Just because you can order at a restaurant doesn’t mean you’re a chef," lawyer

In one example of generative AI tools being misused, a lawyer who specializes in video game contracts says a recent agreement fell through after the client received a load of vibe-coded material made by someone who didn't "know what he made."

Haley MacLean, IP lawyer and video game practice head at Voyer Law, shared the anonymized incident on Bluesky.

"Programming contractor delivers my client a milestone," she begins. "It’s broken and full of issues so we request revisions before acceptance. Contractor says he can’t and wants full payment. Turns out it’s all AI and he doesn’t even know what he made. So he’s not getting paid and he wasted my client’s time."

In an interview with GamesRadar+, MacLean previously outlined the legal arguments against gen AI use in game development, calling it a copyright risk, a threat to reputation, and a rights ownership hazard. Here, she examines the tech through the lens that more and more developers – in games and beyond – are using: even looking purely at output and ignoring ethical or creative concerns, there's a clear difference between applying AI and thoughtlessly relying on it.

"Also it was a breach of [confidentiality] because he stuck all the confidential game info into the AI tool to 'make' the milestone so there’s also that, she adds. "Just because you can order at a restaurant doesn’t mean you’re a chef."

MacLean told us that she sees more and more clients baking anti-AI clauses into contracts, and she recommends this sort of protection due to the legal risks the tech poses. "Now it's just boilerplate, to the point that if I did encounter one that didn't have a gen AI clause, if the publisher was creating assets too, I would say we need to push for that to make sure the publisher is not using gen AI in the marketing, porting, QA of your game," she said.

A torrent of AI slop on storefronts like Steam, and in open-source circles like ports and recomps, has intensified discussion of how gen AI should be treated and used in games. The heads of PS3 emulator RPCS3 took words from the mouths of many, telling AI-reliant vibe coders to "learn how to debug, code, and leave behind something useful to humanity when you're gone."

Games industry leaders like Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney remain devout AI proponents, but many developers have said they oppose the tech, or at least its current mainstream forms, for several reasons.

Epic even briefly made gen AI a requirement for a new Unreal Engine game jam, and that was just days after saying it "vibe coded" the new Epic Games Store launcher. It's hard not to feel like we're poisoning language, with vibe coding increasingly used to refer to code made by people who understand AI prompts better than programming languages.

In 2025, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell predicted that AI could lead to a "funny situation" where less-experienced programmers who are better with AI tooling could be "more effective" in terms of value creation.

In a Steam Next Fest plagued by AI slop, the biggest single-player demo is a game about fighting "rampant AI" – a sim where you're basically a merchant in Cyberpunk 2077