Whenever I run into a moral or political or similar dilemma I always ask myself, if this was an episode of TNG, which side would be the baddies and who would Picard side with? Never steered me wrong. RIP Patrick Stewart.
A lot of the wealth generation can be productive. You start a company to cure cancer or something. It succeeds and the company is worth loads on paper although you don't buy any yachts or anything. Should you be eaten?
Hot take: Maybe not literally eating, but anything > $1B in whatever form (cash, stocks, equity, etc) should be redistributed fairly. At the lowest level, janitors at Tesla are just as important as engineers - if the toilets are nasty and nobody takes care of them then nobody will want to work there. So on top of paying them $15/hour, they should also get some stock.
When you get to $100 million you get a letter from the president congratulating you for winning capitalism and everything after that gets taxed at 100%.
If I write a novel, have someone translate it to French and publish it, that's a compiler. If I hand some brief notes to someone who writes the novel for me, that's the llm. These are fundamentally different things.
We have graduates come in and master development with agents in a few days. There's really not that much to it. There are a lot of people out there trying to make it sound difficult. Maybe to make themselves feel better, maybe to try and make money?
Master development in a few days? Unless you are mastering something extremely basic like, I don't know, WordPress websites, I highly doubt that. Learning how to do proper architecture and various test systems requires a lot of critical thinking skill that comes with experience far longer than a couple of days, unless you are just a meat proxy for AI, and adapt AI's opinion as your own, with no critical thinking applied?
They could be dead you know. I wouldn't joke around, we're all in the same business after all. I'm sure the SRE's didn't decide who rented space in their DC.
I wouldn't buy a game that used generative ai and would refund one that I later discovered had. A quick straw poll of the gaming channels I'm in shows a lot of agreement amongst my friends.
You're not going to know if they used an LLM to write a better shader or if they copied code from stack overflow like we used to do a few years ago.
I'm so excited that LLMs are great at coding. Most of my problems I have with various games I love is that they're written by people who couldn't write performant code at all but are great at building a world and telling a story.
Just look at Escape from Tarkov. Great game but some of the worst software architecture choices of all time. It used to take 4 minutes to get out of match and often 10-15 minutes to get into one and it was all just because of shitty code / design.
It's been fixed now and I'm sure modern LLMs were the reason.
Oh absolutely, I don't have a magic way of detecting these things, but I do what I can. I would greatly prefer the best efforts of a person, regardless of how it turns out, to anything from generative ai. Everyone else can do as they wish, I'm not out to change anyone's mind :)
I'd bet 500 thousand dollars that this sentiment goes away as fast as they were rerunning cold and flu medicine commercials after everyone was sick of giving a shit about COVID.
Too many people fall into the trap of black and white thinking, as if the only way to use gen AI is to type into ChatGPT "make a fun game that makes loads of money plz."
I'm sure there are, but for me this isn't some reactionary mistake. I understand the technology and I thought about it carefully and made a call based on how I understand the ethics of the situation.
I was recently working on audio code, and I needed a function that produced a fast approximation of a sine wave. I asked chatgpt about common techniques, did some experiments to figure out the right performance/accuracy tradeoff, and finally asked chatgpt to help me optimize the function to use SIMD instructions.
If this code made it into a game, at what point did I do something wrong?
I mean, I'd never try to tell you what to do, but as you asked, what you're talking about is the base of the pyramid, that holds up and normalizes the system that's putting artists out of work and enshittifying everything. These companies stole literally everything and used it to build a tool whose economic end goal is to put everyone out of a job. I'm not down with that, but you do you.
A less misanthropic alternative: The technology required to replace the person is much smarter and more adaptable than that which was needed to replace the horse. Because of this, you can end up in the horse's role in the story without having to be as dumb as a literal one so long as it's this other lever which moves instead.
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