Epic Games CEO and Fortnite boss Tim Sweeney:
everyone will have to 'fess up to using it eventually as AI will become “involved in nearly all future production.”
Once again Epic games act like the moronic villains they are.
As an engineer, tell that to my seat-flattened ass Tim Apple.
Companies that use AI in production are sewing the seeds of their own demise.
everyone will have to 'fess up to using it eventually as AI will become "involved in nearly all future production.
True enough! No reason not to say it up front, right?
Look y’all, not 1-in-20 people give a flying fuck about AI like we do on here.
That is true, but for instance Ian M Banks predicted AI being able to make art already back in the 70’s in his Culture series of books.
Even accurately simulating famous artists. And his conclusion was that AI should not make art at all, because it would end up detracting from the value of art.I think the reason the CEO is wrong, is that it will be a legal shitshow, and I think AI art may become illegal, or at the very least required to be clearly labeled as AI art.
We will see how it turns out.
I’ll call your bet and say that Sweeny is right. I think AI will become so commonplace that there will be no way around it and the market has already been streamlined in this direction.
I would love it if my “feels” could be seen. But that is not reality. This battle is already long lost. Lemmy and the like can rage about it til their flames die out but it is a lost cause.
There have already been several lawsuits against AI companies, where it is revealed that AI art is copied from existing original works.
You may be right, but I don’t think that battle is lost quite yet.
AI is mostly good for memes, beyond that it tends to quickly becomes repetitive, and of little value.
Of course AI art generally has a human “director” guiding the AI on what to do. As I said previously we will see how it turns out.
I’m not sure the end result of this will be within 10 years.The result is that this is unsustainable unless copyright and IP law except for trademark and authorship are dropped, to avoid imbalance between using AI on existing work to generate commercially clean substance and using your ability, helped by existing culturally meaningful material.
It’s basically an IP laundering technology. Supply to satisfy demand.
When libertarians say that regulations make barriers for those more vulnerable, but not for those who can bend those barriers, they are right. Except I doubt many a libertarian expected to be proven right this way 20 years ago.
And I think they might even drop IP laws. When enough elite types are certain that control of computing power and datasets allow them to remain on top in such an environment.
That’s also where all the advice to get used to AI in all production comes from, I think, they are already salivating at the thought of just reusing old stuff from enormous datasets, legally, not paying anything, and keeping staff only to do basic control of what the machine generates. Basically people who expect that they’ll be able to do the theft of the century and remain elite.
The headlines about AI killing human creativity don’t help, they are telling these people what they want to hear.
It won’t kill all human creativity. It will kill those relying upon killing it. It’s like a gold mine in EU4, except giving inflation 10x the original.
I’ve just read yesterday what the Russian idiom “red price” means (said about the biggest price one can give for something, and already a robbery). So - the opposite of that was “white price”. No, it’s not about civil war. It’s about copper and silver money. There were not that many silver mines in Russia, so when someone decided to turn the printer on, they’d mint a lot of copper coins. While silver money was mostly foreign (“yefimok”, from Joachimstaler, same as taler, dollar, you get the etymology, the international coin of that age, which is also why metropolies had their traditional money and colonies had dollars - dollar meant a silver coin of the same weight as Joachimstaler).
Since I’ve remembered Russian history, that’s also similar to USSR’s advertised strong side - instead of relying upon complex evolution process to achieve big things, we’ll just build a command system in charge of all our resources and plan the path we already know. As you might see, it doesn’t answer where future evolution will come from. It didn’t come at all.
Why do they say these stupid things as if they were giving an order?
They can’t order people to buy their stuff, they can’t order their stuff to work when it doesn’t. Having “AI” in it doesn’t change the latter part in case they think otherwise, just got this idea.
I suppose they like the change from the old “spend lots of resources, then scale indefinitely” with software development to the more traditional in other spheres “spend constant amount of resources for constant result”, and expect it will build hierarchies like everywhere.
Well, companies were going bankrupt long before personal computing.
I don’t know about Epic Games, I think I’ll play Oolite in free time when I’m done with my EU4 addiction. Or actually make something useful.
Cool.
Maybe they can also stop forcing updates that break my game, too?
Fortunately, GOG exists. Which proves that Steam doesn’t need to force the updates on us, but chooses to.
If your games are breaking on update, isn’t that the game devs’ faults?
It varies.
There are definitely cases where the latest update outright breaks the game and that is bad QC.
But what people generally refer to here are games with a modding scene. A vocal part of the userbase rely heavily on mods and/or custom DLLs. So when the game updates, all of those break until the modders and tool writers are able to catch up.
There are a lot of implications to this for games with (meaningful) online components. But for predominantly SP games? It is a fun time when you sit down to play a game in the evening and see it was updated and know you can’t go back to that save/game for at least a few days. And there very much SHOULD be a way to opt out or freeze a version for those.
Devs are able to include the ability to run past versions of the game. If they push an update that breaks mods without doing that, I feel like thats their own fault.
Also, even if the dev doesnt do this, there are ways to download previous versions of the game using the steam console.
Steam forces game updates down your throat. It makes sense for competitive online games, but take fallout 4 for example. Totally offline single player. A million mods made for specific game versions, and all the guides for modding stress a half dozen little things you can do to your steam install to stop the updates but the shit happens anyway. Crap like modifying steam INI files and making them read only. Shit users shouldn’t need to do.
It’s not on Bethesda to just what…not update their game? It’s on steam to say hold up, maybe we shouldnt be pushing this update - it might break everything. Yes/no dialog prompts aren’t rocket science.
A few weeks ago Bethesda pushed a new update on a 10+ year old game, and it destroyed countless modded save files for everyone. This is on steam and their ham fisted updates.
Edit: don’t take my word for it, find some reviews here with 1000+ hours in the game:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/reviews/
910.3 hrs on record - “Bethesda? Please stop releasing updates to 10y+ old games. Just breaking mods and frustrating players at this point.”
1,565.3 hrs on record - ‘Well, after 1.6K hours spent playing, all the towns built, monsters killed and latex suits craftet for my beautifull girls companions, latest update destroyed all the 200 mods again…’
1,617.5 hrs on record - “The new update was hot rubbish. Leave well enough alone Bethesda, updating a ten-year old game and breaking a thriving modding community…”
Hmm, sounds like a “Freeze Updates” option should be available per game. I don’t do much modding, but I’ll see if I can suggest that idea somewhere or +1 any existing similar suggestion.
I would never respond to social media drama in their position.
“Calls.”
There’s only one call, and it’s coming from Tim Sweeny at Epic. It’s just more of his usual yelling at clouds, because he’s got a pathological hate-on for anyone else who runs a storefont, including Apple and Google but especially Valve. He hasn’t made any positive contribution to the world since about 1998, and at this point we can all safely discard his opinion with nothing of value being lost. He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform because he thinks it’ll make him free money, but maybe he ought to worry about the smell coming from his own house before he goes around trying to dictate at others how they should run theirs.
It’s so unfunny that the only one to contest Valve on PC monopoly is Tim Fortnite, who seemingly does the worst job everywhere yet still can still afford it. It’s almost like Gaben himself created a perfect villain for his company, so it’d never be criticized.
Gog (and to an extent, itch) are also competing with steam but while they might not be coming close to their market share they don’t draw anywhere near the ire that epic does and just similarly just rely on their strengths.
Your comment just made me realize I did a kind of GOG holiday sale shopping spree this year after having not done a steam holiday sale purchase in like a decade.
And the majority of it was having cheap easy drm-free access to some very good and very old games. Like yeah I know I have my ISO of the TIE Fighter collector’s cd-rom somewhere around here, but if I can permanently have legit drm-free access to all versions of the game for just a few dollars, then supporting the business enabling that is a no brainer.
Yeah. GoG and Humble (as well as many MUCH smaller stores) have very much criticized the de facto Valve monopoly over the years (… decades?). As have many devs who have criticized just how much of a percentage Valve takes (and how they reduce that for the big games). They just generally are smart enough to say it VERY obliquely because they know they don’t want to antagonize a rabid userbase.
Epic… Epic increasingly are poised to “not need” PC gamers as it were. Fortnite is its own platform and Unreal Engine is increasingly used by film and industry. So they are much more willing to criticize Valve (and only occasionally remember EGS is sort of a thing…) which… tends to highlight why nobody else does.
I think that both GOG and Itch.io not only rely on their strenghts, but has their own niche market to cover, so they don’t directly compete but complete each other in the whole gaming scene and they can easily coexist. That’s Epic who wants to get a slice of general gaming pie Steam eats.
He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform
Don’t forget the
blatant scams calledcrypto games! He proudly announced Epic Games Store would happily sell games centered around NFTs and crypto after Valve said they wouldn’t allow it.
I’m curious how they define AI. In my view AI has been used for games for as long as games have existed.
LLM and GenAI, you dingus.
This stinks of whataboutism, giving examples that incredibly obviously won’t be included
So then they should say that instead.
Everyone knows it but you, seemingly
Funny how the meaning of AI is slowly changed by these companies.
It is highly likely art and script, there are a lot of horrible games these days with ai art and script.
So AI controlled photoshop is ok?
I think the standard is set on wrong metric. Slop is slop and it doesnt matter how ot was brewed be it asset steal or lazy ai
If you are talking about NPC AI as if their behaviour that is programmed - then you talk about the wrong thing. The buzz is about AI being used to generate textures, levels, designs of characters, text/dialogue, story/plot of the game.
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Disclosure is good, but it would be useful to be granular and clear.
Games could use ai for interactive dialogue or content generation and it would be really cool.
Games could run models like olmo 3 which are completely open source, and that wouldn’t be bad in my opinion.
Ai textures probably make sense too depending on context.
It’s like hard to draw a line as well. If I take a picture with my phone today of the city I live in and use it in a game, the phone applies some AI filters automatically.
Ew why
People like when the phone cleans up their face
I like when my phone captures actual unedited pictures. I think it’s dangerous to modify recordings automatically without the user’s express consent.
Phones have been doing a lot of post-processing for a long time.
Tbh, most phone cameras would look crap without it. It’s something of a miracle what they can achieve with a tiny sensor and a tiny fixed lens.
Have you used a phone camera recently? This has been baked in for many years on every out of the box camera experience on flagship phones.
So you’re saying even MY pictures have probably been edited by my phone without my consent? That’s really bad. I didn’t opt into this. I don’t like what this could be used for.
Yeah, just because it’s been “baked in” for many years, doesn’t make it OK
I think different people have different aversions to why they don’t like or want to use AI.
In the case of “automatic” “filters” on pictures taken on phones, this is or was called computational photography. Over time more capabilities were added to these systems until we now have the moon situation and the latest NN processing.
If someone only cares about environmental impact, then that doesn’t really apply in this case if the processing happens on device, since by definition a phone is low power and thus doesn’t consume water for cooling or much power for compute.
However, some people care about copying, for numerous and possibly conflicting reasons. Generating assets might violate their sense that IP was stolen, since it’s a pretty well known fact that that these models were created in large part with dubiously licensed or entirely unlicensed works. I think a reasonable argument can be made that the algorithms that make LLMs work parallels compression. But whatever the case, the legality doesn’t matter for most people’s feelings.
Others don’t like that assets are generated by compute at all. Maybe for economic or political reasons. Some might feel that a social contract has been violated. For example, it used to be the case that on large social media, you had some kind of “buy in” from society. The content might have been low quality or useless drivel, but there was a relativly high cost to producing lots of content, and the owners of the site didn’t have direct or complete control of the platform.
Now a single person or company can create a social media site, complete with generated content and generated users, and sucker clueless users into thinking it’s real. It was a problem before, various people getting sucked into an echo chamber of their peers, now it is likely to happen that there will be another set of users get sucked into an entirely generated echo chamber.
We can see this happening now. Companies like openai are creating social media sites (“apps” as they call them now) filled only with slop. There are even companies that make apps for romance and dating virtual or fake partners.
Generated content is also undesirable for some users because maybe they want to see the output of a person. There is already plenty of factory bullshit on the various app stores, why do they need or want the output of a machine when there is already existing predatory content out there they could have now.
Some people are starting to wake up to the fact that they have only a single life. Chasing money doesn’t do it for most. Some find religion, others want to achieve and see others achieve. Generating content isn’t an achievement of the person initiating the generation. They didn’t suffer to make it. A person slaves away in art school for years only to take a shit job they looked up to for years, then doing the best work they can under crazy pressure is an achievement.
Jean completely agree, but for me that just underlined the point above of making it more granular. But there will be almost no big games where you can say truly nothing was done by the AI.
It would be funny if a game used the base tier OpenAI api and your wizard started slipping some ads into his dialogue.
Agree 100%. It is just Disclosure, if you use AI for voice lines on a robot character but the game is good then disclosing that “this game used ai during creation” isnt a bad thing, you used a tool for a tool to help make your game. I dont think disclosure hurts you.
If your game is a simple asset swap of a unity demo and you used 10 prompts to generate all the story, dialogue and sky boxes then disclousing you used ai is simple a branding iron on a pile of shit. The branding iron aint changing the smell of your pile.
There is a lot of inbetween these 2 extreams, but the consumer havung more information in the buying process is not a bad thing.
Slopification
LOL This is gonna catch on. I’ve seen things that this describes.
It’s literally a plagiarism machine, so I completely agree with them.
I think what’s important in this drama is that, despite their evil monopoly shit they’re guilty of, Valve really does do the right thing sometimes to win consumers. Gamers want AI disclosures, even if devs don’t.
That’s why it’s not surprising to see that statement from Sweeny, and why it’s not surprising that people still hate the Epic Games Store.
There’s nothing evil in Steam monopoly. Their evil thing is gambling.
Just curious, what is the evil monopoly shit you’re referring to? Is it simply the fact they are effectively a monopoly in games distribution, and that in and of itself is bad, or are there more specific practices or actions you’re thinking of?
Both. I’m strongly of the opinion that monopolies should not exist, and if they do it’s the result of illegal and/or unethical activity, and should be fixed immediately. They break the free market and end up hurting everyone in the long run.
In addition to what @Asterisk@lemmy.world said, they also include a forced arbitration clause in their terms of service to prevent class action lawsuits from customers.
Tbh, they’re very low on my personal list of monopolies to hate, so I don’t really have that many arguments ready to go. I’m sure others have made a good case against Steam somewhere on the internet already.
People often point to their 30% cut of all transactions (except for large publishers) and their MFN policies that force devs to price games the same on other stores too.
To add, I am pretty sure most of devs are actually for AI disclosure. Who really is against are publishers.
It’s a pity other platforms, especially social media / video platforms don’t require full disclosure of use of AI. It might allow a lot of AI slop and misinformation to be eradicated, downvoted, or at least call itself out.
Based
We need the disclosures now to slow the pace of the bullshit taking over, but it will not be stopped.
I mean, fuck, at this point if they’re using photoshop to extend a background, it’s AI. It’ll just end up becoming the California this contains items known to cause cancer logo all over again. It’s still the right thing to call it out, but everything, in short order, will require the label.
So why the fuck are they fighting to not do it? I’ll be a couple of billable hours and everyone and their brother will either disclose that they’re doing it or lie about it and we can move on with life.
It is a fools errand and I do not understand why the smart people at Valve do not understand this. First…it relies on the developer to add the tag. Second the developer may not even know an asset they bought used AI in its creation. Most AI researchers agree that it will become near impossible to determine if an asset was generated with AI, and even using AI to detect will just mean when it does detect, it now knows how to create one that cannot be detected and we end up in a cat and mouse race that humans have no ability to play in.
We already have tools to rank titles and if it is AI slop, a low effort copycat game, the ratings will reflect this regardless of the tech that may or may not have been used.
I would hazard to guess that are countless titles that used some AI in its development, perhaps unbeknownst to the developer. Plus, what if a developer made everything from scratch themselves but used AI on one texture to upscale it…does this get an AI label even though it amounts to something like 0.00001% do the title? AI labels are a fools errand and we all need to just rely on the rating system and judge titles on their merits not the tools that made them as like I said, it will become into know AI was used.
We already have tools to rank titles and if it is AI slop, a low effort copycat game, the ratings will reflect this regardless of the tech that may or may not have been used.
It is not enough for me. I want to know if AI was involved so that I can avoid it even if it is good.
What % of AI used is too much for you?
A game could be good and yet contain media created with AI generation - high rating + AI tag covers that case.
Most AI use will be slop, but as you say some could be an accident. How the dev responds to users finding out will inform users how to rate the dev team themselves.
I think users finding out is a window rapidly closing as AI get so good that it is not possible to tell it is AI.
