How the fuck would I boycott a brand for being owned by Nestle before I find out that it’s owned by Nestle?

I don’t know if other games are using generative AI. Maybe they are. If I find out they are, I will not buy them. If I don’t find out that they are, how would I know that they’re using it? The fact that I’m not able to detect it 100% of the time doesn’t make me okay with it when I don’t know it’s there. What in any of my comments has made you think I have an “I don’t care as long as I don’t notice it” attitude???

No? I just don’t know that I should avoid a product if I don’t know about the ethical problems with it. That’s how boycotts work…

How can you be sure that in any game AI wasn’t used to generate some sort of an internal document or asset that would never be in the final product but was integral to the creation of the final product?

I never claimed to be omniscient. I simply don’t support a company after I find out that they have unethical business practices. What are you not understanding about this?

Correct! If you’re not going to support artists and writers, the least you can do is not support the industry that’s actively destroying the fields of art and writing (on top of the myraid other problems with generative AI)

Boycotting because they used generative AI to make their game instead of hiring writers. Even if this was the only part of the game they used it on (if you believe that, l have a bridge to seII you), I’m not going to give someone money if they couldn’t even be fucked to hire some sci-fi writer off of fiverr to write their fill text with it.

I personally know artists and writers who are having to get jobs at fucking Walmart because of this shit. I’ll be less irate about generative AI once we have universal basic income so that real artists can continue to generate real art alongside these soulless husks.

Didn’t equate them. Also, you have been reading my responses since I pointed out that flaw in your argument. Makes me wonder if maybe you just don’t have an adequate response to my comment, but you wanted to get the last word in anyway

Damn, guess I’m writing a whole response anyway

Nope. Procedural generation requires a lot of creative and technical input on the part of the developer. It’s not used to offload creative or intellectual work, it creates creative and intellectual work. The intellectual work is something I forgot to mention in that reply, but the loss of the intellectual effort is just as bad as the loss of the creativity.

Let’s compare the topic of this discussion with the game I’m currently playing, Kerbal Space Program.

Contracts in Kerbal Space Program’s career mode are (for the most part) procedurally generated. There are a few mission types, usually asking the player to bring a part or set of parts to a particular location and perform some action with them. Attach a part to a satellite in orbit around Duna, take pressure readings in flight over Kerbin, plant a flag on the Mun, etc. This is not offloading creativity onto the machine, this is using procedural generation to provide the player with an endless variety of objectives. Producing this system of procedurally generated missions required creativity and forethought from the developers. I don’t work at Squad, but I imagine it took a number of manhours to set all of the parameters and limitations for the system, and to test it to make sure it works, and that it doesn’t generate any missions that are impossible to complete.

Contrast that with the AI generated text that is the topic of this discussion. The creative input for that text up there was something along the lines of “generate some sci-fi technobabble that would fit in a starship’s event log” and “do it again, but don’t talk about the ship, just talk about astronomical data.” I know this for certain, because I generated a nearly identical passage using those two prompts exactly. They could have gotten a freelance sci-fi author to write these few bits of text, or even just sat down for 10 minutes and wrote it themselves. It would cost them nearly nothing, and in exchange they would have a piece of text that fits within the world and was written by a human. Instead, they offloaded that creative work onto a machine. They didn’t make more work for themselves like a developer that uses procedural generation, they made less work for themselves by asking a machine to do it instead.

I could make a similar contrast between this and basically any procedurally generated system in games. Minecraft, Daggerfall, Borderlands, FTL: Faster than Light, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, all of these games use procedural generation to complement the creative and technical work they put into the games, not to avoid having to do that work in the first place.

I’m willing to grant literally all of this. I have a deep-seated hatred of generative AI that clouds my ability to have productive discussions about it. It turns me into an asshole, specifically to people who defend it.

When did I demand an equivalence? That’s what I asked 37 minutes ago, and what you’ve spent several replies now pivoting away from answering

I was about to type out a whole response, but I need to learn when to cut it short.

Generative AI is demonic, using it offloads your creativity, humanity, and soul into an unthinking, unfeeling machine. Anything that uses generative AI is inherently worse because it was not made by someone with agency or creativity. You’re advocating for putting artists and writers out of work.

So the reason behind that was to point out that, by your logic, slavery would be excusable. That’s the argument you’re making. The consumer won’t notice the difference, therefore it’s fine for the producer to use it.

I like how l saw this repIy coming and accounted for it and pre-repIied to it, and you stiII Ieft it. Yeah, it would be outrageous to equate generative Al and slavery, that’s why l didn’t do that

What am I projecting??? Why is it that now that I am asking you to explain things, you won’t?

If it doesn’t make games bad, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and developers cannot be faulted for using it. LOL

“If slavery doesn’t harm the economy, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and plantation owners cannot be faulted for using them. LOL”

I know Lemmings have a lot of trouble reading, so I’ll get this out of the way now: no, I’m not saying that generative AI is slavery, nor am I saying they’re equivalent. I’m drawing one similarity to make a point. That’s called a simile. The point being, that one supposed criticism isn’t valid doesn’t mean that no criticisms are valid.

When did I demand an equivalence??? This is what using ChatGPT does yo your brain, it destroys your reading comprehension

There’s a number of reasons, not least of which being that generative AI works by processing vast amounts of prior work (without their creators’ consent) to make a facsimile of it, while procedural generation only manipulates assets the developer creates. Procedural generation isn’t putting artists and writers out of business. Procedural generation isn’t making Idiocracy a reality, with fucking English majors unable to read Dickens without asking OpenAI to interpret the text for them. “They do similar things” doesn’t mean they’re equivalent. My point being, it’s not inconsistent to be okay with procedural generation and not okay with generative AI.

Sharing one thing in common does not make two things equivalent. You’re welcome to try again though

I feel like it does. theunknownmuncher thinks it’s somehow inconsistent to be against generative AI while being ok with procedural generation, which implies that they think they’re equivalent in some way. As if the reason people don’t like generative AI is because it makes bad games.

Edit: throughout this discussion, my opinion has evolved somewhat. Procedural generation is fine, because it only uses things created by the developer, and it will necessarily generate a better product than a generative AI, because the developer is the one who tunes it. An AI will generate any text that might fit within the genre, with no consideration for what’s canon to the work it’s being inserted in.

Damn, I was looking forward to playing this. Glad I read this first

Edit to clarify: what I meant was, if you don’t understand why procedural generation is acceptable, and generative AI is not, you are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject. Leaving the original text for context.

If you don’t know the difference between procedural generation and generative AI, you are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject

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