I'm sorry but things like 1001 Nights, an 'AI-native game' currently being promoted-but-not-sold on Steam, are harmful. They are. It being someone's personal interest or student project or research doesn't alter this fact. I don't have 'discomfort' about it, I want it to be destroyed.
Unlike some people who talk about this, I have actual skin in the game. I have spent years building skills that a lot of people with money now want to replace with a shitty imitation. One person's idle curiosity is another person's existential threat. You can't normalize and legitimize GPT and expect me to care about why you're doing it.
Because capitalists view tools like GPT as a weapon to use against people like me.
Because the way the tool itself is built is profoundly unethical.
Because the people who are building the tool, or at least the leadership thereof, are ideologues of an insane right-wing death cult.
Because today's 'little experiments' are justifications and stalking horses for larger-scale destruction of people's livelihoods and the creative craft those livelihoods are built on.
Because you're an useful idiot and a mark, and the instant OpenAI thinks it doesn't need people like you it'll pull the plug on whatever API you're using and make it vastly too expensive to access for any indie team. How do you think this is going to go? Do you think they're going to subsidize you forever? Do you think OpenAI actually wants to be spending money running those servers so your cutesy little 'indie game' can keep running? Do you think water and electricity grow on trees?
You can't claim 'well, I'm not trying to make the world worse' while actively being subsidized by, and in turn promoting, an organization that absolutely is. You can't take free compute power from the fucking machine cult nazis and be like 'uwu i'm just a small bean engineer pursuing things that seem interesting to me'.
So my reaction to people involved with these projects is: Okay, cool. You think your special interest matters more than my life.
I don't think it's smart or nuanced to pretend like this isn't the case. I'm not interested in passively ignoring and enabling as more and more people in the industry decide to compromise on this. I see 1001 Nights has a bunch of festival and event seals on their Steam page. I think those event organizers fucked up profoundly.
The creators of projects like these have no doubt been told some version of this argument many, many times. But they don't care. They care more about... what, exactly? What is a project like 1001 Nights meant to demonstrate or prove? What are you trying to learn?
Because it feels very much like the end goal is to demonstrate that you can use chatGPT to substitute for hiring writers. Which is to say: fuck you, buddy.
It's not as bad as last year (where there were a few more AI/"metaverse"-related games on show iirc), but 1001 Nights being at AMaze Berlin right now is kinda just a frustrating reminder that there's a deep-set naiveté with the people making selections for a space that should be celebrating deeply human artistic works.
not to assume someone else's argument, but I think that the claim that AI is not inherently destructive/harmful is not about AI specifically in game development, it's about the applications it can have beyond that, with capitalism being a reason that it's being leveraged towards such harm.
within your own comparison, I'd say it's more similar to saying "you don't hate nuclear reaction, you hate militarism". because just as how nuclear power can be a huge source of less-harmfully-produced energy, AI can have valuable application, just not so much in creative fields. I'd love to see what it can be used to accomplish in broader applications where it isn't just a means to replace human labor, but moreso a tool that can be used to accomplish tasks otherwise not feasible.
