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Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

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Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#111

Post by Der_Einzige »

hatthew wrote: post #98
s_dev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back. People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can. The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once m…

Investments need a return on investment. If "the thing you wanted to exist now does" is the only return, that's not enough to support anywhere near the current amount of digital product creation happening today.

Good.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#112

Post by thereisnospork »

foota wrote: post #89
piker wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent was responding to this diabolically uninformed quote from the GP: “You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like.” It’s hard to have “invest” in a sentence without a capitalist structure unless GP somehow meant invest their personal time or barter or something.

I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear.

Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch the movie they are crowdfunding. We can also crowdfund some popcorn machines and communal viewing rooms, after all people will want to have a snack and watch their crowdfunded movie with friends and family.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#113

Post by lobf »

markerz wrote: post #75
smcg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to get rid of patents and copyright then entire industries would have to roll over and die (the music industry, publishing, Disney, etc). Also, people only invest in things if there is an expectation of profit. Your model for raising capital does not make sense.

Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalti…

>For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available

Which is why there is famously no market or money to be made on generic medicine.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#114

Post by teamonkey »

neutronicus wrote: post #35
newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

I think they just want, broadly, to divest from the American tech work force, whether that's via AI or outsourcing. If "the remaining employees just collapse" it's a data point in support of the thesis that developing software in HCOL markets is unsustainable, and if they don't, margins are better! So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.

Yes, absolutely. US games developers are paid a lot more than elsewhere.

There has been a growing trend over the past couple of decades to outsource more and more game development to cheaper parts of the world, trending towards keeping only a small core team in the home country, supported by for-hire remote developers in Eastern Europe and Asia.

The other big advantage to work for hire is not needing to keep a large team of specialists employed throughout development, when they may not be required for all of that time. Keeping everyone fully utilised has always been one of the big challenges for game studios.

Ironically, AI may actually reduce the amount of outsourcing that a core team needs to do (though a lot of it is content and AI is still pretty bad at generating content).

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#115

Post by lobf »

louthy wrote: post #26
newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware.…

This is one of my favorite eras / subjects in tech history.

I was just recently reading about the history of the Ultima series and you’re describing Richard Garriott. As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control and they were forced to release a series of bad titles that brought the whole franchise down.

It’s busy really interesting how fast that industry changed, and the massive scale involved compared to just 10-15 years prior, depending on where you measure from.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#116

Post by daemin »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #101
daemin wrote: post #93

The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.

Unrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.

I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs.

Using machine learning to make enemies smarter has been thought about and talked about for decades, but I don't see it being used either for similar reasons. Training a ML algorithm takes resources which are in short supply and time which could take longer than for the player to finish the game (if you want smarter enemies play against real human players). There's also the fact that the game has to run on the minimum specification computer, which means different players will have differently skilled enemies and their experience of the game will suffer.

There have been some games in the past which used some form of machine learning as a core gameplay feature, but they have been pet breeding simulators.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#117

Post by AshamedCaptain »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #101
daemin wrote: post #93

The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.

Unrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.

Right until you release it and a minor gets the NPC to talk about rape or something.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#118

Post by foota »

thereisnospork wrote: post #112
foota wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear.

Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch t…

That was a lot of snark :-) I know what you're saying. It's not clear to what degree the film industry would be viable in its current form though without IP rights. If everyone can watch the latest marvel film at home for free, are they going to be willing to pay to see it in theaters?

There would likely still be some demand for the experience, but the tickets would need to be more expensive to recoup the costs of making the film. At that point: it does seem like people pooling together their funds to fund the movie itself isn't insane. The point is that the "investors" wouldn't be investing in the hopes of a financial return, they'd be paying for the creation of the film.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#119

Post by rurp »

munificent wrote: post #20

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply in…

> something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.

Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube.

If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#120

Post by zetanor »

munificent wrote: post #20

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply in…

>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone

I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it.

On the flip side, the firehose of trash has pushed me to mess around and make little demos, so who knows?

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