Indie game devs says generative AI means he couldn't make his 2021 breakout today

An indie developer claims he couldn't make his 2021 indie game today in 2024 - and it all comes down to generative AI.

Developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. has taken to Twitter to post videos reflecting on the development of An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs. The lovely little narrative-driven adventure game sees a lone human trying to navigate a maze of airports to reach their loved one, but as Nelson Jr. attests to in the tweets below, he's not sure he could have made the same game today.

"Today I couldn't make it because of generative AI," Nelson Jr. says in the video below. The game originally started without the dogs entirely, but then the developer accidentally put in an eight-foot-tall stock photo of a dog behind an airport counter, and the course of the game was settled: the team would use stock photos of dogs to "build something beautiful and new."

The reason the team at Strange Scaffold was able to use the stock photos in their game all comes down to when it was made. An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs was created between 2019 and 2021, so the legality of the stock photos was never in serious doubt because you could easily search them online and find out whether you could safely use them or not. 

The problem these days is how generative AI has become "injected" into public domain images, Nelson Jr. notes. The new stuff is all coming from a "poisoned well," the developer says; now you can't be 100% sure whether the public domain image you're using is free to re-contextualize and repurpose. 

Someone could have trained an AI image on corporate-owned art and injected it into the public domain. The result? A developer like Nelson Jr. isn't sure whether the public domain image they're using in their game is actually free or whether it's ripped off the work of others. 

"If I wanted to do a sequel or a spin-off I could not use the same creative processes because those doors are now closed kind of forever," Nelson Jr. laments. The developer adds that although generative AI is "really cool" and that there are people looking into how to handle it in an ethical fashion, we'll ultimately never be able to go back to a time before generative AI "proliferated" around the internet.

If Nelson Jr. seems familiar to you, it's because they put out El Paso, Elsewhere last year, an absolute banger of a throwback shooter in the Max Payne vein. If you haven't played it, or An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, we recommend you remedy that.

You can also read up on our upcoming indie games guide for a look ahead at the future of smaller games.