An Overwhelmingly Negative and Demoralizing Force

https://aftermath.site/ai-video-game-development-art-vibe-coding-midjourney

by Doches • 1 year ago

443 409 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

But make some shallow games with generic, cell-shaded anime waifus accessed by gambling and they eat that shit up

dkobia2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

bluefirebrand15• 1 year 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

esafak4• 1 year ago

Perhaps the OP completes the assigned task ahead of schedule and keeps the saved time.

floriannn• 1 year 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.

dominicrose• 1 year ago

That's not the worst thing. Having more work means you're less bored. You probably won't be payed more though. But being too productive can cause you to have no next task, wich isn't the same thing as having free time.

I think that's part of the reason why devs like working from home and not be spied on.

adrian_b• 1 year ago

"AI" is just a trick to circumvent the copyright laws that are the main brake in writing quickly programs.

The "AI" generated code is just code extracted from various sources used for training, which could not be used by a human programmer because most likely they would have copyrights incompatible with the product for which "AI" is used.

All my life I could have written much faster any commercial software if I had been free to just copy and paste any random code lines coming from open-source libraries and applications, from proprietary programs written for former employers or from various programs written by myself as side projects with my own resources and in my own time, but whose copyrights I am not willing to donate to my current employer, so that I would no longer be able to use in the future my own programs.

I could search and find suitable source code for any current task as fast and with much greater reliability than by prompting an AI application. I am just not permitted to do that by the existing laws, unlike the AI companies.

Already many decades ago, it was claimed that the solution for enhancing programmer productivity is more "code reuse". However "code reuse" has never happened at the scale imagined in the distant past, but not because of technical reasons, but due to the copyright laws, whose purpose is exactly to prevent code reuse.

Now "AI" appears to be the magical solution that can provide "code reuse" at the scale dreamed a half of century ago, by escaping from the copyright constraints.

When writing a program for my personal use, I would never use an AI assistant, because it cannot accelerate my work in any way. For boilerplate code, I use various templates and very smart editor auto-completion, there is no need of any "AI" for that.

On the other hand, when writing a proprietary program, especially for some employer that has stupid copyright rules, e.g. not allowing the use of libraries with different copyrights, even when those copyrights are compatible with the requirements of the product, then I would not hesitate to prompt an AI assistant, in order to get code stripped of copyright, saving thus time over rewriting an equivalent code just for the purpose of enabling it to be copyrighted by the employer.

popularonion2• 1 year ago

Not sure why this is downvoted. People forget or weren’t around for the early 2000s when companies were absolutely preoccupied with code copyright and terrified of lawsuits. That loosened up only slightly during the GitHub/StackOverflow era.

If you proposed something like GitHub Copilot to any company in 2020, the legal department would’ve nuked you from orbit. Now it’s ok because “everyone is doing it and we can’t be left behind”.

Edit: I just realized this was a driver for why whiteboard puzzles became so big - the ideal employee for MSFT/FB/Google etc was someone who could spit out library quality, copyright-unencumbered, “clean room” code without access to an internet connection. That is what companies had to optimize for.

bflesch• 1 year ago

This is an extremely important point, and first time I see it mentioned with regards to software copyright. Remember the days where companies got sued for including GPL'd code in their proprietary products?

voidUpdate2• 1 year ago

I wish I had a job where if I completed all my work quickly, I was allowed to do whatever

ang_cire8• 1 year ago

How do they know if you're done, if you haven't "turned it in" yet? They're probably not watching your screen constantly.

My last boss told me essentially (paraphrasing), "I budget time for your tasks. If you finish late, I look like I underestimate time required, or you're not up to it. If you finish early, I look like I overestimate. If I give you a week to do something, I don't care if you finish in 5 minutes, don't give it to me until the week is up unless you want something else to do."

cschep• 1 year ago

You can implement this yourself fairly easily.

justonceokay• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

I think there will still be room for "debugging AI slop-code" and "performance-turning AI slop-code" and "cranking up the strictness of the linter (or type-checker for dynamically-typed languages) to chase out silly bugs" , not to mention the need for better languages / runtime that give better guarantees about correctness.

It's the front-end of the hype cycle. The tech-debt problems will come home to roost in a year or two.

AlexandrB2• 1 year ago

I think there will still be room for "debugging AI slop-code" and "performance-turning AI slop-code"

Ah yes, maintenance, the most fun and satisfying part of the job. /s

658397472• 1 year ago

It's the front-end of the hype cycle. The tech-debt problems will come home to roost in a year or two.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

fc417fc8022• 1 year ago

not to mention the need for better languages / runtime that give better guarantees about correctness.

Use LLM to write Haskell. Problem solved?

philistine3• 1 year ago

AI will never produce a deletion.

That, right here, is a world-shaking statement. Bravo.

QuadrupleA• 1 year ago

Not quite true though - I've occasionally passed a codebase to DeepSeek to have it simplify, and it does a decent job. Can even "code golf" if you ask it.

But the sentiment is true, by default current LLMs produce verbose, overcomplicated code

esafak4• 1 year ago

Today's assistants can refactor, which includes deletions.

Eliezer• 1 year ago

And if it isn't already false it will be false in 6 months, or 1.5 years on the outside. AI is a moving target, and the oldest people among you might remember a time in the 1750s when it didn't talk to you about code at all.

Taterr• 1 year ago

It can absolutely be used to refactor and reduce code, simply asking "Can this be simplified" in reference to a file or system often results in a nice refactor.

However I wouldn't say refactoring is as hands free as letting AI produce the code in the first place, you need to cherry pick its best ideas and guide it a little bit more.

stevenhuang• 1 year ago

It really isn't, and if you think it is, you're holding it wrong.

rqtwteye• 1 year ago

You have to go lower down the stack. Don't use AI but write the AI. For the foreseeable future there is a lot of opportunity to make the AI faster.

I am sure assembly programmers were horrified at the code the first C compilers produced. And I personally am horrified by the inefficiency of python compared to the C++ code I used to write. We always have traded faster development for inefficiency.

kmeisthax2• 1 year ago

C solved the horrible machine code problem by inflicting programmers with the concept of undefined behavior, where blunt instruments called optimizers take a machete to your code. There's a very expensive document locked up somewhere in the ISO vault that tells you what you can and can't write in C, and if you break any of those rules the compiler is free to write whatever it wants.

This created a league of incredibly elitist[0] programmers who, having mastered what they thought was the rules of C, insisted to everyone else that the real problem was you not understanding C, not the fact that C had made itself a nightmare to program in. C is bad soil to plant a project in even if you know where the poison is and how to avoid it.

The inefficiency of Python[1] is downstream of a trauma response to C and all the many, many ways to shoot yourself in the foot with it. Garbage collection and bytecode are tithes paid to absolve oneself of the sins of C. It's not a matter of Python being "faster to write, harder to execute" as much as Python being used as a defense mechanism.

In contrast, the trade-off from AI is unclear, aside from the fact that you didn't spend time writing it, and thus aren't learning anything from it. It's one thing to sacrifice performance for stability; versus sacrificing efficiency and understanding for faster code churn. I don't think the latter is a good tradeoff! That's how we got under-baked and developer-hostile ecosystems like C to begin with!

[0] The opposite of a "DEI hire" is an "APE hire", where APE stands for "Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion"

[1] I'm using Python as a stand-in for any memory-safe programming language that makes use of a bytecode interpreter that manipulates runtime-managed memory objects.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 1 year ago

C was specifically designed to map 1:1 onto PDP-11 assembly. For example, the '++' operator was created solely to represent auto-increment instructions like TST (R0)+.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 1 year ago

The AI companies probably use Python because all the computation happens on the GPU and changing Python control plane code is faster than changing C/C++ control plane code

AnimalMuppet• 1 year ago

If the company values that 10x speedup, there is absolutely still a place for you in this environment. Only now it's going to take five days instead of two, because it's going to be harder to track that down in the less-well-structured stuff that AI produces.

Leynos• 1 year ago

Why are you letting the AI construct poorly structured code? You should be discussing an architectural plan with it first and only signing off on the code design when you are comfortable with it.

candiddevmike• 1 year ago

I wonder what the impact of LLM codegen will have on open source projects like Kubernetes and Linux.

bluefirebrand15• 1 year ago

I haven't really seen what Linus thinks of LLMs but I'm curious

I suspect he is pretty unimpressed by the code that LLMs produce given his history with code he thinks is subpar, but what do I know

ajjenkins• 1 year ago

AI can definitely produce a deletion. In fact, I commonly use AI to do this. Copy some code and prompt the AI to make the code simpler or more concise. The output will usually be fewer lines of code.

Unless you meant that AI won’t remove entire features from the code. But AI can do that too if you prompt it to. I think the bigger issue is that companies don’t put enough value on removing things and only focus on adding new features. That’s not a problem with AI though.

ryandrake• 1 year ago

I messed around with Copilot for a while and this is one of the things that actually really impressed me. It was very good at taking a messy block of code, and simplifying it by removing unnecessary stuff, sometimes reducing it to a one line lambda. Very helpful!

Freedom2• 1 year ago

I'm no big fan of LLM generated code, but the fact that GP bluntly states "AI will never produce a deletion" despite this being categorically false makes it hard to take the rest of their spiel in good faith.

As a side note, I've had coworkers disappear for N days too and in that time the requirements changed (as is our business) and their lack of communication meant that their work was incompatible with the new requirements. So just because someone achieves a 10x speedup in a vacuum also isn't necessarily always a good thing.

specialist2• 1 year ago

This is probably just me projecting...

u/justonceokay's wrote:

The solution to bad code is more code.

This has always been true, in all domains.

Gen-AI's contribution is further automating the production of "slop". Bots arguing with other bots, perpetuating the vicious cycle of bullshit jobs (David Graeber) and enshitification (Cory Docotrow).

u/justonceokay's wrote:

AI will never produce a deletion.

I acknowledge your example of tidying up some code. What Bill Joy may have characterized as "working in the small".

But what of novelty, craft, innovation? Can Gen-AI, moot the need for code? Like the oft-cited example of -2,000 LOC? https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

Can Gen-AI do the (traditional, pre 2000s) role of quality assurance? Identify unnecessary or unneeded work? Tie functionality back to requirements? Verify the goal has been satisfied?

Not yet, for sure. But I guess it's conceivable, provided sufficient training data. Is there sufficient training data?

You wrote:

only focus on adding new features

Yup.

Further, somewhere in the transition from shipping CDs to publishing services, I went from developing products to just doing IT & data processing.

The code I write today (in anger) has a shorter shelf-life, creates much less value, is barely even worth the bother of creation much less validation.

Gen-AI can absolutely do all this @!#!$hit IT and data processing monkey motion.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

AI can refactor or trim code. But in practice, the way it's being used and measured in most orgs is all about speed and output

Lutger• 1 year ago

So its rather that AI amplifies the already existing short-term incentives, increasing the harder to attribute and easier to ignore long-term costs.

The one actual major downside to AI is that PM and higher are now looking for problems to solve with it. I haven't really seen this before a lot with technology, except when cloud first became a thing and maybe sometimes with Microsoft products.

stuckinhell4• 1 year ago

AI can do deletions and refactors, and 10x speedups. You just need to push the latest models constantly.

DeathArrow2• 1 year ago

AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production

Wasn't it like that always for most companies? Get to market fast, add features fast, sell them, add more features?

AdieuToLogic2• 1 year ago

>AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production
Wasn't it like that always for most companies? Get to market fast, add features fast, sell them, add more features?

This reminds me of an old software engineering adage.

  When delivering a system, there are three choices
  stakeholders have:

  You can have it fast,
  You can have it cheap,
  You can have it correct.

  Pick any two.

762236• 1 year ago

AI writes my unit tests. I clean them up a bit to ensure I've gone over every line of code. But it is nice to speed through the boring parts, and without bringing declarative constructs into play (imperative coding is how most of us think).

gitpusher• 1 year ago

I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old…

When they look at the calendar and it says May 2025 instead of April

8note• 1 year ago

AI will never produce a deletion.

I'm currently reading an LLM generated deletion. its hard to get an LLM to work with existing tools, but not impossible

bitwize5• 1 year ago

If you've ever had to work alongside someone who has, or whose job it is to obtain, all the money... you will find that time to market is very often the ONLY criterion that matters. Turning the crank to churn out some AI slop is well worth it if it means having something to go live with tomorrow as opposed to a month from now.

LevelsIO's flight simulator sucked. But his payoff-to-effort ratio is so absurdly high, as a business type you have to be brain-dead to leave money on the table by refusing to try replicating his success.

bookman117• 1 year ago

It feels like LLMs are doing to coding what the internet/attention economy did to journalism.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

You're describing the kind of developer who builds foundations, not just features. And yeah, that kind of thinking gets lost when the only thing that's measured is how fast you can ship something that looks like it works

dyauspitr• 1 year ago

AI deletes a lot of you tell it to optimize code and the new code will pass all the tests…

cies• 1 year ago

I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old…

They will not feel old because they will enter into bliss of Singularity(TM).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

kkukshtel• 1 year ago

Claude Code removed an npm package (and its tree of deps) from my project and wrote its own more simple component that did the core part of what I needed the package to do.

I think we'll be okay and likely better off.

rolandog• 1 year ago

Wholeheartedly agree. I also feel like I'm sometimes reliving the King Neptune vs Spongebob meme equivalent of coding. No room for Think, Plan, Execute... Only throw spaghetti code at wall.

nilkn2• 1 year 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.

petesergeant2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

achierius4• 1 year ago

What sort of tasks have you seen them struggle with? Not to dispute, just collecting datapoints for my own sake.

kmeisthax2• 1 year ago

If you're not doing the work, you're not learning from the result.

The CEOs in question bought what they believed to be a power tool, but got what is more like a smarter copy machine. To be clear, copy machines are not useless, but they also aren't going to drive the 200% increases in productivity that people think they will.

But because management demands the 200% increase in productivity they were promised by the AI tools, all the artists and programmers on the team hear "stop doing anything interesting or novel, just copy what already exists". To be blunt, that's not the shit they signed up for, and it's going to result in a far worse product. Nobody wants slop.

raxxorraxor2• 1 year ago

Having spend hours upon hours with image snythesis for artistic hobby purposes, it is indeed an awesome tool. If you get into it you might learn about its limitations though.

Real knowledge here is often absend from the strongest AI prosletisers, others are more realistic about it. It still remains an awesome tool, but a limited one.

AIs today are not creative at all. They find statistical matches. They perform a different work than artists do.

But please, replace all your artwork with AI generated ones. I believe the forced "adapt" phase with that approach would realize itself rather quickly.

nilkn2• 1 year ago

It still remains an awesome tool, but a limited one.

And that's enough to drive significant industry-wide change. Just because it can't fully automate everything doesn't mean companies aren't going to expect (and, indeed, increasingly require) their employees to learn how to effectively utilize the technology. The CEO of Shopify recently made it clear that refusal to learn to use AI tools will factor directly into performance evaluations for all staff. This is just the beginning. It's best to be wise and go where the puck is headed.

The article gives several examples of where these tools are used to rapidly accelerate experimentation, pitches, etc. Supposedly this is a bad thing and should be avoided because it's not sufficiently artisan, but no defensible argument was presented as to why these use cases are illegitimate.

In terms of writing code, we're entering an era where developers who have invested in learning how to utilize this technology are simply better and more valuable to companies than developers who have not. Naysayers will find all sorts of false ways to nitpick that statement, yet it remains true. Effective usage means knowing when (and when not) to use these tools -- and to what degree. It also, for now at least, means remaining a human expert about the craft at hand.

recursivedoubts2• 1 year 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.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• 1 year 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.

recursivedoubts2• 1 year ago

i don't think it's an either/or situation

bayindirh3• 1 year 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.

ToucanLoucan• 1 year ago

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.

This was pretty consistently my and many others viewpoint since 2023. We were assured many times over that this time it would be different. I found this unconvincing.

rchaud2• 1 year ago

I realize that people are not actually complaining about AI, but about how modern capitalism is going to use AI.

Something very similar can be said about the issue of guns in America. We live in a profoundly sick society where the airwaves fill our ears with fear, envy and hatred. The easy availability of guns might not have been a problem if it didn't intersect with a zero-sum economy.

Couple that with the unavailability of community and social supports and you have a a recipe for disaster.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 1 year ago

criticizing the humans that are using AI to replace workers, instead of criticizing AI itself

I think you misunderstand OP's point. An employer saying "we only hire experienced developers [therefore worries about inexperienced developers being misled by AI are unlikely to manifest]" doesn't seem to realize that the AI is what makes inexperienced developers. In particular, using the AI to learn the craft will not allow prospective developers to learn the fundamentals that will help them understand when the AI is being unhelpful.

It's not so much to do with roles currently being performed by humans instead being performed by AI. It's that the experienced humans (engineers, doctors, lawyers, researchers, etc.) who can benefit the most from AI will eventually retire and the inexperienced humans who don't benefit much from AI will be shit outta luck because the adults in the room didn't think they'd need an actual education.

ffsm87• 1 year ago

Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from?

Strictly speaking, you don't even need university courses to get experienced devs.

There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so without any formal teaching. People like that will always be more effective at their job once employed, simply because they'll have just that much more experience from trying various stuff.

Not to discredit University degrees of course - the best devs will have gotten formal teaching and code in their free time.

erikerikson2• 1 year ago

GP didn't mention university degrees.

You get experienced devs from inexperienced devs that get experience.

[edit: added "degrees" as intended. University was mentioned as the context of their observation]

bluefirebrand15• 1 year ago

People like that will always be more effective at their job once employed

This is honestly not my experience with self taught programmers. They can produce excellent code in a vacuum but they often lack a ton of foundational stuff

In a past job, I had to untangle a massive nested loop structure written by a self taught dev, which did work but ran extremely slowly

He was very confused and asked me to explain why my code ran fast, his ran slow, because "it was the same number of loops"

I tried to explain Big O, linear versus exponential complexity, etc, but he really didn't get it

But the company was very impressed by him and considered him our "rockstar" because he produced high volumes of code very quickly

philistine3• 1 year ago

There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so without any formal teaching.

We're talking about the industry responsible for ALL the growth of the largest economy in the history of the world. It's not the 1970s anymore. You can't just count on weirdos in basements to build an industry.

658397472• 1 year ago

There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so without any formal teaching.

That's not the kind of experience companies look for though. Do you have a degree? How much time have you spent working for other companies? That's all that matters to them.

voidhorse• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

tmpz222• 1 year ago

Fast fashion - also ruinous to the environment.

mattgreenrocks• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Then maybe under pretext of playing with AI, finally refactor and clean up that codebase?

rchaud2• 1 year 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.

lanfeust610• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

I have very little objection to AI, providing we get UBI to mitigate the fallout.

lanfeust610• 1 year 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.

parpfish2• 1 year ago

I was thinking about this and realized that if we want an AI boom to lead to UBI, AI needs to start replacing the cushy white collar jobs first.

If you start by replacing menial labor, there will be more unemployment but you’re not going to build the political will to do anything because those jobs were seen as “less than” and the political class will talk about how good and efficient it is that these jobs are gone.

You need to start by automating away “good jobs” that directly affect middle/upper class people. Jobs where people have extensive training and/or a “calling” to the field. Once lawyers, software engineers, doctors, executives, etc get smacked with widespread unemployment, the political class will take UBI much more seriously.

hello_computer9• 1 year ago

But why will that happen? If they have robots and AI and all the money, what’s stopping the powers that be from disposing of the excess biomass?

hello_computer9• 1 year ago

It’s karma. The creatives weren’t terribly concerned when the factory guys lost their jobs. “Lern to code!” Now it’s our turn to “Learn to OnlyFans” or “Learn to Homeless”

Fraterkes5• 1 year ago

"learn to code" was thrown around by programmers, not creatives. Everyone else (including writers and artists) has long hated that phrase, and condemded it as stupid and shortsighted.

Terr_4• 1 year ago

The creatives [...] “Lern to code!”

No, the underlying format of "$LABOR_ISSUE can be solved by $CHANGE_JOB" comes from a place of politics, where a politician is trying to suggest they have a plan to somehow tackle a painful problem among their constituents, and that therefore they should be (re-)elected.

Then the politicians piled onto "coal-miners can learn to code" etc. because it was uniquely attractive, since:

1. No big capital expenditures, so they don't need to promise/explain how a new factory will get built.

2. The potential for remote work means constituents wouldn't need to sell their homes or move.

3. Participants wouldn't require multiple years of expensive formal schooling.

4. It had some "more money than you make now" appeal.

Fraterkes5• 1 year ago

If ai exacerbates culture issues and management incompetence then that is an inherent downside of ai.

There is a bunch of programmers who like ai, but as the article shows, programmers are not the only people subjected to ai in the workplace. If you're an artist, you've taken a job that has crap pay and stability for the amount of training you put in, and the only reason you do it is because you like the actual content of the job (physically making art). There is obviously no upside to ai for those people, and this focus on the managers' or developers' perspective is myopic.

lanfeust610• 1 year ago

It's an interesting point that passion-jobs that creatives take on (including game dev) tend to get paid less, and where the thrilling component is disrupted there could be less incentive to bother entering the field.

I think for the most part creatives will still line up for these gigs, because they care about contributing to the end products, not the amount of time they spend using Blender.

andybak8• 1 year ago

It might seem hard to believe but there are a bunch of artists who also like AI. People whose artistic practice predates AI. The definition of "artist" is a quagmire which I won't get into but I am not stretching the definition here in any way.

hbsbsbsndk• 1 year 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.

kstrauser• 1 year 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.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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?

grg04• 1 year 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.

000ooo0002• 1 year ago

Can't wait to hear the inevitable slurs people will create to refer to heavy AI users and staunch AI avoiders.

esafak4• 1 year ago

Prompt puncher and Luddite come to mind.

Schiendelman• 1 year ago

"Sloppers" appeared in another thread in this post. I've seen it before, I think it'll stick.

esafak4• 1 year 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.

dkobia2• 1 year 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.

tmpz222• 1 year 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_2• 1 year ago

When have companies ever cared about the long-term effects of anything, and why would they suddenly start now?

Aeolun5• 1 year ago

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 think this is the biggest risk. You sometimes get stuck in a cycle in which you hope the AI can fix its own mistake, because you don’t want to expend the effort to understand what it wrote.

It’s pure laziness that occurs only because you didn’t write the code yourself in the first place.

At the same time, I find myself incredibly bored when typing out boilerplate code these days. It was one thing with Copilot, but tools like Cursor completely obviate the need.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

AI can get you to "something that runs" frighteningly fast, but understanding why it works (or doesn't) is where the real time cost creeps in

chilldsgn2• 1 year ago

100% agree with you, my sentiment is the same. Some time ago I considered making the LLM create tests for me, but decided against it. If I don't understand what needs to be tested, how can I write the code that satisfies this test?

We humans have way more context and intuition to rely on to implement business requirements in software than a machine does.

DeathArrow2• 1 year 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.

AlienRobot• 1 year 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.

matt32102• 1 year ago

The AI code has thousands of licenses but the legal system hasn't caught up

woah2• 1 year 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.

svantana2• 1 year 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.

munksbeer2• 1 year 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.

bluefirebrand15• 1 year 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

woah2• 1 year ago

I said "better code faster". Delivering features to users is always a good thing, and in fact is the entire point of what we do.

nathan_compton3• 1 year ago

I've posted recently about a dichotomy which I have had in my head for years as a technical person: there are two kinds of tools; the first lets you do the right thing more easily and the second lets you do the wrong thing more quickly and for longer before you have to pay for it. AI/LLMs can definitely be the latter kind of tool, especially in a context where short term incentives swamp long term ones.

int_19h4• 1 year ago

I'm actually pro-AI and I use AI assistants for coding, but I'm also very concerned that the way those things will be deployed at scale in practice is likely to lead to severe degradation of software quality across the board.

Why the hand-wringing? Well, for one thing, as a developer I still have to work on that code, fix the bugs in it, maintain it etc. You could say that this is a positive since AI slop would provide for endless job security for people who know how to clean up after it - and it's true, it does, but it's a very tedious and boring job.

But I'm not just a developer, either - I'm also a user, and thinking about how low the average software quality already is today, the prospect of it getting even worse across the board is very unpleasant.

And as for things taking care of themselves, I don't think they will. So long as companies can still ship something, it's "good enough", and cost-cutting will justify everything else. That's just how our economy works these days.

ang_cire8• 1 year ago

This assumes a level of both rationality and omniscience that don't exist in the real world.

If a company fails to compete in the market and dies, there is no "autopsy" that goes in and realizes that it failed because of a chain-reaction of factors stemming from bad AI-slop code. And execs are so far removed from the code level, they don't know either, and their next company will do the same thing.

What you're likely to end up with is project managers and developers who do know the AI code sucks, and they'll be heeded by execs just as much they are now, which is to say not at all.

And when the bad AI-code-using devs apply to the next business whose execs are pro-AI because they're clueless, guess who they'll hire?

matt32102• 1 year 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.

bluefirebrand15• 1 year 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

andybak8• 1 year 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.

pfdietz3• 1 year ago

Sounds like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

some-guy• 1 year 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_compton3• 1 year 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.

bufferoverflow2• 1 year 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_cire8• 1 year 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. :)

bufferoverflow2• 1 year ago

How would that help me? My work laptop doesn't have 512GB RAM, not even 10% of that.

gwbas1c5• 1 year 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_compton3• 1 year 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.

fhd22• 1 year 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.

caseyy6• 1 year 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• 1 year 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?

caseyy6• 1 year ago

It's hopeful because AI has not devalued creative human labor but increased its worth. Similar to how if one were a skilled chef, they didn't start working for McDonald's when it came to be, but for a restaurant that pays significantly above McDonald's.

Most people's purchasing power being reduced is a separate matter, more related to the eroding middle class and greedflation. Many things can be said about it, but they are less related to the trend I highlighted. Even if, supposing the middle class erosion continues, the scenario you suggest may very well play out.

milesrout5• 1 year ago

The situation with food is that everyone today has access to good quality food if they choose to actually put their money towards it, but large numbers of people enjoy McDonalds and KFC and such slop, so they choose to spend far more on it than they'd spend cooking for themselves.

It is still much better than when large numbers of people starved if it rained a bit in the wrong week.

    He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees
    Of the singing birds and the humming bees;
    Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether
    The cloud in the west would bring foul weather.

The weather and its effect on the food supply was the preoccupation of 90% of the population 90% of the time for all of agricultural man's history (and pre-history) and hunting and gathering was even worse for quality of life.

JohnMakin• 1 year ago

real skills now command a higher price than before.

Only if companies value/recognize those real skills over that of the alternative, and even if they do, companies are pretty notorious for choosing whatever is cheapest/easiest (or perceived to be).

indoordin0saur4• 1 year 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-div2• 1 year ago

There's nothing painful about this to anyone who hasn't been conscripted into the culture wars.

indoordin0saur4• 1 year 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.

gwbas1c5• 1 year ago

"they" was a gender-neutral pronoun when I was in school in the 1990s.

ryoshoe• 1 year ago

Singular they was used by respected authors even as far back as the 19th century.

indoordin0saur4• 1 year ago

It has been considered normal in some colloquial uses for a long time. But until the late 2010s/early 2020s all style guides considered it to be poor form due to the ambiguity and muddy sentence structure it creates. Recommendations were changed recently for political reasons.

caseyy6• 1 year 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

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tJdLsQzfWg

jordwest• 1 year 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.

caseyy6• 1 year 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-sa...

milesrout5• 1 year ago

Very selective data in that presentation. The worst figures are always selected for comparisons: in one it's since 2019, then since 2020, then since 2022, then since 2020, then 2019, and on and on.

There is nothing wrong with making entertainment products to make money. That's the reason all products are made: to make money. Games have gone bad because the audience has bad taste. People like Fortnite. They like microtransactions. They like themepark rubbish that you can sell branded skins for. It is the same reason Magic: the Gathering has been ruined with constant IP tie-ins: the audience likes it. People pay for it. People like tat.

more_corn• 1 year 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.

gwbas1c5• 1 year 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• 1 year 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).

gwbas1c5• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

specialist2• 1 year 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.

Animats• 1 year ago

AI-generated art just keeps getting better. This looks like a losing battle.

gazebo642• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

ohgr3• 1 year 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.

tpmoney2• 1 year 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.

ang_cire8• 1 year ago

another competitor who use it will be able to produce more games, faster and less expensive

And yet this is no guarantee they will succeed. In fact, the largest franchises and games tend to be the ones that take their time and build for quality. There are a thousand GTA knock-offs on Steam, but it's R* that rakes in the money.

miningape3• 1 year ago

Exactly, cheap buggy shovelware has always been available to gamers. They just choose not to buy it because they know the experience will be sht since no one spent any time polishing it from a POC to a product.

AI generates code that's harder for humans to understand so that polishing process is takes longer and is even more costly when you have AI shtting out code at breakneck speed.

gazebo642• 1 year ago

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.

It's actually quite easy, and not uncommon, to deny all of those things. Game code is complex and massively interwoven and relying on generative code that you didn't write and don't fully understand will certainly break down as game systems increase in complexity, and you will struggle to maintain it or make effective modifications -- so ignoring the fact that the quality is lower, there's an argument to be made that it will be "slower" to write in the long term.

I think it's also flat wrong to say games are "mostly codes" -- games are a visual medium and people remember the visual/audio experience they had playing a game. Textures, animations, models, effects, lighting, etc. all define what a game is just as much if not more than the actual gameplay systems. Art is the main differentiating factor between games when you consider that most gameplay systems are derivative of one another.

grg04• 1 year ago

And then there is a fourth category: those who preach things they have no idea about.

miningape3• 1 year ago

OP falls into this category

DadBase• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Shopify CEO: "AI usage is now a baseline expectation"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43613079

crvdgc• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Here's to the next decade of getting paid to clean up after "rockstars."

snitty• 1 year 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!"

Aeolun5• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

milesrout5• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

It's because everyone's "personal experience" is "I used it once and it didn't work".

ilrwbwrkhv2• 1 year 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.

probably_wrong• 1 year ago

I personally prefer the one where everyone tells you that your error is because you used the outdated and almost unusable version from yesterday instead of the revolutionary release from today that will change everything we know. Rinse and repeat tomorrow.

namaria4• 1 year ago

Not to mention the variations of "you need to prompt better" including now "rules files" which begs the question: wouldn't just writing code be a much better way to exercise control over the machine?

ctrlp• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Why won’t luddites open their own factories, amirite? They would if they had money.

mistrial9• 1 year 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..

fc417fc8022• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

bondarchuk• 1 year ago

Automation of knowledge work. Simply by using AI you are training your own replacement and integrating it into company processes.

rep_lodsb• 1 year ago

Rather than some conspiracy, my suspicion is that AI companies accidentally succeded in building a machine capable of hacking (some) people's brains. Not because it's superhumanly intelligent, or even has any agenda at all, but simply because LLMs are specifically tuned to generate the kind of language that is convincing to the "average person".

Managers and politicians might be especially susceptible to this, but there's also enough in the tech crowd who seem to have been hypnotized into becoming mindless enthusiasts for AI.

dullcrisp• 1 year ago

I really hope that if someone does quit over this, they do it with a fun AI-generated resignation letter. What a great idea!

Or maybe they can just use the AI to write creative emails to management explaining why they weren’t able to use AI in their work this day/week/quarter.

zdragnar• 1 year ago

strongly encouraging him and his team to make greater use of AI tools

I've seen this with other tools before. Every single time, it's because someone in the company signed a big contract to get seats, and they want to be able to show great utilization numbers to justify the expense.

AI has the added benefit of being the currently in-vogue buzzword, and any and every grant or investment sounds way better with it than without, even if it adds absolutely nothing whatsoever.

chairhairair• 1 year ago

Has your friend talked with current bio research students? It’s very common to hear that people are having success writing Python/R/Matlab/bash scripts using these tools when they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.

Possibly this is just among the smallish group of students I know at MIT, but I would be surprised to hear that a biomedical researcher has no use for them.

fumeux_fume• 1 year ago

Recommending that someone in the industry take pointers from how students do their work is always solid advice.

amarcheschi• 1 year ago

I'm taking a course on computational health laboratory. I do have to say gemini is helping me a lot, but someone who knows what's happening is going to be much better than us. Our professor told us it is of course allowed to make things with llms, since on the field we will be able to do that. However, I found they're much less precise with bio-informatic libraries than others...

I do have to say that we're just approaching the tip of the iceberg and there are huge issues related to standardization, dirty datas... We still need the supervision and the help of one of the two professors to proceed even with llms

antifa• 1 year ago

I have general one-shot success asking chatgpt to make bash/python scripts and one-liners where otherwise it would take 1hr to a day to figure out on my own (and I'd use one of my main languages maybe) or I might not even bother trying, which is great for productivity but also over 90% of my job doesn't need throw-away scripts and one-liners.

throwaway173738• 1 year ago

Gemini loves to leave poetry on our reviews, right below the three bullet points about how we definitely needed to do this refactor but also we did it completely wrong and need to redo it. So we mainly just ignore it. I heard it gives good advice to web devs though.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

That is both hilarious and depressingly on-brand for how AI is being handled in a lot of orgs right now. Management pushes it because they need to tick the "we're innovating" box, regardless of whether it makes any sense for the actual work being done

whizzter• 1 year ago

Our org seems to be taking some benefits from being sped up by using AI tools for code generation (much of it is CRUD or layout stuff), however at times I'm asked for help by colleagues and the first thing I've done is Googled and found the answer and gotten a "Oh right, you can google also" since they've been trying to figure out the issue with ChatGPT or similar.

im3w1l2• 1 year ago

If you are not building AI into your workflows right now you are falling behind those that do. It's real, it's here to stay and it's only getting better.

bwoj2• 1 year ago

That’s such outdated thinking. I’m using AI to build AI into my workflows.

Aeolun5• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

That's not the point of the article.

ggm2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

ggm2• 1 year 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.

boh• 1 year 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.

grg04• 1 year ago

Bradley's game is DOA. Is it ARK: Aquatica by any chance?

EigenLord• 1 year 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.

000ooo0002• 1 year 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.

yahoozoo2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

namaria4• 1 year ago

Undefined behavior as a service is truly a bizarre proposition to my ears. Layering undefined behavior (agents) and gaming undefined behavior in hopes it comes out as you need (prompting) sounds insane and sometimes I have to wonder if I am the insane one. Very weird times.

grg04• 1 year 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.

yahoozoo2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

KurSix5• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

We can only hope this insane trend self-immolates before it causes too much collateral damage.

immibis2• 1 year 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"

bitwize5• 1 year 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.

protocolture2• 1 year 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.

svantana2• 1 year 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.

protocolture2• 1 year 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.

christkv• 1 year ago

Are we going to get a steam label for handcrafted ?

internet_points• 1 year 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

chilldsgn2• 1 year 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.

miningape3• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

raxxorraxor2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

conartist62• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

An Overwhelmingly Negative and Demoralizing Force

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