Do Our Opinions of Generative AI in Games Really Matter?

I’m surprised that after going off track this conversation managed to reign it in. The last AI post… Not so much.

Edit:
I want this comment to have meaning though so from my standpoint, I don’t want to use AI because I enjoy the game development process. Using AI would just be robbing myself of the enjoyment. Why should I ask it for help when there’s this very nice forum to use instead? Why should I ask chat gpt something when I can get a response from Google that doesn’t cost 10 gallons of water (I think it was). Yes I know about Gemini being forced and I hate it but literally what can you do, there’s no way to turn it off.

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Actually you can optout in google.com by adding -noai to your search querry.

See I can try to help too :sweat_smile:

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I’ve used -XX when I can’t install an extension to remove it but I’ll also keep that one in my back pocket : )

Jerry Garcia loved mushrooms and was a proponent of legalizing organic psychedelics.
He also did plenty of LSD prior to his and his bands dive into cocaine and heroin.
Recommended reading in this regard

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Normalized… I have to agree with almost everything you state. But I found the Medical one interesting. Granted this is a single case anecdotal example I have.

Talking with our vet (owner of the veterinary clinic) he said the other vets at the practice wanted some AI system for diagnosing. He got it in to try it out. It was supposed to look at scans and determine enlarged hearts. Upon reviewing the results/diagnosis of the system output he found it to be wrong about 90% of the time. It was reporting almost every scan as enlarged.

Personally, even something right 90% of the time is not great in terms of a medical diagnosis. But to be wrong 90%?!?!

Sure with more “training” and large samples it could improve. His concern after seeing the results was that the other vets would not be really learning and instead just take what it spit out as fact. He requires them to provide the own diagnosis first, then see what the system says and then he will compare both results. But unless it dramatically improves he’s also planning on returning it.

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Nobody knows anything at all about the future. You can guess.

AI is amazing. I love it. But don’t believe the hype!

It is not a teacher. It is not reliable. It is not going to take everybody’s job. It is not intelligent in the sense most people mean by ‘intelligence’.

It is going to be used by big tech to try to lay off people. That is the whole sales pitch. I cannot see this working TBH. It does recreate copyrighted material, this has been proven beyond doubt in my mind at least. It can be constrained like Grok so that Elon Musk is not criticised - ie it is easily manipulated by big business to tell you whatever their message is. It cannot be trusted. It is not creative in the true ‘creative’ sense. It cannot be completely original. It hallucinates and makes shit up. Because it is not intelligent in any way.

However, as a tool, that is currently available, I don’t understand what the fuss is. Use it, why not, do whatever with it.

When I listen to music I just want to hear great stuff that gets me going. I don’t care how it was made. When I play a game, I just want to play a great game. I don’t care how it was made. When I read a book, I just want a great book. I don’t care what inspired the writer.

I do care about copyright, but AI does have a case, although I think it certainly sits in the very grey area. I do care about people, and I really want an experienced and highly trained human doctor to review my medical charts. If they choose to use AI in their job, that is up to them. But I want that doctor to spend more than 5 seconds on my case.

If AI is a tool, there is nothing to be worried about. If AI is more than a tool, and it has yet to prove that, then we have something to discuss. At the moment, it is just a tool. The tool makers have spent billions, are promising the world, but they are trying to sell it. They also may have broken some laws like copyright, they should answer for that.

I think the best analogy is of the printing press. Do you have any idea how many people lost their jobs because of this tool. Or how many secretarial staff when computers emerged. Or how many book keepers. Tons. Is this AI different? Not really. It is an amazing tool. It is what is done with it that might be a problem. Or what crap people believe it is capable of, people in power, governments for instance.

Nobody can see the future. Big businesses get away with all sorts of nonsense all the time with bribes and armies of lawyers and small print. Just be patient, the bubble will burst, the lies will be outed, and probably justice will sort of prevail in the end, sort of, and the rich will probably stay rich. Just vote for someone that will not give your taxes to the charlatans.

AI is not going away. Like calculators, computers or social media. The only thing we can do is not give our money to it, or vote for people that will fund it. Not because we hate it, but because it is just a tool, a capitalist tool, that does not deserve it and it is already positioned in very grey legal areas already.

Long live copyright! A law that needs defending!

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This is still the point,

they use concept art !

If they didnt have AI, they would be using the original source art. Its the they that matters.

I dont want to try to change anyones opinions but if you ignore AI ypu migbt be needlessly wasting your effort … much like a years effort on godot is for sale for Unreal many times for anyone with enough green matter to afford it.

What?

You cannot buy learning! Years of effort on Godot gives you experience and knowledge. Buying something just gives you the thing you bought. The two are not the same!

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I regret that comment but deleting the post would have been worse. The answer thats consequential to the previous post (was that also ‘in key’) would go something like:

‘Experience and learning can also be gained by reinventing the wheel.’

I actually think purchasing expensive addons is a good option for bigger companies with the ability to produce titles fast. There is a trap people fall into like investing in an expensive taxi then having to drive all week to pay off the debt.

Well, I’m kinda old school. When I grew up we where fiting copyright because the games back in my time where way too expensive for us kids to buy. So, cracking games became part of the fun.

But times do change, the hippies of the 60s are now the corporate CEOs making millions with stocks and proprietary software of low quality.

You could also say that everytime an amateure musician makes music for free a professional musician suffers. Just like free open source software used to be called a cancer and communism.
If the big tech companies would play fair I’d be all for it. But it doesn’t look like that going to happen. If there was a complete open source LLM model I’d be the first to try it out. But there is none.
But looking at everything from the negative side doesn’t make things better.

The other way of exploiting creatives is to hire them, produce a triple A title, pay them peanuts and rake in a cool $5 B.

Now the AI has appeared and everyone has the potential in their hands but the market breaks and you have the good 'ol Betham tragedy of the commons, too many sheep eat the last clump of grass.

I had forgotten about that, I remember that too.

So true. I used to love Google. I hate them now and can’t wait to see them fail.

Lol. Like Easter Island! They cut down all the trees. Imagine the person cutting down the very last tree!

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… and ordered. Many thanks.

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Yeah I remember seeing this all over (Apple IIe generation here). On one side it was taking money away from the developer, on the other side if you were a kid doing this, for the most part, you probably couldn’t afford to buy it (and wouldn’t have) so was there any loss?

BUT I also remember a number of promising developers and gaming companies that folded in this time as they made a great game and only sold a (relatively) handful of copies making it no longer financially viable. If cracking had not been happening and even a small percentage of those cracks had become sales instead would these places have survived?

Doubtful. Because the fact of the matter is that pre-internet the number of people cracking games was miniscule enough, that they weren’t reaching the customers they needed to. As the Internet rose to prominence, it was more the price of doing business. But you had to have a popular game for people to pirate it in a way that was financially impactful.

True enough… when it was either pass the cracked floppy to a friend or spend a few hours with a 2400 or if you were lucky enough a 9600 modem just to download something the proliferation wasn’t a fraction of what it is today with double digit mb internet feeds being considered low end now. At the office our 500mb connection… roughly 50 MB per second would be about (if my estimating is correct) 33 some 1.4MB floppies… per second. On 2400 it would have been about an hour and 20 minutes (best case) per floppy. 45+ hours vs 1 second. Things have definitely changed. :slight_smile:

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I’d one again add the problem of energy / resource consumption and infrastructure here. Remember how for the past 15 years we were slowly gaining collective knowledge of climate change and the need to de-phase fossil fuels?

Suddenly it seems to be totally fine to drain Texas of it’s water, build new gas and fission power-plants… And if I understand the news correctly, it seems that even the underlying infrastructure in the US is being sold/privatized - mainly energy grids.

Also I find it quite unnerving to see how sect-like the discussion has become. Mainstream is as mainstream always is: a bit daft on everything and mostly an ignorant flow. But people promoting “AI” and their futuristic use act a bit sect-like.

I’m for my part a bit glad, that the hole “AI will solve all future problems” argument slowly dies off, as progress with all those products also slows down. The argument that seems to remain is “Everybody is using it, so you should, too - or you will fall behind” is hopefully a impotent one. Compared to all the arguments against the current manifestations of LLM applications it is a wonder, we still don’t regulate it properly.

Let’s see how it turns out, after the big ROI will not come, regulations start picking up pace after winter again.

Ending on a personal note: LLMs are interesting and fun to use, I’d say. Sometimes I even think them useful. I enjoy running my own setups here and pay for my electricity bill myself. But I have friends that use ChatGPT daily and seem to get the worst out of it: Wrong information, conformation biases, a lot of slop (the current festive season was so inviting to generate yet another fun song or cute cat-santa video). And then again, I worked and lived in europe’s entertainment industry for the last 10 years and the things offered by “AI-companies” seem to catch the wrong bugs: music and art is the fun part… yet my tax software still struggles with identifying my scanned reciepts, my tax office still charges more every year (and needs a lot of human-hours to classify my expenses) and my national tax agency still struggles to efficiently catch fradulent actors. Horray :smiley:

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With AI just kinda lost any interest in new stuff not just games