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An Overwhelmingly Negative and Demoralizing Force

• terminalbraid 1y ago
  This story just makes me sad for the developers. I think especially for games you need a level of creativity that AI won't give you, especially once you get past the "basic engine boilerplate". That's not to say it can't help you, but this "all in" method just looks forced and painful. Some of the best games I've played were far more "this is the game I wanted to play" with a lot of vision, execution, polish, and careful craftspersonship. I can only hope endeavors (experiments?) like this extreme fail fast and we learn from it.
  • tjpnz 1y ago
    Asset flips (half arsed rubbish made with store bought assets) were a big problem in the games industry not so long ago. They're less prevalent now because gamers instinctively avoid such titles. I'm sure they'll wise up to generative slop too, I've personally seen enough examples to get a general feel for it. Not fun, derivative, soulless, buggy as hell.
    • hnthrow90348765 1y ago
      But make some shallow games with generic, cell-shaded anime waifus accessed by gambling and they eat that shit up
      • ang_cire 1y ago
        If someone bothered to make deep, innovative games with cell-shaded anime waifus without gambling, they'd likely switch. This is more likely a market problem of US game companies not supplying sufficient CSAWs (acronym feels unfortunate but somehow appropriate).
      • Analemma_ 1y ago
        Your dismissive characterization is not really accurate. Even in the cell-shaded anime waifu genre, there is a spectrum of gameplay quality and gamers do gravitate toward and reward the better games. The big reason MiHoYo games (Genshin Impact, Star Rail) have such a big presence and staying power is that even though they are waifu games at the core, the gameplay is surprisingly good (they're a night-and-day difference compared to slop like Blue Archive), and they're still fun even if you resolve to never pay any microtransactions.
        • justanotherjoe 1y ago
          it's accurate. I'm willing to bet those games wouldn't have 10% of it's players without the waifu and sex bait and the gambling mechanics. And there are gambling mechanics present even if you are f2p in those games, i bet. You just gamble your daily currencies or whatever. And it's always just one click away to actually spend money. Not to say I'm a hater or something like that. I played a lot of those back in the day. But it's more honest to admit the art and the casino mechanic make the brain excited... the mechanics are 'okay'. Edit: I just had a random thought. One of the strongest desire of a person is that of aesthetic desire. To feel that our life is 'picturesque' or aesthetic or beautiful. Overloading the game with aesthetic beauty is actually genius since it's an easy and strong form of aesthetic (beautiful girls. not just sexy but 'beautiful'. As in their whole face and outfit. Also other aesthetic quality like purity, innocence, cheerfulness, cuteness etc. Waifu stuffs.). And it's often so saturated with beauty that all ugly things in the players' real lifes fade away. It numbs our 'life aesthetic check' since it's flooded with so much 'beauty'. That's why people who play these games say 'i dont even think about the waifus anymore, so the mechanic must be good,' cause that numbed state is the intended state. Wheny our aesthetic center is kinda 'numbed'. And that's probably why it feels so good to play these games. When you play other games your sense of beauty is not similarly flooded and numbed, so you're all too aware that this action of playing games is not 'beautiful' in some real sense.
• dkobia 1y ago
  I've been wrestling with this tension between embracing AI tools and preserving human expertise in my work. On one hand, I have experienced real genuine productivity gains with LLMs - they help me code, organize thoughts and offer useful perspectives I hadn't even considered. On the other, I realize managers often don't understand the nature of creative work which is trivialized by all the content generation tools. Creativity emerges through a messy exploration and human experience -- but it seems no one has time for that these days. Managers have found a shiny new tool to do more with less. Also, AI companies are deliberately targeting executives with promises of cost-cutting and efficiency. Someone has to pay for all the R&D.
  • 3D30497420 1y ago
    I had very similar thoughts while reading through the article. I also have found some real value in LLMs, and when used well, I think can and will be quite beneficial. Notably, a good number the examples were just straight-up bad management, irrespective of the tools being used. I also think some of these reactions are people realizing that they work for managers or in businesses that ultimately don't really care about the quality of their work, just that it delivers monetary value at the end.
• throwawayfgyb 1y ago
  I really like AI. It allows me to complete my $JOB tasks faster, so I have more time for my passion projects, that I craft lovingly and without crappy AI.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    I have never had a job where completing tasks faster wound up with me having more personal free time. It always just means you move on to the next task more quickly
    • esafak 1y ago
      Perhaps the OP completes the assigned task ahead of schedule and keeps the saved time.
      • htek 1y ago
        Shhh! Do you want to kill AI? All the C-suite and middle management need to hear is that "My QoL has never been better since I could use AI at work! Now I can 'quiet quit' half the day away! I can see my family after hours! Or even have a second job!"
        • onemoresoop 1y ago
          Expectations will go up, while the pay will stay the same. And many will just take it because of lack of alternatives
      • sksxihve 1y ago
        While sitting in the open office staring blankly into space because of RTO, work really has nothing to do with productivity it's all fugazi.
    • floriannn 1y ago
      This is a fair bit easier as a remote worker, but even in-office you would just sandbag your time rather than publishing the finished work immediately. In-office it's more likely that you would waste time on the internet rather than working on a personal project though.
• justonceokay 1y ago
  I’ve always been the kind of developer that aims to have more red lines than green ones in my diffs. I like writing libraries so we can create hundreds of integration tests declaratively. I’m the kind of developer that disappears for two days and comes back with a 10x speedup because I found two loop variables that should be switched. There is no place for me in this environment. I’d not that I couldn’t use the tools to make so much code, it’s that AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production. The solution to bad code is more code. AI will never produce a deletion. Publish or perish has come for us and it’s sad. It makes me feel old just like my Python programming made the mainframe people feel old. I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old…
  • pja 1y ago
    > Unseen were all the sleepless nights we experienced from untested sql queries and regexes and misconfigurations he had pushed in his effort to look good. It always came back to a lack of testing edge cases and an eagerness to ship. If you do this you are creating a rod for your own back: You need management to see the failures & the time it takes to fix them, otherwise they will assume everything is fine & wonderful with their new toy & proceed with their plan to inflict it on everyone, oblivious to the true costs + benefits.
    • lovich 1y ago
      >If you do this you are creating a rod for your own back: You need management to see the failures & the time it takes to fix them, otherwise they will assume everything is fine & wonderful with their new toy & proceed with their plan to inflict it on everyone, oblivious to the true costs + benefits. If at every company I work for, my manager's average 7-8 months in their role as _my_ manager, and I am switching jobs every 2-3 years because companies would rather rehire their entire staff than give out raises that are even a portion of the market growth, why would I care? Not that the market is currently in that state, but that's how a large portion of tech companies were operating for the past decade. Long term consequences don't matter because there are no longer term relationships.
  • NortySpock 1y ago
• nilkn 1y ago
  I don't have much sympathy for this. This country has long expected millions and millions of blue collar workers to accept and embrace change or lose their careers and retirements. When those people resisted, they were left to rot. Now I'm reading a sob story about someone throwing a fit because they refuse to learn to use ChatGPT and Claude and the CEO had to sit them down and hold their hand in a way. Out of all the skillset transitions that history has required or imposed, this is one of the easiest ever. They weren't fired; they weren't laid off; they weren't reassigned or demoted; they got attention and assistance from the CEO and guidance on what they needed to do to change and adapt while keeping their job and paycheck at the same time, with otherwise no disruption to their life at all for now. Prosperity and wealth do not come for free. You are not owed anything. The world is not going to give you special treatment or handle you with care because you view yourself as an artisan. Those are rewards for people who keep up, not for those who resist change. It's always been that way. Just because you've so far been on the receiving end of prosperity doesn't mean you're owed that kind of easy life forever. Nobody else gets that kind of guarantee -- why should you? The bottom line is the people in this article will be learning new skills one way or another. The only question is whether those are skills that adapt their existing career for an evolving world or whether those are skills that enable them to transition completely out of development and into a different sector entirely.
  • petesergeant 1y ago
    > These are rewards for people who keep up, not for those who resist change. lol. I work with LLM outputs all day -- like it's my job to make the LLM do things -- and I probably speak to some LLM to answer a question for me between 10 and 100 times a day. They're kinda helpful for some programming tasks, but pretty bad at others. Any company that tried to mandate me to use an LLM would get kicked to the curb. That's not because I'm "not keeping up", it's because they're simply not good enough to put more work through.
    • ewzimm 1y ago
      Wouldn't this depend a lot on how management responds to your use? For example, if you just kept a log of prompts and outputs with notes about why the output wasn't acceptable, that could be considered productive use in this early stage of LLMs, especially if management's goal was to have you learning how to use LLMs. Learning how not to use something is just as important in the process of adapting any new tool. If management is convinced of the benefits of LLMs and the workers are all just refusing to use them, the main problem seems to be a dysfunctional working environment. It's ultimately management's responsibility to work that out, but if the management isn't completely incompetent, people tasked with using them could do a lot to help the situation by testing and providing constructive feedback rather than making a stand by refusing to try and providing grand narratives about damaging the artistic integrity of something that has been commoditized from inception like video game art. I'm not saying that video game art can't be art, but it has existed in a commercial crunch culture since the 1970s.
• recursivedoubts 1y ago
  I teach compilers, systems, etc. at a university. Innumerable times I have seen AI lead a poor student down a completely incorrect but plausible path that will still compile. I'm adding `.noai` files to all the project going forward: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/disable-ai-assistant.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/disable-ai-assistant.htm... AI may be somewhat useful for experienced devs but it is a catastrophe for inexperienced developers. "That's OK, we only hire experienced developers." Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from? Again and again in this AI arc I'm reminded of the magicians apprentice scene from fantasia.
  • robinhoode 1y ago
    > Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from? Almost every time I hear this argument, I realize that people are not actually complaining about AI, but about how modern capitalism is going to use AI. Don't get me wrong, it will take huge social upheaval to replace the current economic system. But at least it's an honest assessment -- criticizing the humans that are using AI to replace workers, instead of criticizing AI itself -- even if you fear biting the hands that feed you.
    • recursivedoubts 1y ago
      i don't think it's an either/or situation
    • bayindirh 1y ago
      Actually, there are two main problems with AI: 1. How it's gonna be used and how it'll be a detriment to quality and knowledge. 2. How AI models are trained with a great disregard to consent, ethics, and licenses. The technology itself, the idea, what it can do is not the problem, but how it's made and how it's gonna be used will be a great problem going forward, and none of the suppliers tell that it should be used in moderation and will be harmful in the long run. Plus the same producers are ready to crush/distort anything to get their way. ... smells very similar to tobacco/soda industry. Both created faux-research institutes to further their causes.
• voidhorse 1y ago
  I think the software industry will look just like the material goods space post-industrialization after the dust settles: Large corporations will use AI to deliver low-quality software at high speed and high scale. "Artisan" developers will continue to exist, but in much smaller numbers and they will mostly make a living by producing refined, high-quality custom software at a premium or on creative marketplaces. Think Etsy for software. That's the world we are heading for, unless/until companies decide LLMs are ultimately not cost beneficial or overzealous use of them leads to a real hallucination induced catastrophe.
  • GarnetFloride 1y ago
    Sounds like fast fashion. The thinnest, cheapest fabric, slapped together as fast as possible with the least amount of stitching. Shipped fast and obsolete fast.
    • tmpz22 1y ago
      Fast fashion - also ruinous to the environment.
• mattgreenrocks 1y ago
  Management: "devs aren't paid to play with shiny new tech, they should be shipping features!" Also management: "I need you to play with AI and try to find a use for it"
  • undebuggable 1y ago
    Then maybe under pretext of playing with AI, finally refactor and clean up that codebase?
• rchaud 1y ago
  > “I have no idea how he ended up as an art director when he can’t visualise what he wants in his head unless can see some end results”, Bradley says. Rather than beginning with sketches and ideas, then iterating on those to produce a more finalised image or vision, Bradley says his boss will just keep prompting an AI for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team will have to backwards engineer the whole thing to make it work. Sounds like an "idea guy" rather than an art director or designer. I would do this exact same thing, but on royalty-free image websites, trying to get the right background or explanatory graphic for my finance powerpoints. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft now has AI "generating" such images for you, but it's much slower than what I could do flipping through those image sites.
• lanfeust6 1y ago
  It would be an understatement to call this a skewed perspective. In most of the anecdotes they seem to try really hard to trivialize the productive benefits of AI, which is difficult to take seriously. The case that LLMs create flawed outputs or are limited in what they can do is not controversial at all, but by and large, reports by experienced developers is that it has improved their productivity, and it's now part of their workflow. Whether businesses and hire-ups try to use it in absurd ways is neither here nor there. That, and culture issues, were a problem before AI. Obviously some workers have a strong incentive to oppose adoption, because it may jeopardize their careers. Even if the capabilities are over-stated it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy as higher-ups choices may go. Union shops will try to stall it, but it's here to stay. You're in a globally competitive market.
  • oneeyedpigeon 1y ago
    I have very little objection to AI, providing we get UBI to mitigate the fallout.
    • lanfeust6 1y ago
      Right, well even without AGI (no two people agree on whether it's coming within 5 years, 30, or 100), finely-tuned LLMs can disrupt the economy fast if the bottlenecks get taken care of. The big one is the robot-economy. This is popularly placed further off in timescales, but it does not require AGI at all. We already have humanoid robots on the market for the price of a small car, they're just dumb. Once we scale up solar and battery production, and then manufacturing, it's coming for menial labor jobs. They already have all the pieces, it's a foregone conclusion. What we don't know how to do is to create a real "intelligence", and here the evangelists will wax about the algorithms and the nature of intelligence, but at the end of the day it takes more than scaling up an LLM to constitute an AGI. The bet is that AI-assisted research will lead to breakthrough in a trivial amount of time. With white-collar jobs the threat of AI feels more abstract and localized, and you still get talk about "creating new jobs", but when robots start coming off the assembly line people will demand UBI so fast it will make your head spin. Either that or they'll try to set fire to them or block them with unions, etc. Hard to say when because another effort like the CHIPS act could expedite things.
• hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
  Software developers are so aware of "enshittification" and yet also bullish about this generation of AI, it's baffling. It's very clear the "value" of the LLM generation is to churn out low-cost, low-quality garbage. We already outsourced stuff to Fivrr but now we can cut people out altogether. Producing "content" nobody wants.
• 000ooo000 1y ago
  Can't wait to hear the inevitable slurs people will create to refer to heavy AI users and staunch AI avoiders.
  • esafak 1y ago
    Prompt puncher and Luddite come to mind.
  • Schiendelman 1y ago
    "Sloppers" appeared in another thread in this post. I've seen it before, I think it'll stick.
• kstrauser 1y ago
  There are many, many reasons to be skeptical of AI. There are also excellent tasks it can efficiently help with. I wrote a project where I'd initially hardcoded a menu hierarchy into its Rust. I wanted to pull that out into a config file so it could be altered, localized, etc without users having it and recompile the source. I opened a “menu.yaml” file, typed the name of the top-level menu, paused for a moment to sip coffee, and Zed popped up a suggested completion of the file which was syntactically correct and perfect for use as-is. I honestly expected I’d spend an hour mechanically translating Rust to YAML and debugging the mistakes. It actually took about 10 seconds. It’s also been freaking brilliant for writing docstrings explaining what the code I just manually wrote does. I don't want to use AI to write my code, any more than I'd want it to solve my crossword. I sure like having it help with the repetitive gruntwork and boilerplate.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
    This sort of extremely narrow use case is what I think AI is good for but the problem is that if you have it for this one you will use it for other things and slowly atrophy.
• Jyaif 1y ago
  “He doesn't know that the important thing isn't just the end result, it's the journey and the questions you answer along the way” This is satire right?
  • grg0 1y ago
    Many of the best games were discovered through an iterative process of trial and error, not through magic divination. So, yes, it is the journey along the way that matters in this kind of creative process. This applies not just to concept art, but game mechanics and virtually every element of the game.
• esafak 1y ago
  Companies need to be aware of the long-term affects of relying on AI. It causes atrophy and, when it introduces a bug, it takes more time to understand and fix than if you had written it yourself. I just spent a week fixing a concurrency bug in generated code. Yes, there were tests; I uncovered the bug when I realized the test was incorrect... My strong advice, is to digest every line of generated code; don't let it run ahead of you.
  • dkobia 1y ago
    It is absolutely terrifying to watch tools like Cursor generate so much code. Maybe not a great analogy, but it feels like driving with Tesla FSD in New Delhi in the middle of rush hour. If you let it run ahead of you, the amount of code to review will be overwhelming. I've also encountered situations where it is unable to pass tests for code it wrote.
    • varelse 1y ago
      [dead]
    • tmpz22 1y ago
      Like TikTok AI Coding breaks human psychology. It is engrained in us that if we have a tool that looks right enough and highly productive we will over-apply it to our work. Even diligent programmers will be lured to accepting giant commits without diligent review and they will pay for it. Of course yeeting bad code into production with a poor review process is already a thing. But this will scale that bad code as now you have developers who will have grown up on it.
  • Analemma_ 1y ago
    When have companies ever cared about the long-term effects of anything, and why would they suddenly start now?
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • Aeolun 1y ago
• DeathArrow 1y ago
  If a manager thinks paying $20 monthly for an AI tool will make a developer or artist 5x more productive, he's delusional. On the other hand, AI can be useful and can accelerate a bit some work.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• AlienRobot 1y ago
  A very bad programmer can program some cool stuff with the help of libraries, toolkits, frameworks and engines that they barely understand. I think that's pretty cool and makes things otherwise impossible possible, but it doesn't make the very bad programmer better than they really are. I believe AI is a variation of this, except a library at least has a license.
  • matt3210 1y ago
    The AI code has thousands of licenses but the legal system hasn't caught up
• woah 1y ago
  Why so much hand-wringing? If you are an anti-AI developer and you are able to develop better code faster than someone using AI, good for you. If AI-using developers will end up ruining their codebase in months like many here are saying, then things will take care of themselves.
  • svantana 1y ago
    I see two main problems with this approach: 1. productivity and quality is hard to measure 2. the codebase they are ruining is the same one I am working on.
    • munksbeer 1y ago
      > 2. the codebase they are ruining is the same one I am working on. We're supposed to have a process for dealing with this already, because developers can ruin a codebase without ai.
      • MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
        See point 1.
        • munksbeer 1y ago
          I don't understand. Presumably you have code reviews to stop coders committing rubbish to the repo?
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Faster is not a smart metric to judge a programmer by. "more code faster" is not a good thing, it has never been a good thing I'm not worried about pro AI workers ruining their codebases at their jobs I'm worried about pro AI coworkers ruining my job by shitting up the codebases I have to work in
    • woah 1y ago
• matt3210 1y ago
  One thing jumps out about the person who noticed the AI was wrong on things they were familiar with. It's like when ELon Musk talks about rockets. I don't know about rockets so I take his word for it. When Elon Must talked about software it was obvious he has no idea what he's doing. So when the AI generates something I know nothing about, it looks productive but when it's generating things for which I'm familiar I know its full of shit.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > So when the AI generates something I know nothing about, it looks productive but when it's generating things for which I'm familiar I know its full of shit. This is why when you hear people talk about how great it is at producing X, our takeaway should be "this person is not an expert at X, and their opinions can be disregarded" They are telling on themselves that they are not experts at the thing they think the AI is doing a great job at
    • andybak 1y ago
      "This is why when you hear people talk about how terrible it is at producing X, our takeaway should be "this person either hasn't tried to use it in good faith, and their opinions can be disregarded" I'm playing devil's advocate somewhat here but it often seem like that there's a bunch of people on both sides using hella motivated reasoning because they have very strong feelings that developed early on in their exposure to AI. AI is both terrible and wonderful. It's useless and some things and impressive at others. It will ruin whole sectors of the economy and upturn lives. It will get better and it is getting better so any limitations you currently observe are probably termporary. The net benefit for humanity may turn out to be positive or negative - it's too early to tell.
      • bluefirebrand 1y ago
        > AI is both terrible and wonderful. It's useless and some things and impressive at others That's kind of my problem. I am saying that it mostly only appears impressive to people who don't know better When people do know better it comes up short consistently Most of the pro AI people I see are bullish about it on things they have no idea about, like non-technical CEOs insisting that it can create good code
• some-guy 1y ago
  I always assumed game development would be one of the most impacted by AI hype, for better or worse. With game development there’s a much higher threshold for subjectivity and “incorrectness”. I’m in a Fortune 500 software company and we are also being pushed AI down our throats, even though so far it has only been useful for small development tasks. However our tolerance for incorrectness is much, much lower—and many skip levels are already realizing this.
  • nathan_compton 1y ago
    I'm an indie game developer and its a domain where I find AI to be most useless - too much of what a game is interactive, spatial, and about game-feel. The AI just can't do it. Even GPT's latest models really struggled to write reasonable 3d transformations, which is unsurprising, since they live in text world, not 3d world.
• bufferoverflow 1y ago
  I wish our company forced AI on us. Our security is so tight, it's pretty much impossible to use any good LLMs.
  • ang_cire 1y ago
    It really doesn't take that beefy of a machine to run a good LLM locally instead of paying some SaaS company to do it for you. I've got a refurb homelab server off PCSP with 512gb ram for <$1k, and I run decently good LLM models (Deepseek-r1:70b, llama3.3:70b). Given your username, you might even try pitching a GPU server to them as dual-purpose; LLM + hashcat. :)
    • bufferoverflow 1y ago
      How would that help me? My work laptop doesn't have 512GB RAM, not even 10% of that.
      • ang_cire 1y ago
        Because if your company is against using LLMs for work based on security concerns, it's usually the concern that an employee will enter company confidential data into the LLM, which when using a SaaS LLM means exposing the data. But if your company buys a server to run it themselves, that security risk is not present.
• gwbas1c 1y ago
  > “He doesn't know that the important thing isn't just the end result, it's the journey and the questions you answer along the way”. Bradley says that the studio’s management have become so enamoured with the technology that without a reliance on AI-generated imagery for presentations and pitches they would not be at the stage they are now, which is dealing with publishers and investors. Take out the word AI and replace it with any other tool that's over-hyped or over-used, and the above statement will apply to any organization.
• nathan_compton 1y ago
  When LLMs came out I suppressed my inner curmudgeon and dove in, since the technology was interesting to me and seemed much more likely than crypto to be useful beyond crime. Thus, I have used LLMs extensively for many years now and I have found that despite the hype and amazing progress, they still basically only excel first drafts and simple refactorings (where they are, I have to say, incredibly useful for eliminating busy work). But I have yet to use a model, reasoning or otherwise, that could solve a problem that required genuine thought, usually in the form of constructing the right abstraction, bottom up style. LLMs write code like super-human dummies, with a tendency to put too much code in a given function and with very little ability to invent a domain in which the solution is simple and clearly expressed, probably because they don't care about that kind of readability and its not much in their data set. I'm deeply influenced by languages like Forth and Lisp, where that kind of bottom up code is the cultural standard and and I prefer it, probably because I don't have the kind of linear intelligence and huge memory of an LLM. For me the hardest part of using LLMs is knowing when to stop and think about the problem in earnest, before the AI generated code gets out of my human brain's capacity to encompass. If you think a bit about how AI still is limited to text as its white board and local memory, text which it generates linearly from top to bottom, even reasoning, it sort of becomes clear why it would struggle with genuine abstraction over problems. I'm no longer so naive as to say it won't happen one day, even soon, but so far its not there.
  • fhd2 1y ago
    My solution is to _only_ chat. No auto completion, nothing agentic, just chats. If it goes off the rails, restart the conversation. I have the chat window in my "IDE" (well, Emacs) and though it can add entire files as context and stuff like that, I curate the context in a fairly fine-grained way through either copy and pasting, quickly writing out pseudo code, and stuff like that. Any generated snippets I treat like StackOverflow answers: Copy, paste, test, rewrite, or for small snippets, I just type the relevant change myself. Whenever I'm sceptical I will prompt stuff like "are you sure X exists?", or do a web search. Once I get my problem solved, I spend a bit of time to really understand the code, figure out what could be simplified, even silly stuff like parameters the model just set to the default value. It's the only way of using LLMs for development I've found that works for me. I'd definitely say it speeds me up, though certainly not 10x. Compared to just being armed with Google, maybe 1.1x.
• caseyy 1y ago
  There is a small, hopeful flipside to this. While people using AI to produce art (such as concept art) have flooded the market, real skills now command a higher price than before. To pull this out of the games industry for just a moment, imagine this: you are a business and need a logo produced. Would you hire someone at the market price who uses AI to generate something... sort of on-brand they most definitely cannot provide indemnity cover for (considering how many of these dubiously owned works they produce), or would you pay above the market price to have an artist make a logo for you that is guaranteed to be their own work? The answer is clear - you'd cough up the premium. This is now happening on platforms like UpWork and Fiverr. The prices for real human work have not decreased; they have shot up significantly. It's also happening slowly in games. The concept artists who are skilled command a higher salary than those who rely on AI. If you depend on image-generating AI to do your work, I don't think many game industry companies would hire you. Only the start-ups that lack experience in game production, perhaps. But that part of the industry has always existed - the one made of dreamy projects with no prospect of being produced. It's not worth paying much attention to, except if you're an investor. In which case, obviously it's a bad investment. Besides, just as machine-translated game localization isn't accepted by any serious publisher (because it is awful and can cause real reputational damage), I doubt any evident AI art would be allowed into the final game. Every single piece of that will need to be produced by humans for the foreseeable future. If AI truly can produce games or many of their components, these games will form the baseline quality of cheap game groups on the marketplaces, just like in the logo example above. The buyer will pay a premium for a quality, human product. Well, at least until AI can meaningfully surpass humans in creativity - the models we have now can only mimic and there isn't a clear way to make them surpass.
  • gdulli 1y ago
    > There is a small, hopeful flipside to this. While people using AI to produce art (such as concept art) have flooded the market, real skills now command a higher price than before. It's "hopeful" that the future of all culture will resemble food, where the majority have access to McDonalds type slop while the rich enjoy artisan culture?
    • 1y ago
• indoordin0saur 1y ago
  This article is an example of why the gender-neutral use of pronouns makes things a pain to read. If you're already changing the interviewees' names then IDK why you couldn't just pick an arbitrary he/she pronoun to stick to for one character. > Francis says their understanding of the AI-pusher’s outlook is that they see the entire game-making process as a problem, one that AI tech companies alone think they can solve. This is a sentiment they do not agree with.
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    There's nothing painful about this to anyone who hasn't been conscripted into the culture wars.
    • indoordin0saur 1y ago
      But it was the culture war that resulted in this change to the language. Previous to the war, singular 'they' was to be avoided due to the ambiguity it introduces.
      • spacecadet 1y ago
        What ambiguity? We know it's a human, the human has a name. We do not know their gender or sex, both are not relevant. They works perfectly. This seems like a you problem...
        • sanitycheck 1y ago
          "X and Y were in the garden, Y noticed the ripe tomatoes as they went into the greenhouse". Is X in the greenhouse? I'm way woker than the average person but I have to admit encountering a singular 'they' breaks my concentration in a distracting way - there's definitely possible ambiguity.
          • card_zero 1y ago
            They also applies to objects (like it does), so here it could be the tomatoes that are going into the greenhouse.
• caseyy 1y ago
  AI is the latest "overwhelmingly negative" games industry fad, affecting game developers. It's one of many. Most are because nine out of ten companies make games for the wrong reason. They don't make them as interactive art, as something the developers would like to play, or to perfect the craft. They make them to make publishers and businessmen rich. That business model hasn't been going so well in recent years[0], and it's already been proclaimed dead in some corners of the industry[1]. Many industry legends have started their own studios (H. Kojima, J. Solomon, R. Colantonio, ...), producing games for the right reasons. When these games are inevitably mainstream hits, that will be the inflection point where the old industry will significantly decline. Or that's what I think, anwyay. [0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tJdLsQzfWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tJdLsQzfWg
  • jordwest 1y ago
    I don't share your optimism, I think as long as there are truly great games being made and the developers earning well from them, the business people are going to be looking at them and saying "we could do that". What those studios lack in creativity or passion they more than make up for in marketing, sales, and sometimes manipulative money extraction game mechanics.
    • caseyy 1y ago
      It's not so much optimism as facts. Large AAA game companies have driven away investors[0] and talent[1]. The old growth engines (microtransactions, live service games, season passes, user-generated content, loot boxes, eSports hero shooters, etc.) also no longer work, as neither general players nor whales find them appealing. AI is considered a potential future growth engine, as it cuts costs in art production, where the bulk of game production costs lie. Game executives are latching onto it hard because it's arguably one of the few straightforward ways to keep growing their publicly-traded companies and their own stock earnings. But technologists already know how this will end. Other games industry leaders are betting on collapse and renewal to simpler business models, like self-funded value-first games. Also, many bet on less cashflow-intensive game production, including lower salaries (there is much to be said about that). Looking at industry reports and business circle murmurs, this is the current state of gaming. Some consider it optimistic, and others (especially the business types without much creative talent) - dire. But it does seem to be the objective situation. [0] VC investment has been down by more than 10x over the last two years, and many big Western game companies have lost investors' money in the previous five years. See Matthew Ball's report, which I linked in my parent comment, for more info. [1] The games industry has seen more than 10% sustained attrition over the last 5 years, and about 50% of employees hope to leave their employer within a year: https://www.skillsearch.com/news/item/games---interactive-salary-and-satisfaction-report-2024 https://www.skillsearch.com/news/item/games---interactive-sa...
• more_corn 1y ago
  Everyone I know uses it to some degree. Simply having a smart debugger does wonders. You don’t have to give up control, it can help you stay in flow state. Or it can constantly irritate you if you fight it.
• gwbas1c 1y ago
  I would think that, if AI-generated content is inferior, these games will fail in the marketplace. So, where are the games with AI-generated content? Where are the reviews that praise or pan them? (Remember, AI is a tool. Tools take time to learn, and sometimes, the tool isn't worth using.)
  • jim-jim-jim 1y ago
    > I would think that, if AI-generated content is inferior, these games will fail in the marketplace. You'd hope so, but I'm not so sure. Media developments are not merely additive, at least with bean counters in charge. Certain formats absolutely eclipse others. It's increasingly hard to watch mainstream films with practical effects or animal actors. Even though most audiences would vastly prefer the real deal, they just put up with it. It's easy to envision a similar future where the budget for art simply isn't there in most offerings, and we're left praising mediocre holdout auteurs for their simple adherence to traditional form (not naming names here).
    • gwbas1c 1y ago
      > It's increasingly hard to watch mainstream films with practical effects or animal actors. Even though most audiences would vastly prefer the real deal, they just put up with it. I (mostly) prefer today's special effects to the ones in the past. The old ones would take me out of the moment, because I'd notice that it was a special effect. (IE, in the original Star Wars movies you can see the matt lines on VHS, and the strings on the C3P0 puppet in the desert. Really distracting.) --- A few more points: A lot of the article reminds me of how recording artists would complain, in the 2000s and 2010s, that they would put a lot of effort into a recording, and then most people were listening to it on a sh*tty MP3. The recording artists didn't understand their audiences. It's hard to know if it's a case where the video game artists don't understand the audiences, or the tool (AI) really isn't bringing value to the process. > It's easy to envision a similar future where the budget for art simply isn't there in most offerings, and we're left praising mediocre holdout auteurs for their simple adherence to traditional form I'm not sure what you mean by that.
• akomtu 1y ago
  Corporations don't need human workers, they need machines, the proverbial cogs that lack their own will and implement the will of the corporation instead. AI will make it happen: human workers will be managed by AI with sub-second precision and kill whatever little creativity and humanity the workers still had.
• specialist 1y ago
  Each example's endeavor is the production of culture. The least interesting use case for "AI". Real wealth creation will come from other domains. These new tools (big data, ML, LLMs, etc) unlock the ability to tackle entirely new problems. But as a fad, "AI" is pretty good for separating investors from their money. It's also great for further beating down wages.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Animats 1y ago
  AI-generated art just keeps getting better. This looks like a losing battle.
  • gazebo64 1y ago
    I think the most salient point the artists make in the article is that the process of ideating and iterating on art is just as valuable, if not moreso, than the end result. You can get a good looking image from an AI generator but miss out on the ideas and discoveries you would otherwise make by actually working on that art. I think it's also unfortunate how the advocates for AI replacing artists in gamedev clearly think of art as a chore or a barrier to launch rather than being the whole point of what they're making. If games are art, then it stands to reason the.. art.. that goes into it is just as important as anything else. A game isn't defined just by the logic of the main loop.
• aucisson_masque 1y ago
  A.i. is a blatant case of darwinism. There are those who adapt, those who will keep moaning about it and finally those who believe it can do everything. First one will succeed, second one will be replaced, third one is going to get hurt. I believe this article and the people it mentions are mostly from the second category. Yet no one with all his mind can deny that ai makes writing code faster, not necessarily better but faster, and games at the end are mostly codes. Of course ai is going to get pushed hard by your ceo, he knows that if he doesn't, another competitor who use it will be able to produce more games, faster and less expensive.
  • ohgr 1y ago
    So on that basis you think the market is happy with shit things made very fast? I can assure you it's not. And people are starting to realise that there is a lot of shit. And know that LLMs generate it.
    • tpmoney 1y ago
      The “market” for almost any definition of that you can choose is demonstrably happy with “shit things made fast” provided that the “shit” thing still mostly works. Within rounding error, no one is paying for any artisan hand crafted products. Today it’s AI, last decade it was Chinese products, before that it was Japanese products. If you can get an 80% solution for 50% of the price, most people are doing that. How often do you “sort by price” when shopping? When was the last time you bought the more expensive higher quality version of something you don’t have a passion for? Or if you want to keep it in the realm of computers, “worse is better” clearly won out. The world uses Linux, not Unix much to the chagrin of the people who wrote the Linux Haters Handbook (regardless of how tongue in cheek that might have been). And the take away from history should be that AI might be “shit” now, but it will improve. If you don’t remember the days when “Made in Japan” was a marker of “shit”, that’s because things that are “shit” can improve faster than things that are “not shit” can maintain their lead.
      • ohgr 1y ago
        You assume it will improve. There is an asymptote from what I can see.
• DadBase 1y ago
  I’ve been doing “vibe coding” since Borland C++. We used to align the mood of the program with ambient ANSI art in the comments. if the compiler crashed, that meant the tone was off.
• gukov 1y ago
  Shopify CEO: "AI usage is now a baseline expectation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43613079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43613079
• crvdgc 1y ago
  A perspective from a friend, who recently gave up trying to get into concept art: Before AI, there was out-sourcing. With mass-produced cheap works, foreign studios eliminated most junior positions. Now AI is just taking this trend to its logical extreme: out-sourcing to machines, the ultimate form of out-sourcing. The cost approaches to 0 and the quantity approaches to infinity.
• jongjong 1y ago
  > In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by the AI was worse than code written by a human–though not drastically so–and was difficult to work with since most of it hadn’t been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it. This is a key insight. The other insight is that devs spend most of their time reading and debugging code, not writing it. AI speeds up the writing of code but slows down debugging... AI was trained with buggy code because most code out there is buggy. Also, when the codebase is complex and the AI cannot see all the dependencies, it performs a LOT worse because it just hallucinates the API calls... It has no idea what version of the API it is using. TBH, I don't think there exists enough non-buggy code out there to train an AI to write good code which doesn't need to be debugged so much. When AI is trained on normal language, averaging out all the patterns produces good results. This is because most humans are good at writing with that level of precision. Code is much more precise and the average human is not good at it. So AI was trained on low-quality data there. The good news for skilled developers is that there probably isn't enough high quality code in the public domain to solve that problem... And there is no incentive for skilled developers to open source their code.
• throwanem 1y ago
  Here's to the next decade of getting paid to clean up after "rockstars."
• snitty 1y ago
  My favorite part about this (and all GenAI) comments section is where one person says, "This is my personal experience using AI" and then a chorus of people chime in "Well, you're using it wrong!"
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    It’s because it’s never “this is my personal experience”, it’s always of the “this whole AI thing is nonsense because it doesn’t work for me” variety.
    • maeln 1y ago
      The same can be said about the other side. It is rarely phrased has "LLM is a useful tool with some important limitations" but "Look the LLM manage to create a junior-level feature, therefor we won't need developers in 2 years from now". It tends to be the same with anything hyped / divisive. Human tend to exaggerate in both direction in communication, especially in low-stake environment such as an internet forum, or when they stand to gain something from the hype.
    • milesrout 1y ago
      You seem to have confused "The whole AI thing is nonsense. [Anecdote]." with "The whole AI thing is nonsense because [anecdote]." I see a lot of "LLMs are not useful. e.g. the other day I asked it to do X and it was terrible." That is not somebody saying that that one experience definitively proves that LLMs are useless, or saying that you should believe that LLMs are useful based only on that one anecdote. It is people making their posts more interesting than just giving their opinions along with arguments for those opinions. Obviously their views are based on the sum of all their experience with LLMs. We don't have to say so every time.
  • johnfn 1y ago
    It's because everyone's "personal experience" is "I used it once and it didn't work".
  • ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
    One very irritating problem I am seeing in a bunch of companies that I have invested in and my money is at stake is that they have taken up larger investments from normal VCs who are usually dumb as rocks but have a larger share is that they are pushing heavily for AI in the day to day processes of the company. For example, some companies are using AI to create tickets or to collate feedback from users. I can clearly see that this is making them think far less through the problem and a lot of this sixth sense understanding of the problem space happens through working through these ticket creation or product creation documents which are now being done by AI. That is causing the quality of the work to become this weird drone like NPC like state where they aren't really solving real issues yet they're getting a lot of stuff done. It's still very early so I do not know how best to talk to them about it. But it's very clear that any sort of creative work, problem solving, etc has huge negative implications when AI is used even a little bit. I have also started to think that a great angel investment question is to ask companies if they are a non AI zone and investing in them will bring better returns in the future.
• ctrlp 1y ago
  I would hope that people with strong opinions about the uses and abuses of AI would start their own firms and hire people who are unwilling to use AI for whatever reasons. The competition should go a long way to proving the naysayer's points or disproving them. Personally, I think there is no evading the AI juggernaut and that artistic metrics or excellence metrics are going to take a back seat to pure shipping garbage faster metrics. The garbage will be come the new baseline of excellence and the former measures of excellence will be cottage industry artisanship with small and dedicated audiences. As a small data point, I don't think AI can make movies worse than they currently are. And they are as bad as they are for commercial but non-AI reasons. But if the means to make movies using AI or scene-making tools build with a combo of AI and maybe game engine platforms puts the ability to make movies into the hands of more artistic people, the result may be more technologically uninteresting but nonetheless more artistically interesting because of narrative/character/storytelling vectors. Better quality for niche audiences. It's a low bar, but it's one possible silver lining.
  • failuser 1y ago
    Why won’t luddites open their own factories, amirite? They would if they had money.
  • mistrial9 1y ago
    a similar inflection point happened in the history of film? because cheap prurient material was faster to produce and did generate commerce quickly.. much faster than say, an epic drama with 3000 extras, costumes and theme musics.. The Film Code in American did happen, was widely mocked, and probably was very responsible for the flourishing of an entire industry to the public for decades.. People left alone for a race to the bottom, does not end well, it seems..
  • fc417fc802 1y ago
    This is equivalent to suggesting (in a world without IP law) that the supporters of such a system ought to start competing firms that refuse to copy things without providing compensation in order that the competition might demonstrate the benefits of the system. Of course without the regulation neither of those systems is likely to be part of a viable business model. That said I agree with your second paragraph. I think we will see an explosion of high quality niche products that would never have been remotely viable before this.
• wedn3sday 1y ago
  Had a funny conversation with a friend of mine recently who told me about how he's in the middle of his yearly review cycle, and management is strongly encouraging him and his team to make greater use of AI tools. He works in biomedical lab research and has absolutely no use for LLMs, but everyone on his team had a great time using the corporate language model to help write amusing resignation letters as various personalities, pirate resignation, dinosaur resignation etc. I dont think anyone actually quit, but what a great way to absolutely nuke team moral!
  • davesque 1y ago
    I've been getting the same thing at my company. Honestly no idea what is driving it other than hype. But it somehow feels different than the usual hype; so prescribed, as though coordinated by some unseen party. Almost like every out of touch business person had a meeting where they agreed they would all push AI for no reason. Can't put my finger on it.
    • Loughla 1y ago
      Is because unlike prior hype cycles, this one is super easy for an MBA to point at and sort of see a way to integrate it. Prior hype, like block chain are more abstract, therefore less useful to people who understand managing but not the actual work.
      • johnnyanmac 1y ago
        Shame that management is deciding that listening to marketing is more important than the craftsmen they push it on.
        • acdha 1y ago
          They’ve always resented those employees having leverage to negotiate better pay and status. Many techies looked at near-management compensation and thought that meant we were part of the elite clubhouse, but they never did.
      • 1y ago
• ihsw 1y ago
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• Aeolun 1y ago
  Art team dislikes the technology that replaces them. Am I the only one that thinks this is kind of a given regardless of the merits of the objection?
  • voidspark 1y ago
    That's not the point of the article.
• ggm 1y ago
  I find introspecting about how I formulate the question and what works better or worse for me personally fascinating. I am content to use the AI to perform "menial" tasks: I had a textfile in something parsable by field with some minor quirks (like right justified text) and was able to specify the field SEMANTICS in a way that made for a prompt to an ICS file calendar which just imported fine as-is. Getting a years forward planning from a texttual note in some structure into calendar -> import -> from-file was sweet. Do I need to train an AI to use a token/API key to do this directly? No. But thinking about how I say efficiently what fields are, and what the boundaries are, helps me understand my data. BTW while I have looked at a ICS file and can see it is type:value, I have no idea of the types, or what specific GMT/Z format it wants for date/time, or the distinctions of meaning for confirmed/pending or the like. These are higher level constructs which seem to have made useful distinct behaviours in the calendar and the AI description of what it had done, and what I should expect lined up. I did not e.g. stipulate the mappings from semantic field to ICS type. I did say "this is a calendar date" and it did the rest. I used AI to write a DJANGO web to do some trivial booking stuff. I did not expect the code to run as-is, but it did. Again, could I live with this product? Yes, but the extensibility worries me. Adding features, I am very conscious one wrong prompt and it can turn this into .. drek. It's fragile.
  • biophysboy 1y ago
    My method is this: before I use AI, I try to ask myself "how much should I surrender my judgment on this problem?" Some problems are too big to surrender judgment. Some problems are solved differently depending on what you want to optimize. Sometimes you want to learn something. Sometimes there's ethics.
    • ggm 1y ago
      Nice. I think I agree, Size of the problem isn't same as "code complexity" or LOC or anything. If the consequences of the wrong solution being deployed are big enough even a 1 line fix can be a disaster. I like surrender judgement. Its loss of locus of control. I also find myself asking if there are ways the AI systems "monetize" the nature of problems being put forward for solutions. I am probably implicitly giving up some IPR asking these questions, I could even be in breach of an NDA in some circumstances. Some problems should not be put to an anonymous external service. I doubt the NSA wants people using claude or mistral or deepseek to solve NSA problems. Unless the goal, is to feed misinformation or mis-drection out into the world.
• john_texas 1y ago
  [dead]
• boh 1y ago
  This just sounds like cases of performative management. Very lazy implementation of what to them is just"productivity-future-tech" of the moment, so they can say "successfully transitioned into AI-driven development" on their CV's. AI is just software and it either fits your strategy or it doesn't. In the same way no company succeeds simply because it started using software, no company is going to succeed simply bcs they started to use AI.
• grg0 1y ago
  Bradley's game is DOA. Is it ARK: Aquatica by any chance?
• EigenLord 1y ago
  I can see why some fields would have an overwhelmingly negative reaction to AI but I simply can't grasp why some software devs are. The entire point of the field is to get computers to do stuff for you. I've been doing this s*it for 10 years, there's too many little details and commands to remember and too much brutally dull work to not automate it. I also have come to realize that in software development, coding is secondary to logical thinking. Logical thinking is the primary medium of every program, the language is just a means to express it. I may have not memorized as many languages as AI, but I can think better than it logically. It helps me execute my tasks better. Also, I've been able to do all kinds of crazy and fun experiments thanks to genAI. Knowing myself I know realistically I will never learn LISP, and will always retain just an academic interest in it. But with AI I can explore these languages and other areas of programming beyond my expertise and experience much more effectively than ever before. Something about the interactive chat interface keeps my attention and allows me to go way deeper than textbooks or other static resources. I do think in many ways it's a skill issue. People conceptualize genAI as a negation of skills, an offloading of skill to the AI, but in actuality grokking these things and learning how to work with them is its own skill. Of course managers just forcing it on people will elicit a bad reaction.
  • 000ooo000 1y ago
    You start by saying it's logical thinking that is a SE's value and then close by suggesting learning how to offload that logical thinking to AI is a 'skill'. Bizarre.
  • yahoozoo 1y ago
    > I've been doing this s*it for 10 years, there's too many little details and commands to remember and too much brutally dull work to not automate it. git gud
  • layer8 1y ago
    As long as one has to double-check and verify every single output, I don’t think that “automation” is the right word. Every LLM use is effectively a one-off and cannot be repeated blindly.
• grg0 1y ago
  > “When I’m told 'Think of how much time you could be spending instead on making the actual game!', those who have drank the AI Kool-Aid don't understand that all this brainstorming and iteration is making the game, it’s a crucial everyday part of game development (and human interaction) and is not a problem to be solved.” This right here is the key. It's that stench of arrogance of those who think others have a "problem" that needs fixing, and that they are in the best position to "solve" it despite having zero context or experience in that domain. It's like calling the plumber and thinking that you're going to teach them something about their job.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• yahoozoo 1y ago
  Let me preface this by saying that I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment the article is trying to convey. That said, the “anonymity”, and the almost tropey at this point C*O characters make this read like a fan fiction.
• Tiktaalik 1y ago
  > The whole game is resting on a prompt ‘what if a game was…’, but with no idea if that would be fun, or how to make it fun. It’s madness”. lol I will point out that this has been an enormous problem in the game industry for long, long before generative AI existed.
• KurSix 1y ago
  The saddest part is watching talented people, who care deeply about the craft, slowly burn out because their judgment is being replaced by a prompt
• BrenBarn 1y ago
  We can only hope this insane trend self-immolates before it causes too much collateral damage.
  • immibis 1y ago
    It's too late for that. The largest economy in the world is already committing seppuku over a formula generated by ChatGPT. To quote some anonymous YouTube commenter: "they told me AI would destroy the world, but I didn't expect it to happen like this"
• bitwize 1y ago
  I like this article. It opens with a statement of its thesis and presents a few profiles of video game workers whose lives have been negatively impacted by AI. Each profile follows a basic template: a paragraph or so about who they are and what they do, a summary of how AI entered their workplace, a bunch of interview quotes about their reaction to it, and a paragraph at the end about what the final outcome was for the person or their company. Succinct, to the point, and easy to read. You don't see a lot of online journalism like this; the clickbait era has been marked by an entire novel about the E! True Hollywood Story of the major player(s) before the fucking point is even mentioned -- or worse still, AI-generated slop as the body text. Props to Aftermath and Luke Plunkett for maintaining a high standard of prose.
• protocolture 1y ago
  >“I am yet to have a team or gamerunner push back on me once I actually explain how these AI art generators work and how they don't contribute in a helpful way to a project, but I have a sense of dread that it is only a matter of time until that changes, especially given that I've gone the majority of my career with no mention of them to every second conversation having it mentioned.” I recently played through a game and after finishing it, read over the reviews. There was a brief period after launch where the game was heavily criticised for its use of AI assets. They removed some, but apparently not all (or more likely, people considered the game tainted and started claiming everything was AI) The (I believe) 4 person dev team used AI tools to keep up with the vast quantity of art they needed to produce for what was a very art heavy game. I can understand people with an existing method not wanting to change. And AI may not actually be a good fit for a lot of this stuff. But I feel like the real winners are going to be the people who do a lot more with a lot less out of sheer necessity to meet outrageous goals.
  • svantana 1y ago
    I see a strong similarity with the (over)use of CGI in movies 25 years ago - the producers were of course thrilled to save money on special fx and at first glance, it looked real. But after seeing a lot of it, a feeling starts to creep in: it's all fake, it's all computer. It breaks the illusion and moves the focus from the story to what the hell they were thinking. Of course today it looks laughable, like a bad video game.
    • protocolture 1y ago
      I think a lot of it was the move to digital away from film too. Old films keep getting great remasters but 2000s era digital films just cant compete.
      • tart-lemonade 1y ago
        Same goes for a lot of TV shows shot on film vs tape vs early digital cameras. Tape and early digital cameras have a much lower quality ceiling than stuff shot on film.
• christkv 1y ago
  Are we going to get a steam label for handcrafted ?
• internet_points 1y ago
  In Norway, there was a recent minor scandal where a county released a report on how they should shut down some schools to save money, and it turned out half the citations were fake. Quite in line with the times. So our Minister of Digitizing Everything says "It's serious. But I want to praise Tromsø Municipality for using artificial intelligence." She's previously said she wants 80% of public sector to be using AI this year and 100% by 5 years. What does that even mean? And why and for what and what should they solve with it? It's so stupid and frustrating I don't even
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• chilldsgn 1y ago
  I've disabled AI in my IDE after trying Jetbrains' AI Assistant for a couple of months. I don't like it and I think relying on LLMs to get my job done is dangerous. Why? I feel less competent at my job. I feel my brain becoming lazy. I enjoy programming a lot, why do I want to hand it off to some machine? My reasoning is that if I spend time practicing and getting really good at software engineering, my work is much faster, more accurate and more reliable and maintainable than an AI agent's. In the long run, using LLMs for producing source code will make things a lot slower, because the people using these machines will lose the human intuition that an AI doesn't have. Be careful.
  • miningape 1y ago
    And the Jetbrains LLM is much less invasive than copilot is. Both of those are splashing in a kiddy pool when you compare it to what tools like Cursor offer.
    • datadrivenangel 1y ago
      Except cursor does the same thing. It's really good for creating small pieces of software, but beyond that just gets painful to fight with.
• raxxorraxor 1y ago
  AI absolutely cannot develop a video game. It is still a high risk creative task and costs for development and artists will not change significantly, even if modern AIs increased their abilities significantly. Perhaps we would be able to synthesize some text, voice and imaging. Also AI can support coding. While AI can probably do a snake game (that perhaps runs/compiles) or attempt to more or less recreate well known codebases like that of Quake (which certainly does not compile), it can only help if the developer does the main work, that is disecting problems into smaller ones until some of them can be automated away. That can improve productivity a bit and certainly could improve developer training. If companies were so inclined to invest in their workforce...
• liendolucas 1y ago
  I prefer to read source code, articles, watch videos or even join a chat channel to discuss and try things out until they work (or understand why they don't work) than fall and consume trash from HypeAI. Heck even if I don't get a solution I prefer to be stuck thinking with paper and pencil. The only time I did it try it for the very first time was an evening that I was so bored that decided to compare my 3 line Python snippet (of which one of those was the "def" statement) that generates an alternating pulse clock against the output of an "ai" prompt. The output code I saw kept me thinking about all those poor souls relying on HypeAI to create anything useful. Not long ago there was a thread about someone proud of a 35k LoC cooking web app entirely made from a prompt. What it kept ringing from that thread was that the author was proud of the total LoC as maybe thought that the more the better. Who knows?
  • soulofmischief 1y ago
    I think the LOC is of note because it shows that these models might be capable of building large, complex systems in the future.
• conartist6 1y ago
  AI is especially toxic to anyone who truly believes in their work -- who puts a bit of themselves into it. These are the people AI sucks the life force out of while giving it to those without giving their stolen energy to managers-of-managers seemingly devoid of passion, care, love, empathy, creativity, and humanity
• etiam 1y ago
  Hands up everyone who thinks the mandatory GPT use mentioned in the post drives towards instructing 'Summarize all employee input since last review and score their performance for salary changes. Also recommend whether to fire or retain. Also format all valuable actions taken for use as training data'
• bawana 1y ago
  Ai excel at mapping an input to an output. Isnt this what management is supposed to do? Why isnt there an AI CFO? CEO? The gains to the bottom line are huge considering their salaries, bonuses and stock options. It will send their share prices sky high.