Just using AI is fine- it's a tool to be used, after all. It's only a problem when more than... I guess 50% of the end product is created by AI. Again, AI is a tool- it's one that has a myriad of legitimate use-cases in programming.
As someone in the software engineering world, AI is being pushed and used for everything. It's not going away. For coding, many higher tier models can write better code than a lot of junior or even non-junior SWEs. And they can think through the problems quicker and develop plans that are often times more in depth. This is just the beginning... They've only just become popular in the last 1.5 years. Think about what it can do in 5 years time.
I think we are at a point where if (emerging) companies want to keep up, they will need to use AI. The reason it feels so "wild west" right now is because it is. A company is now capable more than ever, to just build the tool they want, rather than outsourcing that work or purchasing SaaS from another business. Obviously that doesn't include enterprise support, but at the cost they could be delivering it with just a couple of FTE, it might be a no-brainer.
In the same vein, it's ever more easy for someone who is completely unfamiliar with coding to build something. They don't care about the code. They just care that it works.
Whether we as software engineers like it or not, AI is going to change everything about how we code and build projects. It's already doing it and everyone can see it happening from the outside.
The point is, I don't see how we are ever going back. Eventually, I think codebases will be made for agents and not humans. The occasional hand tracing will be needed. But I think the agents will get so good that the need for that will decrease over time.
It's inevitable. Even if we/I hate the idea of it. Companies realize that and they are making changes, albeit way too quickly, and it's turning the job market on its head. In the 2010s entry level SWE jobs were abundant. Now, they're going to start drying up. Things won't slow down until companies realize that they are shooting themselves in the foot by making the jump too early.
No matter if you, me, or some guy across the world thinks it's immoral or a waste of resources, there is no doubt that it gives people access to information and resources that they never could obtain. People compare it to the dot com boom because it kinda is similar. It gives people easier access to information and lowers the bar for people to do things they would never have tried taking on previously.
And in this case, it gives people who are passionate in the gaming community, a way to give back and show their own creative ideas. Even if it's 50% AI or 100% AI. Yes, there's plenty of AI slop. But I think that's just a symptom of growing pains with the models and their capabilities. At the cost of lots of energy and resources, of course.
Enterprise-grade software is now more achievable and cheaper to produce than ever. Competence with execution of the project with proper testing? Well that's another story and I think that's part of the growing pains that everyone will experience over the next 5 years.
A company is now capable more than ever, to just build the tool they want, rather than outsourcing that work or purchasing SaaS from another business
Outside of places like /r/ClaudeAI and other communities who have actual professional, enterprise-level SWEs discussing this aspect of AI usage, you'll see very few conversations addressing real, "big boy" usage of LLMs for software development. The current, public-facing discourse we're seeing today is largely centered around the flashy stuff - gen AI images, videos, audio - the stuff that anyone can slap together in a minute at most just from downloading ChatGPT or Grok or whatever. Things like game mods and whatnot require just a bit more work, so that's where you'll see people dropping $20 on Claude Pro, or buying the $100 plan if they're inclined to spam their AI mods/apps everywhere.
But once you actually look at the difference between the flashy social media-oriented AI stuff and what's going on at the pro/enterprise level, you'll realize that all of the flashy stuff is just an advertising campaign. The $100/mo Claude Max plan can be used to burn through what would cost a business literally tens of thousands of $$$ in API costs. Consumer AI plans and features are loss leaders - designed to attract the consumer so that they take it to their employer to say "look what I used AI to build", and then their employer starts paying tens or hundreds of thousands for API access.
Everyone's expecting the AI bubble to pop - and, while it may very well pop at some point, the genie can't be put back in the bottle, as open-source models are getting increasingly sophisticated as well. But if things do start getting tight for AI providers, then they'll just ramp down the consumer side of everything - apps, image generation, and so on - while leaning even more into the B2B side of the equation, as that is what is far more likely to make them real money, because a billion dollar corporation has both money to burn and save and wants to expedite and expand the software side of their business. They don't care about AI-generated memes, they want their systems to be powerful and refined. That's the power of AI, and it's not something the average person sees or discusses.
This is only tangentially related to what you brought up and isn't specifically meant to address you, but I feel like it's an important aspect of all of this to mention.
But if things do start getting tight for AI providers, then they'll just ramp down the consumer side of everything
See here's the thing: they can't ramp down. Anthropic alone has over $400 billion in non-cancellable commitments on infrastructure projects to plan for more AI capacity. If this stuff doesn't have mass appeal they are screwed. The option to change course just isn't there.
No I meant specifically ramping down the consumer side of their platforms by doing things like drastically cutting the usage of consumer accounts, moving things like image gen over to the B2B side exclusively, and so on. They lose a lot of money with these consumer plans they offer; my current usage on the $100/mo Claude Max plan would have cost probably about $15k-$20k if I were paying API rates.
I guess theoretically, as the tech improves, the old frontier models should become the new "baseline". Much like technology in other sectors, like manufacturing and what not. So maybe now, it's slop. But as models get better and better, so will the code of their outputs
Oh I'd argue that Opus 5.5 produces far less sloppy code than previous models. I've had Claude working on a project on my PC for about 3 weeks now and I've been watching it like a hawk the whole time. While I'm not proficient in SWE in any meaningful capacity, I have a hunch that while its initial output might be mid, its ability to test and refine makes the final product much better than it would be if it simply one-shot its code.
I'm very, very interested to see where the frontier models will be in a year, 5 years, 10 years, and how sophisticated locally hosted models will become, as they've consistently trailed behind but not by that much.
I for sure agree with you, but I think part of it is just that certain models are better at certain things. Don't use the same model for every task. Knowing which models are good for which task is going to be sort of the SWE's job to understand.
In a way, similar to how JEV compliments the typical AI harness and can be used for specific purposes for better outcomes for a particular task.
Excuse me, my vibecoded slop will be a trainwreck and there's nothing you can do to stop me.
Joking aside, knowing and utilizing the strengths and weaknesses of what exists out there is effectively a discipline in its own right. I'm not proficient in programming in any meaningful way, so learning how to go from "ignorant vibecoder" to "someone who knows what AI tools exist and how they really ought to be used" has been a bit of a steep curve for me. I have probably thousands of hours of experience with chatbots, but things like Claude Code introduce an entirely different dimension of complexity.
Learning how to architect a project, educating one's self on best practices for things like documentation, figuring out how to get an AI to develop its own testing suite, realizing how necessary custom tooling is... all of these things are important once someone actually moves on from making little Three.js apps.
Rambling here, but yeah I agree with you, though my own knowledge currently restricts me to running Claude exclusively. It'll be important for me to dig deeper into what else is out there eventually.
AI still has really fundamental flaws with regards to how it structures code. I think they will be worked out, but I don't think we will ever fully do away with some amount of software engineer oversight. I say this as someone currently fully embracing AI for my work, and optimistic about its future.
The role of software engineer has never been primarily about typing in the code. It's been about understanding goals and requirements, needs of stakeholders, and the best way to deliver whatever feature within a timeline and scope that is appropriate, without regretting decisions you make later.
I recently gave my agent a task to implement some simple feature that would call an API after some specific task was completed. It chugged away for a while and then came back with a full system of enqueueing the api calls and then a cronjob that would dequeue them to fire at the api, with increasing back off for failures and all sort of different error handling in case the API was down and blah blah blah.
That was, technically speaking, an acceptable solution. It achieved the stated goal. But it took me looking at that, understanding that the stakeholders in this case wouldn't care if the odd request failed, or had to retry, understanding that the service in question was so temporary that spinning up a job like that was a ridiculous level of overkill, understanding future maintenance and monitoring that would be needed would absolutely not be worth it- all of those different evaluations are my job, not writing: url.post(body) or whatever.
I don't think AI could never do these things, but I think in its current state, its not going to get people to engage intellectually with the task provided enough to suss out the important questions to answer about the desired implementation for a given task. If some manager or sales guy prompts the AI "make the signup flow call this API when done", and it then plays 20 questions about how to implement, they're going to respond "just do it, i dont care how" or get annoyed and put it down- the whole appeal, to non-technical people- is not having to understand why they would want A or B technical approach to some problem. AI can get very good at intuiting that, I'm sure, but until then, I don't feel majorly threatened in my role.
It highly depends on the model and your instructions. If you just tell it to build you an API with no specific details, it's less likely to produce good code. You as an engineer need to know how to prompt it to get good results, much like how we've learned how to properly "Google" things. Design is crucial. And I think just like how people learned to "Google" things properly, they will also get better at prompting AI properly. There will always be people who don't know how. It's unavoidable.
The slop code won't be from people with highly specific instructions and robust architecture design. However, I think as models get better, they'll have a better baseline understanding for how to do something, given little instructions. Whether that's via an MCP tool or part of the original training data.
There will always be slop code, but I think over time it'll gradually get better. I've used Codex, Claude, Cursor, etc. and it's not just the model sometimes or the user, it's the harness. You need a good model with a good harness and a good design/plan to really produce good code.
The people using ai to mod are likely people who don't know shit about modding in the first place. I'm already seeing so much mod slop in every gaming community I'm a part of and I'm sick of it.
On the other hand it unlocked crazy modding potential for modders who do know shit. To each their own I guess, but I truly feel like I'm in the golden age of modding. I played some I've been literally daydreaming for ages, but it would've been so unbelievably labor intensive, no one would ever make it otherwise.
The people using AI to mod is probably most people who ever worked on mods at this point
Like there's a few who won't as a principle but I guarantee most people who's mods you enjoyed, even before AI existed, have since integrated AI into their workflow
I get it, some are awful, but it's just as ridiculous to say you need experience to be allowed to make mods. How the fuck are people going to learn? Kids make god awful mods all the time without AI, it's just that now it's way more accessible to way more people.
Yes, fully gen'd projects are not good as public releases. You should always try to understand the internal design. But still, who the fuck cares they are mods. You don't pay for them.
I stated this in another subreddit, but this is it. I dabbled in coding and modding when it was .ini and other simple files to edit. That was, of course, many years ago. Since then, I've developed severe chronic fatigue and memory issues. It's incredibly difficult for me to learn a new skill. Especially something like coding.
Meanwhile, I have some mod ideas that have been bugging the shit out of me for a long time. Ideas that fester. What else am I supposed to do? I now have the tools to help. Why not use them?
The big issue with a lot of these mods right now is that they aren't doing debugging and play testing. I've been working on adding DAoC classes work in WoW 3.3.2a. I've been working on just 1 class for 2 weeks. I've been running my local server for 4 solid days to get damage output numbers compared to warlock and other classes to make sure the numbers aren't too under or overpowered. I've been playing both myself and there are 3 AI bots playing from 1 to 80, all playing one of the 3 different skill trees. I'm bouncing back and forth with Claude to get their BG and instance behavior right. To make sure they use their skill sets properly for the build. There's a lot of debugging and correcting to do, even though I'm not doing the actual code.
Does this mean my attempt is shit? Does this mean I should just fuck off and not bother? I'm not of that opinion. If the mods are properly made with the tools at hand, there's no need to shit on them. I have incredible respect for those that do it all by hand. I, and many others, just don't have that ability to do so. Many more just don't have the time.
The people using ai to mod are likely people who don't know shit about modding in the first place.
Literally 80 % of developers these days use AI. Not just the "shitcodders". I can guarantee you every mod, good or bad, that has been updated in the last year used AI at some point or another.
It's a shame because I have ideas that I think would be good and can't code. The problem is I know I'd likely contribute to the spam if I used AI because without checking the code works at every stage, I'd likely create something crap. Checking the code also means finding out if what you created is fun or not
Okay, you shouldn't stop following your ideas and dreams.
As long as you won't share your slop with someone else or pushing it/lying about it, it's fine.
Unironically letting AI code something for you and then trying to bugfix it yourself/using AI help to do it will help you with understanding code.
So, create something shit, try and play with it. If you tinker on the code enough with AI , you will start to recognize the problems on your own soon enough.
The AI bubble will obviously pop in the future, but the tool itself is here to stay, permanently. Might as well use it to learn stuff yourself and make it your servant.
start working on it anyway, jump into a modding discord and ask questions or opinions, look their faqs or discussions if you're stuck, accept that you might need to at some point basically redo the whole shebang from scratch before its in a state you wanna toss to other people, but thats gonna go really quick
the one modding discord I'm in isn't a fan of slop by any means but they don't care if you use AI outside of not doing the intial setup with AI because AI keeps fucking it up for people
What the other guy said. AI is a tool, tools help a person to achieve what they envision, that is all.
If your ability to express yourself is a single prompt that codes an entire slop game in one go then the art you made will show that and be a reflection of you, not the AI used to make it.
I'm currently working on a project with AI. I suspect it will take me at least a year before I can call it good enough for public use. I just don't have the time and energy to learn to code. I do graphic design for my day job and have always been a hobbyist modder since I was playing Morrowind and CS as a kid (when games have editor toolkits, which are few and far between now).
I've had so many ideas for games and stuff over the years that I just never had the time or money to be able to commit to learning how to make let alone then spend multiple years making. Nowadays I don't game so much, but I still have ideas, my current project is a toolset for professionals not a game(and that's all I'll say lol). I'm really excited though and I think AI programming is going to open up a whole new world of great ideas in all kinds of software.
Sure there will be slop, but Ideally we have distribution systems that prioritize showing you the good stuff that people like. If all your seeing is slop in a particular shop, that's a storefront issue.
I'm gonna be honest, I highly suspect we are being manipulated to hate AI so corporations can then lobby regulations that benefit them and fuck everyone else. They'll make it so you need a business license and then you'll have to bid for medallions to use AI like the taxi systems lol, I'm sure they are planning someway to lock it down. There's no way the people in power want the average person to be as capable as AI has the potential to make us.
I also wonder how people who hate AI envision the future of humanity. Are we supposed to always hoard knowledge from each other and have a million subscriptions to print different things from our 3D printer or use our holodeck? That sounds like a dystopic hell doesn't it?
On the other hand - I bet a lot of mods are made by people that are not professionals.
It's wild that six months ago nobody cared about code quality or even what that was. Now people care a whole bunch but still don't really know what that means.
Yeah I get the feeling a lot of anti-ai people just haven't used the stuff in years and have no frame of reference as to what's going on. Just an evil black box that makes everything bad.
Realistically it's a fantastic learning tool. It helps explain key concepts, explain them simply, link you niche resources, and even help debug. Modding can be incredibly niche so it's useful to basically have loose threads you can tug at to help discover the process.
However, if you're not knowledgeable about what you're doing and make the scope too large it quickly falls apart.
Sure you can. "Claude, this doesn't feel good yet. Make this mob run faster, increase the drop rate here, also the vehicle mechanics feel like crap, let's try with 50% less floatiness. Make the changes, rebuild and notify me when I can test again"
The important parts are the judgement, the ideas and the creative spark. The mechanical implementation, eh, whatever.
You can absolutely get on the same page as the agent, hell, it can extract all variables for you, sort them, group them, explain them and put little sample videos next to them that show the exact effect a change would have etc. It can then smoke test all changes end to end, capture gameplay, look at the frames and game logs and so much more. Hand tweaking values in the code is decidedly not where it's at anymore.
What exactly do you think I'm arguing for? Doing all that is good. Most vibe coders will not, and will say "please make it 50% less floaty" because they don't understand anything except the vague notions of the consumer
I agree with what you're saying but I want to share something I've learned by working on a game project using Claude to make the code. I'll say upfront, I will not be selling the game, I will not be locking it behind a patreon, etc... Just a game for me, my family and my group of friends.
I know exactly what you mean about the "50% less floatiness" being odd. I learned very early on that that's not exact. Claude will do it's best but I learned that the best way to fine tune how things feel was having a number of variables be presented in the inspector tab (I'm using Godot, sorry forgot to mention), so that I can manually adjust the numbers. My project involves playing cards, so they're held at the bottom of the screen and hover up to show the full card when you mouse over them, at the same time they push the other cards around them slightly for better readability, they scale up and stand straight when you click them (since the hand fans out), and move to the center when you play them. Each one of those things I instructed Claude to make a variable for in the inspector tab so I can fine tune how they look and feel.
How far up does the card hover when you move your mouse over it and how much does the card scale up? How many cards are influenced by the push and how strong is the push? How fast does the push influence the other cards and how fast do they return home when you move your mouse off a card? etc... etc... Doing that kind of stuff, where you let Claude handle the backend code and present you with variables/knobs for fine tunes has been how I've found the most success for dialing in how things "feel" in the project. It takes more time because you're manually doing the adjustments until it's just right, but the end result feels better and saves time/context/tokens over having claude re-roll the dice until things feel good to you.
I've had Claude/Codex build in editor side tweaks for things like timing numbers and such to tweak on the fly until they feel right without even prompting, when I would have just manually changed the config or magic numbers in the code
If we want to break the analogy down we can but that’s not the point of the comment.
The point is that AI is in fact just a tool and not a guarantee of the end product being either good or bad. The only thing AI really guarantees is that the skill floor for creation has been effectively eliminated. Anyone can create something which means a lot more amateur creations are going to hit the market.
Because AI can make slop feel polished to the uninitiated, how the fuck is anyone supposed to find good stuff? How are good creators going to feel motivated to put out work when it just looks like another chump's slop from the outside?
Just look at everyone going crazy over something someone prompted in 2 days all over modding communities. Maybe an equilibrium exists once everyone gets used to the new normal, we'll have to see
You find it the same way you always did. If you enjoy it, it was good regardless of how it was made. You can have great AI assisted projects and terrible human only ones. Nothing has changed.
All that's happened is that AI has opened the door to talented creative people that previously didn't have the technical knowledge to create. It's just also opened the door to a lot of untalented people who have no idea of the fundamentals of what makes something good. The ratio of good to bad is still the same though, there's just more of everything.
The ratio being the same does not pass the smell test. It kind of sounds like idealist cope. Anyone talented who wanted to will have already been doing it. Having to code isn't some systemic glass ceiling holding people down like you're implying. Anyone can learn
Anyone can learn anything at all in the world... it's just not always practical/feasible given their skillset, intelligence, goals, available time, money, lifestyle, etc...
So I could ask my artist friend to take a 2 year course to program OR just ask the AI nicely and just have it done so they can focus on whatever it is they want to.
I've been considering this question a lot lately. I believe there will be a huge demand for curated lists, like some mixture of OG game journalist sites and steam curators.
I also think AI itself will be used to cut down on all the pure garbage that'll be getting flung around. Submission gets scanned for if it works, if it's just a copy of something else, pure asset flip, etc.
But I think too that there's just a gigantic slop goldrush going on. People thinking "holy fuck I can make some money with this" and spewing into the void. I think it'll slow down once they realize their get rich schemes don't work. Probably.
The only thing AI really guarantees is that the skill floor for creation has been effectively eliminated
So it's not a tool then. That's not a property of any tool. That's something quite other than a tool. It's almost as if it's more like paying someone else to do your work. Which is what it is.
AI is a replacement for outsourcing to cheap third world labour, not a replacement for tools.
I would argue it puts a fairly large thumb on the scale in favour of the end product being bad. Aside from all the moral, social and environmental issues, most normal people react quite viscerally and negatively to generated content.
I’d argue that’s selection bias. When you find out a product you use is bad, ai becomes the easy scapegoat. At the same time you’re probably less likely to admit when AI makes a product good.
Aside from the energy Consumption problems, water consumption, stealing people's data without consent or consequences, ethical issues of stealing people's art and work they've developed during their whole lives without even any aknowledgement, let alone retribution, and the death of actual human work, as everything is slop made by machines now? Oh, nothing, not a problem at all.
Stupid clanker
0
u/MeeedickPraud Indian Nationalist 🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳 (hates minorities and women)3h ago
Aside from the energy Consumption problems
The US underinvesting in it's energy grid over the course of decades is not an inherent "energy consumption problem", Americans need to stop assuming their failures and anecdotal experiences to be a worldwide phenomenon. China's had no problems powering it's AI infrastructure whatsoever, because unlike the US it didn't repeatedly fumble it's energy requirements and idiotically fracture its grids while divesting away from civil nuclear energy.
water consumption
Which is an absolute nothing burger of an arguement made out of sheer ignorance by people who don't know what they're talking about and who think "big number bad", nothing else. There isn't anything about AI datacenters consuming water that's alarming when you take a step back and actually look at the numbers. AI consumes water and energy like any other industry, and at best it's poised to add a single percentage to total water consumption in the US with all the infrastructure accounted for.
Americans waste 9 times as much water on their lawns and golf courses, if i remember correctly.
ethical issues of stealing people's art and work they've developed during their whole lives without even any aknowledgement, let alone retribution, and the death of actual human work
What i've concretely seen AI do so far is lower the barrier of entry and enable illustrative work with regards to online art where the commisioner doesn't need a handcrafted masterpiece as much as...well...an illustration.
Artists are, in fact still very much in play with a strong anti-generative AI force in play. Even without it, there will always be commisioners who want things hand-made and there's nothing stopping artists from making art on an actual canvas like the good ol' days. Human wants are infinite.
And "death of human work"? Christ.
O*NET lists over 20,000 tasks that humans are capable of performing in an economically productive capacity. Tasks mind you, not even jobs. That means the individual actions that go into a job as part of a bundle.
AI is, at best, poised to automate approximately 150 of them.
Other than that AI, like the internet, should be subject to regulations.
I don’t understand the tool analogy. It’s more like asking someone else to do your work and then calling it yours. They didn’t put in the effort to make it, they shouldn’t receive credit.
3
u/MeeedickPraud Indian Nationalist 🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳 (hates minorities and women)10h ago
"Effort" doesn't mean anything when it comes to productivity.
If i spend 12 hours a day toiling away on a field with just my bare hands getting barely anything done, as opposed to wrapping it up in 6 hours or something sitting inside a combine without relatively breaking a sweat, do you think effort made a tangible difference?
"Hard work" and "effort" in an of itself is worthless when it comes to worker productivity. At the end of the day, what matters is how much you can get done as efficienctly as possible, and credit boils down to who ultimately prompted it.
Not how much of their personal input came into play.
It's currently incomprehensibly subsidized and causing normal people unnecessary financial stress
3
u/MeeedickPraud Indian Nationalist 🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳 (hates minorities and women)10h agoedited 10h ago
It's currently incomprehensibly subsidized
By who?
causing normal people unnecessary financial stress
Automation resulting in temporary economic disruption of existing operations and livelihoods is not remotely new, nor is it bad. Automation has, without exception, always led to positive economic outcomes. AI is not an exception to any degree.
Prior to the industrial revolution, 95% of the world was working in agriculture and economically the world was flat with most people living in horrible conditions. Once the industrial revolution kickstarted, it led to droves of workers leaving their rural livelihoods behind to work in standardised processes using spinning-jennies to mass-produce textiles that were then transported and distributed via newly built rail networks (more automation) and ports for export around the world. You can imagine the magnitude of difficulty and disruptions from that. Even still, it led to Britain growing significantly richer because of it and a never-before-seen improvement in standard of living, productivity, and economic growth for Britain.
Spinning jennies were back then what AI is today. Economic disruotion and all. It led to a significant impact against hand-crafted textiles that AI today can't even dream of, yet it was a net-positive on all acoounts because it more or less built an entire economy.
Now only 2% of the world works in agriculture, yet we're all exponentially richer as a whole and most of us live better than even kings did in the past. The ultimate driver of economic growth has always been automation. The more we automate, the more efficient and productive we become and the more we're capable of providing for consumption.
The automation of those areas had real physical world applications that are instantly recognizable as single-handedly beneficial for human life itself whereas AI (I will reluctantly call it AI for the sake of convenience) can only deal in existing digital information. There are no parallels to draw between AI and railroads or jennies. None of the AI companies has made a profit in the roughly 5 years of existence despite being funded with TRILLIONS of capital. What does AI automate that when applied is also profitable? That's where the subsidization comes in; when it stops, is there anything AI is worth using for?
2
u/MeeedickPraud Indian Nationalist 🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳 (hates minorities and women)7h agoedited 7h ago
The automation of those areas had real physical world applications
That doesn't mean anything. Just because every automation/improvement to capital isn't catered towards industrial productivity doesn't automatically make it inferior.
This isn't the 1980s anymore and manufacturing/industrial growth is no longer the driver of economic growth in developed economies. The developed world is beyond the point where it struggles to produce tangible commodities for everyday consumption.
Now it's about services, which is fundamentally an enabler.
that are instantly recognizable as single-handedly beneficial for human life
Yeah, now, with hindsight. That doesn't mean it was automatically seen that way back then.
whereas AI (I will reluctantly call it AI for the sake of convenience) can only deal in existing digital information.
So? I feel like you're under the misguided assumption that tangibility is important for economic value, this is not ths case whatsoever.
Software is not tangible and like AI, was also seen as a disrupter that would take many jobs, and it did. Mathematicians fell by the way side as a profession because their tasks were automated to the point that it made them largely irrelevant unlike before, however, it also enabled a significantly larger rise of jobs for accountants and other roles that dwarfed the loss of mathematicians.
Like AI, software itself was not a tangible tool that was inherently necessary for base production and consumption, but it played a very big part in propping up an entire industry that today employs millions upon millions of people in high paying jobs and is the central piece behind silicon valley, along with the internet (also intangible) that gave rise to e-commerce among other things.
There are no parallels to draw between AI and railroads or jennies. None of the AI companies has made a profit in the roughly 5 years of existence despite being funded with TRILLIONS of capital
I think you're confusing major companies lacking success in what is very much the early days of AI in its infancy with infrastructure rollout still very much in effect, as a testament to the idea that AI has no productive use. Overvaluation and hype by major names don't mean that AI hasn't done anything at all already.
IT is already seing the difference where companies that have integrated AI into their development for instance have seen major boosts in their efficiency and productivity. Projects that could have taken weeks or months can be wrapped within a week or even days. All the big companies like Google and Microsoft have also seen signicant increases in profit around this time since AI was introduced.
R&D has seen a massive improvement as a consequence of AI which has been instrumental in ramping up the tempo and success of research, medical R&D in particular can testify to this. There's plenty of other genuine cases where AI has made a real impact, it's not all smoke and mirrors.
I was most interested in reading your response to the subsidization points and I'm disappointed you didn't respond to them. I was also disappointed that you brought up medical R&D which uses kinds of AI (again using the term reluctantly) that are not related to the primary drivers of the AI boom, those being chatbots which can especially be considered smoke and mirrors. All the companies are extremely secretive about their chatbots' inner workings and what paying for them actually gets you, probably because there isn't legislation to mandate transparency.
1
u/MeeedickPraud Indian Nationalist 🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳🔥🇮🇳 (hates minorities and women)6h ago
I was most interested in reading your response to the subsidization points
Edit: There's additional ways of subsidization, for example a current topic in my country is that many datacenters are being planned/built because of very cheap local electricity but thanks to corporate tax laws the cost of running those datacenters would be effectively subsidized by citizens
what do you mean? im not even making a strong point, i just want to point out that there are a lot of comments pointing out that "ai is just a tool" when that basically means nothing. weapons are just tools, and saying "an ak47 is just a tool" when talking about war would mean nothing. again, im not not even making a strong anti ai point, just that if we want to debate about it we need to do better
Sony uses the tool to trim expenditures and maximize profit, some dude in a cave uses the tool to maximize fun and minimize the hardware needed to have that fun...with a cardboard box
Guns are just a tool, yet the murder rate is exponentially higher in the US compared to other Western countries
If some of those ai specialists are right, about the scenario where ai trains other ai and gets programmed to exterminate us all, should we still say « it’s just a tool » when we lay on the ground and suffocate from the gas the drones unleashed all around ? Obviously it’s an exaggeration of the current reality, but it’s already dangerous with the economic, environmental and cultural crises it is making
So if a tool is more dangerous than useful, is it still a simple and innocent tool ? If I take my example from the beginning, nobody in the reality calls a firearm a tool despite that it is. Instead, we call it a weapon
No, dynamite is a lot more useful for mining. If you wanna kill, there's mountains of better ways to do it. Better explosives for that, too. Not that you should, mind you. But dynamite is incredible for cracking rocks.
Thats a perfect example though, just because some dumbasses blew themselves up and evil people used it for evil deeds, doesn't mean it wasn't massively useful to industry
Time to head for the woods than my dude. Only way to make sure people providing you with stuff are using tools you approve of is to do everything yourself...
not an overstatement, at this point its like walking into a store to buy something but trying to only purchase products that had no vehicles utilized to arrive at that location.
You want products that have no AI in the loop during their creation in 2026? you better look at old ass products that have no updates in the last 2 years at least.
and you sure as hell better not be on the modern internet.
Programming has always been about abstraction. People used to program in machine code. Then assemblers were invented, which translated low-level assembly code into machine code. Then compilers were invented, which translated high-level, human-friendly languages (like FORTRAN or C) into machine or assembly code. Now AI translates human language into high-level programming code. It's just the latest step in the long history of software abstraction.
Yeah, it's going to write shit code if you don't tell it what good code looks like. You'd be surprised how much better it does if you just... Basically just tell it to make sure it's following good standards when writing code. Of course, it's a bit more difficult than that (it works better if you make a skill filled with good practices and whys), but that's basically it
This kind of premade expressions show the lack of arguments behind tbh. « It’s consuming 0.5% of the global electricity and the employment crisis is getting worse than in 2008 » > « yeah but it’s the future man »
AI isn't just a tool. It's a swiss army knife of tools. I get what you're saying, but it's not as simple as your analogy. People say it's "a tool" but in reality it can do anything, especially once you give it access to other tools using MCP. I know I sound like an AI-hype man. I'm not. This is just the reality of it.
then i'm also agreeing with you. i dont even think AI just "just a tool like any other". thats why saying "its a tool" is both kinda wrong and kinda useless
Do you know anyone in the industry(general software dev stuff)? Anyone trying to get into it? pretending these tools aren't part of the job at this point in time is laughable. You can sit on your high horse if you want, but i promise you, the entire infrastructure you are using everyday is now largely backed by these tools, and people in these industries not adapting to the times are losing their jobs.
I'd prefer if our cities weren't crafted in a way where owning a car was a near demand of every individual, yet i own a car. Its the same shit for anyone who touches code and needs to utilize AI.
There is a thread being spread around about Linus Torvalds lately, about other devs shaming devs who use AI tooling, where he mocks the pedestal standers for using a compiler, or an editor. That is a pretty good summary of what this thread is.
Sure there are "bad products" that have a shiny product visual on them to appear top tier, thats a different issue. in fact its THE issue that AI has created across all industries. However, pretending that the "good product" isn't using the same tooling just more competently? is pure fantasy land delusions.
I get these people aren't in the industry, they don't see the changes. The people who aren't utilizing these tools, are seen as a different thing nowadays, they are considered hobbyists rather than people trying to pump out actual work. They can NOT compete in nearly anything without using the tooling, because the pace is just a snails pace. The balance of hobbyist style work vs generated work by that same person is something that still needs to be contended with by most people, because no doubt its valuable to understand the underlying code that is being generated, but pretending that 0 AI usage is a viable path forward in an era where literally everyone else is using things that can increase their pace 100fold is just a hilariously ill informed take on the current state of the industry and modern ai tooling.
i think you are reading too much into what i said... i do work in CS though and im lucky enough that i dont have to use Ai...
but yes i know that in most work environments thats not the case. i was just making the observation that something being a tool doesnt morally justify using it, not saying that theres no reason to use AI (and not making a comment related to code quality either) btw the comparison with cars is a great one
i hear you, comment sections are just ripe for misunderstanding everywhere. We'd probably agree on a ton of stuff, i personally hate how much AI has been pushed on the general public but i came at this purely from a dev perspective.
I get they need to try to make money, but the amount of people interacting with tools irresponsibly is massive.
i think there was a misunderstanding because you probably took my comment as a "nobody should" but its more of a "it might not be the best as a society" that i was trying to convey
If I ask a person to draw me something and if I ask chatgpt to do the same thing then in this example both the AI and the person are fulfilling the same role. The fact that there was no human involved in the instance where an AI did it doesn't make my role bigger. In the end all I did was ask a third party to do it for me
I'm not sure what your point it. It is acknowledged that these people didn't create the games by themselves, but did it by working with artists and developers who all contributed to its creation. These people aren't seen as the sole creators of the work, the same way someone who made something where AI did most of the work should disclose that this is what happened.
More importantly, being a lead or director on these projects involves much more than just asking people to do something and then being completely absent until they deliver the final result, which is what the majority of content made with AI online is.
Talk about being disingenuous. NO. They're saying AI allows people to generate shoddy work outside their skill set. Much like your half dumb friend Billy would work vs something like a hammer. Or even an automated robot.
You consider AI real people? I’m not saying AI stuff is good, but I don’t care if AI mods are released for free or whatever. I’m not saying that the person who used AI is the one and only creator, they are just the architect, but your analogy is just poor. Perhaps you got it from AI as well
It's not a poor analogy, you're just focusing on the wrong part. The point is that when all you do is ask a third party to do something for you, it's very hard to consider this as you creating something. Asking someone to draw something and asking chatgpt to draw something both involve you doing the same action but towards different entities, and in this case the nature of the entities is irrelevant because the question here is how much did you contribute for it to be considered something you made. The question isn't "is the thing that made it human or not"
You can claim something is yours, even if you didn’t physically construct it. This happens a ton in real life.
Architects design building, but don’t actually create it. They can legally claim the building as made by them.
In music, a producer, or for better relevance, a songwriter, can write the lyrics and/or melody for a song. The singer can claim they made the record, but the songwriter can legally claim they made the song.
Most commonly, in software. A software architect or a systems designer can create the blueprint for a software, by mapping out logic, user flow, and infrastructure. Then a team of junior developers go and code it and develop it. The app is still the creation of the software developer. Which is extremely similar to this case.
Fashion designers, sketch dresses. Seamstresses and factory workers do create them. The designer can claim the dress as their creation.
Less relevant, but probably way more common in most people’s lives: Movies. Scriptwriter/screenwriter works with a director to create a script and how it should play out. The actors though, are the ones who act it out. A bunch of other staff help with props, camera, etc. It is then legally credited as a “Film created by…”
Actually if you open a book, you would see that they legally can.
For an architect, at least in the UK, under copyright protection, it protects both the design and the model. Morally, and in general, architects retain the moral right of paternity, which basically means the right to be identified as the author of the building.
Under CDPA, the songwriter owns the Musical Work, whereas the label/record owns the Sound Recording.
Software: Under CDPA, if an employee creates a copyrightable work in the course of their employment, the employer is automatically the first owner of the copyright. This also applies when a designer does not create his own software. Since software isn’t treated as art, the law excludes the developers of having their name attached to the software.
For fashion, as you can probably tell, the manufacturers, similar to the software thing, have no right to the ownership of the design or can claim they “made” it originally. They are simply performing a service (just like AI). If you create a unique specific shape, configuration, and surface decoration of a garment, you have the legal claim to say you created it.
For film, the law states the Principal Director and the Film Producer are the joint authors and initial owners of the copyright, as well as the moral right to say they created the film. Just letting you know since you missed this one out in your comment.
If all of these “designers” can morally and legally call the work they “designed” made by them (not mentioning the design), then people who use AI to create mods can also call their creation theirs. Which is extremely similar to the software shenanigans. Although, it would be wrong to not include, “made with AI.”
Everything you typed is completely irrelevant because it assumes we're arguing on a legal basis when we aren't. No one brought up legal rights. We are clearly arguing in an ontological sense, and the analogy is pointing out how much contribution you practically had in the creation of something, so I'm not sure if you're being dense on purpose or if you genuinely misunderstood the point of the analogy and the discussion. There are countless examples in real life of people who are legally credited as being the creators of something when in reality people don't acknowledge them as such because they know that other people contributed more significantly to the creation.
Ontologically, your input is literally the same whether you're asking someone to draw something or an AI to do it, so your contribution to that thing's creation is the same in both cases. It's that simple.
For stuff like art, I would agree. However stuff like programs aren’t considered art, or similar to art. If you exclude a legal standpoint, MORALLY, this still all applies. Software designers can say they created this software. They will still have to mention they didn’t create it by themselves, but they have every right to do so.
Also, I don’t think ontological would be the best way to describe this argument, though I do get what you mean. For example, the builders example:
In an ontological sense, you can consider either the builders or the architects to be the people who made the building, depending on what school of philosophy you follow. If you are somewhat of a formalist, you’d think that the Architect has the moral right to claim the building as being made by him, aligning with Plato’s theory of forms: True essence of building is the idea, structure and design concept.
However, if you follow a more materialistic/hylomorphic view, you’d see it similar to Aristotle’s theory of matter, which in this case would mean that builders are the creators since they but substance into reality.
There is no objective answer when you are being general. I was just stating my opinion and why I think I was right. If you were to be specific about it, then if a person made something with AI, they are the author of intent, and AI is the author of execution.
However, you would think both claims are equal. However, from an ontological standpoint, a human’s claim is ontologically superior.
The main arguments are:
The prime mover argument: the fact that you posses independent intent (the final clause), the AI posses 0 intent and only listens to you, therefore since you are the first clause, your claim to creation sits higher.
The paintbrush argument: pretty self explanatory.
The material clause: AI is not creating or inventing programming. It is just synthesising the collective intelligence of humans to serve your vision, so it can be considered highly advanced retrieval and formatting from humans, directed by your brain.
You are the architect, the visionary, and the judge. AI is only the fabricator. Ontologically, the software is yours.
Hopefully now you won’t go around throwing philosophical terms you don’t know.
Also by no means do I encourage stuff like AI art, but I do believe in general AI is beneficial, although it should have wayyy more restricted development.
Ontological is exactly what I'm describing, which is the actual state of something rather than the legal state of it. You're the one trying to throw around a bunch of irrelevant arguments in an attempt to make something look more complicated than it is. Now you involve morals when at no point in this discussion was morality invoked. Morals have nothing to do with this discussion. We aren't talking about whether it's moral for someone to claim they made something, we are talking about how much they contributed to its creation.
Once again, in an ontological sense, as in the actual sense, your contribution is ontologically the same whether you ask someone or an AI to do something.
The action performed by you is objectively and physically the same. This applies to anything. Being art or not is irrelevant. The action of contributing to something's creation doesn't stop existing just because it's not an art.
I'm not sure why you keep acting dense and misunderstanding something so obvious. The analogy was straightforward.
If you actually read my comment, you’d realise the entire thing disregarded legality and only talked about what ontologically means, what cases both arguments have, and which ones are more relevant. AI has only one argument. Reread the comment again. So yes, I agree with what your definition of ontological is. And based my entire last comment around it. Before reading my comment maybe learn to read first. I am happy for any criticism on any of my arguments, but I can’t respond if you don’t actually try to debunk them. Come on you can do better, I believe in you
Your cases are irrelevant. I already read addressed this. You invoked concepts that were completely irrelevant to what was being discussed such as morality. You are arguing about things that isn't the basis of this discussion. This isn't a discussion about moral claim.
Just to nitpick, its true that writing software wouldnt really be associated with creating art, but things like game mods definitely are works of art and self expression
Honestly I just want a disclaimer when someone has created a mod using AI. So I don’t end up downloading something that’s broken, without atleast understanding the risks.
Nah, sorry. Like you said, AI is a tool, and a tool complements someones skills, not replaces them.
I can give someone a ratchet, but if they dont know how to repair an engine, the ratchet isnt gonna make them a mechanic. Itll only make the job easier in the right hands.
Using AI to fully write your code is lazy and bullshit. A coder should write something and use AI to find errors, not write everything for him or her.
No. Absolutely not. Because somebody else did the work and the AI just used that. It’s made to take other people’s stuff so you don’t go to them for those skills, without them getting return for what the AI took. This isn’t something like a digital art program, which was made so YOU can do something with it, where YOU need your own skill to use it - a photoshopper and a handpainter couldn’t swap roles without learning. AI only replaces these spaces because it steals from those with skills so we all have to rely on it instead of other people, devaluing any individual skills we have so we have to rely on the unavoidable machines controlled by the rich and powerful that steal from us
If I invent a tool that burns orphans to make phone apps are you going to defend the use of that too? Tools should be judged by their cost and utility. AI has little utility and exorbitant costs.
Well, a tool is meant to help you build something. If you use ai to just vibe-code all the code in your mod then it's bad use of ai and most likely you don't know how to code and fix bugs in said mod
I saw a game on steam made 100% by ai and in one of the patches they put out they reduced energy cost of skills for one character... character that didn't use energy. Hell, no characters used energy in this game
442
u/ScarletteVera women do be really pretty tho 16h ago
Just using AI is fine- it's a tool to be used, after all. It's only a problem when more than... I guess 50% of the end product is created by AI. Again, AI is a tool- it's one that has a myriad of legitimate use-cases in programming.