Veteran game artist Kenney Vleugels, known fondly to some as "Asset Jesus" for his enormous library of ready-made game assets, recently joined the chorus of devs standing against AI and the billionaires pushing it – and in doing so, managed to thoroughly piss off AI-first billionaires Tim Sweeney of Epic Games and Elon Musk of SpaceX and xAI.

On October 18, Vleugels chucked a fairly innocuous message into the sea of Twitter. "Don't let billionaires convince you slop is the future," he argues. "They're used to managing [and] directing, not making things themselves. Of course they can't see the difference. They don't understand your love for the craft. Keep making personal, beautiful games."

Vleugels' post followed a vocal pivot to AI-led development and vibe coding from Epic Games, which proudly boasted of using AI to help assemble a new storefront launcher that has not yet solved the problem of categorically losing to Steam. Evidently reading the post as a slight against him or others like him, Sweeney was quick to reply.

"This is bullshit, Kenney," Sweeney counters. "I’m the same tech tree following optimist who moved from C to C++, from 2D to 3D, and from closed source to open source. I run a company. I write code. I contribute to published papers. I’ve upped my expectations of AI. Up yours!"

Vleugels informed Sweeney that Epic Games employees "are liking my post" and "reach out to me all the time," and stressed that the "'adapt or die'" messaging around AI tools is exhausting and unfair.

Source link