starman2112

I 100% agree, I'm just saying that life today is much more fulfilling for the average person than it was for, like, the average 13th century French peasant. The fact that we have access to this feeling of ennui in the first place is thanks to our safe and comfortable lifestyle.

Shit could be better, and we should fight to make it so. I just think we should also appreciate that our quality of life is nearly unrivaled throughout history, and even the modern world.

The fulfilling part is using that income to buy a telescope and admire the beauty of the cosmos

Or internet porn. Both of these are things our ancestorsnl couldn't have even dreamed of, and would kill to have access to

How the fuck would I boycott a brand for being owned by Nestle before I find out that it's owned by Nestle?

I don't know if other games are using generative AI. Maybe they are. If I find out they are, I will not buy them. If I don't find out that they are, how would I know that they're using it? The fact that I'm not able to detect it 100% of the time doesn't make me okay with it when I don't know it's there. What in any of my comments has made you think I have an "I don't care as long as I don't notice it" attitude???

No? I just don't know that I should avoid a product if I don't know about the ethical problems with it. That's how boycotts work...

How can you be sure that in any game AI wasn't used to generate some sort of an internal document or asset that would never be in the final product but was integral to the creation of the final product?

I never claimed to be omniscient. I simply don't support a company after I find out that they have unethical business practices. What are you not understanding about this?

Correct! If you're not going to support artists and writers, the least you can do is not support the industry that's actively destroying the fields of art and writing (on top of the myraid other problems with generative AI)

Boycotting because they used generative AI to make their game instead of hiring writers. Even if this was the only part of the game they used it on (if you believe that, l have a bridge to seII you), I'm not going to give someone money if they couldn't even be fucked to hire some sci-fi writer off of fiverr to write their fill text with it.

I personally know artists and writers who are having to get jobs at fucking Walmart because of this shit. I'll be less irate about generative AI once we have universal basic income so that real artists can continue to generate real art alongside these soulless husks.

Didn't equate them. Also, you have been reading my responses since I pointed out that flaw in your argument. Makes me wonder if maybe you just don't have an adequate response to my comment, but you wanted to get the last word in anyway

My VPN expires tomorrow. After that, my media center laptop goes offline forever, until the penguin gets its filthy flippers on it.

What's the best distro for a shitty 10 year old Lenovo Yoga? I'll be using it to acquire (through purely legal means) torrents including Wikipedia backups and Linux isos

Damn, guess I'm writing a whole response anyway

Nope. Procedural generation requires a lot of creative and technical input on the part of the developer. It's not used to offload creative or intellectual work, it creates creative and intellectual work. The intellectual work is something I forgot to mention in that reply, but the loss of the intellectual effort is just as bad as the loss of the creativity.

Let's compare the topic of this discussion with the game I'm currently playing, Kerbal Space Program.

Contracts in Kerbal Space Program's career mode are (for the most part) procedurally generated. There are a few mission types, usually asking the player to bring a part or set of parts to a particular location and perform some action with them. Attach a part to a satellite in orbit around Duna, take pressure readings in flight over Kerbin, plant a flag on the Mun, etc. This is not offloading creativity onto the machine, this is using procedural generation to provide the player with an endless variety of objectives. Producing this system of procedurally generated missions required creativity and forethought from the developers. I don't work at Squad, but I imagine it took a number of manhours to set all of the parameters and limitations for the system, and to test it to make sure it works, and that it doesn't generate any missions that are impossible to complete.

Contrast that with the AI generated text that is the topic of this discussion. The creative input for that text up there was something along the lines of "generate some sci-fi technobabble that would fit in a starship's event log" and "do it again, but don't talk about the ship, just talk about astronomical data." I know this for certain, because I generated a nearly identical passage using those two prompts exactly. They could have gotten a freelance sci-fi author to write these few bits of text, or even just sat down for 10 minutes and wrote it themselves. It would cost them nearly nothing, and in exchange they would have a piece of text that fits within the world and was written by a human. Instead, they offloaded that creative work onto a machine. They didn't make more work for themselves like a developer that uses procedural generation, they made less work for themselves by asking a machine to do it instead.

I could make a similar contrast between this and basically any procedurally generated system in games. Minecraft, Daggerfall, Borderlands, FTL: Faster than Light, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, all of these games use procedural generation to complement the creative and technical work they put into the games, not to avoid having to do that work in the first place.

I'm willing to grant literally all of this. I have a deep-seated hatred of generative AI that clouds my ability to have productive discussions about it. It turns me into an asshole, specifically to people who defend it.

When did I demand an equivalence? That's what I asked 37 minutes ago, and what you've spent several replies now pivoting away from answering

I was about to type out a whole response, but I need to learn when to cut it short.

Generative AI is demonic, using it offloads your creativity, humanity, and soul into an unthinking, unfeeling machine. Anything that uses generative AI is inherently worse because it was not made by someone with agency or creativity. You're advocating for putting artists and writers out of work.