At the end of Idiocracy, they showed hoses pulling water out of toilets to water plants.

To extend the joke, I’m picturing devices strapped to people’s asses to let them type by wiping their butts.

So, I’m not a manager, but I am in a leadership position. (I’m a “tech lead” on my team of developers, and I hold more “leadership”-ness than tech leads do on some teams.) And my experience comes more from software engineering than anywhere else.

The first rule is that to be a good leader, you have to be a good person. Don’t “switch teams” if/when you become a manager. Your job is to advocate for your team. To cover and take blame for your team. To give them space to work. To give them the autonomy they need to improve their processes. To make sure they know they have the autonomy they need to improve their processes. To be vocal to your team in calling bullshit on upper management and agree with your team when your higher-ups do bullshit. To absorb bullshit from above as best you to prevent it from impacting the team any more than absolutely necessary. To talk your team up. To make sure their work is as “meaningful” as possible. To bolster their egos by trying to get them a bigger slice of the “jurisdictional pie”. To ease up when they’re struggling. To learn from them and along with them. To ensure to the extent you can that they get insight into what’s going on at higher levels of management (the high-level company goals and how what your team does fits into that as well as how decisions that might affect your team are made high up). To support your team’s basic needs (sleep can be a big one when overnight on-call is involved, do everything in your power and everything not in your power make damned sure your team never has to do overtime, and of course money is tied to basic needs). To make sure the biggest personalities on your team don’t silence or drown out others. To eschew needless busywork and take care of the necessary tedious bookwork behind the scenes so your team doesn’t have to. To make time for your team, both on an individual basis and on a whole-team basis. To be a source of comfort. To foster relationships between your team and those outside their team that they need to work closely with to succeed as a team. To let them self organize. And to be honest, humble, and apologetic when you have made mistakes, and also open about the fact that you’re learning how to be the best you you can be.

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES fall into the trap of thinking you’re “in charge”. There are very few circumstances in which you should tell people what to do or assign things to people. (Help them to learn how to pull assignments rather than pushing assignments onto team members.) Also, don’t try to “leave your mark” or push your agenda on the team. (No “I’m going to improve things”. More “I’m going to help my team improve their own processes.”) Push the team’s agenda to those above you.

A few resources you need to read/watch/consume/whatever, whether you’re in IT or not:

• #NoEstimates^YouTube – Relates strongly to the “take care of tedious bookwork” one above.
• Turn The Ship Around^Book
• The Phoenix Project^Book

Look, it’s an objective fact that people have a hard time distinguishing AI generated video from real video.

Not without a lot of curation.

“this looks horrendous and nobody could ever like it”

I never said that. What I meant by the “do you really think this is the destination” comment is how can you look at a very curated collection of AI-generated video snippets and extrapolate from that that the Stable Diffusion (or whatever) model they used can be just unceremoniously dropped into a game engine without tons of random hallucinations like turning random wood grain in a fence into a full-ass hallucinated person or dog or steak dinner or whatever. And without making one character look drastically different now than they did the last time you visited them 20 minutes prior. (You’ve seen videos of beauty filter fails, haven’t you?) Let alone extra fingers and garbled text and accidental body horror and stuff.

If you generate a bunch of stuff, throw away the stuff that doesn’t look right (a.k.a. “curate”), and carefully edit the remainder into a video, yeah, you can get some pretty decent-looking results. But that’s not how games work, unless you’re just talking about pre-rendered cutscenes.

this could move video games towards photorealism

This can’t. Not without something we have yet to invent. And thinking that whatever may some day exist that can is in any way related to the “this” that you refer to is speculation at best.

you’re saying nothing that precludes it.

I’m not saying photorealistic video games won’t happen. I’m saying that the companies forcing it on gamers are knowingly (or at least uncaringly) pulling a massive grift marketing what’s available today as the thing that will fill the promise of perfect photorealistic video games when nothing like that exists today and they have no reason to think it will any time soon.

You clearly hate AI

“AI” can mean a lot of things. I took a course in college in 2005 called “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”. And in that class, they introduced me to the A* algorithm. (When you do an escort mission in Skyrim and an NPC follows you, the code that determines how the NPC should traverse the distance between the two of you in order to remain in proximity to you – accounting for terrain features, circumventing obstacles, etc – is almost definitely the A* algorithm or some minor variation of it.) I can say I’m fully down with the A* algorithm and have nothing against it. I’ve had occasion to play chess against chess engines several times. 10/10 would play again.

As far as LLMs, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E are concerned, guilty as charged. And the way the industry conflates all of “AI” as if it’s one thing and not a whole bunch of different things (touting advancements in drug research as some kind of proof that their completely unrelated LLM is competent or whatever, for instance).

and hate anyone who likes anything about it.

I mean, I think you’re pretty self-deluded, but not any more so than you think the same of me (as your “that blinds you to reality” states pretty plainly).

Beyond that, the whole world seems to be conspiring to make Generative AI not optional. Want to opt out? Fuck you, your search engine just spats slop on your screen now and some of your favorite content creators on YouTube are slathering it all over their videos now, and your phone and your computer and your browser just updated and now nag you constantly to use AI summaries and stuff. You also have to smile and be diplomatic about it at work because the CTO made a deal with Microsoft to push Copilot on you constantly. Plus, the communities that you’ve enjoyed previously are suddenly inundated by Generative AI fanboys filling your feed with shit.

And I have to imagine it would be hard for someone who thinks Generative AI is “a good thing actually” to really grasp just how fucking intrusive it is to be force-fed that so constantly. It has a way of turning a mild dislike into seething hatred. (Even if Generative AI was innocuous, the Green Eggs and Ham factor huge. At least that guy only had to deal with one Sam-I-Am.)

Summary by Brave Leo AI

I’m not usually one to kink shame, but in this case I can make an exception.

Ask you position my for did?

See Skyrim NPCs with AI and Skyrim remastered by AI.

The first video in the search results in the first link here has “it got weird fast” in the title and NPCs are breaking the third wall and responding strangely to things in general. (The lady at the orphanage mentioned the player “looking through a flickering screen.” I didn’t watch much further than that.)

The second is likely heavily curated and variables very strictly controlled. The characters are perfectly centered in frame and standing mostly still aside from idle animations. The landscapes are… well, they’re inherently still life. There’s no actual gameplay showcased, and there’s no indication from the video just how many of the video creator’s attempts had major issues like too many fingers or were scrapped in favor of the ones that turned out better. The art style switches strangely between characters, with, for instance, the first one looking much more photographic and the second mimicking more what you’d get from a better-quality 3D render. And many of the characters feel very uncanny valley. (The third one, for instance. I haven’t watched that video much further than that either.)

So, yeah, if those videos are “testing it to see if it works”, the answer is a resounding “no”. There’s nothing workable there, and no indication LLMs and Stable Diffusion are a step in the right direction, despite what Nvidia might tell you.

I mean, do you watch those videos and think to yourself “this is it – this is the destination – we’ve done it”?

So no it’s not the same as what is driving the current bubble lol.

I mean, there’s no there there, and no reason to think there ever will be beyond the fact that humans seem pretty intent on developing AGI. Clearly what AI can do now isn’t any kind of boon. So what’s keeping people high on hype if not empty hopes for a breakthrough in the near future?

if you don’t believe that understanding and responding to complex text requires some basic level of reasoning and intelligence.

That’s the opposite of what I said. The kind of real-time dynamic responding to things you’re talking about requires reasoning and intelligence, but LLMs possess neither.

Well that is the neat part, at least for in-game dialogue, hallucinations wouldn’t be a problem at all lol.

It will be if half of what is hallucinates is quests that the rest of the game fails to actually implement. NPC: “Yes, you’re absolutely right, I misidrected you to a ‘Satin Forrest’ that you spent two hours wandering around trying to find. I actually meant to say that the Dryad Queen is waiting to be rescued in the ‘Cashmere Forrest’ that I totally, 100% guarantee exists for real this time.”

what an LLM could provide on top of that is “understanding” and reasoning

No. Just no. “Understanding” and “reasoning” are not things that LLMs can do. They can decide what word (or phrase or part-of-a-word or whatever) statistically follows the usual pattern given the training data. It’s not the magic you make it out to be.

See this…

Guarantee that took huge amounts of some combination of babysitting, editing, fraud, and/or other things that make it completely unsuitable for generating reliably-sensical cutscenes that dynamically respond to in-game events that the devs never accounted specifically for.

people do not see potential

That’s exactly the problem. It’s all empty promises of something “just around the corner”. And that’s all that’s driving the bubble. Fantasies about a super-unrealistic futures in which some completely vague and hypothetical advancement makes it actually work for something useful. I don’t believe the technologies we have now will ever fulfill those super-unrealistic promises. And as I said, if something fulfills those promises one day, I doubt the inner workings of whatever does will resemble an LLM or Stable Diffusion or whatever. If we want something that can generate game content on the fly, we’re very much barking up the wrong tree trying to somehow make LLMs do that.

it’s clear what could be possible.

That’s just straight up self-deception.

Instead of just generative AI, you render a skeleton animated character but it uses the last step of the AI output and skins that, and it looks as good as AI generated.

You haven’t seen a lot of those “fail” videos where some Twitch streamer’s beauty filter fails and flickers, have you?

I’m not 100% sure this is possible though, but pretty sure.

I’m not 100% sure this is impossible though, but pretty sure.

On AGI I make no predictions.

Me neither except that a) LLMs aren’t it and b) I think anything that could pull off the kind of dynamically-responsive realtime game content generation that you’re talking about would pretty much have to meet most reasonable definitions of “AGI”. And I doubt anything short of that in a game would be a net benefit to immersiveness. (*Maybe if the LLM had super limited scope somehow… like generating short stories that you’d find in random books around the game like the books you find in the Elder Scrolls games or something, but even that seems super iffy.) Mind you, I probably would still opt out of that if it was a thing. (For the same reason as I’d never touch anything with loot boxes – I don’t trust game studios not to take advantage of me to try to addict me to their products.)

Smaller LLM models could be great for expanding dialog options in game.

I don’t think LLMs (smaller or otherwise) can ever clear the uncanny valley. The level of adaptability you’re taking about but without hallucinations and random batshit-crazy behavior requires something humans haven’t invented yet and that we have no specific reason will ever happen. (In fact, I think if we can be said to be on a path toward building the first AGI, I believe LLMs and “generative AI” and this whole hype bubble will be looked back on as having been a diversion/destraction from that path that delayed the advent of AGI.)

Unless/until that someday happens, I’d much rather play, and feel like I’d find much more immersive, a game that generated, say, fetch-quests with something like My {rand("health","Lord","wife","none-of-yor-business",...)} {rand("demands","begs","commissions",...)} you to bring a {rand("tufted titmouse","Gauntlet of Light","turkey dinner","giant's toenail",...)} that you can find in/at {rand("Illsword Manor","The Cavern of Lies","the afterlife",...)} to {rand("the illfated dragon","Fenworth Blurd","The Rusty Scabbard Inn",...)} in {rand("Feyspring Vale","Weston","the northern wilderness",...)}. than something with the problems inherent to LLMs.

I suppose I can agree that I’d be interested in new technologies that make gaming more immersive, but “smart” NPCs that can improvise and riff while not ruining the immersion like LLMs would seem so speculative and far off that I might as well wish to stumble into the possession of a genie lamp a la Disney’s Aladdin while I’m at it. Meanwhile, grifters are making shit-tons of money at your expense promising you just that.

AGI has been only ten years away for the last fifty years. Anyone who says it’s less than ten years away now is trying to sell you a bridge.

As for the “filling out assets” and “increased diversity at least at the high end”, I think you’re overestimating the capabilities of (at least current) generative AI. And if you’re not, there are still a lot of legal issues with generative AI, and no matter which way those legal issues end up being decided, we can expect shitty results for consumers and competitors. (I fear, for instance, that the output of generative AI may be subject to copyright when big companies want it to be and not when lawsuits go in the other direction.)

I don’t think we can be friends.

I’m thrilled to hear it.

I do have to wonder, though, if there isn’t a minority of gamers who are completely taken by the hype of AI in gaming.

Like, one of the last few shitty scam-bubbles to intersect with gaming gave us those ridiculous NFT games where you could play the game for blockchain monopoly money or whatever. And at the time, the folks who were super into that shit were super visible and vocal on social media (YouTube and such).

But I honestly have yet to hear a single gamer say “AI is the best thing that has ever happened to vidja-games.” Obviously I’ve heard that ad nauseam from, say, Nvidia, but I’ve never heard it from someone who wasn’t directly working for the companies at the heart of the whole AI bubble itself.

Maybe it’s just because the AI bubble doesn’t create “bag-holders” the same way blockchain did. With blockchain, there were definitely a whole lot of people making insanely optimistic claims about such-and-such shitcoin or whatever just because the hype-er was heavily invested and was trying to drive their own assets up in price. It recruited every participant in the economy into selling the grift in the process of being grifted themselves. But with AI, maybe mostly it’s only the big companies trying to sell the grift.

Which perhaps is reason for optimism in itself.

The most surefire way to piss off a Trump supporter is just to be a decent human being in their vicinity. Or on the internet. Or in movies, TV, or video games. Or in complete private.

Oh man. I’ve gotta re-watch that. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid.

situation /sĭch″oo͞-ā′shən/

noun

• The combination of circumstances at a given moment; a state of affairs. synonym: state.
• Similar: state A critical, problematic, or striking set of circumstances.
• “We don’t want this minor gaffe to turn into a situation.”
• The way in which something is positioned vis-à-vis its surroundings.
• “the town’s situation on the river.”

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

I was on a trip as a kid (probably… I dunno, 9 or 10 years old?) with my family. The hotel had a pool and the family brought me to have a swim. (They didn’t swim, just sat around the pool while I swam.)

It was just us at first, but soon another kid about my age showed up with no parents/supervision. He sat down on the edge of the pool at the deep end and dangled his feet. He conversed a little with me and my family, but otherwise was just there hanging out. He mentioned in passing that he couldn’t swim.

But then suddenly he was in the pool, thrashing and struggling.

My parents honestly had no idea what to do. One ran to grab the life buoy. I don’t remember quite what the other did.

But my swim lessons training kicked in and I did the thing. Jumped out of the pool, ran around to the side of the pool right where the kid was struggling, laid down on the ground next to the pool, and stuck one arm into the pool for him to grab. Worked just as well as my old swim instructor indicated it would.

Once he had me to hold him up out of the water, he was fine, of course. The rest was just a matter of helping him out of the pool.

It was after that that he revealed he had an ostomy bag and wasn’t supposed to be swimming at all, deep end or otherwise. (It was a hospital town and I got the impression he was in town to get some kind of treatment.)

We made sure he got back to his room safely and all.

That’s pretty much the whole story. I don’t know that he’d have died had nobody been there. And my bumbling parents probably would have figured a way to help him even if I wasn’t there. But he had a better chance of walking away from that by virtue of my (admittedly very rudimentary) swim lesson training.

And it was really dramatic being part of it.

Posting conspiracy theories in a community about science? Bold move, Cotton.

Sometimes the babies eat the mom too. Yes I speak from… I guess second-hand experience. First-hand would imply I was a matricidal cannibal hamster.

3.75 pounds.

Oh wait. “Dose.” Thought you said something else.

“Blue no matter who.”

So if you buy a suspicious number of pineapples, do the police show up at your door asking if you’re trying to dispose of a body?