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I’m trying not to sound elitist but maybe this is just plain elitist. But it seems like lowering the barrier to entry to some skills too much just gets us too
by techpineapple 1y ago
I’m trying not to sound elitist but maybe this is just plain elitist. But it seems like lowering the barrier to entry to some skills too much just gets us too much crap, _and_ worst of all changes the economics so you can’t get anything good anymore. See: the movie industry.
And actually, the problem is not that my neighbor who’s passionate about video game design but makes bad games. I’m glad social media is full of that. It’s the highly capitalized content farms that flood the zone.
- dmarcos 1y agoWhat’s your opinion of Youtube? We were better off when just a few could create and distribute video at scale? There was similar criticism to yours when the printing press was invented.
- galleywest200 1y agoGood points, but it is worth considering that in both of those scenarios you listed the content within the end product is fully created by a human and not generated by a machine.
- codybontecou 1y agoThat’s severely discounting the machines used to generate the video content.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoThe machine is "compiling" the video, not taking the creative helm. That was the relationship we had for some 200 years. The machine automates and accelerates the predictable labor, and the creative heads composes and conducts the tasks. As of late, we seem to want to flip the script under the guise that "we can make more content" without considering the impact on the creative process. Not how to drive the output, but just how to make more and more. Creativity be damned. That's the issue.
- dmarcos 1y agoAI is just another form of automation that replaces more of the manual labor. Humans still driving it. How do you feel about photography that replaced portrait paintings? Or photoshop filters? Or computer animation vs hand drawn? I don't see any difference with AI. You can indeed let the AI output stuff automatically but it's as interesting as stock photography. Do you disagree with Carmack's assessment? "AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics"
- johnnyanmac 1y agoUnlike a camera, these new automation still need require paintings. That why I don't consider generative AI as true iteration. It's literally stealing the town's paintingsand using it to mash together this collage that's called "art" . Why would I call that "progress"? You're making metaphorically uglier horses, but you're boasting about breeding them faster. We wee not worried about breeding more horses to begin with. >You can indeed let the AI output stuff automatically but it's as interesting as stock photograp Yes. And stock photography had agreements with the photographer. Much of the art scraped explicity said not to. It's not interesting and potentially illegal. The worst of both worlds. >Do you disagree with Carmack's assessment? I left a top level response somewhere, but overall, c. 2025 : not really. It feels like more hype generation, and this isn't the first time he's had to be a hype man. Maybe one day, maybe before or after we get convinent VR/AR hardware. It'll be a while. And no small team is touching this stuff whike the courts battle about this. Come back to me in 5 years when the ethics is settled and the tech might be more ready. It's pretty hard to even look 5 weeks ahead in these times, let alone 5 years.
- flashgordon 1y agoYeah this is where my own internal conflict is too. May be this cheap flooding is required to bring down the cost of creation so the truly high quality games/content creates by the top 1% will be valued more (though finding would be much harder?)?
- codybontecou 1y agoWe moved from a content generation problem to a search problem.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoIt was always a search problem.
- flashgordon 1y agoYeah this was where I was getting to. Are the content enablers enabling flooding of content so now they can start selling the search tools/tactics. Wonder if this another way of creating a pandemic so you can sell a cure haha
- bryanlarsen 1y agoI think we're saying different things. In 1977 finding a good video game amongst the drek was difficult. It was a search problem in 1977, it's a search problem in 2025. Sturgeon's law. 90% of everything is, and always will be, drek.
- flashgordon 1y agoInteresting. But was the drek in 1977 because flooding the game market was "easy" (I meant to say game development was hard in 1977 - I think - so if there was really drel back then was there a high supply then that was the cause of it?
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
- fullshark 1y agoOr maybe the music industry? I feel like there's more music than ever, but none of it seems to be of much value and/or lasting cultural impact. It doesn't seem like it's gotten better with easier accessibility to tools, just there's a lot more options for you if you are a fan of a certain genre. I can see games being similar, maybe a few creative people invent new genres never seen before, or mix elements in creative ways with AI tools, but I'm guessing it will more likely mean a lot of slight variations of games that bring in money churned out quickly.
- ironman1478 1y agoI think when it comes to music, it's really disheartening to hear people say it hasn't gotten better. There is a lot of good music coming out in so many genres, but it really requires actively seeking it out.
- fullshark 1y agoI've dug pretty deep in the genres I like...it's just all slight variations imo of the work the trendsetting artists did establishing the genre in the first place as far as I can tell.
- lostmsu 1y agoYou might have just gotten older.
- hlfshell 1y agoThe issue is that as music progresses and changes so too does distribution networks. Traditional, or even nontraditional to those from the pre spotify internet days, pipelines of music discovery have been largely co-opted by industry. Outlets of organic discovery are different now - and people typically don't continually keep changing their habits enough to keep up with it. Pair this with the fact that most people settle their musical tastes to be in line with when they are experiencing the most emotionally significant time in their early lives (high school for some, college for others, etc) and the result is an assumption that A) What they encounter forms an overall opinion of "all" new music despite being the tip of the iceberg and B) It's not as good as what they grew up on
- techpineapple 1y ago> What’s your opinion of Youtube? We were better off when just a few could create and distribute video at scale? Yes, I think I would make that argument. But also I think I’m making a different argument. The game market already seems to be pretty flooded. I think many people see it as “we get more great indie games”, but I wonder if we don’t get less. That it creates more of a bipolar distribution. Triple-A relatively unaffected, and more vaporware games but it hollows out the middle. I also think that “we objected to earlier progress and it turned out ok, therefor all objections to progress are bad” is a logical fallacy.
- AstralStorm 1y agoWhat is actually showing up is more asset dumps, rather unimaginative variations on a game. Often seen as job simulator games because they're so formulaic. Sometimes you see unimaginative remixes like Palworld.
- camillomiller 1y agoThis comparison suffers from what I call “the scale fallacy”. You can’t compare disrupting technologies like this as if the scale of their impact plays no role at all. How many people’s livelihood depended on monks writing books by hand?
- emseetech 1y agoThere's a valid argument to be made there though. We possibly were better off when tastemakers managed to filter out the lowest common denominator. When you think of Youtube, you might think of pretty decent stuff but you have to remember the absolute slop like Spiderman/Elsa videos, crude ripoffs and near porn gets many, many more views than the good stuff. I'm not saying strict gatekeeping is necessary, but open systems are an absolute minefield for humanity. That's clear to me after the last 10 years or so.
- dmarcos 1y agoI don’t mind the slop. Filtering and discovery is a solvable issue. I care about tons of niche and educational content that I enjoy that would not exist if it had to be funded / approved by gatekeepers.
- emseetech 1y agoI believe it's more complicated than saying slop is required for niche and education content. That said, we've already decided that truly open systems are not viable. That was settled years ago. Now even 4chan has rules. Right now we have algorithms that promote terrible content based on automated metrics that don't make the good stuff any easier to find. Especially considering the consolidation of platforms into a few hegemonic sites. In that sense we already have gatekeeping, it's just a terrible approach to it. And for the record I mind the slop because of how easily it drowns out and eventually overtakes the good stuff. Even good, educational content feels the need to cater to the algorithm to survive. We're not at a tipping point yet, but it certainly feels we're headed in that direction. Algorithmically promoting tastemakers might be a solution. Pushing the good content to the top and burying the slop.
- AstralStorm 1y agoUnfortunately a big chunk of the public likes the taste of the slop, or is too nostalgic or reticent to try anything new. Sometimes the new thing is also unpolished and needs work, perhaps even a second artist to pick it up and make it good...
- numpad0 1y agoI think it's ok to add selective pressure whenever spammy, unethical, low-quality content starts flooding the system. Books has copyright laws and resistive book distribution channels, YouTube has Likes and moderation systems, etc. With hindsight, one of silent assumptions very common of both pro- and anti-AI arguments up to this point was as follows: because AI is potentially superhuman in arts, the existing selective pressures could inversely punish desired creativity if AI outputs were not unfairly treated. Pro-AI arguments assumed that warping the system is wrong, anti-AI assumed allowing the system go down is worse. IMO, superhuman AI didn't happen anyway, and so now AI slop problem is just spam control problem. No one was ever against punishing spams and unethical actors. It's fine and safe. We're at a postmortem phase during which we'd patch the bugs in laws and law enforcement that allowed AI companies do outlandish hacks like torrenting books and redistributing it as lossy compressed 500GB GGUF.
- keybored 1y ago> There was similar criticism to yours when the printing press was invented. A similar thing was discussed in the past, checkmate. We have this commonsense whig-history where everything became a little bit better century by century. But one could argue that the printing press makes propaganda possible. From that you get thought control by the elite. Now you ironically get an elitist outcome, or an elite-benefiting outcome. Was the printing press a net good? Maybe it’s more complicated than “more books good”.
- dmarcos 1y agoWould you go back to a pre-youtube, pre-printing press, pre-internet, pre-pick-your—favorite-tecnology that democratized content creation and distribution? I know I wouldn’t.
- keybored 1y agoI would not with the snap of a finger revert back to a time centuries ago when I have spent all my life up until now learning to live in the current one. No. Just like a tribal Papua New Guinean would not want to, with the snap of the finger, become one of the vice presidents in the American Psycho movie. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Beyond that I don’t know what there is to say about our so-called democratizing technologies when the discussion gets reduced to—and never goes beyond—those very slogans about them being democratizing. Yes. We are now free to repeat the same slogans that everyone else repeats.
- manmal 1y agoAnother example is fast fashion. It’s almost impossible to get clothing in a store that will last, say, 10 years. While in earlier decades, that was pretty normal.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoWhat's the correlation between programming skill and video game design skill? It's probably not 0 but certainly well under 1. We want good video game designers making games, not just good programmers. I get the feeling that Balatro is not a well coded game. It was coded by one person. Yet it's a great game. The world will be better with more Balatro's.
- techpineapple 1y agoI assert we get less Balatro’s this way(I don’t know Balatro specifically, but I imagine it’s a stand-in for indie-game by one developer), perhaps counter intuitively. This is a question I’ve been pondering post-2000, where are all the new Kevin Smiths? Where are all the great counter-culture indie movies? That Market has certainly not exploded post YouTube the way you might think.
- scld 1y agoThe new Kevin Smiths are on youtube.
- Pet_Ant 1y agoI mean won’t the leave the door open for people to bring value to the market by helping curate? Sifting there the turds to find diamonds? This could be the golden age of the reviewer. Yahtzee could make millions!
- itsdrewmiller 1y agoHow is the movie industry an example of this? There are great movies still coming out every year, and the main commercial trends have been around IP exploitation that may or may not be reducing movie quality but certainly not due to lower barriers to entry.
- ralusek 1y agoA world of slop increases the demand for products that help you discern.
- jasonlotito 1y agoWe've been lowering the barrier to entry for decades now. Where is the line? Some would say digital. Some have pointed to electric. Some have pointed to cars. And on and on and on. But older entertainment doesn't instantly make it better. Will there be more crap? Sure, but that's always been the case. But that also means more stuff of quality. That could mean it's hard to find the quality stuff, but that's a different issue entirely, and one mostly solved with old school stuff (reviewers, just find reviewers you mostly agree with). But in the end, good games are still released every year. And many/most of these good games wouldn't exist if the barrier to entry wasn't lowered.
- AstroBen 1y agoThere are other forces acting on the movie industry. The rise of streaming killing DVD sales, YouTube and tiktok competition for attention etc. lowered their revenue a lot leading to a lot less ability to take risks on new ideas that may or may not sell well Actually the opposite of what you think might come to happen. If you lower the barrier to entry for creating a movie, we might see a lot more creative ideas coming from people that would never have the chance before
- johnnyanmac 1y agowe already hit that point as is. At this point, I just want proper ethics around this rampant scraping going on. It's simple consent, but it seems tech still has problems reminiscent of the old games industry.