Here is the Reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/s/wDDOMrFYNt
OP was initially anti-AI but the pro-AI people are, well, ugh…
Westerners have a view of China that is 10-20 years in the past, or more. They thought only the US would be able to innovate in AI/neural networks with Europe contributing maybe 1% of it, as has been usual in the past. Then China comes along and not only do they provide similar state-of-the-art performances and innovations, they 2. provide more research (look at all the AI related papers being published on arxiv, >50% of them are Chinese) and 3. choose to work open-source/open-weight instead of proprietary.
Now overvalued companies like OpenAI can’t compete, so their second best shot is “but do you really want China to control AI? We should control AI, like we’ve controlled the world’s supply of new things for the past 100 years. Now give me 500 billion $$$”
AI is like the steam machine was in its time. The benefits of steam were not readily apparent, they needed the machines to be designed first to use steam, and the infrastructure to make use of that steam. But once they did, everything accelerated quickly. We are in the first 4 years of AI still, it hasn’t even been half a decade yet. At this stage, at the state-level, AI is considered almost existential. A country that had the steam machine simply outpaced anyone else in production, allowing imperialism at scale. You could out-produce commodities, out-outfit your army, out-manufacture weapons with the steam machine.
AI has that potential, whether it will reach it is another question but at this time it’s not a question of “I don’t like how it looks” or “it’s not really art” anymore. The US government is not interested in AI because it does slightly better customer support, it wants it for war and imperialism. Like focusing on the surface-level arguments of AI is just a distraction, there’s so much more at stake here than our social media experience. Any attempt to “fight back” against it will just put it in the hands of the state and remove it from our hands. Refusal to use it or learn how to use it is self-defeating, as it once again only puts it in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the reactionaries. Do we want to win or do we just want to have good optics? And while we congratulate ourselves on having chased “AI slop” out of whatever big conglomerate social media platform, Raytheon will happily make AI enhanced missiles, unbothered.
Meanwhile China is using AI in education, agriculture, infrastructure and healthcare - which is not a coincidence at all, food especially, considering their history of famine in the country. Other Global South countries are following and developing AI too, though they are doing so slowly, and could benefit from Chinese models (and BRI infrastructure such as the chips required to run and train these models).
They’re scared. China has ~half an energy grid’s worth of reserve electricity produced at all times while we here don’t even know what solar panels are. A lot of people in Europe still have never seen a solar panel in their life, because we tariffed Chinese solar panels to ludicrous 300-1000% amounts so that people will be forced to buy overpriced shitty EU-made panels. And then they don’t buy these panels because they’re too expensive.
I suspect as China’s development with AI progresses we will see more of these arguments about somehow fighting against Chinese AI (as if that was somehow possible) while trying to leave US companies alone. All this talk they’re doing in the comments about China while not mentioned OpenAI or Anthropic is an example. And yes, it’s weird that there’s suddenly anti-China top-level comments out of nowhere, but there’s also a lot of communists that I’ve found on this cluster of subreddits.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI
You can oppose AI slop in art/culture without being against AI for practical uses like infrastructure, military technology, economic planning, etc.
Y’know: places where AI is actually needed and useful, unlike video games.
Please stop with these strawmen, this is ridiculous.
I was directly replying to the comments in the reddit thread.
unlike video games.
AI is extremely needed in video games. Do you know how many people make modern video games? The polish and content demands from customers are ridiculous, and the majority of the work required to meet those demands is technical work. Is it good for Code Vein 2 to cost 300 people 6 years? (1578 people in the credits) With team sizes and project lengths common in the PS2 era, that could’ve been 50 unique games.
Okay, let me rephrase: as long as the art & writing of the game aren’t dictated by AI then I don’t have an issue with AI in gaming.
I should have clarified that point better.
I’m not opposed to automation in video game design, which has been part of it for a long time and gen AI would just be another form of it, so I don’t see why we should oppose its use as assistance. That said, I’m not convinced automation is the make or break in the problems you outline. As far as I can tell, the biggest problems facing the video game industry are capitalist ones: Terrible management (sometimes just bad at leading, sometimes systemic abusive and sexist problems), terrible working conditions (little to no unions, crunch normalized, temp work normalized, people’s “passion for making games” taken advantage of to get them to burn themselves out just to get paid less than equivalent work in other industries), investors wanting more money from customers than exists in the world (endlessly worse monetization schemes that drive development toward making predatory design instead of making a fun game), etc.
I actually think player expectations have little to do with it and believe that largely originated from games “journalist” publications that were carrying water for corporate talking points, whose aim was to shift the blame from company to player, especially surrounding questions of cost. One of such arguments that got repeated was the idea that the price of games had to go up because of how expensive they are to make. But then this argument would cite things like mocap, which is not necessary at all to make a good game and there were people fawning over 3d games when they looked like this. Although I’m sure there’s the occasional “entitled” player who has unfair expectations, my experience is that players are largely way way way more forgiving than I think they should be for their own good and put up with borderline abusive situations at times, where a company puts out mediocre, buggy work and the players pay anyway because they’re so personally invested in a game/franchise/etc.
I think we can make a better argument for gen AI assistance by saying that like other forms of automation, it can (if used in the right way, under healthy working conditions) reduce busywork and allow people to put more of their time into the parts of work that they enjoy.
Yet with all that investment and labor, most of those games aren’t even as good as smaller games made for a fraction of the cost.
We could just make 50 unique smaller games and it’d probably be better than making one bloated AAAA game.
My example was a modern B game. AAAA games like Cyberpunk have 4986 people in the credits. Code Vein is at the lower end of what modern audiences will tolerate. I picked it because it came out this week. The top review presented to me by Steam right now complains about: Technical competency, frame rate, and missing high end visual features. These aren’t things you can fix without man-years of engineering time. The review calls the game cheap several times. They also call it rushed. The person praises the story and the characters and the designs. Things that are actually cheap, but get locked in early and then take armies and years to be able to present to audiences to see if they resonate.
A title that had everything it needed to succeed, but was buried under greed, rushed development, and technical incompetence. Final verdict: Do I feel cheated? YES. Do I recommend the game right now? NO. Do I recommend it at this price? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
The user explicitly says they want the game to have cost more to make, and that lower budget games shouldn’t can’t justify full-price. “229 people found this review helpful”.
So the numbers are even more absurd than I thought but that just emphasizes my point!
We could stick with cheaper graphics and reusable assets while focusing on stories and designs. We can make 200 good games instead of making 1 AAAA game that’s published in a broken state. Customers will whine, but that’s all they ever do and your own example shows they don’t know what they’re talking about anyway. Focus on the art form, rather than the commodity form.
We could stick with cheaper graphics and reusable assets while focusing on stories and designs.
I wish we could. But there isn’t evidence that anyone can make a living doing that. The handful of mega hits that people use as examples of successful cheap games isn’t that evidence, it’s just anecdotes.
Instead my hope is that as AI can automate much of the work and raise the quality floor of the parts that aren’t unique, the parts we actually don’t care about but expect to be there, that it’ll start being possible to spend half a year, a year on something, and then earn the equivalent of half a year or a year’s salary in sales, and have also made something that is actually able to speak for itself, to show the unique part without the jank and missing features dictating the conversation.
asking how to know what is AI on a website that is probably 50% ai-generated comments
spoiler; also unrelated (and also also quite off-topic)
Very curious about this … if you have the opportunity to to press a button, and have all of the USA’s AI developments just vanish from the world completely, and the USA could no longer development AI technology at all? But the rest of the world was untouched , and China then was the only country with leading AI technology. Would you choose that?
spoiler
if you have the opportunity to to press a button,
and China then was the only country with leading AI technology. Would you choose that?
I’m gonna press the button faster than you can blink!1
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