They don’t need to court developers, they need to court consumers. The games will be sold wherever people are buying.
Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification"
Submitted 2 weeks ago by OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/ai-disclousres-debate-valve-dev-response
Comments
twinnie@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Consumers have already decided mobile gambling slop is the most successful investment in the gaming industry. I don‘t trust consumers to know what‘s best for them.
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think the studies showing how certain minds can be targeted and manipulated by dark gambling patterns made me think differently about gambling. I’d at least like lootbox gambling slop to be regulated the same as casinos.
Look how popular fantasy sports is now. It’s basically just the casino industry seeking out new avenues to cheat the definition of “Playing odds to win cash”.
oxysis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Well yeah gambling is addicting, the mobile slop companies know that so they try to get people addicted to it. It’s really sad what’s happened to the mobile gaming space, as it’s so heavily dominated by gambling. Hell the entire world is being run over by gambling companies now. It’s a major problem that will have to be addressed at some point soon.
rtxn@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
consumers
This is very much a pet peeve, but be careful about how you use “consumer” versus “customer”. They each imply completely different power dynamics.
warm@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
It's very much consumer these days, people buy literally anything marketed to them.
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
The reality is, that it’s often stated that generative AI is an inevitability, that regardless of how people feel about it, it’s going to happen and become ubiquitous in every facet of our lives.
That’s only true if it turns out to be worth it. If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
Those heavily invested in it, ether literally through shares of Nvidia, or figuratively through the potential to deskill and shift power away from skilled workers at their companies don’t want that to be a possibility, they need to prevent consumers from having a choice.
If it was an inevitability in it’s own right, if it was just as good and easily substitutable, why would they care about consumers knowing before they payed for it?
U7826391786239@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
relevant article theringer.com/…/ai-bubble-burst-popping-explained…
AI storytelling is an amalgam of several different narratives, including:
Inevitability: AI is the future; its eventual supremacy is both imminent and certain, and therefore anyone who doesn’t want to be left behind had better embrace the technology. See Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, insisting earlier this year that every job in the world will be impacted by AI “immediately.”
Functionality: AI performs miracles, and the AI products that have been released to the public wildly outperform the products they aim to replace. To believe this requires us to ignore the evidence obtained with our own eyes and ears, which tells us in many cases that the products barely work at all, but it’s the premise of every TV ad you watch out of the corner of your eye during a sports telecast.
Grandiosity: The world will never be the same; AI will change everything. This is the biggest and most important story AI companies tell, and as with the other two narratives, big tech seems determined to repeat it so insistently that we come to believe it without looking for any evidence that it’s true.
As far as I can make out, the scheme is essentially: Keep the ship floating for as long as possible, keep inhaling as much capital as possible, and maybe the tech will get somewhere that justifies the absurd valuations, or maybe we’ll worm our way so far into the government that it’ll have to bail us out, or maybe some other paradigm-altering development will fall from the sky. And the way to keep the ship floating is to keep peddling the vision and to seem more confident that the dream is inevitable the less it appears to be coming true.
speaking for myself, MS can thank AI for being the thing that made me finally completely ditch windows after using it 30+ years
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Don’t forget, “Turns out it was a losing bet to back DEI and Trans people”.
This is something scared, pathetic, loser, feral, spineless, sociopathic, moronic fascists come up with to try to win a crowd larger than an elevator; Assume the outcome as a foregone conclusion and try to talk around it, or claim it’s already happened.
Respond directly. “What? That’s ridiculous. I’ve never even seen ANY AI that I liked. Who told you it was going to pervade everything?”
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 2 weeks ago
That reminds me how McDonald’s and other gaat food chains are struggling. People figure it’s too expensive for what you get after prices going up and quality going down for years. They forgot that people buy if the price and quality are good. Same with AI. It’s all fun if it’s free or dirt cheap, but people don’t buy expensive slop.
riskable@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
There’s another scenario: Turns out that if Big AI doesn’t buy up all the available stock of DRAM and GPUs, running local AI models on your own PC will become more realistic.
I run local AI stuff all the time from image generation to code assistance. My GPU fans spin up for a bit as the power consumed by my PC increases but other than that, it’s not much of an impact on anything.
I believe this is the future: Local AI models will eventually take over just like PCs took over from mainframes. There’s a few thresholds that need to be met for that to happen but it seems inevitable. It’s already happening for image generation where the local AI tools are so vastly superior to the cloud stuff there’s no contest.
CatsPajamas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
MIT, like two years out from a study saying there is no tangible business benefit to implementing AI, just released a study saying it is now capable of taking over more than 10% of jobs. Maybe that’s hyperbolic but you can see that it would require a massssssive amount of cost to make that not be worth it. And we’re still pretty much just starting out.
Jayjader@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
I would love to read that study, as going off of your comment I could easily see it being a case of “more than 10% of jobs are bullshit jobs à la David Graeber so having an « AI » do them wouldn’t meaningfully change things” rather than “more than 10% of what can’t be done by previous automation now can be”.
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Corporations are not our friends, even when they seem friendly, like Steam. However, they can be useful allies, so I’m glad to see this response from Steam.
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The ethics and utility (or lack thereof) of AI is an important discussion in it’s own right. In terms of Steam though, I really don’t think it’s relevant. Players want it, that’s it, that’s all that should really matter. Am I missing some nuance here?
borth@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The nuance is that Tim doesn’t give a shit what players want, him and his cronies don’t want it because it’s harder to convince someone to play AI slop when they know it’s AI slop before they even try it 😂
Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
They want it? I don’t know, the review score of Black Ops 7 begs to differ.
Personally I’ll give money to a hard working indie dev that may use AI to help in their work spiradically over a big company shoving AI in everything to replace workers.
grte@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Perhaps they meant players want AI disclosures.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 2 weeks ago
It might make players demand lower prices if some cheap AI slop is used in the game. That’s the thing publishers want to avoid. They want to sell cheap slop for full price and pocket the difference. That’s what it’s about in the end.
Red_October@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I haven’t really seen demands for lower prices on AI slop, but I’ve seen a lot of outright refusal to buy at any price, and returns when the disclosure came later.
Sl00k@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
I posted this in another comment but I think the nuance is really in what did they use the AI for. Are they using Claude code for the programming but did the entire artwork by hand? How many really care about that?
Compared to someone who tried to one shot a slop game with full AI assets and is just trying to make a quick buck.
exu@feditown.com 2 weeks ago
Disclose the exact uses and let customers decide
Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It’s all they had to say for me to continue ignoring Epic.
minorkeys@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Consumers have a right to be informed of information relevant to them making purchasing decisions. AI is obviously relevant to the consumer and should be disclosed.
who@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
“Calls to scrap” the disclosures make it sound like a societal movement, when in fact it’s just two people with obvious bias: Tim Sweeney and some guy who promotes Tim Sweeney’s products on youtube.
I hope this doesn’t seem overly rude, but I don’t give a flying frog what they think. When I allow someone to sell me something, I like to know what’s in it.
kazerniel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m glad for those disclosures (because I’m not touching AI games), but tons of devs don’t disclose their AI usage, even in obvious cases, leaving us to guessing :/
Bassman1805@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There’s also the massive gray area of “what do YOU define AI to mean?”
There are legitimate use cases for machine learning and neural networks besides LLMs and “art” vomit. Like, what AI used to mean to gamers: how the computer plays the game against you. That probably isn’t going to upset many people.
(IIRC, Steam’s AI disclosure is specifically about AI-generated graphics and music so that ambiguity might be settled here)
CatsPajamas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Man I use AI a lot and I’m not even going to dispute that lol. It’s absolutely true.
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yah the more I use AI the more I can detect the absolute bullshit people on both sides spew.
It’s the most amazingly complicated averaging machine we’ve ever invented. It will take the most interesting source materials, the most unique ideas of other people, the most creative materials, and it will find a way to find the safest, most average common qualities between those things. This isn’t a model problem or input problem, it’s fundamental to how generative AI works.
It helps with searching for things online, it helps create guide plans for taking on new tasks like learning some new skill. It’s far better at teaching how to do something like coding than it is left to just code on its own and you copy and paste. It can certainly do that, but you spend so much time correcting it and fixing it that you do far better learning the code yourself and how it works.
Same with art, the people who are using it to best effect are themselves already artists and they use AI to thumbnail compositions or rough layouts and then just do the work themselves but faster because they already know roughly what direction they’re going.
But using it to write your scripts, to copy/paste code, to generate works of art… it’s literally just giving you other people’s ideas mashed together and unseasoned.
mirshafie@europe.pub 2 weeks ago
I’mnot even opposed to AI in games. I’d love to see more granulated disclosures, but Steam-style disclosure should be the bare minimum.
87Six@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Extremely cmon Valve W
Kage520@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I actually would kind of like ai in games. Not slop visuals though. What I really would love would be in a VR game, going up to an NPC, and getting a feel for different cultures of the world I’m in through talking. Maybe you have to have a certain type of conversation to find out the plot for a side quest, or talk to a guard at a bar and work your way to find out the shift rotation as he gets drunk or something so you can infiltrate the castle.
I feel like ai could be useful like that…but getting rid of artists in favor of ai slop is just the worst way to implement this AI thing.
Bahnd@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Avoiding slopification seems to be the main priority, and you would have to have the AI be incorporated into a game it would have to do something that AI is already passable at, otherwise it wont pass that barrier and will get shunned like the rest of the slop.
For example, you could have an LLM act as a character or have a neural net incorporated into the game-ai like how tool assisted DOTA2 competitions work.
I see three main problems, first is that you would need the hardware to run it locally, which may be a hard sell to some people depending on what the game it is, only online expirenes should endebt themselves to AWS, if its single player, its going to lose a ton of sales there. Two, its really hard to convince audiences electrons have feelings, remember Final Fantasy (2001)? Thats what happened last time someone tried to personify a digital construct, and well… It went swimmingly (Microsofts Tay, does not count). Lastly, impact, would a narrative focused title have the same impact of an AI wrote the script? How would you feel after playing through a title like “Papers, please” and when the credits roll it says “script generated by CoPilot”? I feel like it would ring hollow, the feelings would be cheapened by it…
I would be interested to see how this plays out, but im content to support the titles and studios that do things the traditional way.
Rooster326@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
What exactly is “Used AI” though?
Most developers are going to have some form of auto complete - AI powered or not.
Is it just assets? Or?
echodot@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Autocomplete isn’t AI. It’s string recognition which predates AI by about 35 years.
T9 predictive texting definitely didn’t contain AI, but was absolutely a thing for a really long time.
Rooster326@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
There are 2 versions these days.
One powered by AI that can complete the rest of your function, and regular that is typically only the word you are working on.
rtxn@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
auto complete
It’s called lexical analysis or lexical tokenization. It existed long before LLMs, it doesn’t rely on stolen code, and doesn’t consume a small village’s worth of electricity. Superficial parallels with chatbots do not make it AI – it’s a fucking algorithm.
froufox@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
i think it’s impossible totally exclude ai from a developing process nowadays (you googled something? you use ai. etc.), but not having generated images/assets/texts is realistic
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I assume it refers to assets and mechanics that actively involve AI. If you’re using Copilot to finish your switch case, I don’t think that would count.
fonix232@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
And more and more engineers use genAI to generate code. Hell, even I do, because it's superb at getting the boilerplate ready from standard definitions, allowing me to focus on the important bits.
LLMs are also pretty great at extrapolating a good working document from basic requirements.
They're really just a quite knowledgeable but inexperienced intern, and any software engineer that refuses to utilise them to some extent will be left behind - just like those who refused to move to IDEs with syntax highlighting, autocomplete and other helper tools.
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
you’re gonna have the vim users grabbing their pitchforks if you don’t watch it.
Hadriscus@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
Based Ayi Sanchez
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
…what calls? No one is calling for this. One dude said it was unnecessary. That’s not a call, it’s an opinion. He’s not out picketing for the end of fucking AI labels.
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
whether he is or isn’t, they saw a chance to create a huge amount of good PR for Valve while doing and spending absolutely nothing. I mean, look at the amount of upvotes this post has. all they had to do is take what appears to be a principled stand.
witty_username@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Counters calls to scrap disclosures… I don’t follow
nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Some douche nozzle from epic games said Stream needs to scrap their AI disclosure requirements because soon all games will be AI.
Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It also confirms what we already thought: these f***bucket big studios already think of gaming as a cheap product to generate money, not as a piece of art and enjoyment in its own right.
lefixxx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah it was hard to parse for me too
“valve ignores requests to remove ai disclosures”
Wilco@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
We need laws passed where AI should have to be clearly labeled or the user faces severe fines. Robo calls and AI IVR phone systems should clearly tell you “this is AI”.
krakenx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Use of AI should be disclosed the same way 3rd party DRM and EULA agreements are. And similarly it should mention some details. People are free to boycott Denuvo if they want, but people are also free to buy it anyways if they want. Disclosure is never a bad thing.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I heard the new Game of Thrones game is using LLM’s to generate some of its content. Pisses me off.
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
If that’s true that takes my interest in it into the negatives. ASOIAF has about a million moving parts and very distinct characters with complex backstories, there’s not even a small chance an LLM could come close to imitating that.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s just fan speculation at this point, but yeah. I’ll be thinking about it before I buy, if I do.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
lots of big companies are using those to generate code
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t buy a lot of the big company games anyway.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The thing is that it’s kind of voluntary. Game developers could have use AI to develop the game and if they wouldn’t want to disclose it no one would know.
Unless the use of AI is the very crappy “AI art” that’s easy to notice the rest of uses would be very hard or actually impossible to figure it out to audit the legitimacy of the tag.
And this will end like r/art where the mods deleted a post accusing the artist of using AI when it was not AI and the final mod answer was “change your art style so it doesn’t look like AI”. A brutal witch-hunt in the end.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Steam already sells enough slop without AI.
But you know for sure the moment Gaben sees all the money from AI games, that shit will be pushed to the max.
Burghler@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You have no idea why Steam dominates the market if you truly think this.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Aww dude.
Steam was plagued with asset flips for years and refused to do anything about it. Repeatedly saying it was a Unity issue.
Then there’s the slop of shitty “simulator” games
Digital Homicide
Bad Rats
Have we seriously forgotten about Day One: Gary’s Incident
Steam dominates the market because it paid publishers to use them as DRM for physical releases.
ripcord@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yes, yes, we get it. Everything is bad, nothing is good.
Darkness343@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How would the computer controlled enemies work in a 100% AI free videogame?
MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I mean, the term “AI” as it’s used in this context refers to output from Large Language Models (or whatever other complex machine learning systems) that scrape the content of the internet and produce images, text, etc. based on the collective artistic/linguistic work of innumerable uncompensated, unaware human contributors.
Algorithms written by programmers that interpret internal variables and react based on that aren’t the kind of “AI” in question.
Darkness343@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How stupid are people to believe that fancy auto complete engines are AI?
QuantumTickle@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
If “everyone will be using AI” and it’s not a bad thing, then these big companies should wear it as a badge of honor. The rest of us will buy accordingly.
Devial@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
If “everyone will be using AI”, AI will turn to shit.
They can’t create originality, they’re only recycling and recontextualising existing information. But if you recycle and recontextualise the same information over and over again, it keeps degrading more and more.
It’s ironic that the very people who advocate for AI everywhere, fail to realise just how dependent the quality of AI content is on having real, human generated content to input to train the model.
4am@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
“The people who advocate for AI” are literally running around claiming that AI is Jesus and it is sacrilege to stand against it.
And by literally, I mean Peter Thiel is giving talks actually claiming this. This is not an exaggeration, this is not hyperbole.
They are trying to recruit techno-cultists.
Sl00k@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
I think the grey area is what if you’re an indie dev and did the entire story line and artwork yourself, but have the ai handle more complex coding.
It is to our eyes entirely original but used AI. Where do you draw the line?
CatsPajamas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
How does this model collapse thing still get spread around? It’s not true. Synthetic data has actually helped bots get smarter, not dumber. And if you think that all Gemini3 does is recycle idk what to tell you
exu@feditown.com 2 weeks ago
Recycling sounds suspiciously like what “AAA” studios already do
Carighan@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
I wish they'd replace Tim Sweeney with AI. Would genuinely have better takes on most topics, too. Sigh.
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Can we get AI version of the old burnout Tim Sweeney? He was as least unintentionally funny.