“They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can’t even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn’t exist. It’s dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes.”
An under-appreciated AI gripe: professionals can’t discuss it anymore.
Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis'
Submitted 1 day ago by Rheinish@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Anyone working with AI-other-than-llm is now constantly getting weird looks and stupid comments from LLM bros
AmyAye@nord.pub 1 day ago
Similar problem, I had to remind my daughter that I work.in a data center when she was complaining about data centers the other day, and that data centers are pretty coon, her beef (and frankly mine), is with wasteful hyperscaler data centers for AI use.
RaphaelSchmitz@feddit.org 1 day ago
Well, “AI” in games was always behavior, rather than having anything to do with AI.
And even then, artificial stupidity is usually more accurate than AI. FPS bots could easily headshot you immediately on sight but like, what good is that. It’s literally more work to make them worse at the game.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 19 hours ago
True thought there were some exceptions, like Black & White.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
At least the cryptographers could fall back on the full name!
bampop@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Lol I just call it IA (interaction algorithm)
Chakravanti@multiverse.soulism.net 1 day ago
Sx one way, Xs the other.
kat_angstrom@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Management is a cult.
No, seriously. You have to participate in large scale acts of groupthink and demonstrate performative conformity just to be accepted; and once in the group you better not stray too far from the messaging of executives.
Colonel_Panic_@eviltoast.org 1 day ago
Absolutely, if I can just chime in here and address the elephant in the room, we really have to focus on the low hanging fruit and leverage our KPIs to really drive home any wins. From a 30,000ft view it looks like we have synergy and alignment here, but if we zoom in we can see that there are nothing but roadblocks and pain points with our holistic approach. I propose we circle back and try to realign our core competencies and remember what really made us a rock star team in the first place.
kat_angstrom@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And just make sure that you’ve got enough cycles to onboard the efficiency innovations recommended by Claude. I know you’re all excited to have a boost in productivity, but make sure to balance the infrastructure goals against the priority backlogs. Like Claude says, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So get out there and have a great sprint, we’ll meet at tomorrow morning’s stand-up for updates.
Eh_I@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You don’t get to COD 49 with original creative ideas.
StillAlive@piefed.world 1 day ago
Nik Suresh said the same thing.
BaraCoded@literature.cafe 1 day ago
Nah, they’re not “getting psychosis”, AI is revealing their psychosis. We’re talking about people used to convincing themselves that infinite growth is possible in a finite world, that fascism is a solution, that they made themselves with no help, that they deserve to be paid hundreds of times more than their most basic employees, that being a billionaire is ethical, etc etc.
CEOs, HRs, the corporate world in general HAVE ALWAYS BEEN 100% PSYCHOTIC. Why do we think capitalism and the workplace are so alienating in the first place? Why do we think they need to invest millions, if not billions, in PR, medias and propaganda?
brookenium@feddit.online 1 day ago
You’ve hit the nail on the head with the Infinite Growth statement. Most companies see AI as the next way to cut bottom line costs and hit those annual goals. It’s an ouroboros that most companies haven’t seen the end of yet. Eventually they’ll be left with no talent (arguably the most valuable thing a company can acquire) and uninteresting products nobody is interested in.
How do you train newbies into useful employees when you let AI handle the easy stuff. Where’s your pipeline of promotions so you’re developing your next generation of developers? Once the shit starts to hit the fan, you’ll see them crumble and ask how we got here. Human talent takes YEARS to cultivate and is extremely hard to buy, especially when competition builds from reducing the supply when people stop going into these fields for lack of entry-level jobs.
tutter@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 hours ago
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
It really is an ouroboros pretending there is no problem nibbling on the back of its own head after consuming everything else
Gap@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Respectfully: no.
Psychosis is something that builds over time with many factors and AI is one that can definitely be one of the contributing factors. It can be the one that pushes someone over the edge into psychosis and that may seem as “revealing” it but the psychosis could have been avoided without.
This line of thinking feels dangerous to me.
angband@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
That “build-up” you are talking about, that’s called business school followed by entry level management or internship, where modern managers brush over learning their business, in favor of seeking efficiency purely in terms of dollars in/dollars out, in opposition to any other metric.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
It’s near the bottom but Tarn Adams notes the same thing, that it has been happening far longer than just starting when LLMs became popular.
“It’s been going on forever. That was before AI—or this form of AI,” Adams says, before lamenting: “They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can’t even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn’t exist. It’s dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes.”
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m always amazed at people who can’t understand that EVERY system is finite.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
We’ve gotta be almost out of bullshit by now.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“They’re trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. So I don’t see that going anywhere sustainable, and I feel like there will simply be a pop and a reckoning and then [it’s on repeat] unless people do something else.”
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
“Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers”.
As far as I can tell the individual actors extracting more from a system that its capable to support if everybody does the same (the kind of situation Game Theory calls a Tragedy Of The Commons) always think in one of 3 ways:
- They simply don’t think about systemic consequences at all, be it simply that they don’t have the kind of intelligence for it or the purposefully don’t dig down into it because they don’t want to think about consequences.
- They expect the “system” (i.e. somebody else, maybe everybody else) will make up for it so it’s fine if they take more from it than the put back in, as illustrated in my first paragraph.
- They’re aware of what the commulative impact of their actions can or even will have in the future, but they think they themselves and their families will be alright and screw everybody else - essentially that if they can get ahead enough they can ride the wave whilst it crashes.
The same kind of thinking also applies to Ponzi Schemes (like the current AI bubble) - Ignorance (willful or due to lack of knowledge/intelligence), The Many Will Make Up For The Over-Extraction Of The Few and/or I Myself Will Be Alright.
And you know what?
Those people have very good reasons to believe in the second one (that I illustrated at the start) - you look at Neoliberal Capitalism so far that’s what’s been happening as Money acummulates in fewer hands and sin ce with regulations neutralized and Corruption through the roof, those holding most of the wealth can do whatever the fuck they want so they are increasingly pillaging wealth from the rest, and the “system” - i.e. everybody else - just gets poorer and instead of Revolutions and Guillotines for the rich all we see is passive acceptance so the rest so have been making up for the depredations of the few for decades.
And if they’s CEOs they also have very good reasons to believe the third - just look at corporate governance in the last decades, with getting those jobs being far more abour Cronyism than Merit and incompetence being de facto rewards with golden parachutes a even failing upwards.
Given the experience of CEOs for at least the last 3 or 4 decades, it’s pretty rational for them to believe that their depredations wont destroy the Whole enough to come back to them and even if they do, they themselves personally will be alright.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
“Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers”.
That’s been the mindset of these business “leaders” for a few decades already.
The difference is now they have a tool that promises them that they can eliminate workers at an increasingly rapid rate.
Of course that’s a false promise, but once they realize that, a helluva lot of damage will have been done.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
If AI ever reaches the point that it can produce a creative, fun game that feels worth playing - which I doubt, because you gotta have a soul to make art - then anyone can press that button. Why would people buy their game when they can get AI to make their own?
He’s right, these people have shit the corporate bed.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Like the video game crash of ‘83?
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 19 hours ago
Like every time workers seem to be getting woke enough to maybe possibly do something on a scale that touches rich people’s yacht money some of us get some minor concessions that keep us working in the system and reproducing it for the next generation of workers.
Although the dream with ai is an economy without the need for workers (we wouldn’t be a part of it), or labour power pushed to such an insignificant little atomised role that withholding it is no longer a threat.
pachrist@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
It’s unfortunately sustainable because people buy things they like before things they need.
For all of us, for everyone 1 person we know who has a decent job and loves to play games they buy with disposable income, we probably know 5 who shouldn’t buy the game they’re buying because they’re already behind on their sewer bill.
diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de 13 hours ago
Congratulations!!!1 You are the lucky 10000 who discovered copy pasting today!
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
A service for people who don’t read articles.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 17 hours ago
I think it was Cory Doctorow that described it as a feedback loop, so the people who aren’t “all in” on AI get pushed out of the C-suite, in favour of those that are until the whole show is being run by people who want AI to do everything but absolutely no idea how to achieve that. It’s bluster all the way up, driven by a psychotic devotion to shareholders. Sack everyone, raise prices, the line must go up.
And because it’s all fuelled by picosecond trading algorithms, a company who’s line goes up 2% more than another company’s line ends up valued to a hundred times as much.
It’s no longer about being a healthy trading company, you have to show you’re doing everything possible to make everyone’s lives a fucking misery…
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Yeah, and it’s all made up money and value. Capitalism seems to have reached the runaway diesel engine stage, where it ain’t going to stop until we cut off its oxygen or it blows the fuck up.
ElChinchilla@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Have you tried giving the engine more orphans?
Blackmist@feddit.uk 15 hours ago
The list of most valuable companies is highly concerning. It’s nearly all AI or AI-adjacent now.
The only ones that aren’t are oil and magic obesity pills.
isekaihero@ani.social 19 hours ago
The only way forward for many developers will be as indie devs. The corpos are going to shovel AI slop into our buckets and the quality games will be from indie devs.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
Lmao replacing people in creative industries with ai is like chef’s kiss of stupidity
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I just want to add, this is coming from someone who has completed a mathematics PhD, and so has a very very high bar for psychosis (seriously, math departments are fun, but also FUN).
christian@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
…uh oh. How so?
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
While it’s not true that intelligence is correlated with mental problems, advanced mathematics tends to attract or create odd ducks.
There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math. One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
People didn’t notice John Nash devolved into a deep schizophrenic break for a long time because it’s not weird for advanced mathematicians to be talking about very complex unintelligible ideas. Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.Another was the uni-bomber.
There’s plenty of perfectly well balanced mathematicians. You just can’t help but get some weird ideas when your life’s work is to think outside the box about very complicated things all the time.
If you go deep into math work, you’ll meet people who think the universe is a simulation. You’ll meet others who think that’s silly, because the universe is clearly actually an abstract embodiment of the platonic ideal of mathematics. 7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
You’ll just nod and concede the appeal because it’s not the first time someone has shared that idea with you.So when the mathematicians start saying the ideas are getting odd, you know it’s not just “I don’t understand therefore it’s weird”.
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Mostly, we all see the world in unique ways - picture a building of possessed dwarves and you have the average mathematics department.
jlow@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Nice to see something like this on a gaming site (but fuuuuuuck their popups):
Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don’t understand.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 15 hours ago
Left my last job and they really pushed AI. Everything had to be AI and it has to be shoved in everywhere. It was mostly awful. Few places it helped was to complete bullshit HR tasks that we had been complaining about ever since they were introduced as a waste of time.
fyzzlefry@retrolemmy.com 14 hours ago
Network engineer here. My main use case for AI at the moment is for ticket management and as a glorified search engine.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
As long as it isn’t based on and continually trained on privacy violations, stolen property, and a continually growing list of ethical transgressions against humanity in a race to the bottom to fulfill greed and laziness
But, you know. It’s fine, I guess.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 14 hours ago
Ohh yeah search and summary can be useful.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 1 day ago
CEOs get rewarded for getting rid of staff so here we are. Who gets rewarded when the CEOs are let go? Oh right, they get golden parachutes.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
This is why companies should be worker owned cooperatives. Yes, management is a useful skill, and the workers can hire it.
Wishful thinking I know, but so much more sustainable.
diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de 14 hours ago
“They’re trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game.” well technically that was already the case? Press the “send” button on Slack and an entire team of natural stupidity makes you a game for all of the profit. Sometimes multiple, even.
bad1080@piefed.social 1 day ago
It’s become particularly nasty with generative AI, however, because now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don’t understand
CEO looks at AI quake: “it’s literally the same thing!"
(for those who don’t know what AI quake is: https://youtu.be/iBmjTXOK9xw)labyrinth@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
That looks suuuper fun to play!
nailbar@sopuli.xyz 21 hours ago
Kinda like “I had a dream I was playing Quake 2”
godsammitdam@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
“Slowly”
Let’s get something straight. The people at the top are all hired by the CEO and want money. They tell the CEO what a special smart boy he is, the biggest dickus around.
This has been the way of things for decades.
CEOs and higher ups give themselves their own “yes man” psychosis and it flows down the higher up you go.
AI is just socializing the yes man sycophancy psychosis our “corporate leaders” have been experiencing by isolating themselves from society and only surrounding themselves with an echo chamber of paid sycophants.
Grass@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
the real trickle down economics was the psychosis we gained along the way
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Just look at our current president. He is the ultimate byproduct of this mentality.
inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
As long as the AAA studios are generating shareholder value this will be the future unless the workers push back collectively and hard AF because the average gaming isn’t going to do crap to push back on this.
Developers and workers in general are nothing more than a reoccurring cost account to most businesses, a faceless void where money goes to instead of shareholders and executive compensation.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 1 day ago
When Tarn makes big statements, people ought to listen.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Don’t know if I can trust him since the photo shows he’s playing the graphical version of the game.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 16 hours ago
He's probably switched over to the version that he's making money from, frankly.
protist@retrofed.com 1 day ago
Money has been giving management psychosis for generations. AI is just another iteration of that
LordMayor@piefed.social 1 day ago
The funny thing is that Dwarf Fortress is a procedurally generated game. It would seem like genAI/LLMs would be a good fit for it. When I first heard about LLM ability to generate coherent text I thought it might be perfect for DFs story telling. And he’s putting out a great, AI based game without any of it.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Oh hell no
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
I mean, if LLMs could generate coherent, consistent narratives it would be an obvious good use of it. But they can’t do that. The mad lib system the game already uses is still a better option.
blockheadjt@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
You can create systems that generate content without resorting to mass plagiarism.
I’m working on a game that will have 10 million unique levels… due entirely to assets I’ve created that interact with each other in a variety of ways. I would never taint that with a system that not only plagiarizes but destroys the Earth to do so.
LordMayor@piefed.social 1 day ago
I’m not saying he should just he could but has managed to make a complex game without it.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 19 hours ago
After the great procgen bubble of the 10s I kind of was meh on it being shoved in everything to try to pad play time or replay value. I became much more into finite authored content with like a real story, characters, and most importantly a real ending.
That said, procgen seems like a, uh idk, a cool clockwork contraption that an author actually fussed over and tuned to their vision.
Compared to the gen slop that tells me literally nothing of the person who made it. And can’t tell any of their decisions, brushstrokes, or challenges, from what some model that has nothing to do with them “decided” to spew forth.
At best it’s a form of curation that disrespects every artist who influenced what just generated.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 15 hours ago
Age of empires 1 has procgen, its good but you can’t expect it to carry a game on its own either. If all it had was its procgen the game would suck.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
There are of course LLM ‘games’ that pretend to create a story in which the player does arbitrary actions. They’re utter dogshit, because a) they can’t keep track of their world for a prolonged time, since LLMs were never made for such coherent reasoning and keeping track of objects; and b) they just string the player along forever without any particular objectives, since their whole modus operandi is endlessly generating text that seems coherent.
Gonzako@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think my manager has broken out of the psychosis. He was really into it but has seen it’s limits real quickly
dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
He probably got his first bill lmao
FE80@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
“Dwarf Fortress” would be a great name for a band.
AeonFelis@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
The full name of the game is “Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress”
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
If you’re not familiar with the game, you should look into it, it’s incredible. There are tons of great documentaries about it on YouTube
VAK@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
It’s the age of indie imo. We’re seeing the final chapter of studios with 100s of employees. Replacing with AI is the lazy, catastrophic way of doing through it.