The most straightforward solution is to just stuff all "placeholder" materials into a folder called "PLACEHOLDER" in your project, and then delete the folder when you're getting close to concluding development. This is especially useful with engines like Unreal, which will actively tell you if those assets are being referenced by anything so you can replace the references.
That being said, depending on the size of the project, that might require strict project management to ensure that team members are putting placeholder assets in the right place. And sometimes someone might get lazy and use AI generation without telling anyone, which can be frustrating.
For what it's worth, the Democrats probably will impeach after the midterms, especially if they regain control of the senate. But right now it'll likely not even get a floor vote. That's pretty much the reason why they haven't tried impeaching Trump a third time. The Jan 6th impeachment got the most senate votes for conviction in history, but possibly not as many as could be because McConnell punted the whole thing until the new congress when Trump was out of office anyway, making it easier for Republicans to justify voting for acquittal.
Unfortunately, the vote threshold to convict was set up at a time when many of the founding fathers had active disdain for the concept of political parties and the idea of today's hyper-partisanship was virtually unthinkable. The only time when it was really possible was during Nixon's tenure, only for him to resign willingly and get pardoned by his successor. Fox News was literally established in response to Watergate, by political operators who wanted to make sure that another Republican president would never be brought down in the same way again.
The US constitution and systems of government need major reforms. It would be difficult to enact, but trying and failing is better than not trying at all.
I think you're worrying a bit too much here. Trump was elected on the back of the inflation-driven anti-incumbent wave that destroyed multiple incumbent governments in elections around that time period, on top of Biden's advanced age, Harris having a limited time to establish herself in the public sphere as the Democrat candidate and her refusal to form a clean break from herself and Biden - rightly or wrongly, people perceived Biden as having not done nearly enough on inflation and cost of living issues. Trump has done literally nothing to deal with affordability issues, if anything he's only made things worse, and the electorate have noticed that in a big way.
The other thing to keep in mind that Trump has a cultural foothold few other people have, and a bizarre "charisma" that draws a specific type of voter that normally doesn't turn out for elections. When he's not on the ballot, the Republicans tend to do horribly (and they're already doing really badly in special elections). Trump literally can't run again, all of his potential successors have the charisma of a dead fish (the very idea of JD Vance running as the GOP nominee is hilarious, he has no fucking chance in hell), and Trump in his second term is now so unpopular already that anyone associated with his administration will have him as an albatross around their necks.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that 2028 may end up being a shoe-in for the Democrats - even the worst viable candidate would trounce anyone the Republicans might nominate. Hell, it might be the best possible opportunity for someone like AOC to take a shot at it. And that's not even getting into how much the Democrats can do if they have the senate alongside a Dem president post-2028, which would likely mean the death of the filibuster, establishing DC as a state, major voting reforms that Biden couldn't pass because of Manchin and Sinema, Medicare-For-All (or even just a public option), etc.
It should be noted that nobody wants to watch Fox News Lite when the real thing is right there. It's partly why CBS and CNN's viewership is already in the toilet.
I wouldn't be surprised if the big cable news players eventually just end up being Fox News and MS NOW. Nowadays only Fox News, CNN and MS NOW are actually treated as notable players when it comes to reporting on ratings from my cursory check, CBS isn't even on the radar anymore.
Yeah, it looks like someone high up at the DOJ (probably Pam Bondi herself) thought Trump would get mad if he found out and ordered the lawyers to walk back the dismissal. Not surprising.
His argument that AI tools have gotten better feels hollow when he's an AI evangelist who is actively ignoring that LLMs still regularly hallucinate, and even coding LLMs are basically useless for anything more complex than boilerplate code.
The AI industry has a problem in that people just don't want to pay for their products, either because what's free is enough or they don't see the value in the paid subscriptions. No wonder the evangelists are desperately trying to hype this tech up as much as possible, but it's a fool's errand, considering the ridiculous amount of investment going into the industry but with barely any actual revenue made from it.
I just want to see the bubble burst already.
For what it's worth, Persona was only an experimental provider specifically for the UK. Discord have said that they plan only to use on-device age verification methods that do not send identifying information off-device. Said verification methods will probably be easy to foil, but eh.
I guarantee they would be singing a different tune if Pretti had been black. When the Black Panthers asserted their right to bear arms in public, the NRA supported gun control.
It's less "congress" that's the problem and more the Republicans. The Democrats know this is completely insane. They'd try to impeach Trump again in a heartbeat if they had control of both houses. But the Republicans? They're either deep in the sauce, are afraid of being primaried, or are terrified of being targeted by Trump's insane base who have proven they are willing to murder people seen as Trump's enemies.
It's complete lunacy, but the Republicans have been utterly captured by a president who is losing his marbles in real time but has a stranglehold on the party's base. This is another reason why a two-party "big tent" system sucks for everyone who isn't rich as balls.
Diligent commit checking helps with that, at least, and depending on the engine it's way easier to know what's still being used than it used to be. Unreal Engine lets you see what each thing is referencing or being referenced by, and if you delete something the engine will warn you if it's being referenced by anything else in the project. You'll know if something's actually being used if you try to delete the entire placeholder project and if that warning pop-up occurs.
But yeah, it is one of the biggest pains in the ass when it comes to project management.
It's a multifaceted problem, really - not only do you need to actually be sure that something is AI-generated or not, which can be hard to do sometimes, but if you just wanna use AI-generated materials as placeholders, you really want to be absolutely sure they're not in the final product. (Personally for the latter I would just have a big fat "PLACEHOLDER" folder that all AI-generated materials should go into that should be completely deleted by the time the game goes gold.) There's also the potential ethical issues at play.
In that vein, I can see why Tim Bender would rather not deal with any of that shit and be able to keep things relatively simple if something generated does somehow end up in a project.
Machine learning absolutely has some useful purposes, especially in fields like medical science.
Generative AI, though? There's a reason why it's so reviled. There is no inherent creativity, it just regurgitates the material it is trained on, and the results are okay at best rather than great, even with direct human intervention, but are more often than not absolute crap. Concept artists largely agree that generated images as references are more detrimental than helpful. And despite what you might argue about the technicalities of training data, artists still consider it to be stealing and disrespectful to the actual work of artists.
Is generative AI neat for messing around with? Maybe handy for search or formatting some text? Sure, beyond that, it's just a fancy toy. By and large, AI-generated content is very rarely anything more than just slop.
Those particular offers aren't equivalent - Netflix is only paying $83B for just the Warner part of WBD, while Paramount is paying $108B, but for the entire company, and significantly devaluing Discovery in their bid, which is unacceptable to both the Warner board and shareholders, hence why Netflix's bid keeps prevailing.
Democrats have stated that they intend to cause problems for any Paramount/WBD merger and may even act to dismantle it if they return to power (which at this rate is increasingly likely, considering the bloodbath that'll happen in the midterms and Trump having no heir apparent who can feasibly win an election), so that's something, at least.
Also, Paramount might not even get CNN. According to recent reporting (which I can't find the link to right now), WBD is looking to sell off Discovery to a particular investment manager who is known for deftly handling debt-leveraged assets, and Zazlav is basically offloading all of WBD's debt onto Discovery (which is why Paramount is devaluing the Discovery part in its bid for the whole company, whereas Zazlav wants to sell off Discovery for a lot more than Paramount is offering).
I never thought I'd see a positive version of malicious compliance these days, but this is absolutely perfect.
Trying to kill the story five minutes before it goes live was inevitably going to cause it to leak. And now if it goes up at all, any chances will be scrutinized and turned into an even greater controversy. I love it.
However, generative AI isn't even useful for concept art, at least in most cases. This article brings up the perspective of actual concept artists, and they all say generated "artwork" only makes their jobs harder. Part of it is due to warped expectations from clients (for example, the vast majority of concept art is relatively basic rather than big fancy renders but clients expect the latter), but in general the consensus is that these generative models lack originality, require concept artists to figure out where the "inspirations" for each generation came from (which only adds to their workload), and takes out the "discovery" part of exploring concepts that is vital to creating new and interesting ones.
Generating placeholder assets? We've already seen how that can cause problems, since they can be potentially "good enough" for studios to accidentally forget to replace, and later cause controversy when players notice them. We've already seen this happen with Expedition 33 and The Alters.
Coding? "Coding assistants" more often than not tend to spit out poor-quality output that programmers need to fix anyway.
And production-level content is right out. People will notice, and it's never as good as actual human artistry.
I've only found one "productive" use for generative AI in game development that doesn't just add more work for people in the long run - generating placeholder voice lines, assuming you put them all in a "placeholder" folder that you ensure is completely deleted by the end of production, with all references to said placeholders replaced with actual production voice lines. And even then that's not exactly new, it's just a fancier version of using text to speech.
Generative AI is mostly just popular in the c-suite rather than with actual developers or gamers. A Quantic Foundry poll shows that 85% of gamers have a negative perception of generative AI, with 62% saying they had a "very negative" attitude towards it. "This technology simply isn’t going away" is one thing, but who will use it seriously when developers hate using it and gamers hate seeing the output?
Paramount only has a higher offer at first glance, but they're bidding for all of WBD, whereas Netflix just wants the Warner portion (the studios and such) not the Discovery part (the cable stuff). Splitting the company up is something Zazlav massively prefers, since he and the shareholders will get more money out of it, and Paramount by their own admission are greatly undervaluing Discovery compared to what WBD thinks it's worth, which won't go down with the shareholders. It's a large part of why Paramount's bid is being consistently rejected, and any attempt at a hostile takeover is a long shot at best.
You can see how things are going by how cool Netflix and WBD are playing this while Paramount/Ellison are making desperate plays and throwing tantrums about the whole process.
For what it's worth, this hostile takeover attempt is basically dead in the water unless WBD's shareholders are especially stupid. Netflix only wants the studio part of WBD, with Discovery being spun off into its own thing which can be sold off separately, which would net said shareholders much more than what Paramount is offering for the whole thing.
But Ellison wants all of it, not just Discovery, but Netflix doesn't want the cable side, so they have a better offer unless the shareholders are really undervaluing the Discovery side, which I doubt. It also doesn't help that splitting up WBD into seperate entities for more buyout profit was Zazlav's plan from the start (but Paramount was aggressively pushing to buy out the whole thing) and apparently he really hates Ellison and doesn't like that there's Saudi money involved.
The fact that the link in the article is indeed a valid, working dedicated site for hosting "pirated" copies of these games and it hasn't been taken down in nearly a decade says a lot about how much the potential "rightsholders" genuinely do not give a damn about this series.
Feels like copyright law should have stipulations for cases like this, especially considering how long terms are right now - corporations shouldn't be sitting on copyrights doing absolutely nothing with them like dragon hoards.
The most straightforward solution is to just stuff all "placeholder" materials into a folder called "PLACEHOLDER" in your project, and then delete the folder when you're getting close to concluding development. This is especially useful with engines like Unreal, which will actively tell you if those assets are being referenced by anything so you can replace the references. That being said, depending on the size of the project, that might require strict project management to ensure that team members are putting placeholder assets in the right place. And sometimes someone might get lazy and use AI generation without telling anyone, which can be frustrating.
For what it's worth, the Democrats probably will impeach after the midterms, especially if they regain control of the senate. But right now it'll likely not even get a floor vote. That's pretty much the reason why they haven't tried impeaching Trump a third time. The Jan 6th impeachment got the most senate votes for conviction in history, but possibly not as many as could be because McConnell punted the whole thing until the new congress when Trump was out of office anyway, making it easier for Republicans to justify voting for acquittal. Unfortunately, the vote threshold to convict was set up at a time when many of the founding fathers had active disdain for the concept of political parties and the idea of today's hyper-partisanship was virtually unthinkable. The only time when it was really possible was during Nixon's tenure, only for him to resign willingly and get pardoned by his successor. Fox News was literally established in response to Watergate, by political operators who wanted to make sure that another Republican president would never be brought down in the same way again. The US constitution and systems of government need major reforms. It would be difficult to enact, but trying and failing is better than not trying at all.
I think you're worrying a bit too much here. Trump was elected on the back of the inflation-driven anti-incumbent wave that destroyed multiple incumbent governments in elections around that time period, on top of Biden's advanced age, Harris having a limited time to establish herself in the public sphere as the Democrat candidate and her refusal to form a clean break from herself and Biden - rightly or wrongly, people perceived Biden as having not done nearly enough on inflation and cost of living issues. Trump has done literally nothing to deal with affordability issues, if anything he's only made things worse, and the electorate have noticed that in a big way. The other thing to keep in mind that Trump has a cultural foothold few other people have, and a bizarre "charisma" that draws a specific type of voter that normally doesn't turn out for elections. When he's not on the ballot, the Republicans tend to do horribly (and they're already doing really badly in special elections). Trump literally can't run again, all of his potential successors have the charisma of a dead fish (the very idea of JD Vance running as the GOP nominee is hilarious, he has no fucking chance in hell), and Trump in his second term is now so unpopular already that anyone associated with his administration will have him as an albatross around their necks. I'm not exaggerating when I say that 2028 may end up being a shoe-in for the Democrats - even the worst viable candidate would trounce anyone the Republicans might nominate. Hell, it might be the best possible opportunity for someone like AOC to take a shot at it. And that's not even getting into how much the Democrats can do if they have the senate alongside a Dem president post-2028, which would likely mean the death of the filibuster, establishing DC as a state, major voting reforms that Biden couldn't pass because of Manchin and Sinema, Medicare-For-All (or even just a public option), etc.
It should be noted that nobody wants to watch Fox News Lite when the real thing is right there. It's partly why CBS and CNN's viewership is already in the toilet. I wouldn't be surprised if the big cable news players eventually just end up being Fox News and MS NOW. Nowadays only Fox News, CNN and MS NOW are actually treated as notable players when it comes to reporting on ratings from my cursory check, CBS isn't even on the radar anymore.
Yeah, it looks like someone high up at the DOJ (probably Pam Bondi herself) thought Trump would get mad if he found out and ordered the lawyers to walk back the dismissal. Not surprising.
His argument that AI tools have gotten better feels hollow when he's an AI evangelist who is actively ignoring that LLMs still regularly hallucinate, and even coding LLMs are basically useless for anything more complex than boilerplate code. The AI industry has a problem in that people just don't want to pay for their products, either because what's free is enough or they don't see the value in the paid subscriptions. No wonder the evangelists are desperately trying to hype this tech up as much as possible, but it's a fool's errand, considering the ridiculous amount of investment going into the industry but with barely any actual revenue made from it. I just want to see the bubble burst already.
For what it's worth, Persona was only an experimental provider specifically for the UK. Discord have said that they plan only to use on-device age verification methods that do not send identifying information off-device. Said verification methods will probably be easy to foil, but eh.
I guarantee they would be singing a different tune if Pretti had been black. When the Black Panthers asserted their right to bear arms in public, the NRA supported gun control.
It's less "congress" that's the problem and more the Republicans. The Democrats know this is completely insane. They'd try to impeach Trump again in a heartbeat if they had control of both houses. But the Republicans? They're either deep in the sauce, are afraid of being primaried, or are terrified of being targeted by Trump's insane base who have proven they are willing to murder people seen as Trump's enemies. It's complete lunacy, but the Republicans have been utterly captured by a president who is losing his marbles in real time but has a stranglehold on the party's base. This is another reason why a two-party "big tent" system sucks for everyone who isn't rich as balls.
*placeholder folder
Diligent commit checking helps with that, at least, and depending on the engine it's way easier to know what's still being used than it used to be. Unreal Engine lets you see what each thing is referencing or being referenced by, and if you delete something the engine will warn you if it's being referenced by anything else in the project. You'll know if something's actually being used if you try to delete the entire placeholder project and if that warning pop-up occurs. But yeah, it is one of the biggest pains in the ass when it comes to project management.
It's a multifaceted problem, really - not only do you need to actually be sure that something is AI-generated or not, which can be hard to do sometimes, but if you just wanna use AI-generated materials as placeholders, you really want to be absolutely sure they're not in the final product. (Personally for the latter I would just have a big fat "PLACEHOLDER" folder that all AI-generated materials should go into that should be completely deleted by the time the game goes gold.) There's also the potential ethical issues at play. In that vein, I can see why Tim Bender would rather not deal with any of that shit and be able to keep things relatively simple if something generated does somehow end up in a project.
Machine learning absolutely has some useful purposes, especially in fields like medical science. Generative AI, though? There's a reason why it's so reviled. There is no inherent creativity, it just regurgitates the material it is trained on, and the results are okay at best rather than great, even with direct human intervention, but are more often than not absolute crap. Concept artists largely agree that generated images as references are more detrimental than helpful. And despite what you might argue about the technicalities of training data, artists still consider it to be stealing and disrespectful to the actual work of artists. Is generative AI neat for messing around with? Maybe handy for search or formatting some text? Sure, beyond that, it's just a fancy toy. By and large, AI-generated content is very rarely anything more than just slop.
Those particular offers aren't equivalent - Netflix is only paying $83B for just the Warner part of WBD, while Paramount is paying $108B, but for the entire company, and significantly devaluing Discovery in their bid, which is unacceptable to both the Warner board and shareholders, hence why Netflix's bid keeps prevailing.
Democrats have stated that they intend to cause problems for any Paramount/WBD merger and may even act to dismantle it if they return to power (which at this rate is increasingly likely, considering the bloodbath that'll happen in the midterms and Trump having no heir apparent who can feasibly win an election), so that's something, at least. Also, Paramount might not even get CNN. According to recent reporting (which I can't find the link to right now), WBD is looking to sell off Discovery to a particular investment manager who is known for deftly handling debt-leveraged assets, and Zazlav is basically offloading all of WBD's debt onto Discovery (which is why Paramount is devaluing the Discovery part in its bid for the whole company, whereas Zazlav wants to sell off Discovery for a lot more than Paramount is offering).
I never thought I'd see a positive version of malicious compliance these days, but this is absolutely perfect. Trying to kill the story five minutes before it goes live was inevitably going to cause it to leak. And now if it goes up at all, any chances will be scrutinized and turned into an even greater controversy. I love it.
However, generative AI isn't even useful for concept art, at least in most cases. This article brings up the perspective of actual concept artists, and they all say generated "artwork" only makes their jobs harder. Part of it is due to warped expectations from clients (for example, the vast majority of concept art is relatively basic rather than big fancy renders but clients expect the latter), but in general the consensus is that these generative models lack originality, require concept artists to figure out where the "inspirations" for each generation came from (which only adds to their workload), and takes out the "discovery" part of exploring concepts that is vital to creating new and interesting ones. Generating placeholder assets? We've already seen how that can cause problems, since they can be potentially "good enough" for studios to accidentally forget to replace, and later cause controversy when players notice them. We've already seen this happen with Expedition 33 and The Alters. Coding? "Coding assistants" more often than not tend to spit out poor-quality output that programmers need to fix anyway. And production-level content is right out. People will notice, and it's never as good as actual human artistry. I've only found one "productive" use for generative AI in game development that doesn't just add more work for people in the long run - generating placeholder voice lines, assuming you put them all in a "placeholder" folder that you ensure is completely deleted by the end of production, with all references to said placeholders replaced with actual production voice lines. And even then that's not exactly new, it's just a fancier version of using text to speech. Generative AI is mostly just popular in the c-suite rather than with actual developers or gamers. A Quantic Foundry poll shows that 85% of gamers have a negative perception of generative AI, with 62% saying they had a "very negative" attitude towards it. "This technology simply isn’t going away" is one thing, but who will use it seriously when developers hate using it and gamers hate seeing the output?
Paramount only has a higher offer at first glance, but they're bidding for all of WBD, whereas Netflix just wants the Warner portion (the studios and such) not the Discovery part (the cable stuff). Splitting the company up is something Zazlav massively prefers, since he and the shareholders will get more money out of it, and Paramount by their own admission are greatly undervaluing Discovery compared to what WBD thinks it's worth, which won't go down with the shareholders. It's a large part of why Paramount's bid is being consistently rejected, and any attempt at a hostile takeover is a long shot at best. You can see how things are going by how cool Netflix and WBD are playing this while Paramount/Ellison are making desperate plays and throwing tantrums about the whole process.
For what it's worth, this hostile takeover attempt is basically dead in the water unless WBD's shareholders are especially stupid. Netflix only wants the studio part of WBD, with Discovery being spun off into its own thing which can be sold off separately, which would net said shareholders much more than what Paramount is offering for the whole thing. But Ellison wants all of it, not just Discovery, but Netflix doesn't want the cable side, so they have a better offer unless the shareholders are really undervaluing the Discovery side, which I doubt. It also doesn't help that splitting up WBD into seperate entities for more buyout profit was Zazlav's plan from the start (but Paramount was aggressively pushing to buy out the whole thing) and apparently he really hates Ellison and doesn't like that there's Saudi money involved.
The fact that the link in the article is indeed a valid, working dedicated site for hosting "pirated" copies of these games and it hasn't been taken down in nearly a decade says a lot about how much the potential "rightsholders" genuinely do not give a damn about this series. Feels like copyright law should have stipulations for cases like this, especially considering how long terms are right now - corporations shouldn't be sitting on copyrights doing absolutely nothing with them like dragon hoards.