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Comment by makerofthings | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't buy a game that used generative ai and would refund one that I later discovered had. A quick straw poll of the gaming channels I'm in shows a lot of agreement amongst my friends.

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You're not going to know if they used an LLM to write a better shader or if they copied code from stack overflow like we used to do a few years ago.

I'm so excited that LLMs are great at coding. Most of my problems I have with various games I love is that they're written by people who couldn't write performant code at all but are great at building a world and telling a story.

Just look at Escape from Tarkov. Great game but some of the worst software architecture choices of all time. It used to take 4 minutes to get out of match and often 10-15 minutes to get into one and it was all just because of shitty code / design.

It's been fixed now and I'm sure modern LLMs were the reason.

John Carmack is the exception not the rule.

Oh absolutely, I don't have a magic way of detecting these things, but I do what I can. I would greatly prefer the best efforts of a person, regardless of how it turns out, to anything from generative ai. Everyone else can do as they wish, I'm not out to change anyone's mind :)

"Best effort" except when it includes using competent tools. Then you just want mediocre effort

Fair enough. Cheers

Yeah, we'll see how long that lasts.

I'd bet 500 thousand dollars that this sentiment goes away as fast as they were rerunning cold and flu medicine commercials after everyone was sick of giving a shit about COVID.

Too many people fall into the trap of black and white thinking, as if the only way to use gen AI is to type into ChatGPT "make a fun game that makes loads of money plz."

I'm sure there are, but for me this isn't some reactionary mistake. I understand the technology and I thought about it carefully and made a call based on how I understand the ethics of the situation.

I was recently working on audio code, and I needed a function that produced a fast approximation of a sine wave. I asked chatgpt about common techniques, did some experiments to figure out the right performance/accuracy tradeoff, and finally asked chatgpt to help me optimize the function to use SIMD instructions.

If this code made it into a game, at what point did I do something wrong?

I mean, I'd never try to tell you what to do, but as you asked, what you're talking about is the base of the pyramid, that holds up and normalizes the system that's putting artists out of work and enshittifying everything. These companies stole literally everything and used it to build a tool whose economic end goal is to put everyone out of a job. I'm not down with that, but you do you.

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