What’s your opinion of Youtube? We were better off when just a few could create and distribute video at scale?
There was similar criticism to yours when the printing press was invented.
There was similar criticism to yours when the printing press was invented.
Yes, I think I would make that argument.
But also I think I’m making a different argument. The game market already seems to be pretty flooded. I think many people see it as “we get more great indie games”, but I wonder if we don’t get less. That it creates more of a bipolar distribution. Triple-A relatively unaffected, and more vaporware games but it hollows out the middle.
I also think that “we objected to earlier progress and it turned out ok, therefor all objections to progress are bad” is a logical fallacy.
Often seen as job simulator games because they're so formulaic.
Sometimes you see unimaginative remixes like Palworld.
I can see games being similar, maybe a few creative people invent new genres never seen before, or mix elements in creative ways with AI tools, but I'm guessing it will more likely mean a lot of slight variations of games that bring in money churned out quickly.
Pair this with the fact that most people settle their musical tastes to be in line with when they are experiencing the most emotionally significant time in their early lives (high school for some, college for others, etc) and the result is an assumption that
A) What they encounter forms an overall opinion of "all" new music despite being the tip of the iceberg and
B) It's not as good as what they grew up on
Another little cut on why people are trusting big tech less ad less.
It's always been that way, especially before mass-produced recordings were available.
The "Beatles" period was partly because you had to choose wisely what you were going to spend your limited dollars on when you went to the record shop.
The difference today is that recording technology is cheap, and, with streaming, you don't have to "choose wisely" when you go to the record store. Now all of the mediocre artists, who were generally excluded from the "Beatles" period, can get on streaming platforms.
BTW: There's awesome music coming out today. It just takes time for word to spread.
You both listen to so much music and have a palette that is so wide-ranging that you can somewhat objectively judge it as not having gotten better?
I'm sorry, but this seems exactly like what every single generation says. I'm pretty sure that I read some similar quotes aimed at the Beatles back in the 60s.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...
A lot of what's happening is imo is just there's so much more competition for attention, and music has lost value as a cultural force beyond the music itself for younger people than it used to have, when young people would develop parasocial relationships or "crushes" or build their self-identity on pop stars and their fandom. A lot of this power culturally has been balkanized.
Speaking of the music itself, once the economic incentive is removed to create great songs (we are there already) we will get fewer great songs. That force is countering the fact that we have more tools and distribution channels than ever to create great songs, and those two forces are in opposition and to me, it seems like the fewer great songs force is winning (subjective).
That was the relationship we had for some 200 years. The machine automates and accelerates the predictable labor, and the creative heads composes and conducts the tasks.
As of late, we seem to want to flip the script under the guise that "we can make more content" without considering the impact on the creative process. Not how to drive the output, but just how to make more and more. Creativity be damned. That's the issue.
"AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics"
>You can indeed let the AI output stuff automatically but it's as interesting as stock photograp
Yes. And stock photography had agreements with the photographer. Much of the art scraped explicity said not to. It's not interesting and potentially illegal. The worst of both worlds.
>Do you disagree with Carmack's assessment?
I left a top level response somewhere, but overall, c. 2025 : not really. It feels like more hype generation, and this isn't the first time he's had to be a hype man. Maybe one day, maybe before or after we get convinent VR/AR hardware. It'll be a while.
And no small team is touching this stuff whike the courts battle about this. Come back to me in 5 years when the ethics is settled and the tech might be more ready. It's pretty hard to even look 5 weeks ahead in these times, let alone 5 years.
A similar thing was discussed in the past, checkmate.
We have this commonsense whig-history where everything became a little bit better century by century. But one could argue that the printing press makes propaganda possible. From that you get thought control by the elite. Now you ironically get an elitist outcome, or an elite-benefiting outcome.
Was the printing press a net good? Maybe it’s more complicated than “more books good”.
Beyond that I don’t know what there is to say about our so-called democratizing technologies when the discussion gets reduced to—and never goes beyond—those very slogans about them being democratizing. Yes. We are now free to repeat the same slogans that everyone else repeats.
There's no incentive to fix it because they control the information and profit off the situation. The system is working as intended.
Sturgeon's law. 90% of everything is, and always will be, drek.
When you think of Youtube, you might think of pretty decent stuff but you have to remember the absolute slop like Spiderman/Elsa videos, crude ripoffs and near porn gets many, many more views than the good stuff.
I'm not saying strict gatekeeping is necessary, but open systems are an absolute minefield for humanity. That's clear to me after the last 10 years or so.
That said, we've already decided that truly open systems are not viable. That was settled years ago. Now even 4chan has rules.
Right now we have algorithms that promote terrible content based on automated metrics that don't make the good stuff any easier to find. Especially considering the consolidation of platforms into a few hegemonic sites.
In that sense we already have gatekeeping, it's just a terrible approach to it.
And for the record I mind the slop because of how easily it drowns out and eventually overtakes the good stuff. Even good, educational content feels the need to cater to the algorithm to survive.
We're not at a tipping point yet, but it certainly feels we're headed in that direction.
Algorithmically promoting tastemakers might be a solution. Pushing the good content to the top and burying the slop.
Sometimes the new thing is also unpolished and needs work, perhaps even a second artist to pick it up and make it good...
I very much mind the theft. Even Youtube is offering ways to just "generate new videos" which is done by outright stealing from other youtubers.
With hindsight, one of silent assumptions very common of both pro- and anti-AI arguments up to this point was as follows: because AI is potentially superhuman in arts, the existing selective pressures could inversely punish desired creativity if AI outputs were not unfairly treated. Pro-AI arguments assumed that warping the system is wrong, anti-AI assumed allowing the system go down is worse. IMO, superhuman AI didn't happen anyway, and so now AI slop problem is just spam control problem.
No one was ever against punishing spams and unethical actors. It's fine and safe. We're at a postmortem phase during which we'd patch the bugs in laws and law enforcement that allowed AI companies do outlandish hacks like torrenting books and redistributing it as lossy compressed 500GB GGUF.