cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/49263187
Tim Sweeney claims it’s a “Scarlet Letter” which makes players “try to kill the game”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has criticised rival Valve for forcing studios to disclose when they use AI in game development.
Epic recently showed how it was integrating AI into Unreal Engine 6.
Time Sweeney said:
“If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you’ve got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game.
“I think it’s really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn’t do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success. You have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does.”
Which is totally ignoring the factor that the user should know about the purchase it makes and be able to decide for themselves. Transparency for the player is not a bad thing.
What, in the past six years of hype bullshit, leads you to justify this profoundly charitable position?
It’s about artistic freedom. I know how hard it is to program and make games and can imagine a better way using advanced (future) AI tools.
The problem with game development is not just the amount of work, and the capital required, it is the intersection of complicated technology and artistic outcome. Almost all disciplines in computer sciences are part of video games. It isn’t just hard and more time intensive than a single person can do, there is a higher risk of complete failure. You need high level of “technical intelligence” to even do it, which precludes a large number of potential artists.
We have very few computer games that I consider “art”. This not made to be pretty or profitable or entertainment, but something that shows you something new about the world. They do exist and they are labors of love or accidents, but they are rare. This is very different from other media like books or even movies. And movies are expensive and complicated affairs, but at least they have a linear nature.
The fundamental issue with computer games as a medium is that it is near impossible to invent a truly new game, with new gameplay and a worthy story that is not linear, and then turn it into a viable product (not even talking about commercial success, but something that is approachable to a wide audience. Like art ought to be. See Façade (video game) - Wikipedia for example.
AI has the potential to change all of this. The tools will become drastically more powerful and hardware and models cheaper to use.
Now, in a 100 years you’d surely have the ability to create virtual worlds by descriptive prompt, like ordinary people in Star Trek can do with the holodeck. How do we get from here to there? What technology is needed? Imagine you prompt “make a GTA V clone but underground with dwarves” and you get a complete game generated where you can now play or create or tweak a narrative. That’s what the holodeck can do in star trek, and what I always wished for ever since I was a little kid.
Only then will we have the artistic freedom to create video games as art.
Or think of dialogue that plays with you as you deviate, already examples exist with TTS. Or a game or dungeon master playing with you, throwing challenges in your way. Or a crafting component in the game, where you don’t have to painstakingly paint textures and nudge vertices to create some new style of armor or weapon or a house. You can just describe it in detail.
There are tons of problems with AI and society and the disgusting capitalists who will try to monopolize it. Making it easier or cheaper to create games isn’t one of them.
Nobody’s saying its not allowed. Freedom not at issue. My freedom to know what I’m buying is being respected. A sticker on the box. A tiny tag in the corner of the entire store page.
What future ai tools? This shit is a dead end, all the money and all the silicon has been ramming its head into a mountain of granite for six years. You can’t even buy a gaming computer, much less get funding for real ai research, and the blowback is going to chill the field for decades. Again.
‘Art is hard’ yeah, you aren’t addressing that. The actual making of art is part of the art. You would fucking know that if you had ever made any. There is a difference between art and vibes.
Ai does not, at present, have jack shit. It can optimize my StarCraft build order. Which it could do in 2010.
Cool, love that for them.
I’ll be fucking dead, and if we don’t cut the shit on hyper consumption, everything but maybe roaches will too. Do you think data centers will outlive us by more than five minutes?
You didn’t even fucking respect me enough to write this yourself did you? Choke to death sucking lies out of sam altman’s weird rapey dick, if you’re not too old for him.
But also
Six years ago I think I would have offered to be this person’s friend, or run a ttrpg for them, or teach them about art. But you can’t even do that from here. They can’t engage. There’s no vector for salvaging humanity, and they don’t even understand what they’re not doing? How can I respect others with this shit poisoning their idiot-fat?