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We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. It will happen regardless, but any oasis of real content will become important. Automation will be a

We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. It will happen regardless, but any oasis of real content will become important. Automation will be a force multiplier for laziness and predation more so than for creativity.

minimaxir 3y ago
Massive amounts of shovelware on Steam is most definitely not a new phenomenon.
- imdsm 3y ago
  Amazon is more like eBay than eBay now Steam is like eBay but for low quality games It happens to them all. There are big games on steam, but 95% of the stuff on there is low value, low cost content
  - __loam 3y ago
    Steam has systems in place to bubble high quality work to the top.
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
>We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. Everywhere. Games, porn, text, articles, music, etc. For the generation that grew up with the internet already existing, this is their epoch moment, lives pre and post generative AIs. I was thinking the other day that original artworks are going to be far more valued with a glut of AI generated. Thinking slightly ahead, you can find your absolute favorite artist, and in seconds use their style you love so much to make the family portrait you would never be able to commission them to do. But going forward even more… It’s just not the same as a print right? Well, thanks to AI being able to learn and determine where brush strokes would land, we take advancements from 3D printers and your desktop painting rig picks up a brush and paints it just as the artist would have. Then going forward even more.. the artist himself needs some cash and knocks out 100 of these customs while they sleep, signs them, and now they are originals, sort of. So… verifiable originals are going to be the hot thing. A painting with a video of the artist painting it… but not an AI generated video of course! Maybe the artist will have to print it on location while you watch.
- draugadrotten 3y ago
  > Maybe the artist will have to print it on location while you watch. For the music industry, this happened already. Artists makes a lot more money from live performances than from album sales or streaming fees.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    That’s a good analogy. And it’s right.
- pengaru 3y ago
  You must have never seen the original Bladerunner if you found this line of thinking as original... "you think I'd be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?!?"
  - xsmasher 3y ago
    To me that implies that real animals are scarce; the price is not related to any kind of "artistic realness." If they said that hand-crafted robotic snakes were more expensive than run-of-the-mill live-bred snakes, that would support your point about artistic realness.
- __loam 3y ago
  > Well, thanks to AI being able to learn and determine where brush strokes would land, we take advancements from 3D printers and your desktop painting rig picks up a brush and paints it just as the artist would have. Good luck convincing enough people in the art community to give you data on their process so you can do this. There's definitely enough out there in things like PSD files but the AI community has been so rude and antagonistic to art communities that most of them have a kneejerk hate reaction on any mention of the technology, and rightfully so. AI users and companies have been gleefully abusing artists from day 1.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Why would you assume it would need to be given? If you examine a painting with enough care, you could work out a few brush strokes. Now hand that to an AI that can process everything and come up with a style and how to paint it. If you are making a thing, there is evidence of how it was made. Patten match enough of it and you’re done.
TOMDM 3y ago
This has been an issue on Steam for ages, people call them "asset flip" games, because someone can buy a few $10 asset packs and piece together a game out of them. AI generated content is not meaningfully better or worse than these low effort games, though taking the time to generate passable content with AI is probably a lot more effort than just using $50 worth of assets that are already packaged up for unity.
crazygringo 3y ago
> We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. No, we've been inundated with low-quality content for decades now. This is nothing new. Fortunately, ratings and reviews and popularity have always been an extremely effective antidote. Even if 99% of stuff on a platform is total crap, nobody cares. It's a non-issue. Whether you're talking about music, books, TV shows, or whatever. The 1% rises to the top and you don't honestly need to pay attention to the rest. If you choose to pay $20 for something that has 3 reviews that are all 1-star, then that's more your problem than the system's problem.
- oehpr 3y ago
  I have to agree reviews work very well. But it distresses me that, knowing the absolute tsunami of garbage that awaits us without it, we are SO laissez faire when it comes to protecting that system. We allow companies to game reviews with kick backs, we lets spammers in posting fake reviews. This is currently our one wall of defense and cracks in it should terrify us.
- asdff 3y ago
  >No, we've been inundated with low-quality content for decades now. This is nothing new. Trends matter too. If it gets to be an order of magnitude cheaper to shill your products on social media and forums, set up seo crap articles to phish users from search results, or churn out good old fashioned email scams, then expect an order of magnitude worse signal to noise ratio on the internet as a result. There could be a point reached where the internet is functionally broken, with the signal to noise ratio too low to make it useful for anything, save for navigating directly to known good hosts that themselves will become increasingly more lucrative targets for enshittification.
  - cwkoss 3y ago
    Yeah that happened 10 years ago
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  > No, we've been inundated with low-quality content for decades now. This is nothing new. The problem with this argument is that scale matters. When a small number of people were trading mp3 files on FTP servers it was not seen as a problem. When Napster came out, it was seen as a problem. It was correctly seen as a qualitative shift in the effect it would have on society.
com2kid 3y ago
We are also on the cusp of individual developers being able to produce works that used to take entire teams. I'm working on simulating a small town using Generative AI agents, schedules, social interactions, realistic reactions to outside events, dialogue between characters, the whole shebang. A year ago that wasn't an "after work side project". I just did a full launch on https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/ https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/ - a side project that was only possible because of AI help. Between art assets and also coding in brand new areas that I hadn't used before, AIs are an obscene boost to what individuals can do. The price and complexity of software development projects has been increasing for years now, AI is a huge reset on the amount of effort needed to make stuff.
- xk_id 3y ago
  > AIs are an obscene boost to what individuals can do. Depends what the individual is trying to do. Making memes? Blog spam? Sure. But for non-trivial content I haven’t seen an example that was compelling.
  - com2kid 3y ago
    > But for non-trivial content I haven’t seen an example that was compelling. ChatGPT helped me write my websocket code, I'd never used websockets before and it saved me hours (of not more) of time learning a new API. I had a concurrency bug in some code, I threw it at GPT4 and asked it what the problem was, a few seconds later it split out a solution. I had some complex state management code: "Hi this code has an off by 1 error in it, can you find it?" "My page demonstrates this visual problem, here is the CSS file for the page, what is wrong?" The color picker component used on my above linked site was 80% written by ChatGPT4. AI is a huge productivity booster. Heck I use it to steel man opposing views of my blog posts to try and make sure I have sound arguments.
    - xk_id 3y ago
      I wouldn’t be able to trust running generative code that I don’t personally have context for, or hasn’t been reviewed by an experienced peer; even if it seems to work as intended. It’s the kind of irresponsible OceanGate mentality. As for blog posts, “better than nothing” doesn’t automatically make content “compelling”.
newobj 3y ago
Asset store is still a more effective tool to create shovelware than AI. It's been this way for years. Recommendation systems (digital or otherwise) are already coping with it.

minimaxir 3y ago

Massive amounts of shovelware on Steam is most definitely not a new phenomenon.

imdsm 3y ago
Amazon is more like eBay than eBay now Steam is like eBay but for low quality games It happens to them all. There are big games on steam, but 95% of the stuff on there is low value, low cost content
- __loam 3y ago
  Steam has systems in place to bubble high quality work to the top.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago

>We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. Everywhere. Games, porn, text, articles, music, etc. For the generation that grew up with the internet already existing, this is their epoch moment, lives pre and post generative AIs. I was thinking the other day that original artworks are going to be far more valued with a glut of AI generated. Thinking slightly ahead, you can find your absolute favorite artist, and in seconds use their style you love so much to make the family portrait you would never be able to commission them to do. But going forward even more… It’s just not the same as a print right? Well, thanks to AI being able to learn and determine where brush strokes would land, we take advancements from 3D printers and your desktop painting rig picks up a brush and paints it just as the artist would have. Then going forward even more.. the artist himself needs some cash and knocks out 100 of these customs while they sleep, signs them, and now they are originals, sort of. So… verifiable originals are going to be the hot thing. A painting with a video of the artist painting it… but not an AI generated video of course! Maybe the artist will have to print it on location while you watch.

draugadrotten 3y ago
> Maybe the artist will have to print it on location while you watch. For the music industry, this happened already. Artists makes a lot more money from live performances than from album sales or streaming fees.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  That’s a good analogy. And it’s right.
pengaru 3y ago
You must have never seen the original Bladerunner if you found this line of thinking as original... "you think I'd be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?!?"
- xsmasher 3y ago
  To me that implies that real animals are scarce; the price is not related to any kind of "artistic realness." If they said that hand-crafted robotic snakes were more expensive than run-of-the-mill live-bred snakes, that would support your point about artistic realness.
__loam 3y ago
> Well, thanks to AI being able to learn and determine where brush strokes would land, we take advancements from 3D printers and your desktop painting rig picks up a brush and paints it just as the artist would have. Good luck convincing enough people in the art community to give you data on their process so you can do this. There's definitely enough out there in things like PSD files but the AI community has been so rude and antagonistic to art communities that most of them have a kneejerk hate reaction on any mention of the technology, and rightfully so. AI users and companies have been gleefully abusing artists from day 1.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Why would you assume it would need to be given? If you examine a painting with enough care, you could work out a few brush strokes. Now hand that to an AI that can process everything and come up with a style and how to paint it. If you are making a thing, there is evidence of how it was made. Patten match enough of it and you’re done.

TOMDM 3y ago

This has been an issue on Steam for ages, people call them "asset flip" games, because someone can buy a few $10 asset packs and piece together a game out of them. AI generated content is not meaningfully better or worse than these low effort games, though taking the time to generate passable content with AI is probably a lot more effort than just using $50 worth of assets that are already packaged up for unity.

crazygringo 3y ago

> We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. No, we've been inundated with low-quality content for decades now. This is nothing new. Fortunately, ratings and reviews and popularity have always been an extremely effective antidote. Even if 99% of stuff on a platform is total crap, nobody cares. It's a non-issue. Whether you're talking about music, books, TV shows, or whatever. The 1% rises to the top and you don't honestly need to pay attention to the rest. If you choose to pay $20 for something that has 3 reviews that are all 1-star, then that's more your problem than the system's problem.

oehpr 3y ago
I have to agree reviews work very well. But it distresses me that, knowing the absolute tsunami of garbage that awaits us without it, we are SO laissez faire when it comes to protecting that system. We allow companies to game reviews with kick backs, we lets spammers in posting fake reviews. This is currently our one wall of defense and cracks in it should terrify us.
asdff 3y ago
>No, we've been inundated with low-quality content for decades now. This is nothing new. Trends matter too. If it gets to be an order of magnitude cheaper to shill your products on social media and forums, set up seo crap articles to phish users from search results, or churn out good old fashioned email scams, then expect an order of magnitude worse signal to noise ratio on the internet as a result. There could be a point reached where the internet is functionally broken, with the signal to noise ratio too low to make it useful for anything, save for navigating directly to known good hosts that themselves will become increasingly more lucrative targets for enshittification.
- cwkoss 3y ago
  Yeah that happened 10 years ago
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
> No, we've been inundated with low-quality content for decades now. This is nothing new. The problem with this argument is that scale matters. When a small number of people were trading mp3 files on FTP servers it was not seen as a problem. When Napster came out, it was seen as a problem. It was correctly seen as a qualitative shift in the effect it would have on society.

com2kid 3y ago

We are also on the cusp of individual developers being able to produce works that used to take entire teams. I'm working on simulating a small town using Generative AI agents, schedules, social interactions, realistic reactions to outside events, dialogue between characters, the whole shebang. A year ago that wasn't an "after work side project". I just did a full launch on https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/ https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/ - a side project that was only possible because of AI help. Between art assets and also coding in brand new areas that I hadn't used before, AIs are an obscene boost to what individuals can do. The price and complexity of software development projects has been increasing for years now, AI is a huge reset on the amount of effort needed to make stuff.

xk_id 3y ago
> AIs are an obscene boost to what individuals can do. Depends what the individual is trying to do. Making memes? Blog spam? Sure. But for non-trivial content I haven’t seen an example that was compelling.
- com2kid 3y ago
  > But for non-trivial content I haven’t seen an example that was compelling. ChatGPT helped me write my websocket code, I'd never used websockets before and it saved me hours (of not more) of time learning a new API. I had a concurrency bug in some code, I threw it at GPT4 and asked it what the problem was, a few seconds later it split out a solution. I had some complex state management code: "Hi this code has an off by 1 error in it, can you find it?" "My page demonstrates this visual problem, here is the CSS file for the page, what is wrong?" The color picker component used on my above linked site was 80% written by ChatGPT4. AI is a huge productivity booster. Heck I use it to steel man opposing views of my blog posts to try and make sure I have sound arguments.
  - xk_id 3y ago
    I wouldn’t be able to trust running generative code that I don’t personally have context for, or hasn’t been reviewed by an experienced peer; even if it seems to work as intended. It’s the kind of irresponsible OceanGate mentality. As for blog posts, “better than nothing” doesn’t automatically make content “compelling”.

newobj 3y ago

Asset store is still a more effective tool to create shovelware than AI. It's been this way for years. Recommendation systems (digital or otherwise) are already coping with it.