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I strongly disagree. Let me try and change your mind. Let's say that you have been building your passion project; it could be a game, it could be a synth, it c
by peteforde 8mo ago
I strongly disagree. Let me try and change your mind.
Let's say that you have been building your passion project; it could be a game, it could be a synth, it could be a mobile app. You were a year into development already when LLMs blew up, and you very quickly realized that you could leverage them to move much, much faster. This allowed you to tackle a long list of features that realistically would have never left the daydreaming to-do list because in reality, it'd have been a minor miracle to just get to v1.0 much less do all of the cool stuff you thought of along the way. This is the real power of the agentic workflow: in experienced hands, it's an incredible force multiplier.
And yet, even while your churning out features and knocking out bugs that you never would have found on your own without users being upset, the world gets progressively more and more pissy about this moment's Scarlet Letter. Suddenly mentioning that actually, you're getting amazing results from LLMs makes a significant percentage of people irrationally angry, leaving comments that would otherwise be appropriate to shame deviants and cheaters.
Suddenly, you're faced with a really awful realization: you'd love to loudly and proudly show the world how your LLM-assisted dev workflow has allowed you to produce something you honestly might not have ever finished in 2023, but if you do then people are going to write off what you've done as slop before even looking at it, and since you were actually thinking that maybe what you were building might have some legitimate commercial viability, you can't actually advocate for sanity and transparency without taking a serious hit to your product's success. By extension, this means that it might cause real damage to you and your family.
What I am describing is a chilling effect, and it is real. All of the billions in VC have literally nothing to offer someone who just wants to build cool shit and can suddenly do so faster and often better.
At the very least, consider that there is a tangible cost to telling the world that the thing you created exists at least in part because of AI but there is no such thing as people being more likely to pay for something simply because AI was involved. There is only downside. That is the chill.
It's not about victimhood. It is about not fighting battles that can only lose you ground.
- raincole 8mo agoSteam has an AI disclaimer now and many games with the disclaimer still sell well. So yeah it's totally victim mentality. The evidence is just right on Steam, but instead of actually looking at the largest market in the gaming world some AI bros chose to fight an imaginary enemy in their minds. https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/games-with-ai-disclosures-have-grossed-an-estimated-660m-on-steam https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/games-with-ai-disclosures-h...
- yellowapple 8mo agoPer your link, only 6% of those games made more than $10k. Also, the AI disclaimer covers the very broad category of “AI has touched some part of this project at some point, no matter how minor, and no matter if it was eventually replaced with non-AI assets”. The original article seems to be more about the narrower category of “AI is a significant part of this project”, which would exclude nearly all of the top-12-grossing games that your link covers.
- peteforde 8mo agoHere's a social experiment for you to try: create or switch to a different profile, put on your debate club hat and post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions. Speak eloquently and be polite. Say things that are defensibly reasonable if you were arguing the opposite position. Then watch the silent downvoting begin. Perhaps y'all aren't aware that this is happening, or the degree to which it doesn't matter how coherent or fair your point may be. If you speak out in favour of considered, responsible use of agentic LLM usage, there's a mob of socketpuppets that are eager to punish you because you're not on their team.
- raincole 8mo ago> post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions > Then watch the silent downvoting begin I express my pro-AI positions on HN all the time. Also, top 3 comments in this very thread are all pro-AI right now. That's how deeply your victim mentality rooted. You chose to ignore all the positive parts and cling to the downvotes. That's a choice you made and I won't bother to convince you otherwise anymore.