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ragging on a top game studio for using LLM placeholder text is maybe not the most efficient use of time with all the fires currently burning

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it's not just LLM placeholder textt – it's concept art as well, and who knows what else. And if we don't push back now – and HARD – then they'll keep thinking it's okay to keep replacing actual artists and workers with it.

"Cede rhetorical ground to win the larger fight" is a strategy that has exclusively failed over the past decade. And there cannot be a nuanced conversation when for every person trying to do it the ""right way"", there are nine trying to use the tool as a weapon.

it’s less the dubious uses and more the hubris and posturing of the c suite

Everyone is more or less okay with it” dude you make people emigrate to work there because you don’t do remote work, they risk having to change countries if they disagree with it

I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying an effective war requires maybe some energy conservation and more selective fire this technology is not going to just disappear

Yeah people should should just accept technology that steals drinking water, spikes utility bills, smogs the air, gives their kids asthma, creates 24/7 noise pollution, increases demand for fracking, employs no one, and destroys jobs. What is actually wrong with you e360.yale.edu/features/pen...

e360.yale.eduTo Feed Data Centers, Pennsylvania Faces a New Fracking SurgeA rash of data centers planned for western Pennsylvania has residents and environmentalists on edge. The sprawling complexes will be powered by plants that burn fracked natural gas, whose production h...

If it’s going to keep costing billions of dollars with zero efficiency gains to show for it and also spark massive public backlash each time it’s used, idk it might disappear

It doesn't, actually. Social wars are the opposite. You need to fight every little thing, constantly, and hold the line because the other side just wants to make it normal. It had to remain not normal. That's the only way this works.

Adobe Flash was killed off by its creator despite being used by TONS of people, big and small and was well-liked enough people created emulators to maintain things built for it. AI is a giant scam so poorly thought out the only investors are rich idiots whining we peasants don't pay for it.

I’m conserving resources by not buying their shit and telling other people to not buy their shit it’s actually very smart

Maybe. But I remember when the Segway was going to completely up-end urban planning because cities would need to be redesigned to accomodate the transformative technology.

although if you want to spend massive calories being extremely mad at every single application of half cooked language learning and automation technology in the decades to come I am obviously not in any position to stop you from following your passion

What the AI boosters want to do is try every use case for AI until they find one we tolerate, and then gradually broaden the limits of that use case until it encompasses things that were once intolerable. It's important to tell them that "acceptable AI" is a null set.

It’s so incredibly pathetic that you think this takes even a modicum of energy to be mad at. Like, you’re such a pathetic loser you just give up and let things wash over you like some kinda mindless stooge? Anyway take your faux intellectual high-horse and shove rocks up your ass

calorie budget blood synthesis 20 ambulation 100 life supporting activities 200 tweeting "this sucks" 10000000 sleeping 10 someone good at nutrition please help me. my body is dying

out here spending calories on not purchasing a video game. damn love spending all my energy on not consuming product. over here pursuing my passion of not clicking "add to cart" and spending $70

Arguing against AI is fun, moral, and VERY easy. I've never seen a more useless product in my life. NFT's were at least useful for fraud. People already hate AI or are indifferent to it AT BEST. Companies are losing money left and right on AI. Why are YOU "wasting calories" defending it, Karl?

This was a roughly 2 day internet backlash involving no money or coordination and very little time expenditure from anyone. And it worked. Why not take the easy “W” and move on?

"Decades to come" is exactly the kind of defeatist thinking we need to avoid when it comes to genAI. I remember hearing similar arguments in regards to NFTs back in 2021. How is that market doing now? How about the metaverse? All these things we were told would be "the future?" Come on, be serious.

i'm 20 years into a grudge with Sony because of that time they put rootkits on music CDs and it's been incredibly easy to maintain.

Why should we not shit on evey half assed llm forced on us. Apps are bloating to shit, my time is wasted because i cant just be default opt out and im paying more for it in every way possible????

This is a clownshoes argument and you know it. It's not just placeholder text. It's work from the ground up that it's being used for. And your oh so enlightened attitude is nothing more than blatant bootlicking. Call Larian out for their bullshit practices or shut the fuck up.

terrible take. especially since this also broke the dam on people discussing Larian's terrible hiring practices. there's no need to defend any use of genAI, and as usual, it's co-morbid with other problems.

If I managed to scrape together the money and resources to make a game from scratch without using AI in any way at any point I think the big corporations that you’re licking the boots of can also manage to do that if they really want to.

why shouldn't people be mad at companies using illegal data produced by illegally polluting the environment and illegally destroying people's health while laying off hundreds of other people to replace them with the use of that illegal data. sounds like a serious issue to me.

This is exactly the battle to fight at exactly the right time. What you're arguing is to *wait* until the problem becomes so wrapped into their workflow it becomes impossible to excise.

Considering most of the folks yelling about it, it's their literal jobs at stake, perhaps the other adults actually know what their time is worth. Maybe they don't need a blue checked loser treating them like children about it as if social media is a zero sum game of attention.

I can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time, and they can use lorem ipsum for text alignment and big all caps summaries for everything else like everyone else did for a century; you dont need to let the plagiarism machine get a foot in the door to save 5 seconds makingsure your column is straight

Considering how egregious the gaming industry got with lootboxes and other microtransactions that were initially justified and forgiven because they were "only cosmetics," nobody should be giving them an inch on AI. The businessmen will always take a mile if they're given an inch on anything.

No, I think it’s good actually that we push back against the idea of normalizing the use of gen AI which is what the whole “placeholder” argument is doing. The placeholder text should have been written by a human being. End of fucking story.

Lorem epsum exists for what was never a problem and didn't need to burn water over. There is literally not a single justifiable reason to use LLM placeholder text over lorem epsum.

Actually it's the perfect battle to pick. It's big, public, and sends a message. Making using LLMs so toxic that even things their CEO thinks is innocuous leading to people yelling at them is a pretty good way to get them to think twice.

I think its a little absurd to call "ragging on a top game studio" a notable expenditure of time and effort. We're typing on social media. It takes a few minutes. Sure, some people are gonna make this their main issue for a bit because it hits them just wrong. So what? That's what they want to do.

Counterpoint, dont fucking normalize that shit under any circumstances And fuck you for saying “Oh hey let them get their foot in the door using it like this because its so impossible to have a spine and not buy a game from a studio I like”

You... do realize that by the time you make an appropriate set of prompts for your placeholder text you've literally written enough to have a functional placeholder text if not more than you need, right? All you need for placeholder text is a short description, if that, of what you want to go there.

Also, if we don't slam the hammer down *NOW* then when? After jobs have been permanently lost because the LLM and art theft programs replacing them have become entrenched? We know from microtransactions that too little immediate outrage means they're just going to creep more and more in over time.

I will rag on a studio for using LLM placeholder text when Lorem Ipsum is still here and costs literally nothing in terms of environmental resources to use in comparison to generative LLM models. Bad take

I know there's more important things going on, but I've been a Larian fan since 2000, so it's extremely disappointing to see my favourite game studio - where multiple friends of 20+ years work - even touch something as horrible as LLMs.

I'm kind of inclined to disagree. Like a studio that is only trying to use it for work that won't (intentionally) make it into the final build are the studios to raise a stink about, because they're the studios that are just dipping their toes in to test the waters.

Like in this case you've got a studio testing the waters, finding the waters to be viciously unfavourable, and then backing out. The studios that are diving in full cannon ball are the ones that aren't gonna be convinced otherwise because they've already made their decisions.

How does it not make sense to hold those with higher accountability/responsibility to higher standards?? This isn't some random solo dev. People absolutely should let the biggest companies know how they feel about their business, because others follow suit. Apparently fruitless, yet you prattle on.

They pay people to think and create. Why use any kind of AI for that in the process to simply have “placeholders”? It’s a complete waste of time and resources, not only for larian. So glad the environment is at stake so people can…not think?

So many of the fires currently burning are at least partly caused, or involve, gen-AI, ranging from politics to economics to technology to environment to social quietude that YES, this IS the battle to fight at this very moment. We have to keep shaming the companies that boast using LLMs and "AI".

I'm not gonna mistake an Internet rage campaign as being a major political triumph, but I also think making consequences to use AI in your work flow if you have any public facing cred can go a longer way than one might think. Less AI use = protection of jobs and the environment.

Back in my day we had Lorem ipsum to fill out dialogue boxes, and then guess what? It definitely doesn’t end up in the final game because it’s a placeholder

It actually takes very little effort and sends a very clear message to companies that even a beloved studio would get this kind of pushback. It's quite easy to hold a consistent line vs the effort needed to write about how more rational you are than others.

Being a little bitch boy at people because they care about other actual humans is maybe not the most efficient use of time with all the fires currently burning. And have you considered the fact that the people pushing AI ARE THE ONES LIGHTING THE FUCKING FIRES?

Dawg I cannot think of a worse use case than placeholder text and assets. You want obvious and easily searchable placeholder assets to make sure they dont exist in the final product. This is ignoring all the bad shit about ai.