

Anyway, I feel for the employees at Spry Fox. I feel for all the artists and writers or anyone else who never touched AI during development and maybe had no idea this was happening. I feel for everyone who worries the company may shut down and don't know how the paychecks are gonna keep coming in. But man.³

This is actively being handled beyond poorly and I gotta be done with the game unless they can walk this back and do some work to rebuild confidence, which is a shame because I do think they had something special here.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here's your end of post cat. Her name is Selmers.