This Is Not Worker Solidarity You Morons

I wrote this argument once already. Then I deleted Substack.

Unfortunately, the argument survived because gaming culture has spent the intervening period becoming even fucking stupider about artificial intelligence.

So this one is not an apology.

No gamer is getting an apology from me.

I am reviving the old article with original title because now, I actually think I was being too accommodating.

Here is the entire proposition:

A developer used generative AI somewhere while making a videogame.

Okay.

Fucking and?

Finish the fucking argument.

What happened?

Did somebody lose a job?

Did the game get worse?

Did management use the tool to fire half the studio and make the survivors supervise six machines each?

Did the generated output infringe somebody's rights?

Did a live-generation system expose players to some new risk?

Did the studio violate the rules of an award, marketplace, contract, or competition?

Did the use impose some demonstrable environmental burden greater than the relevant alternatives?

What the fuck happened?

Because “they used AI” is not the description of a harm.

That is a provenance fact. It tells me an instrument entered a production path.

Now tell me what the instrument did.

That little missing step is apparently beyond an embarrassingly large fraction of gaming culture.

The Gamer's Definition of "Supporting People."

The original version of this article began with Vapor World: Over the Mind.

It is almost too perfect.

The Korean indie studio ALIVE launched the game into Early Access in August with about 100,000 wishlists and a team the studio described as roughly five people. The launch immediately ran into fury over conspicuously AI-generated cinematics that had not appeared in the earlier demo. The most-helpful Steam review included the sentence:

“Unfortunately I support people not robots.”

Oh, also, these cutscenes apparently looked like total fucking shit.

PC Gamer reported visible continuity problems in the cinematics and described them extremely unfavorably compared with the game's actual art. Director Young Kim said the team had struggled to produce the narrative cinematics with its available resources, turned to AI hoping to concentrate more effort on the game itself, and then concluded the experiment had failed. ALIVE removed every AI-generated cutscene and restored its earlier in-engine versions.

Great.

That is a quality argument.

The cinematics looked bad.

Players disliked something that was actually in the fucking game.

The developer looked at the result, agreed that it had failed, and changed it.

That is an entirely ordinary game-development loop.

Now.

What does “I support people not robots” add?

Fucking nothing.

Actually, worse than nothing. It actively misdescribes the real fucking world.

That studio was about five people.

The people you goddamned morons wanted so badly to support were right fucking there.

The robot did not walk into ALIVE headquarters, fire the concept artist, steal their employee badge, eat their lunch out of the refrigerator, and take their health insurance.

Five human beings selected an instrument because five human beings were trying to make more game than five human beings could comfortably make.

• Their experiment fucking sucked.
  • So criticize the experiment.

The leap from that fact to worker solidarity requires locating a fucking worker who was actually fucking displaced.

There wasn't one.

There was a hypothetical employee who might have existed in another completely different production configuration that does not fucking exist, under another budget that does not fucking exist, another schedule that does not fucking exist, another funding environment that does not fucking exist, and another version of the game that does not fucking exist, you fucking morons.

That imaginary sixth employee became morally more important to you goddamned degenerates than the five extant workers actually making the goddamned game.

That was the original point. It remains the point.

You fucking morons.

The Fictional Missing Worker Has Become an Entire Fucking Political Movement For Morons.

Suppose a publisher employs eighty artists.

Management fires sixty. It deploys generative systems to recreate a large portion of their previous output.

The remaining twenty absorb supervisory work.

Executives keep the productivity savings.

Holy shit!

We have successfully located a labor problem.

• There were (fucking real, extant, with rent and families) workers.
• There was a transition.
  • People lost wages and bargaining power.
  • Management changed the production relation.
    • Management captured the gains.

Now we can discuss automation, substitution, deskilling, workload, ownership, profit distribution, bargaining power, unemployment, severance, credit, and the future structure of creative labor.

That is real labor analysis.

Now, change the case.

A three-person studio has never employed a background illustrator.

One developer generates ten temporary backgrounds while prototyping an encounter.

Six are deleted.

Three are painted over.

One becomes a composition reference for a final asset.

Who was fired?

Fucking nobody.

Which salary disappeared?

Fucking none.

Which employee was replaced?

No employee existed in that fucking position.

You can still object to the model's training provenance.

You can still dislike the process.

You can still refuse to buy the game.

Your wallet remains your wallet. Go fucking ape. Be a consumer.

What you cannot do, morons, is conjure a nonexistent wage relation out of counterfactual fucking vapor and call your economic punishment of workers for increased entertainment value worker solidarity.

You have skipped the worker again, you fucking idiot.

Gaming Culture Has Built a Purity Detector.

This has now become measurable.

A 2026 study analyzed more than 508,000 English-language Steam reviews and found games disclosing generative-AI use received lower recommendation rates and more negative sentiment than games associated with procedural generation.

In a qualitative sample, reviewers repeatedly interpreted generative AI as evidence of low developer investment.

Read that carefully.

Interpreted as.

• The production method becomes a proxy for exerted effort.
  • The effort proxy becomes a proxy for quality.
    • Quality becomes a proxy for ethics.

Then everybody forgets the chain existed, because they are fucking morons.

• AI detected.
  • Low effort inferred.
  • Bad game inferred.
  • Worker abuse inferred.
  • Moral contamination established.
    • Punish.
      • Gamer Fuel.

And once an idiot builds a purity detector, it eventually starts hallucinating contaminants.

That is not a hypothetical. You fucking morons already did that.

The indie RPG Shrine's Legacy received negative Steam reviews accusing it of being AI-generated. The developer publicly denied using generative AI and said its writing, code, and art were human-made. Some of you just fucking heroic little internet activists then demanded the developers provide evidence proving they had made their game by hand.

Because of course you fucking idiots couldn't admit you were wrong.

This is where this whole idiotic thing reaches religious-comedy levels.

This little anti-AI purity system became so committed to "protecting human artists" that it started economically punishing human artists for looking insufficiently human.

Terrible fucking work. Completely idiotic, completely shameful, and completely foreseeable.

Your vibes-based detector has become sovereign over the thing it was supposed to "protect," geniuses.

Even Fucking Valve Can Maintain This Distinction.

Steam's own documentation is more conceptually disciplined than a substantial amount of gaming discourse.

Its current content survey explicitly says that modern game-development environments contain AI-powered tools and that efficiency gains from those tools are not the focus of its generative-AI content section. The section focuses primarily on generated content that actually ships with the game and is consumed by players.

Steam then subjects that generated output to the same basic content promises as all other shipped material, with extra guardrail requirements for live generation.

Valve managed to figure this one out before you fucking dipshits.

“AI Replaces Artists”.

Yeah. Sometimes it does.

So show me them. Bring them to me.

Larian became an especially useful case because the asinine little reaction game got ahead of the facts.

Swen Vincke described generative AI being used in early ideation and reference exploration, with original artists producing the actual art and no AI-generated art intended for the final game. Amid the backlash from the idiots among us, he said Larian had 72 artists, 23 of them concept artists, and was hiring more.

That does not establish that every internal practice at Larian is wonderful. It establishes something much narrower and much more destructive to the standard argument:

You cannot infer artist displacement from the presence of the tool, you fucking morons.

The publicly described labor relation in that case pointed in the opposite fucking direction.

If evidence later shows workers were displaced, excellent. Bring me the evidence. Then we have a case.

Until then:

• AI use
  • → worker replacement

is not an argument. That is not even a complete thought.

Just classic human slop.

“AI Produces Slop”

Now let's review the AI slop.

This one is hilariously easy, which is why it is so embarassing so few of you can do it.

• If the character grows three fingers during a cinematic,
  • criticize that.
• If the prose sucks,
  • criticize it.
• If generated dialogue loops,
  • criticize it.
• If the visual language becomes incoherent,
  • criticize it.
• If the code is brittle garbage,
  • criticize it.
• If the game contains ten thousand generated quests and nine thousand nine hundred of them feel like a refrigerator trying to write The Witcher 3 while high,
  • criticize the fucking quests.

That is what those reviews are for, gamers.

Vapor World actually demonstrates this distinction beautifully.

• The output was bad.
  • The studio replaced it.
    • Case closed.

The fact that AI participated does not need to perform some form of additional metaphysical labor.

A bad texture remains a bad texture.

A boring quest remains a boring quest.

A broken script remains a broken script.

The player experiences the result.

So review the fucking result, genius.

“Using AI Is Lazy”

Who gives a fucking shit you fucking moron? What the fuck are you even talking about?

Game development is not a fucking workout, pervert.

Nobody receives a 10x ethical multiplier because the process required more repetitive labor from a degrading human hand, you fucking idiot.

Unlike you perverts, I do not want developers to spend fourteen hours performing a task that a tool can reduce to forty minutes unless those extra thirteen hours and twenty minutes actually fucking produce something worth having.

I do not require programmers to prove their moral character by declining tool assistance. I do not require level designers to calculate every transform with a fucking pencil so I can get hard.

I do not try to destroy the careers of artists because they did not manufacture their own brushes from their plucked hair.

I do not demand that an indie developer implement a physics engine from first principles because using Havok is “cheating,” and my metric for value is apparently how much of someone else's life was expended.

I do not need somebody to hand-place eighty thousand blades of grass so that I can feel the spent labor radiating out of my monitor like a fucking psychopath.

Different tools create different ethical questions. Training provenance, licensing, attribution, data rights, and labor displacement can distinguish generative AI from older production tools.

Yeah. Great.

Then argue those distinctions, genius.

Difficulty itself is not a virtue.

The player is buying a game.

The player is not purchasing proof that the developer suffered enough for them.

Fucking perverts.

“Human Art Has Soul”.

Sure. You and I may prefer it.

That is an aesthetic preference.

You and I are allowed to have one.

Some people want hand-thrown pottery.

Some people only want to hear analog synthesizers.

Some people insist on practical effects.

Some people want film grain produced by actual film.

Some people want paintings where every last mark passed through a human hand.

There is absolutely nothing incoherent about valuing provenance as part of an aesthetic experience.

The complete incoherence begins when:

• “I prefer human-authored artifacts”

magically turns into:

• “therefore someone else using a machine has harmed a worker.”

Those are different propositions.

Your taste in video game art does not become labor economics because you said it very angrily and followed the herd correctly.

“The Models Were Trained Unethically”.

Totally possible.

Now we finally have an argument again.

• Which model?
• Which training corpus?
• Which license?
• Which rights holder?
• Which jurisdiction?
• Which consent mechanism?
• Which commercial relationship?
• Which downstream use?

The answer to these questions still does not rescue the blanket proposition.

Different systems have different provenance. Some tools use licensed material. Some operate on user-owned corpora. Some organizations train their own systems. Some use synthetic data. Some uses involve text assistance. Others generate final commercial artwork. Some outputs preserve recognizable protected material. Others do not.

“AI” is doing absolutely obscene categorical work here.

If your argument concerns exploitation in training, then follow the training relation.

Find it.

Establish it.

Attack the training relation.

Between the company and the human they sourced data from.

Do not wave at a glowing rectangle in the nearest developer's toolbox and announce that justice has been completed because you don't know where else to look but fucking Steam.

“AI Is Bad for the Environment”.

Measure it.

This is another totally legitimate domain converted into a useless fucking religious object by sheer laziness.

Compute consumes resources.

And so does rendering. So do build farms. So do offices. So does outsourcing. So does motion capture. So does flying employees to all those conferences. So does making a game for six years instead of four because the studio is afraid you absolute fucking morons will tank the entire fucking project if you can convince yourselves an AI touched while screaming in Discord.

The relevant question concerns the marginal resource burden of the actual production path against realistic alternatives.

• If an AI workflow burns grotesque amounts of electricity to accomplish something trivial, show it.
• If another workflow reduces thousands of hours of production and its resource footprint, show that too.

Environmental accounting still requires accounting. As in, work.

“Server warm” is not an environmental analysis.

“Developers Should Disclose AI”

Disclose what matters.

Steam already does this more intelligently than the purity regime.

Generated material that ships?

Follow the platform disclosure requirements. The rules apply to everyone.

Live generated systems?

Absolutely. Players may be interacting directly with them, and the safety, privacy, legal, moderation, and dependency questions are materially different.

A game advertised as entirely hand-drawn while secretly shipping generated illustrations?

Of fucking course. Now provenance entered the product promise.

A competition whose rules prohibit generative AI?

Follow the fucking rules.

Copilot suggested some lines inside an internal build script?

No.

No sane production history should become a sacramental genealogy documenting every time a machine participated in cognition.

“I Vote With My Wallet”.

Yes.

I sure noticed.

You sure do, don't you?

And?

Protip, gamers:

Possessing economic power does not make every exercise of economic power virtuous, you fucking imbeciles.

This little fact seems to be extremely confusing to the people who say this phrase like it is heroic.

“I can punish you economically” is a statement of capacity.

Not a moral argument.

Applied Case: The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

The debate tent, the founder-body, and the American enemy business.

Modal Path EthicsAidan Lawson

Steam itself defines a review bomb as a mass use of reviews to express unhappiness, lower a score, and provoke a response. Its developer documentation explicitly acknowledges that such episodes can impose substantial costs on teams of people.

And gaming culture fucking loves this instrument. It's their go-to.

It is completely fucking incoherent.

Developers are simultaneously:

• poor exploited creative workers who must be defended from management,

and

• vendors who can be financially battered into changing production practices whenever consumers become angry.

The contradiction disappears through the moron's magic little comfort phrase:

Vote with your wallet!

No.

Fuck you.

Own what you are doing.

You are applying economic pressure to labor through the market.

Sometimes that pressure may be justified.

Sometimes it may improve a video game.

Sometimes a developer really behaves like an asshole or the publisher deserves the consumer revolt.

Except the weapon does not become benevolent because the glorious consumer is the one holding it.

Party Animals Was The Joke Writing Itself

In May, Party Animals developer Recreate Games announced a $75,000 AI-video contest.

Steam's wisest minds became furious.

Then they review-bombed Party Animals. They don't know how to do much else. These are not our smartest people.

They review-bombed the game.

The already existing game.

Because its developer announced a separate video contest encouraging people to create things with AI.

PC Gamer documented the review bombing and the studio's subsequent attempt to reconsider the contest.

There it is.

Gaming consumer politics completing the full circuit of brain death.

• The players were angry about a creative-production policy in a video contest.
  • So they used a rating of the existing videogame as an economic weapon against the people responsible.

You can do that.

You can attack those workers.

You can try to ruin a game studio over a video contest, if you want to live out your only life as a person who does shit like that.

Just one request.

Stop calling every fucking instance of consumer leverage solidarity.

Sometimes you are simply the party with leverage over those workers.

You are not the default hero because you do or do not buy video games, moron.

Gamers: Not a Moral Class.

This is the part I am no longer interested in softening.

No one on this fucking planet owes “gamers” respect as a political constituency.

"Gamers" deserve fucking nothing.

Individual people deserve ordinary human respect.

Your consumer identity does not become a fucking moral class because several million people share a storefront and know how to coordinate a tantrum better than the local daycare.

"Gaming culture" has developed an absolutely deranged and fucking shameful relationship with developers.

Developers are romanticized as artists whenever players want ammunition against publishers for whatever bullshit they are demanding today.

Then the same exact people become lazy fucking scammers when a patch is late.

They become exploited labor when its time to tantrum about the layoffs that came after their studio got attacked by these same fucking morons until it no longer looked viable to management.

Then they become greedy fucks who belong on the street when DLC costs twelve dollars.

Then they are sacred irreplaceable human creators as soon as AI enters the room.

Then those same precious sacred human creators can have their livelihoods taken until they change how they work.

It is all just fucking incoherent. Just fucking shameful.

"Gamers" are malicious fucking idiots. They are not worthy of anyone's respect or attention.

This has always been true of the modern culture.

Artificial intelligence did something very useful here.

It finally forced all these contradictory stories into the same room.

• The fictional worker.
• The entitled consumer victim.
• The heroic indie scammer.
• The evil corporation that I support every day.
• The sacred artist I want fired and replaced.
• The lazy developer who is also expected to show proof of carpal tunnel syndrome to get me off.
• The labor activist attacking labor.
• The fucking wallet voter.

Now these morons are standing next to each other and everybody can finally see that several of them are the same fucking moron changing costumes between paragraphs for Reddit karma.

So, Fuck Gamers: I Am Going To Use AI To Make Excellent Games Alone.

Fucking extensively too.

There. Saved you super-slueths the Blues Clues detective work. Go do your homework.

Fuck this culture. Fuck this discourse. You morons are not my audience. No one should be making anything for a community of people that treats developers like this. I worry every day and every night for whoever is stuck hosing you fucking idiots down before bedtime.

So yeah, I think I am going to go right ahead and use AI for programming. Gonna to use it for prototypes and test systems. Gonna use it to get models started. Gonna use it for research. Also going to use it to generate things when generation serves the game more than the available alternatives.

Gonna throw away many bad outputs and refine others into what I was trying to create. Then I'm going to replace things when my own work produces something better.

I am going to care about rights, attribution, representation, privacy, platform rules, and the quality of the fucking game.

I am not going to care at all about the social concerns of "gamers."

Fuck gamers. They treat people like shit. Always have.

Oh, and I am absolutely not going to perform unnecessary labor so that some incredibly fucking weird Steam user can feel reassured that this videogame was produced with sufficient human suffering.

This is not CrossFit, you fucking perverts.

The point is not to make development harder.

The point is to make the fucking game.

And make it fucking good.

So if an instrument lets one person with zero resources build something that previously required many more, that fact creates serious economic questions about what happens to those many more people at scale.

At the same time, it creates an extraordinary possibility for the one person who never possessed the capital to hire the others.

Both realities exist.

At the same time.

Fucking crazy, right?

Hard to wrap the mind around. Takes a few years.

Just Finish The Argument.

This is really all I am demanding.

When somebody says AI use in a videogame is bad, make them finish that fucking sentence.

There are real questions available:

• What happened to the quality of the game?
• Who lost work or bargaining power?
• Who captured the productivity gains?
• Was somebody's work used without an acceptable right or license?
• Did the developer misrepresent the product?
• Did the process violate a governing rule?
• Did live generation introduce safety, privacy, moderation, or dependency risks?
• What measurable external costs were created, and compared with what alternative?

Those are arguments.

Some of those can totally condemn a particular use, a particular company, or a particular model provider.

Some can justify a refund, a boycott, regulation, or a union fight.

Some can justify saying, with complete precision:

This particular use of this particular instrument hurt real people.

Stop doing that.

Great. Do all that.

What none of them establish is:

AI use in games is bad.

That sentence has no mechanism.

There is no locus.

No transition.

No affected worker.

No identified right.

No measured cost.

No required output failure.

No theory of repair.

That sentence is a sticker used to distract your three-year-old.

And if your response to seeing that sticker is to coordinate an economic attack on the developers while announcing your support for developers, I have some unfortunate fucking news about which side of the labor relation you are currently occupying.

The people are still piloting the robots, morons.

The people are still making the games.

The people still have rent.

The people still need the launch to work.

The people still have to survive long enough to make another one.

The fucking robot does not give a shit whether you bought the deluxe edition or not.

So criticize the work. Audit the labor relation. Follow the rights. Follow the money. Follow the damage. Follow the extant fucking transition.

And when all you have left is:

“AI touched it.”

You have absolutely fucking nothing.

This is not worker solidarity.

You fucking morons.