AI Could Create A Massive Problem For Valve’s Steam
from the flood-the-zone-with-shit dept
Two trends that I’m very interested in are about to collide and it’s going to be a mess.
By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game industry. I get it, but I’m also not going to pretend like I don’t still hold that very same view. AI tools are just that: tools. If the tools are good and used at the behest of the artists in the industry to make better games, that’s a good thing. If they upend artistic intent or simply suck, that’s a bad thing. And on the matter of jobs within the industry, if there is a net reduction in jobs, that’s bad! If AI lowers the barriers of entry for otherwise creative people and the result is even more jobs within the industry spread over more studios and, importantly, more cultural output in the form of games, that’s good!
Except when it’s not. And even if the AI evangelists are right, or those of us who see the possibility that AI use will ultimately result in more people in the industry and more games released to the public are right, that can still present very real problems within the industry. And I think there could be a serious one looming for storefronts like Steam.
This concern calcified in my head somewhat when I came across indie publisher Mike Rose, known for producing Yes, Your Grace, talking about just what all of this output could mean on Steam specifically.
“From a publisher perspective specifically, it’s mega annoying,” Rose tells GamesRadar+ in an interview, echoing other publishers like Hooded Horse. “If we thought the number of games being launched on Steam was crazy before, now it’s just impossible. During the last Next Fest, it seemed like around 1/3 of the demos had either AI generated key art, and/or AI-generated content. So now we have that to compete with too. Hurray!” Publishing lead John Buckley of Palworld developer Pocketpair called out the same AI trend in the latest Steam Next Fest.
Steam, as a focal point for the more open PC gaming market, is the clearest barometer for the rising quantity of games, with over 20,000 releases fighting for space every year. Even with Valve sticking to AI content disclosures for games listed on Steam, the rise of AI tools will only contribute to the torrent of content flooding the platform as games – or at least AI-made things game-shaped enough to be sold – become easier to produce.
Claims that there are too many games being released on Steam certainly isn’t new, nor has it historically been tied to anything to do with artificial intelligence. There have been complaints about this, as well as Valve’s apparent lack of interest in playing any real curation role, going back to 2023. Wait, make that 2020. Oh, wait, it actually goes back to 2015.
But while Steam hasn’t yet collapsed under the weight of its own volume of releases on the platform to date, the through line to all of that criticism has been Valve’s stoic apathy towards keeping up with the volume when it comes to helping its customers navigate the flood.
And that could be a very real problem for the platform. Steam’s value to the consumer, besides being the most recognizable outlet for PC gaming, is in its curation capabilities. To date, other than providing some search filters and a few tools to personalize the recommendations it makes for new titles to you, Steam has mostly left curation up to the customer themselves, or third-party list-makers. Meanwhile, the process for listing a game on Steam has not changed appreciably in the past several years. It’s still the same $100 entry fee to get your title listed. You still have to jump through all the registration steps with Steamworks, generate an app ID, build the store page, upload your assets. Then you wait for Valve to do its own review before you can publish your game, but that mostly amounts to ensuring that you’re compliant with Steam policies, that the game can launch successfully, and that’s about it.
With a potential flood of PC games coming, that sure doesn’t feel like enough to keep the platform from becoming an unnavigable wasteland where you can’t tell the gems from the slop. And, barring any new rules limiting to what degree AI can be used in game creation, that tidal wave is coming.
On this point, Rose focuses on “the elephant in the room” here: “It’s probably never going away again.”
“People can now make stuff by telling a bot to make it for them, and you know, the thing is that humans are mega lazy,” he reasons. “I don’t even mean that as an insult! We just are. So for a lot of people, if there’s a choice between ‘spend a bunch of time and money making a cool thing,’ vs ‘type some prompts into a program and the thing is made for me very quickly’ – the average person is going to pick the latter.
And that’s the thing really: Our feelings on it don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that a bunch of us don’t like genAI. It’s gonna get used now, and it’ll get used more and more. As the kids say: Video games are cooked.”
I don’t think that video games are cooked, but his point that AI will be in use in the industry is the one I’ve been making for months now. We have to be talking about how it will be used, not if. That ship has sailed.
And if Steam is still going to be of any value at all to the consumer, Valve better be thinking right damned now how it’s going to get more involved in the curation of what shows up on its platform.
Filed Under: ai, curation, filtering, steam, video games
Companies: valve
Comments on “AI Could Create A Massive Problem For Valve’s Steam”
Compulsory tag
Games with AI generated content should have a compulsory tag indicating as such. Gamers can use that to filter out the slop if they so choose.
I don’t mean the community tags. Whoever decides community tags for games are stupid. Games with contradictory or ambiguous tags make them useless.
Well, funny thing about that: Every time I’ve seen a company sail that ship and get caught sailing that ship without telling people they sailed it, even if only by accident, that ship gets set aflame. At least three games (and a fourth if you don’t believe the “we didn’t use AI” stuff for the Tomb Raider skins) have been caught with AI-generated content that was used without disclosure, and each time, the response to that usage was overwhelmingly negative.
Generative AI, even in its most “ethical” version, isn’t something that a lot of people want. Even if a game turns out to be shit, people would prefer it was hand-crafted shit rather than AI slop. And for all the evangelizing about “democratizing creativity”, the fact of the matter is that AI slop will come to be seen as the opposite of what its evangelists want it to be seen as: Where they want AI slop seen as true art and its “creators” seen as artists, everyone with some goddamned sense will see it as the apotheosis of laziness and non-creativity. Oooh, someone picked out a few settings and wrote a prompt for an AI image generator! So fucking what. Bob Ross was more creative with a half-hour’s worth of time and some oil paints, and all he did on his show was paint landscapes.
I understand that there are legitimate uses for what we colloquially refer to as “AI”. But generative AI, especially as a replacement for human-made creative works, is not one of them. Wanting to be an artist is fine; wanting to be one without putting the work in to learn and hone and master a craft is narcissism mixed with arrogance.
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“Wanting to be an artist is fine; wanting to be one without putting the work in to learn and hone and master a craft is narcissism mixed with arrogance.”
How far would you like to carry this standard?
Does it also apply to people who drive a car without doing their own maintenance? Or those who write computer programs without knowing how to change out their motherboards?
If you eat steak, did you butcher the cow?
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Anyone who uses generative AI as a replacement for the process of making a creative work—an illustration, a video, a piece of writing of any kind, a song, a blog entry, whatever—is not an artist in any measurable sense of the term.
People who, say, use samples in their music still take the time to listen to the songs they’re sampling and figure out some new way to twist the sample in question into something new. Someone who generates an AI-created song isn’t doing any of that. They’re just going “here’s what I want a song to be about and the style I want it to be in” to the Emptiness Machine and expecting the perfect result without any real process beyond “push button, receive song”. You won’t find any artistry in works made by generative AI because the artistry of any work lies within the process of creation.
Those other comparisons are all bogus deflections with no direct 1:1 correlation to the act of artistic creation. You can drive a car without knowing a goddamn thing about the engine (though that knowledge would help), you can code a application without knowing anything about how your device works, and you can eat meat without having obtained it from the source yourself. But creating art—as in really creating it, not asking a computer to do all the work for you? That requires knowledge and skill of how to craft that work. Writing a book of any kind both is and isn’t as easy as “put one word in front of another”; if you understand why I say that, you’re already one step closer to being more of an artist than your average AI slop enthusiast.
Anyone who thinks they’re an artist because they generated something through the Emptiness Machine is fooling themselves. Anyone who believes AI “art” is the future of art/media/pop culture is climbing a stairway to Heaven that’s made of cardboard.
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“Writing a book of any kind both is and isn’t as easy as “put one word in front of another”; if you understand why I say that, you’re already one step closer to being more of an artist than your average AI slop enthusiast.”
Interesting that you mention that because I am, in fact and in real life, an author. Though I don’t write books, at least not so far, I just do stories and “novelettes”.
I suppose my examples would have been better if I had asked if you need to know how to tune an engine in order to be a race car driver, or how to butcher a cow to be a chef.
I guess I really don’t know enough about how this AI stuff really works, and I’ve never been sufficiently interested in the subject to make any particular effort to understand it.
Yeah, I’m an old coot — so what do you expect? 🙂
But I do find the debate around it interesting and the variance in perspectives is intriguing.
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Moderately, yes. That said, while I would think a race car driver doesn’t necessarily need to know how to tune an engine, the knowledge is definitely helpful. And a chef doesn’t need to know the ins and outs of butchering scow to cook the meat that comes from said cows. An artist who is committed to being an artist, on the other hand, should and must know the process of their art so they can justify the decisions of that process. That’s to say nothing of building a base of inspiration and being able to explain how certain works inspired you. An AI slop enthusiast might be able to tell you what styles they chose for a generated AI image and why, but they won’t be able to tell you why the Emptiness Machine generated the image in the way it did.
Re: Re: Re:3 If they don't care about being an artist?
What if they don’t care about being considered an artist, and simply want to cause their vision of a game to exist, with the least amount of cost and work? Will you refuse to drive a car because it was made by machine instead of by hand?
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I don’t really care if AI slop enthusiasts want to be considered artists. They’re still lazy assholes for using generative AI. If the only way someone can make a game is through generative AI, that game probably won’t be worth playing—just like images, songs, videos, and written works made with generative AI are worth less of my time than it took for an LLM to generate them.
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Game makers became lazy in 2000s when first game engine appears (like Flash), because “real” game makers were supposed to be craftsmen coding in assembly and making assets a pixel at the time, not drag-dropping and coding scripts.
But games then became utterly complex, with dozen platforms to support, unlimited possibilities of optimizations, immersive sound effects, good narrative, natural gameplay, decent accessibility, online gaming and so on, that a simple FFS game could requires years of work for a team of few experienced devs. Even Candy Crash was made by a dozen people, and GTA 5 took 5 years involving 1,000 devs.
AI is still just a tool, you cannot prompt “make a great game that doesn’t look like anything people have seen before. no mistakes plz” yet. You’ll have slop, crashes, slowdowns, broken gameplay, and unsupported screen sizes, but you may have something to publish in less than a year, and could see if at least someone would dare to play it. Then once it’ll be a great success (it may never happen, as nearly every time), rewrite from scratch with a dedicated team.
Re: Re: Re:2
I could quite easily explain to you how I selected and prepared this Costco frozen pizza, and some principles behind the choice of ingredients Costco used, but claiming that makes me a chef would be quite crazy.
But of course, much like the US patent office, lots of people lose their minds as soon as “on a computer” is added to the explanation.
Re: Re: Re: Come on now....
“Anyone who uses generative AI as a replacement for the process of making a creative work—an illustration, a video, a piece of writing of any kind, a song, a blog entry, whatever—is not an artist in any measurable sense of the term.”
I can think of at least 5 different ways to describe an artist’s use of AI to replace a creative process while still being an artist themselves. Let’s not be silly.
If someone is creating a children’s book and is an excellent writer/author but can’t draw for shit, and has AI create illustrations for his book, that fits your criteria. If you would call the excellent writer/author a non-artist, then you would be very silly.
Re: Re: Re:2
Then I’m a silly motherfucker.
Sure, the writer is an artist for the writing they do. But generating images because they, what, can’t afford to pay an actual human illustrator for their time and skill? Nah, poverty isn’t an excuse for AI slop.
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You really like trying to get people to argue about something else besides the actual topic of discussion, don’tcha Frank?
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I love false equivalence nonsense. You must be one of the people who like $nuanced discussions.
$(For values of “nuance” which involve only the nuance i which we are invested, but not the other 99% of the elephant-in-the-nuance which we will oh-so-studiously ignore.)
Which all translates to Steam becoming for most people what it already is for me: a place to buy the games I already know I want from other people’s recommendations or other sources outside Steam. I don’t go browsing Steam looking for games. I go elsewhere to people I know or to review and recommendation sites I know and find games I’m interested in there. Steam is the cashier, nothing more.
That might stem the flood of cheaply-made crap games, but I’m not optimistic. The cost of making and publishing them is so low it only takes a few suckers to make it profitable, and there’s always new suckers coming along who don’t know how to navigate the bog.
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Unfortunately so many people browse Steam for whatever reason and buy this shit. For the lols, or just to see, or because “Let’s browse Steam games and livestream the experience”.
The barrier is already low. You can download thousands of dollar’s worth of software like Krita, Blender, and Godot for free and start making your game yourself right now without having to rely on some third party SaaS code generator that can arbitrarily throttle or even revoke your access:
https://x.com/patomolina/status/2045281665363386504
Software used to be the one industry you could be almost completely self-reliant
The barrier is already low. You can download thousands of dollar’s worth of software like Krita, Blender, and Godot for free and start making your game yourself right now without having to rely on some third party SaaS code generator that can arbitrarily throttle or even revoke your access:
https://x.com/patomolina/status/2045281665363386504
I don't understand the hate
I don’t understand the hate for “ai generated” stuff.
Maybe it’s because I don’t play games and am not really exposed to that culture.
But I’ve seen some AI generated pictures that look pretty darn impressive and the fact that they are “AI” doesn’t make them less interesting or amusing than they would be if they were hand drawn.
On computers, even “hand drawn” isn’t; art programs all allow you to draw perfect lines and circles and angles of all sorts. Computer art is a long way from a pencil on paper or paint on canvas, regardless of whether AI is involved or not.
So here’s a genuine question:
Why all the hate for AI? If something is good, it’s good, and the tool used to make it, whether it’s a paintbrush or a chainsaw, seems like it shouldn’t be relevant to the worthiness of the end result.
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Because the source material they use is all appropriated from actual people without their permission, then used to generate profits for the AI companies without giving those people any of it. Without the work the models were trained on there wouldn’t be any profits for the AI companies, but they look at it as their right to use everyone’s work without permission and without paying for it.
On top of that, there’s the prodigious environmental and economic costs of those models. They require data centers so big they can’t be used for anything else, consume so much power that it destabilized the electric grid in the area and drives prices sky-high for everyone else, and consume memory (both DRAM and SSD memory) in quantities that leave nothing for the rest of us. Literally. There will be no available DDR5 nor SSDs for consumers this year, the AI companies have bought up 100% of the production for the entire year.
Now, is some nice imagery worth all that?
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Is some nice imagery worth all that?
It seems that a lot of people believe that the answer to your question is yes it is.
Folks here and on many other websites have spent years decrying copyright overreach and excessive terms and restrictive contracts and on and on.
But now that there’s an industry using “creative data” (I can’t think of a better term) in a wholesale manner, those same people are screaming about “artist’s rights”.
Without taking a position on the right or wrong of this issue, I wonder if this kind of thing is the future of creative endeavor. For good or for ill, it certainly appears to have democratized the creation of a lot of artistic stuff, or at least a lot of stuff that looks pretty darn artistic to me.
Are folks who rail against AI in the same position as groups of monks after the printing press suddenly made books available to the masses?
I genuinely don’t know the answer, and I suspect it’s because I simply don’t know enough about AI.
Again, I’ve looked at a few pictures and thought they were pretty nifty, but other than that my exposure to the whole thing has been pretty much limited to what I read on websites like this one.
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Because most of the “copyright overreach” isn’t on the part of the creators, it’s on the part of the middlemen (publishers and distributors and the like) who take the lion’s share of the profits and give the actual creators a pittance. There’s no contradiction in being in favor of creator’s rights and simultaneously in opposing copyright overreach.
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Generative AI does nothing that is even remotely comparable to the printing press making written works cheaper to produce and widely available to the masses.
You can keep coming up with those bogus comparisons, but you won’t find many people here willing to treat them seriously. They’re all an attempt to deflect from the numerous already-mentioned problems with generative AI, not the least of which is how “democratizing creativity” means worsening the culture divide by way of making a shared culture that much harder to achieve. Imagine if anyone could generate an entire feature-length Avengers movie for their specific tastes. Why, then, would anyone watch the ones produced by Marvel/Disney? And how would we be able to talk about specific Avengers movies when there would be so many different ones that we’d have no frame of reference for what movie any two people would be talking about? For that matter, imagine if someone makes an Avengers movie with a sex scene in it and chooses to “use” the same actors as the MCU films—would the use of the likenesses of, say, Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr. be morally and ethically acceptable even (and especially) if they never gave their approval to have their likeness used that way?
We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, that much is true. But generative AI is less a genie and more a monkey’s paw: You get what you wish for, but it comes with a cost you probably won’t like.
Re: Re: Re:2
“would the use of the likenesses of, say, Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr. be morally and ethically acceptable even (and especially) if they never gave their approval to have their likeness used that way?”
What is your position on Elvis impersonators, and “tribute bands” in general?
Re: Re: Re:3
My snarky-yet-serious position is that you’re trying to deflect from the direct yes-or-no question of “is it morally and ethically acceptable to use someone’s likeness without their permission in a way that said someone would never have approved”. But if I must: I generally have no issue with those things because they still require a modicum of talent and there’s no mistaking the tributes for the real thing. (Especially with Elvis, since he’s dead.) With generative AI, it’s entirely possible to create something that looks or sounds like “the real deal” (e.g., a celebrity deepfake) and pass it off as genuine to, say, a dumbass in a hurry.
Re: Re: Re: Let me just pick up on one thing here...
AI is not democratising art. This stuff costs more money to create than doing stuff manually. Any half-decent AI output has gone through multiple layers of prompts, and/or is being driven by someone who has spent a lot of time refining their prompts, and that means signing up to a paid service.
At a rate that excludes large parts of the world and people on reduced incomes.
A pencil and paper, a cheap second-hand guitar, hell, even a tablet with a word processing programme on are all cheaper than a year’s subscription to these tools.
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And after all that, they don’t really work that well for most of the use cases their advocates are presenting. I have to work with Github Copilot at my job, and at the best of times it’s like mentoring a junior engineer: I have to hand-hold it through the entire process, explaining to it what it got wrong and what it needs to do to correct it at every step. As with mentoring another engineer, I could’ve just done the work myself faster. Unlike that junior engineer, I don’t get a more experienced and better engineer out of it. Copilot never improves, and I take a hit to my productivity because of it. At it’s worst it blows up so badly I have to just abandon the attempt (which at least saves time, which is a sad commentary on it).
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“I don’t understand why people hate it when eateries fail to provide tasty food, maybe it’s because I don’t eat out”
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Let me put it this way:
Do you think the message the Luddites were trying to communicate by smashing looms was “We fucking hate looms”?
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People literally draw/paint with a stylus on computers, and have done since ages. It’s hella harder with a mouse, so credit to those who suffer through it. And understanding how to really use the tools is as complex as mixing paints and choosing host media, etc.
Sure, some ppl will do graphic arts or childish stuff by letting the programs give you a perfect circle and bucket-filling it. Not very good art.
“they don’t really work that well for most of the use cases their advocates are presenting.”
If that is truly the case then the whole thing will blow over and become irrelevant in a short period of time.
If a tool manufacturer was producing wrenches that broke every second time you tried to loosen a bolt, people would soon start buying their wrenches elsewhere.
Same thing here. If you’re using the wrong tool or an inferior tool for your job, then you’re in the position of the guy who went to the doctor and said, “It hurts when I do this.”
Answer: Don’t do that.
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It’s hard to avoid doing the thing when every C-suite asshole with a few hundred million dollars to spare is shoehorning AI, generative or otherwise, into their businesses regardless of whether it’s needed. When the boss tells you “use this or lose your job”, chances are good that you’ll use the AI instead of risking your paycheck.
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“When the boss tells you “use this or lose your job”, chances are good that you’ll use the AI instead of risking your paycheck.”
Yeah, that’s the same position as anyone who gets told to use a particular widget of any kind to do his job, not just AI-assisted stuff.
If said widget is not an effective tool, either the directive will change or the company will evolve somehow to account for that inefficiency (or not).
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In the meantime, the tool will be used regardless, and the damage it could do will be done. Not exactly a great outcome there.
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I think society, just in general, needs to be rescued from “C-suite assholes”. So many of our problems can be traced back to this cause.
This is exactly the sort of thing people were getting worked up over before and got brushed off. Glad we did get there eventually, though
The problem isn’t really so much for the platform, but all the games that struggle to get noticed in an environment where search is broken, tbh. Realistically, Steam will be fine, just as it is now despite search being functionally useless. The lock in from convenience and it’s frontpage still serving the majority of popular games is enough to keep it going.
Y’know, if you phrased it like he did, instead of as a provocative sales pitch, it’d save a lot of grief and make a nuanced conversation a lot easier.
AI are tools of a different kind.
AI are indeed tools. Historically, tools have been used to eliminate jobs. There are no exceptions to this. Long before the tool is able to make the artists lives easier, employers start chopping off headcounts. The game industry is already plagued by massive and frequent layoffs.
No one is talking about how Steam already saw an absolute flood of ultra low quality content when they started allowing porn. And no, I’m not saying all porn on steam is low quality. When I say “low quality content” I’m talking about the barely-a-game software products where you uncover an erotic image, which as a genre probably makes up double digit percentages of all the releases on steam now; the same game copy pasted over and over again with ever so slightly tweaked visuals and a new nude.
What I’m saying is the flood has already come, and people are navigating it. It’s already a problem, but it’s being dealt with. Steam isn’t becoming the Kindle Store of vidya, it already is. Shovelware has been a part of the gaming industry since well before the internet and we haven’t been doomed yet.
Also, the guys behind Palworld complaining about shovelware on Steam is rich. Just because your shovelware became a meme doesn’t make it quality.
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Yes, but there’s a “don’t show me porn” toggle.
Steam games
How many novels are published every month? Some good and some less so but an easy to enter market with editors and publishers curating and recommending etc. some will be slop and some AI slop just like games so the Steam-GameShop Needs to think more like Steam-Book-Shop.
very naive
Distilling AI use to “just another tool” is amazingly, reductively naive. The entire tech is built on theft, exploitation, and abuse, and every corporation involved in forcing AI into everything everywhere is deeply anti-human, anti-social, and at their core, fascist.
So, exactly like the wider Internet. Or Amazon, where a search will often produce a page of non-matching shit (“Sponsored”), maybe followed by some matches mixed in with shit, then a long tail of shit (if the search works at all; perhaps a quarter of the Amazon-search links that show up on DuckDuckGo just give a “something went wrong on our end” error).
But long before the latest wave of stuff being falsely advertised as A.I., web searches were already like that for 15-20 years, producing garbage pages that have matching keywords—maybe just dumped with no pretense of prose, or maybe as Markov-generated slop. Ever download a PDF “product manual” that’s just a link back to the same bullshit site it came from?
I don’t see why any particular aggregation site should be held out as having a specific problem. Make it easy for people to get refunds, and the operator will quickly get a list of potential garbage to be inspected. Not that such sites even really need to do “curation”; the lack of it doesn’t seem to be harming Amazon much, even if you do see people writing “I’m wary of counterfeit products” frequently on message boards.
Oh hey, the regurgitation engines drowning anything decent with their endless sea of garbage finally entered an arena you care about?
You’re about a year behind the curve here, arguably more. Better late than never, I guess.
The tools aren’t good.
You said if the tools are good. They’re not. If false then Santa exists returns true, you know.
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Claiming the tools aren’t good these days immediately outs you as a naive fool. What is true is the tools are not as good as the hype from the companies. And they’re not going to get rid of the need for people. But in competent hands, they’re incredibly powerful.
Anyone who says they’re not good clearly either has not used the most modern versions… or has no idea how to use them well.
I’m going to assume you most likely tried older tools and have not experimented with the more modern ones. But claiming that good AI is like Santa Claus is laughably wrong.
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Yeah? That’s funny given Bsky’s recent, well-publicized self-DoS.
The tools produce unmanageable amounts of stuff, which cannot be properly checked or managed as a result, and there’s plenty of errors still hidden in them. Lots of times, when I see a regurgitation engine try to give me info on something I have domain-specific knowledge of, I can spot multiple errors. It is the Elon-Musk-talks-about-a-subject-you-know-something-about thing; I have no reason to think they’re any more accurate in subjects I am not versed in.
They create an illusion of productivity (but actually cost more human time), are eating insane amounts of hardware, actively atrophy the abilities of people who use ’em, and are gonna citogenesis into oblivion their own training data as the oroborous eats itself.
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You seem particularly confidently ignorant.
It’s fine. You don’t have to like the tools, but each time you reveal your ignorance doesn’t make you look cool or savvy. It just is “old man yells at cloud.”
As I said, I agree that there’s a ton of hype. They’re not as useful as the hype screams. And they’d be terrible at replacing people. But they are incredibly useful in the right hands.
Clearly, not yours.
Re: Re: Re:2
Yeah?
Bluesky says they managed to screw up and DoS themselves by via logging.
Bluesky, you included, are ride-or-die for vibecoding.
I don’t think these are unrelated.
Re: Re: Re:3
Again, you are an extraordinarily overconfident fool.
You should maybe stop being so confidently wrong about shit you don’t understand.
Re: Re: Re:4
Not for nothing, Mike, but…Bluesky did DOS itself via fucked-up code, and at least one staff member has admitted to using AI-generated code.
Re: Re: Re:5 Not one staff member, the whole platform.
‘Why are you blaming AI? Bluesky being down had nothing to do with AI, you people know nothing!’
Meanwhile…
https://bsky.app/profile/jay.bsky.team/post/3micqcyeawc2g
‘Jay 🦋
@jay.bsky.team
Bluesky is made with AI, the engineers and even some non-engineers use Claude code.’
Gee, wonder why people are skeptical about claims that that AI had nothing to do with Bluesky’s issues which came from a coding error?
Re: Re:
Yeah? That’s funny given Bsky’s recent, well-publicized self-DoS.
The tools produce unmanageable amounts of stuff, which cannot be properly checked or managed as a result, and there’s plenty of errors still hidden in them. Lots of times, when I see a regurgitation engine try to give me info on something I have domain-specific knowledge of, I can spot multiple errors. It is the Elon-Musk-talks-about-a-subject-you-know-something-about thing; I have no reason to think they’re any more accurate in subjects I am not versed in.
They create an illusion of productivity (but actually cost more human time), are eating insane amounts of hardware, actively atrophy the abilities of people who use ’em, and are gonna citogenesis into oblivion their own training data as the oroborous eats itself.
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If thinking the slopengines produce techdebt and shit code is being a naive idiot, what would you call that BlueSky dev who chucked their phone in a pool to cool it? Or the people who decided that brain was worth paying six figs?
If you think the tools are so great, maybe replace them with the machine.
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Those are words. They don’t seem to form sentences that mean anything to me. But they are words.
You seem particularly susceptible to weird conspiracy theories. Maybe work on that?
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All I’m saying is, personally, I’d be careful about giving Why any more phones.
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If thinking the slopengines produce techdebt and shit code is being a naive idiot, what would you call that BlueSky dev who chucked their phone in a pool to cool it? Or the people who decided that brain was worth paying six figs?
If you think the tools are so great, maybe replace them with the machine.
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‘Santa Clause’, you say?
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OMG MIKE MADE A TYPO!!!!!!!!
Your big win of the day.
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I think it’s ironic in the context of bigging up the power of ‘AI’, yes. Particularly given the ‘typos’ that’ve been creeping into articles and headlines on this site.
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This site has always had typos. We’re human. I’m not sure wtf that has to do with AI? If anything it shows the opposite. If we over relied on AI there wouldn’t be those typos.
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Good AI currently does not exist in my field, and the evidence strongly suggests it’s never going to exist. Hallucinations have been getting worse over time, not better.
You just can’t use a tool that might hallucinate in a field that relies on facts and case history. My field is a sub-type of law, and I have seen enough hot-shot lawyers, people who are about my age but haven’t been in this sub-category as long and are more used to general law, get in trouble by relying on AI and get shot down for it.
Frankly, the tools are toxic and touching them seems like a fast-track to getting censured or disbarred.
The tools aren’t good.
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Entirely possible. I wouldn’t use AI in law at all. It does seem quite a silly place to use it.
But I am telling you that in many other fields it is very useful as a tool. Where it tends to fall down is when it’s used as a replacement for humans. But as a power assist, there are many industries where it is quite useful.
You insisted that because it was not useful to you, it could not possibly be useful to anyone. To me, that’s a sign of a very dumb person who cannot think beyond his or her own experiences. I can tell you, quite clearly, that as a tool it is incredibly useful in many fields, but again, as an assistive tool, generally where the hallucinations are not a problem.
The issue it seems, is that you have a very narrow (and quite limited and ignorant) view of what kinds of tools there are today. And you stupidly assume that your narrow view is representative of the whole.
You’re wrong.