AI-Written Code Added to Popular DOOM Engine — Developers Quit After Dispute, Players Blast the Modder

21.10.2025 Comment Views: 21

Some players are irritated by more than just AI-generated artwork.

Recently, artificial intelligence sparked fresh backlash within the gaming community — this time the controversy centered not on AI voiceovers or generated art, but on AI-produced code.

Graf Zahl, a developer known within the DOOM scene for a particular reputation (he is described there as “pompous and arrogant”), attempted to integrate code written by ChatGPT into the GZDoom project.

The creator defended his choice to use AI-generated code with the following statement:

All this hostility toward AI — frankly, I’m over it. These days everyone leans on AI to produce routine, boilerplate code*, and those who oppose that approach stubbornly will likely lose out and be mocked. I do have reservations about using AI for code that’s tightly tailored to the project, but, in practice, it’s just a cursory verification of configuration settings that you can find across various sites — only with about ten times the effort.

By “boilerplate” he means the uncreative, standardized code developers often write to satisfy language, operating system, or framework requirements.

There were earlier reports that many contributors left GZDoom “due to conflicts with project leadership” and forked the codebase into UZDoom — positioning it as a direct successor to GZDoom that will retain existing features and eventually add new ones.

The proposed AI-written patch for GZDoom was ultimately rejected, so the project’s current public builds are likely free of AI-generated code.

Source: iXBT.games

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