uludag

Highly doubt it as games themselves are designed to produce this energy and motivation. It's not like we have super geniuses who are wasting their potential on games, but rather games provide a sandbox that encourage exploration, experimentation, and create intrinsic motivation loops. I feel confident saying that playing games like Factorio is a much better use of time than using social media or passively consuming media.

The real world is filled with industry know-how, real-life constraints, and monetary risk. I'm almost positive these people don't have millions of dollars lying around to invest in agriculture R&D.

I'm just a layman on this subject, but it would seem that with how interconnected our world is, it'd be very hard for global warming to be a net positive for most countries. The topic of refugees alone has shown that destabilization in some parts of the world can have reverberations in completely others (e.g. Western Europe).

That said, the very rich who are insulated from practically any externality of climate change, many who are actively building doomsday bunkers, may look very keenly at the opportunities a societal upheaval may bring their way.

Look at the pictures from the original post.

Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.

Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.

Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.

Seeing the US public, this does't seem much like a culture war. Maybe culture consensus would be more apt. I would have a hard time finding large groups of people vehemently arguing for data centers or more AI at a town hall or something.

I personally think that beyond normalizing, we should be actively be trying to dismiss this with all the cynicism we have. What does Anthropic have to gain from writing this? Behind the the scenes what might Anthropic be failing to disclose? How many failed experiments do we not know about?

If said game, video, or social media site used 1-2.5 kWh of electricity for every 10s of content then I'd say definitely!

Thankfully web browsing is no where near that.

Before "AI," humans have created a vast array of "multimodal output" (computer art, instruments, dance, architecture, etc.). Why are you giving the AI a harness and a plethora of tools and not the human in this comparison? Without these, the LLM too would be utterly useless.

Also, that situation is extremely contrived. If a criminal threatened to kill me if I misspelled a word, I would choose a dictionary. If a criminal challenged me to predict a next token, I'd choose the LLM. For all real precarious dangerous situations, I would obviously choose a human. Like immagine the hilarity (or tragedy) that would pursuit if ChatGPT tried to handle a hostage situation or a plane hijacking.

and those meatflaps are normally called vocal folds/cords btw

I'm actually extremely confident that I can use the architecture to make a sweeping claim on what it can or can't do and will be extremely surprised if proven wrong:

A pure next-token language model won't be able to give detailed instructions to an ensemble of motors, mimicking a human body, to do a wide variety of tasks our human brain is excellent at doing, for example, inserting keys into a car, opening the door, sitting down, starting the car, putting the car in reverse, and exit a parking lot, being careful not to hit anything.

And what's wrong with downplaying the abilities and faculties of AI models if that's what people feel like saying? We don't call humans or animals sacks of chemicals because we believe they have moral status.

Wouldn't "general intelligence" require so much more than scoring well (or even amazingly) on benchmarks?

Like what about having some "AGI model" embodied in something (maybe humanoid), and test it by having it step in an assortment of cars and park them. Does bodily-kinesthetic intelligence account for nothing? Humans are intelligent creatures and can dynamically adapt to the physical shape of a variety of vehicles and their movement characteristics. And there's so many things like this that are extremely basic, which some people dismiss since practically every human has the capability to do it, but actually requires a high degree of intelligence.

I can just immagine the response to a headline "LLM chooses mass death: thousands killed in horrific AI accident" being something like "lots of humans have caused mass death too."

> So I vote we just ban almonds. Problem solved!

I'm pretty sure if we had an actually vote between banning AI data centers and banning almond farming, one would win by a landslide. I'm actually confident that if some hypothetical community had absolutely no water or energy problems they would vote against having the AI data center built.

I think the point is without taste you wouldn't even know what things should be copied out of the countless competitors. How would you even know in the first place if a competitor did a particular thing tastefully without a good sense of taste yourself?

Also, there are a lot of areas where taste will absolutely reign supreme (and has been), especially anything related to media or entertainment (books, articles, videos, games, music, etc.)

Isn't this jaw-droppingly the wrong answer?! If the model isn't given any way to directly view the image shouldn't it just reply with one sentence asking for permission. This reads as a model hyper-trained to burn tokens.

Like suppose you issue a command to Opus or Fable which doesn't make sense and requires a lot of work. It will almost certainly not push back on your silly request and go ahead and burn as many tokens as it can doing the wrong task. This happens to me all the time.

Or if I was to tell a model to do something and it realized it could only do it by hacking into another service, by all means it should ask me if I want it to hack and not go ahead and do it by itself.

Very weird indeed. People must not realize that you can completely change the response you get back from an LLM by how you ask questions. Any bias can implicitly be implanted in the question you ask and drastically modify the response. This is what I got Gemini to say about the article:

  The author’s tone in this piece can be described as brutally candid, deeply relieved, and unapologetically sarcastic.

very different from "The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending."

Well paid expats wearing a hijab, who definitely aren't refugees, will not be treated nicely in Germany. Lived and worked in Germany and saw it a lot. It's a low bar indeed to treat skilled labor coming to your country nicely that sadly Germany can't even pass.

In case anyone's curious I recommend the podcast episode with Zach Barth on the Draknek and Friends podcast to hear where he's at now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLrh8wcBy8I

Happy to hear that he's continuing developing games and we can expect more to come!

But at some point you really have to accept ignorance. Like, there are countless stories that anyone could read and be outraged about. I think it makes sense to determine the areas that you can make a difference and be informed regarding those to the extend that it helps you making informed decisions.

Yeah, the game "Baseball" on the NES is a good example. I get though that an 8-bit aesthetic would be very tricky to get things like the player portrait details looking right. Cool project by the way!

I'm not sure if this is just me but the mismatch in pixel sizes and inconsistent palette is very jarring. This would be more impressive if this actually matched the 8-bit aesthetic of like the NES.

Yeah, I get all forms of media are avoiding the appearance of using AI like the plague. I still think that what they're saying can still be taken at face value. Like if the game has a 3D sequel I don't immagine the time to release or quality would be outside the distribution of how long similar games take pre-AI.

Maybe you don't understand, if we didn't have LLMs expanding our ideas into longer form we wouldn't have anything to give to LLMs to summarize.

Here's an example of this regarding the recent indie hit "Mina the Hollower." They were recently interviewed and asked the question "What is Yacht Club's stance on AI and has AI been used in the production of Mina the Hollower at all?" to which their reply was "We all got caught up in AI fever like the rest of the world, but we didn't find it was very effective for what we're doing. Maybe our work just isn't that generic! We've found some ways it can help... like Google or a thesaurus, but it hasn't affected what's in our game." [1]

It's hard to immagine that even the best AI model would result in anything better than a marginal reduction in release timeline. Like maybe for such projects one could spend $X00,000 worth of tokens for maybe like a %single-digit-percent reduction in time to release. Marginally good, maybe even project saving, but not any larger a paradigm shift than Unity was.

[1] https://www.gamereactor.eu/mina-the-hollower-interview-discu...

I've been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit and testing out the demos people have been sharing, as this would be the place where people most enthusiastic about vibe-coding games post and everything I've seen has been immensely underwhelming. The problem with these games fall into the following categories:

- An utter lack of animation. So many games feature mostly static images.

- AI assets make the game's art style feel horribly incohesive. I played a TCG game where there were high fantasy art, chibi 2d art, anime art, seemingly used haphazardly.

- Bad UX. For example, in the same TCG game, all of the cards had very fancy artwork generated, but the game board itself was far away enough that the made the cards look like blobs on the board.

- Buggy mechanics: There was this guy why shared a platformer generated by fable where you move a lamp to create a shadow path. The character had very awkward movement, would constantly get stuck/unstuck, and would be hard to control.

- Broken mechanics: A lot of games featured exploits that just rendered the game boring to play

- Poor balancing

- Lack of ovararching game structure: no story, no meta-progression, no world-map. These AI games tend to be isolated experiences.

I don't see the masses creating quality, sellable games anytime in the near future. There are so many aesthetic qualities to a game that have direct human bottlenecks. AI can even make games significantly worse as you can seemingly implement many bad mechanics without validating them. Good game devs seem to be relentlessly pruning out the things that down work.

I kind of feel like I'm going crazy when I read comments like this. The era of "little flash games" has never left and there have always been countless number of such games developed. The only thing AI is doing is putting AI developed games in front of Hacker News readers.

Same thoughts exactly. I personally started looking into indie game dev and I've just started to realize how naive I was and how hard just game design can be, and that I'll probably never be good at it, and that most of my ideas are pretty garbage (or incomplete at best).

Even with the perfect AI to write, one would need to iterate through many different ideas, play testing constantly, getting people to play test and analyze what they found fun and where they got stuck. And to get the best ideas you'll need to be playing lots of different kinds of games.

> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.

I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.

Here's what the $12 payed for: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/a75a8b72...

Such a fix would have only required basic CSS knowledge and taken max 5 minutes with the HTML inspector. Paying $12 to save 5 minutes ($144/hour) is a decision that a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable making.

Any suggestion on how I should calibrate my cynicism towards this?

I can immagine Anthropic running this experiment multiple times and picking the most impressive one. Or I could immagine like this entire run costing like $1000+ of tokens for this particular run. Or maybe they tried a bunch of Pokemon games and it couldn't even finish some of them. Or is it just able to do this because it has an immense amount of FireRed training data, and if you were to give it an "original" Pokemon game, where it actually had to navigate novel circumstances it would fail.

I had a thought about this coming from the book "Seeing Like a State."

Productivity in large organizations has never been and can never be purely of the legible work which is written in Jira tickets, documented, expressed clearly, but is sustained by an illegible network of relationships between the workers and unwritten knowledge/practices. AI can only consume the work which is legible, but as more work gets pushed into this realm, the illegible relationships and expertise becomes fragmented and atrophies, which puts backpressure on the system's productivity as a whole. And reading said book, my guess that attempting to impose perfect legibility for the sake of AI tooling will ultimately prove disastrous.