the journalist who wrote the larian + gen ai piece released the full, more contextual transcript on blsky, but what i find hilarious is that he was surprised by fan backlash at gen ai being construed in the negative?
everyone (including myself) has talked about the issue of relying on gen ai; it's disrupting the creative process, stunting the ability to brainstorm, its borderline deceptive since they can say 'technically our game has no ai in it's final product' and can bypass the 'ai badge' on platforms like steam (which coe33 did too, sadly), and it's also affecting concept artists. not to mention the ethical qualms of 'generating' from appropriated art that is not named for its source or mindful of resource wasteage--
did you know Micron has pulled out of supplying and manufacturing consumer-based RAM in favour of working exclusively with ai companies?
did you know that Samsung has predicted a 100% price increase in consumer-based RAM already?
this means electronics which use RAM [basically all of modern tech.] are going to become considerably more expensive (not even adding the ethics of coltan/lithium mining to this list).
did you know many electric grids are not designed to accommodate this amount of strain from data farms--and they do not use renewable and sustainable energy sources at high enough levels to offset the damages of fossil burning?
china is the only pioneer in the sustainable electrical grid market atm (that i am aware of)--and because of their 10-year dev plan in alt. energy sources, they produce excess electricity and charge data centres half the price that American/European grids do? did you know that large companies don't have to pay more for their electricity use most of the time, the supplier just hikes up the prices for ALL users, so Microsoft and Google pay the same amount as you do, and based on the fact many of us aren't giant corporations, we technically pay MORE since we have to work more and spend less of the revenue elsewhere.
and don't even dream about the Global South having infrastructure to support any of this, many of those countries deal with daily load shedding!
anyway, i digress, because i wanted to talk about the fact that I'm tripped out a bit by the 'filler text' bit.
I especially don't like the very vague and ambiguous use of the phrase "filler text" in early design, character and narrative development because as someone who drafts and proofs endlessly, but often relies on a mini txt file with story beats or dialogue boxes I'm saving for future scenes, it's often very easy to forget the fidelity of your text if you don't explicitly mark it. I've sometimes plagiarised MYSELF and sometimes I'll write things down and forget to reference where the quote is (and because Google doesn't work anymore and I have limited access to good scholarly search archives this year, sometimes I end up stonewalling and then have to discard the use of a quote or reference because it wasn't thoroughly logged -- human error!
but a machine or LLM won't have this precontext or 'moral' predicament around its text generation, and game dev department communication is notorious for never really being on the same page or being done P2P; emails and memos and notes are messy and limited forms of communication.
So when they say filler text, we also have to factor human forgetfulness, LLMs lack of referencing, plagiarism, and the possibility of errors on two fronts from as EARLY as the concept stage. That's wild. And if gen ai is used for the conceptual bits too, that means that sometimes the text material will not engage with the art material at a core level. I've read that fromsoftware (elden ring specifically) is exceptional at adding the lore and worldbuilding into character designs like armour or fabrics or weapons etc--that nuance will be affected to, because no one will be thinking about that nuance (because it is so microscopic).
personally (ethically, artistically, morally and based on the fact that machine learning is just blatant, wide-spread, uncontrolled consumption, regurgitation and exploitation of human input and output--passion and drive), i do not support or care to condone and be a participant in any art spaces that use gen ai, chat gpt, llms or other destructive, disenfranchising, and displacing technologies.
where I could understand (and still not condone) using LLMS or ai in text is for text or character fidelity (to ensure tone is consistent) -- but then again, writing is eclectic, acerbic, romantic, soapy, contextual, stylised, misleading, grotesque, picturesque, etc., etc. a character doing something out of character or having a rapid declaration or acceleration in verve or passions, or lack there of, could be ACTIVE story telling beats used to aid character development or devolution in a narrative, i.e: traumas overwhelming a stoic character causing them to break out of their perceived norm, trickery, manipulation, forms of fantastical representations of loss of sanity/autonomy, etc. so fidelity texting could also be a hinderance. a limitation. plateauing. in this case, i could simply argue: why machine when you can have beta readers, proofers, game/play testers?
another use I could understand is as an aid in rendering, airbrushing, asset building, smoothing or touching up on hastily drawn or modelled assets because of limited time constraints to alleviate artist pressures (but, then again, it could be argued that hiring more artists would alleviate this pressure, and a longer production time would help, too).
So for every "understandable" use of ai, there's a drawback--and a very normal, human alternative.
and that's why I'm disappointed but also baffled that the excuses given were somehow supposed to make things less dire or serious? in the end, it just came off as shady, insincere and callous!
that said, environmental bodies are being omitted from the discussion by devs (they speak of voice actors and mocap and writers--but not water and electricity and the ecosystem).
this generation is suffering from irresponsible resource use and the strain on the electricity grid -- YOUR ELECTRICITY GRID THAT YOU RELY ON IN SUMMER AND WINTER AGAINST HEAT STROKE AND FREEZING TEMPERATURES! THAT YOU RELY ON FOR BANKING AND THE HOSPITAL AND COMMUNICATION AND STORAGE AND PERISHABLES.
ontop of all this, we have media monopolies, we have streaming being pushed but no ability to own things physically--we have impermanent opinions and sanitised media, we have a rise in propaganda and minimalism and fascist ideologies coming for queer and gender equality rights.
where are we going? what is the 'inevitable ai machine' paving? what is the end goal besides rich getting richer, poor getting poorer and hate being used to pit the status quo against the always-already-disenfranchised other?
SOME DISRUPTION SCENARIOS
Since many people think of terrorism in terms of destruction, with as much loss of life as the terrorists can manage, we have to examine some possibilities of disruption. In the following scenarios, the terrorists are seeking to disrupt, not destroy, and avoid unnecessary destruction. There's little destruction, and almost no loss of life.
ELECTRICAL NETWORK
One spring evening, while there is still enough light to see, a lone individual fires at a high-tension power line with a rifle and severs the cable. A high wind wraps the falling cable around another on the pole, causing a flash and shorting out the line. A circuit breaker at the generating station trips, and another safety shuts down the generator automatically to prevent damage. The entire west side of the city, with one hundred thousand inhabitants, loses electrical power. The people coming home from work find their lights won't go on, and their air conditioning and television sets don't work.
Those with battery-operated radios and TVs find they can't pick up all the stations, because many don't have emergency power supplies.
Traffic lights all go out at once, during the rush hour, and the police don't have enough manpower to direct traffic at any but a few intersections. Even the freeways are stalled, as cars getting off are stopped by the traffic jams in the streets and the pileups back up onto the freeway.
Police, fire stations, and hospitals all have emergency power and, after a short delay in starting up their emergency generators, can continue service.
A power company repair crew reaches the cut cable an hour after the power went off, and they repair the cable after an hour's work. The crew radios to the generating station that the cable is intact once more, and the staff at the station restarts the generators.
Many people had neglected to turn off their appliances when the power went off, and the large demand causes a sudden surge, causing some circuit breakers to trip and shut off power to some sections. These are re-set, and the area has power once again.
Meanwhile, the lone terrorist, having observed the progress of the situation, goes to an unmanned substation and fires a rifle bullet into a transformer, causing a short which results in the power failing again. Travel in the darkened streets is slow, and it takes him another hour to find a transformer at the top of a power pole, although he had earmarked it days before. He fires again, this time with no effect since the power is already off.
When the repair crew replaces the damaged transformer and tests the line, they find there's another interruption from the second damaged transformer. Having had only one spare transformer in stock, they can't replace this one.
Working through the night, the repair crew manages to isolate the area served by the second transformer from the network, and the power is on again, but not in the affected area. There is a delay of several days before a spare transformer is obtainable, and this area remains without power for that time.
...
This is a passage from Disruptive Terrorism by Victor Santoro, published in 1984. (I've owned this copy since 1992.) Since we're on Tumblr right now, I have little doubt that there's somebody around here who knows enough about power plants and grids to confirm or disprove how plausible this is in modern times. I'd love to hear from them so I'd appreciate it if you can help it reach them.
