Is This Really The Future You Want?

[u/Kamsimation]

This is what happens when there's no regulation

[u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

But we were told that AI is just a stochastic parrot, every single output of it is full of hallucinations, and it only slows down the development 🤔

[u/Bruoche → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

People need to learn something can both be low quality AND oversaturate a market in a way that hurt higher quality product.

If your game takes five years to develop, it doesn't matter the clone is shittier, it'll get 5 years of enjoying profits off the game without having to worry about competing with you, because your game simply isn't out.

I think these low quality clones benefits neither consumer or the indie devs

[u/Material-Watercress1 → u/Bruoche]

We need to admit that there is some market appetite for slop

[u/Bruoche → u/Material-Watercress1]

There is always a market for easy content, for a lot of reason. I still wouldn't say it's good...

[u/Lurker_Zee → u/Bruoche]

People need to learn Schrödinger's victim.

It's bad when we say it is.

But it is also good enough to make us look like the victims, when we say it is. As long as you remember it's bad all the time, comrade.

[u/Clageo → u/Lurker_Zee]

This is what zero reading comprehension does to someone

[u/Bruoche → u/Lurker_Zee]

You're just repeating what the comment I'm answering to said without addressing my point....

[u/Lurker_Zee → u/Bruoche]

Your point is hypocritical.

Your point says "Believe this thing that I want you to believe, but also believe that it has an exception that hurts me, and cry for me."

Why? Because you say it?

No, it's a victim fallacy and I am not impressed.

[u/Bruoche → u/Lurker_Zee]

My comment is specifically saying it isn't an exception.

That's the very reason consumer laws exists : something can be shitty and yet profitable.

If you have a bunch of low quality games flooding all markets, it adds friction to finding good games and thus hurt said good games by borrowing them in trash.

Take for example reaction channels like SSSniperWolf. It's trash. Yet it is profitable and hurts creator by using their content without credit.

[u/schattig_eenhoorntje → u/Bruoche]

What are you developing for 5 years?

AI speeds the development up, so no game needs 5 years to produce. Both legit indie devs and copycats get a speed boost.

If making a game takes you a lot of time (let's say a year), it must contain some very non-trivial mechanics handled by non-trivial code because all the easy stuff is very fast to make with AI. In this case, AI wouldn't be able to replicate that.

[u/Bruoche → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

5 year is too long for the type of games AI would replicate, that's fair.

Even then, the most extreme case I can think of is stuff like mecha chameleon with 2 month of dev, and even then I'd expect they would loose a lot of sales were they cloned heavily before arrival.

How long did the popularity of mecha chameleon last? A few months at most, hardly more then even their extremely short development period of 2 months. If everyone had their hand on a clunkier version before, most people would have had their fill by the time the game comes out and I don't expect many would have converted back to buying it to play a slightly more polished version then the game they already got bored with.

And that's for commercial games. 5 year is very long for a team full time but many indies are hobbyists and solo. Multiple years is common for any fully fledged projects. Between inexperience, being spread thin with other duties and the sheer amount of work there is it does take time to make a good polished game.

We often talk about the 20/80 rule, 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, churning out features with or without AI is very easy, but those last 20% of polish take actually 80% of your time. It's easy to add a weapon that targets multiple ennemies in a RPG, but what if the player select the border with part of the select area having no ennemies? How to handle status effects that trigger on hit? What if an ennemy has multiple limbs to target?

Then you need to add sprite for it, make it good, then export it, then import it in your files, hook it to the game, make sound effects, make them right, mix them, try them in context, edit, export, import, hook, make the code giving text and descriptions and stuff, link all of it to new keys for locale files, write it all in each languages, maybe throw animations for the weapon, and so on...

I'm myself working on just a text game and content alone takes so long because there's always more details to polish everywhere all the time, little edge case you didn't think about, little juice to add, assets to make, it all takes time and adds up for every little detail.

Sure you can slop your way through in a couple of hour and get a tech demo, my first prototype took less then a week, but game design, polishing, balancing, asset creation, hooking things up, debugging, writing, and so on are all essential if you care about making a good game and will just takes time no matter what.

[u/13MasonJarsUpMyAss → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

there are games that will take over five years, even with good AI assistance. take Dwarf Fortress, for example. Assuming they had access to a current frontier level LLM since 2002, the game probably would have taken them ten years to get to its current state

[u/Bruoche → u/13MasonJarsUpMyAss]

Exanima is another extreme example, to think it's supposed to just be a stepping stone to a bigger project too...

[u/Roth_Skyfire → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

It can't even get the number of r in strawberry correct. Useless.

[u/DaylightDarkle → u/Roth_Skyfire]

I've come from the future!!

Don't vote for trump!!!

[u/Nyapano → u/DaylightDarkle]

You're about ten years off, go back another ten

[u/Lurker_Zee → u/Nyapano]

What if he's from a century into the future and the president is an orange engram?

[u/Jpfgd → u/Roth_Skyfire]

Guys I just tried using this ruler to drive a nail it and it did not help. Rulers are useless…

[u/daddywookie → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

In groups and out groups. Enemies that are both morally weak but also dangerously strong. From a certain angle the AI wars are very similar to right wing rhetoric

[u/PijaniFemboj → u/daddywookie]

Or its just an example of the goomba fallacy.

Anti-ai people aren't a hivemind, shocker.

[u/Olangotang → u/PijaniFemboj]

They are also still stochastic parrots though. The more the context fills up with your responses, the closer the output will be to them. They are still useful, but idiots think they can't be both stochastic parrots AND useful.

[u/jcagraham → u/PijaniFemboj]

Yeah, this is basically how propaganda has always worked. The enemy is all powerful which is why they're the cause of every problem, but they're also weak and can be easily defeated.

It's like conspiracy theories where there's a secret society that speaks to each other in code that can be easily interpreted by those not in the secret society.

[u/PiemasterUK → u/PijaniFemboj]

It's not goomba fallacy if it's the same person arguing both sides though. If a game can take 2+ years to develop and yet miraculously someone else can reverse engineer, develop and release it from a screenshot in a fraction of that time, surely the real question is why wasn't the original developer using the obviously superior tools too?

[u/MeowRawrUwu → u/PiemasterUK]

1. That doesn’t matter. People will use their own preferred methods
2. Because rushing games is bad and most good developers don’t want to do that

. A game releasing earlier doesn’t make it better if it’s unpolished

[u/PiemasterUK → u/MeowRawrUwu]

If it isn't better, or at least comparable, then who cares? At that point it's just a cheap knockoff like any other that won't detract from the real thing.

[u/13MasonJarsUpMyAss → u/PiemasterUK]

it will, though, by releasing early with a similar name, tainting the image of the original product and stealing its thunder, so to speak

[u/PiemasterUK → u/13MasonJarsUpMyAss]

Please give examples. Because elsewhere in the thread people gave examples of movies that tried to do the same thing and the originals were all big hits and I haven't heard of any of the knockoffs.

[u/CaptainJin → u/PiemasterUK]

Not AI, but I can think of two recent knockoffs that released after a trailer generated tons of hype but before the original concepts released. Bodycam for Unrecord (still to be released) and Ironnest: Heavy Turret Simulator for PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant (still to be released).

There's arguably a growing trend of early access titles rushing out to jump ahead of "original" game concepts if it generates enough interest on social media. If you post a video proud of the progress your game is making and it gets noticed, there's a chance someone will release the same concept in a few months as a rough around the edges, modestly playable, poor performance, early access UE5 title. But fixes are for later; the sale now is what matters.

I won't pretend like it isn't just market economics being market economics, but it just puts a gross taste in my mouth.

[u/13MasonJarsUpMyAss → u/PiemasterUK]

this is a pretty new phenomenon. indie games being crazy smash hits wasn't really a huge thing until like the mid 2010s, and AI being able to pull off stuff like this is obviously a pretty recent thing.

The best example I can think of pre AI is Unrecord. Hyperrealistic bodycam game that sort of went viral on social media. Still unreleased. Another guy swooped in and made the game Bodycam. It's pretty different, but he definitely profited off of the hype over Unrecord (people see it and say 'oh, is this that one bodycam game from twitter?' it looked cool)

Bodycam isn't a ripoff by any means, it's like a PvP FPS where Unrecord is a singleplayer story game. it just profited in a similar way as these AI ripoffs

[u/PijaniFemboj → u/PiemasterUK]

Personal preference because they find non-ai development more fulfilling, boycotts due to moral reasons, lack of knowledge about how good the technology is, etc etc.

There are plenty of valid non-hypocritical reasons.

[u/Beautiful_Fish_6004 → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

Junior vibe-coders slow down development and seniors are deskilled. That said, these projects aren’t made from scratch. What you’re talking about is classical coding and assistance with it and has nothing to do with what is happening here. They start with compiled binary files, which are usually not readable by people, and work backwards to reconstruct the program.

If reverse engineering can be automated, it will produce results, that’s obvious. This is not the same as developing anything new in the classical sense. It’s literally just reconstructing instructions from the binary, not inventing anything new. It is still error-prone and can make incorrect inferences, which is similar to hallucinations.

It cannot recover the original source code in full, it just does the cheapest thing which is to analyse bins. Comments, meaningful variable names, formatting, design notes, data structure and control flow are lost.

The only way to circumvent getting your bins stolen in the future is to only allow streaming of games. That’s already a thing, which I’m guessing Nvidia will want to push. Is that what everyone wants?

[u/schattig_eenhoorntje → u/Beautiful_Fish_6004]

> Junior vibe-coders slow down development

Vibe coding actually turns out to be very skill dependent. AI exposed bad engineers who were dedicating all their time to primitive low-level tasks. If AI slows you down, you're just not ready for the real job yet.

> seniors are deskilled
This is simply not true. Sure, you lose at some areas but gain in others. With vibe coding, seniors now have to own the entire product, instead of just a part, and they have to learn a lot. I personally learned so much new things compared to 2022. The market is tough because there are too many highly competent engineers nowadays. I can say that it was much more lax in 2022.

> They start with compiled binary files

Nope, it's done from video demos. If the game is not even in Steam yet, there's no binary files. AI is just writing an entirely new code from scratch.

Overall, you haven't addressed the main "stochastic parrot" point. If AI can reproduce entire games, then it's not just a hallucination generation machine as it was told in every corner of social media. Antis must be held resposible for their lies

[u/Beautiful_Fish_6004 → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

Vibe-coders take longer, despite the feeling of being more productive. The juniors can’t explain the code because they typically lack the fundamentals and can’t do code reviews independently. Seniors have to come in and help them when they could have been productive.

Deskilling and cognitive offloading as risks has been observed over and over and that’s an old subject.

The imitation of what is visible in gameplay footage is majorly flawed, so yes, it remains inaccurate. No complex 3D games have been fully copied that way, only simple features and usually isn’t up to the standards of the originals. It’s by far more inaccurate than decompiling binaries and you’re not going to get a full game from either of those unless the gameplay is simple. Inaccuracies are the same as hallucinations for when you want to replicate instructions.

A working output does not mean it understood the program/game the way a developer does. Not sure why you have to resort to something as imprecise as a metaphor to understand it.

Here’s some rhetorics for you: Pro hyper-capitalists need to stop lying about being humanists.

[u/schattig_eenhoorntje → u/Beautiful_Fish_6004]

> Vibe-coders take longer, despite the feeling of being more productive

No proof of that

> The juniors can’t explain the code because they typically lack the fundamentals and can’t do code reviews independently
Well, they should learn until it's no longer the case. Before that, they are just not fit for the job

> Seniors have to come in and help them when they could have been productive.
Much easier solution - just not hire ppl that slow things down

> Deskilling and cognitive offloading as risks has been observed over and over and that’s an old subject.

Personal growth is one's own responsibility. You can learn fast with AI - but if you decide to not do that, noone has the right to make you. You will just suffer as a result of your own actions. For top devs specifically, I see that the majority are pretty responsible and the overall level of expertise has increased.

> The imitation of what is visible in gameplay footage is majorly flawed, so yes, it remains inaccurate. No complex 3D games have been fully copied that way, only simple features and usually isn’t up to the standards of the originals
Well no problem then.

> Here’s some rhetorics for you: Pro hyper-capitalists need to stop lying about being humanists.

"being humanists" is a such a vague subjective statement that it can't be proven and disproven. I personally never presented myself as a "humanist". I'm pro-progress and I can't stand intellectual dishonesty.

[u/Beautiful_Fish_6004 → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

All the hallmarks of an automated response.

[u/schattig_eenhoorntje → u/Beautiful_Fish_6004]

English is not even my first language
It's actually quite flattening to hear that the text I wrote myself looks AI generated - it means that it's perfect in terms of vocabulary and grammar

[u/Beautiful_Fish_6004 → u/schattig_eenhoorntje]

Not at all, it’s full of flaws.