Isaiah D. K.

Muser | Storyteller | Tinkerer | Toymaker | Interloper | Outcast

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

Does the finite and fleeting nature of our lives make us kinder or crueler?

#thoughts #humanity #mortality

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@SandyofCthulhu Dude. You just made an excuse to justify literal pricey based on a facile lie and encouraged people to do it!

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

A fundamental issue with human perception is the lack of a true, objective view of reality. We all process reality though our own imperfect models built from limited personal experience and knowledge.

Awareness of this would seem to be a good thing, but it often causes one to doubt everything and form a very critical view of your own beliefs and abilities, which can be debilitating.

How can one have a positive belief of anything when one knows it's imperfect and possibly wrong? But how is a negative belief any more "real" than a positive one?

Research into the topic appears to show that "positive illusions" are not only beneficial but likely essential to personal flourishing. However, I think it would be more helpful to use the traditional concept of faith or hope here instead. As they don't carry any negative connotations.

The happiest and most fulfilled people I've ever seen or met all have these "positive illusions", which any miserable "realist" will openly mock as foolish. But who is to say the latter is any less delusional than the former? Just in a much more harmful way.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@Weston_Mitchell Players are free to add tags to any game and report existing ones. If a tag gets enough reports, it will be removed. Devs can also blacklist tags.

A much bigger issue is the completely useless recommendation and "similar to" features, which are somewhat related.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

The dot-com bubble is a perfect example of what we're going through right now: A rush of idiots trying to capitalize on some powerful new tech that nobody fully understands yet and doing it all wrong. Making it look utterly stupid to the old guard.

The real victors of these kinds of bubbles are those smart and open-minded enough to ignore the noise and learn the true power of the new tech before it becomes common knowledge.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@cmuratori Sorry. I thought your deviation into ethics and subjective feelings, while you admitted the lack of a definitive explanation/defense, meant you now realized the complexity of the situation.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@djpharoh2 @cmuratori Yes.

This is an excellent example of protected fair use of copyrighted material through transformative work. However, the Mona Lisa itself and many, if not all, of the famous paintings used would be public domain anyway.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@Grummz "originality is the art of concealing your source"

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@cmuratori I'm glad you're now starting to see that the issue isn't as absurdly simplistic as you presented.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

A more accurate analogy here would be an artist going to a library and learning from borrowed books. He may have returned the copyrighted works when done, but the knowledge he learned from them is still stored in his mind.

So is using such a mind to create new works illegal?

Many will disagree with this framing, but the only solution I'm seeing presented is to require every creator prove their works are not based on any "stolen" knowledge. Otherwise, everyone is justified in literally stealing from them.

It's the most astoundingly irrational and ironic "anti-piracy" stance I've ever seen. I know the idea is to scare creators away from using AI, but the reality is it will only make consumers paranoid and emboldened to harm them.

[Casey Muratori @cmuratori]

Just want to make sure people understand what they are arguing, because I've seen this argument come up, and it is not fact-based. The AI tools most commonly used today were not trained exclusively on publicly available and/or purchased books, films, and games. It was trained on literally pirated works. Multiple major AI providers have admitted to this in court already.

And it is not as if modern AIs were trained on one or two pirated things, but potentially millions of them. We do not currently know exactly how many, because the furthest-along case (Anthropic) settled out-of-court for a billion-dollar settlement.

So just to be clear, the argument being made in the quote below - while an argument we could (and perhaps should) have in the future - is not one we need to have right now, because it is irrelevant to the current facts. We can confine ourselves today to arguing about literal piracy - the analogy is if artists usually learned to draw by going to the bookstore, stealing all the books there without paying for them, and bringing them home to keep.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@Mk2Sektor @cmuratori What precisely is "theft" here and why is it acceptable for less critical aspects of a game, like the mechanics that actually define it...?

[Jo @junker_jo]

They’re using the guy beheading your brother in the street to distract you from your real enemy: Jeff Bezos delivering medicine to your front door overnight

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

Knowledge is indeed power, but such power burdens one with a responsibility there is no escape from.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@esrtweet @yacineMTB Telling people to simply "get better" is the most idiotic advice possible.

At least be somewhat helpful in your dunking and link to resources that will help them learn HOW to improve.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

Accessible game creation platforms have been tried and failed numerous times already. It's because of the common misconception that if you just make it easy to create them, everyone and their grandma will start producing amazing stuff, but that's not what happens.

True creativity and craftsmanship are rare and difficult. So you just end up with a few decent creators on the platform slowly drowning in a sea of garbage, and AI automation will only make this worse.

Most people just want to consume because they don't want entertainment to be their job. Combine this with the fact that short-form content is destroying our minds and AI automation will allow the production of a million instant ripoffs of whatever is trending, and you have a recipe for disaster.

So I somewhat hope this and other projects like it do indeed fail for the sake of all humanity, because otherwise I think we're headed down a very dark path blinded by greed.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

The next big social platform won't start with photos or videos. It will start with games.

https://t.co/EOEBWDUx2D is the TikTok for user-generated games: anyone can play, create, publish, and monetize.

In 5 days, they hit 1M organic plays across 3,000 games.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough
I just knew too much

— CeeLo Green, Crazy

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

A lack of responsibility isn't freedom.

Freedom comes from responsibility.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@MauLer93 Actually, highly intuitive design is superior to both, but variable player skill and intelligence levels makes it difficult to achieve.

I think the best comprise is to make these accessibility features, but keep them optional. That way the onus is always on the player.

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

@georgebsocial gifs uploaded to X are actually converted to mp4s. So watching people do that here is quite painful. 😬

[Isaiah D. K. @IsaiahKelly]

This is the most nuanced and levelheaded take on AI from an industry leader I've heard, and it's refreshing.

AI's greatest strength is indeed its ability to replicate. However, he's a little too eager to dismiss it as a non-issue and an actual weakness. The claim that "derivative properties don't work" is simply absurd.

The most successful video games and genres today are all derivative. Even more absurd is the suggestion that large corporations have a monopoly on human creativity and market success. But of course he has to make such ridiculous claims to soothe shareholders' fears.

Yes. Creativity and innovation are vital to creating new hit properties, but that's not the same as protection of an existing property, and AI will eventually empower creative individuals to implement their "derivative" visions far quicker than any monolithic corporation can by its very nature.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

The CEO of Take-Two, the company behind GTA, just said something the entire AI industry doesn't want to hear.

And he said it without being anti-AI.

Strauss Zelnick's argument is precise. AI is built on datasets. Datasets are backward-looking. Creativity is forward-looking. A model trained on everything that already exists cannot, by definition, produce something genuinely unexpected. And all hits, by their very nature, are unexpected.

Asset creation and hit creation are not the same thing. AI is getting very good at the first one. The second one is what actually makes money, builds franchises, and changes culture. Nobody has shown AI can do that yet.

The derivative property problem is real. You can clone GTA with existing technology. You could do it before AI. It would take 3 years and look identical. It still wouldn't sell. Because it isn't GTA. It's a clone of GTA.

And consumers, despite what the industry occasionally pretends, can feel the difference between something genuinely new and something assembled from the residue of things that already worked.

Thousands of mobile games ship every year. 0 to 5 hits get made. The same studios make them every time. The technology to make more games has been commoditized for years. It didn't democratize hit creation. It just flooded the market with more forgettable product.

The Silicon Valley thesis that AI unlocks game creation for everyone is true in the same way that cheap cameras unlocked filmmaking for everyone. They did. And the same 5 studios still make the movies everyone watches.

What Zelnick is saying, without quite saying it, is that the thing AI cannot replicate is taste. The instinct for what hasn't been done yet. The cultural antenna that detects the gap in the market before the data can see it.

Data tells you what people wanted. Hits tell people what they want next.

Those are different jobs.