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Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

blog.terrygodier.com

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Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#251

Post by TeMPOraL »

wvbdmp wrote: post #247
TeMPOraL wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this be basically fraudulent advertising?

AFAIK, a lot of commercials, particularly for cars, haven’t really shot the physical product in decades and instead used CGI. I think Ikea also makes heavy use of renderings. It’s all kind of insane. OTOH, a hundred years ago ads all used illustrations… I guess you’d have to show that the real strings don’t sound or behave as shown in the video, however it was created.

In this case there's a difference between CGI and generative AI. However they came up with arrangement of pixels on the screen, the product is still portrayed accurately.

Now, unless the company in question got their new strings into Sona training data, I wager that the generated output has little casual connection with the product being advertised. If I found out IKEA's newest product looks nothing like on the commercial, because the ad was using generative AI and hallucinated something approximating the product, I'd be looking at it as fraudulent too.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#252

Post by wavemode »

mechanicum wrote: post #108
Aurornis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the Bluesky thread that Gruber linked where the original author calls out the copy: https://bsky.app/profile/mmmeh.bsky.social/post/3mslc3b3u4c2... You can trace back to the original repo from that thread. The key points are that the copy had 1. The same name. One was "Dark Hours" and the other was "DarkHours". 2. The same highly specific bug. I didn't investigate closely but from the description the bug soun…

I’ve seen the original repo, I mean Godier’s. A name clash is the least damning evidence in my opinion. Last year my previous employer asked us for suggestions for naming an AI agent. Everyone produced pretty much the same list, because everyone just asked ChatGPT. Except me. I had also asked ChatGPT, but I bothered to google the suggestions and found there were already like half a dozen AI agents for every suggestio…

> they ultimately launched what was by then the 7th or 8th AI-related product with essentially the same name

let me guess, they called it "Copliot"

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#253

Post by phil-martin »

user43928 wrote: post #6

On the previous HN posts I got this impression: The developer's astrology app containing tarot reading features was rejected from Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps. He then replaced the app's content with a clone of, if not the identical open source astronomy app "Dark Hours", copying even the name. The original is here: https://darkhours.app The developer was then in contact with John Gruber, who wrote…

Maybe it’s not a developer at all, and a couple of open claws doing random app things…

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#254

Post by natch »

sillyfluke wrote: post #224
natch wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed that when a developer cries foul over an Apple App Store rejection, it often seems to be a red flag that there is something fishy about that developer. Gruber, not to his credit, often does not give Apple the benefit of the doubt on these matters. imho he bears some responsibility if he feels duped.

...and I've noticed that's not always the case. What's the value of such a bland whitewashing comment?

Sure, glad to clarify. The value is to point out something that I’ve noticed a lot of people miss as conversations about App Store rejections tend to take a knee-jerk negative attitude toward Apple. Considering the opposite possibility would clear up a lot of false conceptions and raise the quality of discussions.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#255

Post by tpmoney »

ethin wrote: post #201
tpmoney wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI". >The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul. I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics…

> it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. The problem is that this is only happening because the powerful are forcing it on us. This is exactly why the backlash against it has gotten so big. Had companies not jumped on the AI bandwagon and forced it down veryone's throats (sometimes putting your job on the line if you refused) the backlash probably would be non-existent. The AI boosters/pro-AI peop…

> The problem is that this is only happening because the powerful are forcing it on us.

Look, I won't deny that like the dot-com bubble and the "cloud" hype of years before that there isn't overhyping and forcing going on. But this feels to me a lot like someone in the mid 90's looking at this "internet" thing and thinking it's all a fad being pushed on us by computer nerds. I'm not saying every company and every attempt to stuff "AI" into everything is going to be some revolution that will stick with us forever, but neither were a lot of early online providers. But like I said, AI is infrastructure, and people are going to figure out how to build things on top of it that will become integrated and standard parts of our lives, just like computers, the internet and the cloud are all today.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#256

Post by grvdrm »

terabytest wrote: post #226

> I won’t be using AI in this way to create any more web stuff, and I do not use it to anything close to this extent on iOS software. I do ask questions, debug issues, things like that, but I do not create apps with Claude for iOS. I’m worried this is another lie. “Current,” Terry’s other app, is very obviously built by AI. Its interface carries all the tells (and slop-induced UI bugs) that you’d run into if an app w…

What tells?

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#257

Post by bsder »

WhrRTheBaboons wrote: post #178
avaer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about all of the cases that don't come out. Everyone hates AI, yet everyone is using AI. I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI, but how many put the tag of shame on the Steam store page? It's a very strange situation.

>I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI Do you refuse to believe nearly 100% of written content isn't made by AI? Was your comment? I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.

> I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.

Come on. There are shades here.

I guarantee that even your best programmers are using AI to run down certain classes of bugs--especially in corporate environments. Asking the AI to help you unwind some screwy source control merge or to remember some obscure set of flags is a damn good usage of AI, for example. Nobody thinks twice of using a search engine for this so AI is a no-brainer.

The issue is when people use the AI for all the code. I have to tell AI all the time "That code is there because X and you mangling it is a problem." or "You violated Y. Explain to me why you did that anyway and don't do it again."

The problem is that to do that you have to know the code and you don't know the code if you didn't write it.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#258

Post by huebnerob »

1123581321 wrote: post #209
huebnerob wrote: post #87

Even with all these revelations, there’s still something so weird about this whole story. To go from crafting such a strong, principled app as Current to conjuring an AI-slop-fueled false narrative around an astrology app is such a wild swing in respectability.

Current was just a vibe-coded thing that blew up about a month before people started to become inured to the Claude Code look. The essay was intriguing but the app wasn’t like it. The app is essentially a standard RSS clone reader with water-themed names for folders, feeds, etc. (I paid for Current to try it when it came out.)

That’d make sense, I don’t actually have any personal experience with Current so I was just going off the essay/site. But of course AI is quite good at making inordinately convincing versions of those.

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#259

Post by bigiain »

munificent wrote: post #231
ljm wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're calling it ass covering but I kinda see it as buck-passing too. Seems like D'addario didn't want to hold the buck so they kept passing it down until it made its way back to the worker who did it. Seems to me like that worker's ass wasn't covered at all and now everyone's all up in his shit on his socials, and the layers of management get to wash their hands, even though it's the management and executive that a…

Going forward, I suspect one of the main employment opportunities left for humans in the AI era is "scapegoat". Corporations don't want to take any responsibility for anything. AI can't be responsible. So there's a market opportunity for a person who is willing to take a job where their main value-add is to receive the blame when something goes sideways. What a sad dystopia we are creating.

Every staff member with a ChatGPT account gets a complimentary promotion to CISO...

Re: Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

#260

Post by cptroot »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #227
cptroot wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point What is the point then? The best games have all of their elements working together in service of their intended experience. > someone who uses AI for internationalization Do you think this would be an ok use of AI for a game? Did you not see the outrage over Hollow Knight: Silksong's translation last year? How every time a game is discovered to have used AI…

The point is that some parts of games truly don't impact the experience. Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way. Hell, name a game from memory that didn't have the same settings screen with minor styling variations as every other game you played. What exactly am I missing out on by having a resolution dropdown that was hand coded? Does a bespoke "ultra" graphics slider bring the…

> Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way

Most of these are going to be smaller indie games that already don't have many settings to set. Off the top of my head, I'd probably say Ultrakill takes the cake with its opening screen. Based on the description of the expectations, my guess is you're mostly basing your expectations off of large AAA games with multiple pages of settings? Fair enough that they should mostly be implementing "standards" correctly, and theming and character take a back seat.

It sounds like your overall point mostly relates not to settings screens, but things that "don't meaningfully affect gameplay". I think that's a much better argument than the one your example point led me to understand.

As a final note, it's worth reiterating that Steam does not require disclosure for AI-gen code. That settings menu example you were mentioning would be fine, as long as it used art assets generated by a human.

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