Jacob Norr

The discourse around Big Walk has made it abundantly clear to me that all existing AI discourse revolves around how poorly introduced AI was. Instead of focusing on a tools-first approach, AI companies focused on stupid content generation shit which produced some of the worst garbage ever seen on the internet. Time for a stupid rant about AI from me. I want to make a few things clear: - Yes, all reasonable people agree that AI generated artwork/media is soulless garbage in its current state. Unless there was substantial effort on the part of the human behind it (e.g. the shape store) it has no original vision or cohesion. - Programming can 100% be an artform. But it also covers a wide breadth of technical knowledge. Even with my own CSCI degree, there's still a lot of shit that I personally didn't know how to do, and there weren't a lot of great on-boarding guides out there for those things. - House House did not do anything wrong here, they are airing far more on the side of caution than they frankly need to at this point. I think their reluctance to disclose this was justified given how massively overblown the reaction has been. They frankly shouldn't have done so. -- Programming and Art both have incredibly monotonous elements to them. Art is a lot more freeform and expressive, but programming at scale (especially in gamedev) is a logistical clusterfuck where you have to juggle dozens, if not hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of things around with all sorts of rigid scripts and build chains, configurations, etc. No one is having fun writing a CMake file, no one enjoys writing python scripts to organize and curate data, even if it's something they're good at. Programmers have complained for years about the logistical bullshit they have to deal with, and now they don't have to. This is the key difference between the shitty generative usage everyone knows AI for, and the pragmatic usage of AI as a tool that programmers are using it for. Generative AI art literally only exists for cynical reasons, and it deserves the hate it gets. It actually puts people out of a job, and doesn't function as a tool to accelerate artists in any way, merely to replace them. Programmers aren't replaced by AI, they are accelerated by it. We can use generative AI to rapidly drive the creation of scripts and toolchains to solve logistical problems much faster than we'd normally be able to on our own, allowing us to focus less on monotonous bullshit, and more on the fun elements of system archetyping, technical design, and steering all of the logistics together. Instead of needing to hand-write all our scripts, we can just describe the problems we're trying to solve, provide contextual files, and it can stitch everything together. It also grants a wider scope of accessibility to the breadth of technical knowledge in the industry, some of which is gatekept behind being in said industry. If there are things that we may not actually know how to do (because it's low-level or system specific), the agent has a deep knowledge resouvoir it can tap into. Then we can review it, restylize it by hand to understand it, and start iterating by hand from there. Having performance problems? The agent is good at finding shit and optimizing. Having trouble finding a bug? Describe it and the agent can look through the code and work out what the problem likely is, and it can even test the code and build isolated test cases to get things working as intended. It's a wonderful tool that saves a lot of mental strain. For people like me with limited attention and energy, it helps a fuck ton. -- Anyway, my point isn't to shill AI, it's your choice whether you use it or not. My focus here was more illustrating why AI is different for programmers versus artists. Ultimately, this moral grandstanding over other people's choice to use AI to assist in their work has become so overblown that it's genuinely irritating. If you refuse to play a game just because someone has interacted with AI in the course of development, then you might as well get mad at them for using Google, or stack overflow, or books instead of paying someone to solve their problem instead. Clearly we're so fucking deep into late stage capitalism, money always has to be a barrier to solving problems. And if your issue is with how much electricity and water is being consumed, push for all of that generative shit to be priced out in favor of AI as a tool for accelerating human hands in the creation of content. I agree that we should not be building compute centers in people's backyards, but the water consumption is a distration from things that are causing far more harm on the environment.