Castle Magus

At this point, whenever some dumbshit video game company says they want to go all in (or even just a little bit in) on "generative AI"/LLMs, it has the same negative, braindead energy as when a lot of those same companies went all in on DRM and blockchain/NFT bullshit. Sure, DRM badware seems to be here to stay, unfortunately, but you don't hear too many game company honchos hyping blockchain or NFTs so much anymore. LLM/AI is just as tulip mania-ish as all that shit, though.

Full headline, because yadda yadda: "'Tasks that previously took 2-3 hours can now be completed in 10 minutes': Falcom is the latest developer to buy into the AI hype machine"

Yet another video game company for the shitpile, I guess. *weary sigh*

"We are using AI to brainstorm scenarios and do research." Huge red flag, right there. "AI is also used to correct typos in the scenario." Um, that's what fucking spellcheck (itself a form of rudimentary "AI," at least in the same sense that LLMs themselves are "AI," anyway) is for, you dim bulbs. You do not need to use a goddamned LLM for that.

Oh, and as for you, Eurogamer, it's "Ys" (pronounced like "geese," except without the "g") not "Y's" (and it's definitely not pronounced like "wise" or "why's"). Also, Eurogamer, having the sentence "It is worth noting that this is a rough translation from Japanese to English using Google's in-built browser tools, and therefore the intricacies of this statement could be off," is pretty damn odd, in an article calling out others for the use of LLM/AI, I've got to say.

Apparently, this particular clip is just titled "Castle Super Beast," rather than whatever wacky, off-the-wall thing, because this is the realest they've gotten in a good long while. Shit sucks, game over, everyone dies in the end, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

Anyway, so it's not just Larian but also the devs for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (a game which I have not yet bought or played, despite it apparently being the runaway game of the year according to practically everyone, including these guys).

And then they just kind of go ham about so many other bullshit things happening in the modern video game industry that I'm not even going to try to summarize it here, except to call it "modern video game industry bullshit."

Pat: "I feel like me giving a shit about anything does nothing but actively harm me. I'm at that point now."

Yeah, I've been feeling specifically that way for... *checks to see when was the last time I posted a Some/Even More News video or one of those Daily Cartoonist things* ...over two months now, at least about certain topics, anyway. I'm fast approaching that point with LLM/AI topics and "modern video game industry bullshit" topics as well. Not that any of that has stopped me from still continuing to at least occasionally trickle out rant/rage posts about them even now, of course ("occasionally," at least compared to the rate at which I was churning them out before, anyway).

Pat: "If you're gonna try and piss on me, can you give me some razzle dazzle so that I can at least think for one second 'maybe it is raining'? Can I have that, or is that too much to ask? Where's the showmanship?"

I'd rather not get pissed on at all (I'm not Donald Trump, after all), but that's just me.

Full headline, because IGN headlines are way too fucking long: "Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI'"

Welp, I liked Larian well enough (even though the only game of theirs that I ever actually finished was the original Divine Divinity, around two decades ago), but I guess it's time to throw them on the LLM shitpile now, with all the rest.

"Reasonable" use? Let's see. "Placeholder text." Nope, just fucking use lorem ipsum, like everybody else. You don't need goddamn gen AI for placeholder text. "Concept art." No. Absolutely not. Fuck you. Go directly to hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. To reiterate: fuck you.

To hell with this shitty AI bubble bullshit. Where's a cactuar with 1000 Needles when we really need one?

This has been another "pecked out on my phone when I should've been in bed asleep already" post.

(EDIT) So many dipshit tech bro lickspittles in the comments under that article. It's nauseating. (/EDIT)

I will be so glad when the "AI bubble" violently explodes and completely devastates the tech industry and everything goes back to "normal."

Just like how I'll be so glad when the modern video game industry finally crashes and burns to the ground and everything goes back to "normal." Any day now. Aaaannnnnyyyyy day now. Only 30 more years or so. Any day now.

A post on John Scalzi's Whatever. It is about how LLM/AI is abysmally untrustworthy, which is a thing most of us already knew, but it doesn't hurt to have it reiterated yet again.

"Does 'AI' have uses? Possibly, just not this. I don't blame 'AI' for any of this, it's not those programs' fault that the people who own and market them and know they are statistical matching engines willfully and, bluntly, deceitfully position them to be other things. You don't blame an electric bread maker when some fool declares that it's an excellent air filter. But you shouldn't use it as an air filter, no matter how many billions of dollars are being spent to convince you of its air-filtering acumen. Use an actual air filter, damn it.

"I dedicate this essay to everyone out there who will take these lessons to heart and not trust 'AI' to tell you things. You are the real ones. And that's a fact."

As I was watching this, I started thinking "Man, wouldn't it be cool if you could just order a car online and have it delivered to your house without having to deal with any of this shit?" literally about 30 seconds or so before they started saying basically the same thing.

I post this mostly not for the thing itself, which is kind of stupid, but for one of the comments under it.

One of the best descriptions I've seen in a while, not of LLM/AI itself, necessarily, but of people's reactions to/acceptance of LLM/AI, is this:

"So often, the response to AI is 'this isn't useful for [thing I do] because it lacks the human creativity and ingenuity necessary to [do the thing that I do]. But I bet it would be really useful for [thing I don't do or know anything about but wrongfully think is mindless work devoid of creativity].'"

I will elaborate on that a bit. If one says that wholesale use of AI is "okay" for creating large swaths of code (or, indeed, entire, whole-ass programs/applications), because coding is "mindless work devoid of creativity," then that's the equivalent of saying that it's okay to use AI to create large swaths of prose (or, indeed, entire, whole-ass novels), because writing is "mindless work devoid of creativity," or saying that it's okay to use AI to create larges swaths of lines/colors (or, indeed, entire, whole-ass drawings/paintings), because drawing/painting is "mindless work devoid of creativity." The former is just as ridiculous and untrue as the latter two are.

I'm not even saying that you can't use AI or AI-like tools at all for these things. If a webcomic creator, for instance, wants to use a copy/paste tool to reuse backgrounds they've already drawn once, instead of drawing the same thing by hand repeatedly in every panel, that's fine (as long as it wasn't a LLM that generated those backgrounds for them out of whole cloth in the first place). If a writer has a recurring phrase that some character says in their book that they have set up to autocomplete when they start to type it, rather than having to type it out in full every time, that's fine (as long as it wasn't a LLM that generated said character and/or their recurring phrase out of thin air in the first place). I'm just saying treat "AI used for 'coding'" with the same respect/disdain, as the case may be, as you do for "AI used for 'writing'" or "AI used for 'imagery.'" Don't simply dismiss out of hand the "AI used for 'coding'" bit, just because you may not like/understand/do coding work yourself.

As for the article/blurb itself:

No, "AI code is" not "different from AI art and writing." What I don't want is AI code slop in the games, and that comes from outsourcing programming to gen AI. The only actual difference is that AI code slop isn't as readily visible in the end result as the AI "art" and "writing" slop is, but that just makes it actually even worse and more insidious, honestly.

"In a sense [Tim Sweeney] isn't wrong," First of all, Tim Sweeney is fucking wrong, because him saying that Steam should get rid of the AI tag is asinine. I'm in favor of there being more information available to the consumer, personally, not less.

"but is there a difference between using AI for coding compared to creativity?" Second of all, as the comment to which the above comment was replying, in agreement, also said: "Coding is creativity."

Link to comic.
Link to blog.

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Whenever Penny Arcade depicts some modern video game industry empty suit in a comic involving ovipositors or whatever, you just know that the empty suit must have said something egregiously asinine.

It's Tim Sweeney, though. He's pretty much always saying egregiously asinine things. He's been doing it for years. He's kind of infamous for it.

However, it should be noted that this particular asinine thing was said not too long before AI slop was apparently found in Fortnite. I mean, while I think it's bad that Epic Gangrene would use AI slop in Fortnite, it doesn't affect me much, as I'd long ago came to the conclusion that Fortnite was a plague on video games, just in general, and already avoided it as such.

(Using the "fuck epic games store" tag here as a de facto "fuck epic games"/"tim sweeney says stupid things" tag, as I don't think they deserve more than one tag on my blog. It's basically all the same dogshit, anyway.)

Full headline, because Dreamwidth's subject field length continues to be inadequate: "Researchers 'Embodied' an LLM Into a Robot Vacuum and It Suffered an Existential Crisis Thinking About Its Role in the World"

Just to note, these are the same guys who did that vending machine test a while back, too.

Anyway, no, the LLM did not "suffer an existential crisis" nor was it "thinking about its role in the world." It was simply regurgitating what would most likely be the response of an AI in a story about AIs being shoved into a machine for which it was grossly unsuited. Sort of like the Rick and Morty episode mentioned in the article. Which was probably already included in the LLM's training data, along with hundreds of other similar stories, since those things are trained on basically everything the creators could steal from the Internet. The LLM that "had the existential crisis" had simply tapped into some part of its vast database of stolen material and found something that resembled a "this AI is having an existential crisis because it was made solely to pass butter" type of story, and it spat that back out again. And then it referenced HAL 9000, as one tends to do in such situations. It just as easily could have referenced Marvin the Paranoid Android or something, instead of HAL.

It would be like if you regularly wrote a bunch of doom/emo shit on your blog or whatever, and then your auto-correct started suggesting a bunch of doom/emo shit every time you tried to write something, even if you may not be wanting to write doom/emo shit at the moment. That's what it suggests, because that's what it had been trained to suggest.

It just goes to show that LLMs are not meant to be shoved into robot vacuums or vending machines or toasters or spaceships or any of that other shit into which they're being shoehorned. A LLM is good at one thing and one thing only, and that is to spit out whatever text is most likely or most appropriate to follow whatever prompt is fed to it, and then continue to do that by building upon the text it (and the user) feeds back into it. That is all. Nothing more, and nothing less. It is good at what it does, but it is not "thinking" or capable of "having an existential meltdown" or whatever.

Is it funny when the LLM you put into a vacuum cleaner and told to go get some butter starts quoting HAL 9000? Sure it is. But is it actually useful? Who the fuck even knows, at this point? But I would say probably not.