It's been used many times before, but I like the analogy of ordering food. If I go to a restaurant and order risotto, I haven't made the dish, I've only consumed it. I want you to focus on that word "consume", it's important here.

Another idea I've seen recently that I like was a summed post something like this:

• People use AI to write a 4,000 word article from a 15 word idea (introduction of noise)
• Others then use AI to summarize the 4,000 word article into a 15 word blurb (introduction of more noise)

I know I'm using a lot of analogies here; from food to writing and now the visual medium - but stick with me. Completely sidestepping any lofty notions of soul or humanity, let's look strictly at what's being communicated in a visual piece of art generated by AI. It's an idea, one containing neither your specific style (the creative process) or vision (the final product), though you may feel you get a close approximation after several iterations and a detailed/complex enough prompt. If you wanted to convey the idea of "eagle perched in a tree", you've already done so with that phrase (or prompt in this respect). By providing an AI-generated image, you've narrowed my own ability to interpret down into the AI-generated noise now taking up space between us.

The reason you'd use AI-generated art is because you need to fill space, like the thumbnail to go with an article. An empty space to dump things into. While I can't ever claim enough authority to define what exactly art is and is not (nobody can), I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how far the tech evolves, to me PERSONALLY, AI will only ever generate content, not art. There is already more art in the world than I could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes, I neither want nor need this garbage.

We could explain it to you, but you're not interested in understanding.

Same on all accounts. Got the original NES Metroid for my birthday when I was a kid and impacted my taste in games forevermore. Of course I've played all the Castlevanias as well and Hollow Knight is a masterpiece.

It's hard to properly compare because I've played Super Metroid more times than I honestly remember and have only made it through Dread 1.5x (at best). There are so many cool rooms in Super (and even later games like the Prime series) where I play them and go, "Oh, this is the room with X!" where X is a cool encounter, maybe a friendly/non-hostile creature, or an entertaining set piece. Dread doesn't really have that, the areas check off zones like flavors of ice cream, the music is not memorable, and creatures are often used across multiple zones, further diluting any uniqueness to the areas.

It's best summed up by this screenshot I took of Dread (I added the red outlines around the black space myself to highlight my point). Notice how the foreground has no character or texture and all the detail has been pushed into the background, which is essentially the negative space you traverse through. My eyes don't really hold on this area, they capture the boundary of the play space and then navigate through it, passing over a lot of the inconsequential stuff in the background. Again, compare to Super.

Also the EMMI stealth sections are so incongruous with the rest of the game you could cleanly slice them out entirely (while redistributing any of the power ups of course) and the game would be the same. In fact I rather hate them because instead of taking my time to explore and soak in the environment, I'm just chased through a very samey looking area.

Oh and finally, it's a small point and I don't want to make too much out of it, but like ... the game opens with SPOILERS beating her so hard she loses her abilities. That's weird, right? Kinda oof, IMHO.

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you've probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn't have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there's a big push (it'll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there's a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they're no longer "obligated" to provide support, they'll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who's worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they're closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They'll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that's capitalism baby.

Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it's instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.

This isn't solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.

It is an opinion piece and I'm not gonna pretend it's not heavily biased, but why shouldn't it be? What are the reasons to own a Cybertruck when the whole intent of the product feels like a pro-Elon circlejerk?

I'm an average consumer and shall we say, an Elon-disdainer. I don't like the man, though I have better things to do with my time than actively hate him. At first glance, it does not appear to even be a truck. It's wild and awful looking, it doesn't sell itself at all on the visuals alone so it had better have killer features. Which are ........ ?

Look, when you show up to my potluck with a literal crockpot full of shit, I don't feel the need to entertain you. "Is that literal shit?" I ask. "It's my grandmother's recipe!" you reply. "Well that may be, but is it literal shit? In a crockpot? Cooking all day?" "You haven't even tried it!"

I don't know why I have to justify not eating shit. Coming up with reasons not to blindly consume transparently bad products was not a position I felt I'd ever need to reason myself out of.

EDIT: sorry if that came off sounding too critical of you, I don't mean to attack you personally. But the shape of this discussion is a thorn in my side that sits at a particular junction between how we choose to see biases in media and modern consumerism and I think it warrants further investigation.

Disappointing, but somehow inevitable.

"This will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use it. "

So it sounds like the floodgates are opening and now it'll be up to the users to sort out the flood of BS. None of this is truly surprising, while I'm not cynical enough to suggest their temporary stance was a quick way to score some easy points with the anti-AI crowd, we all kind of have to acknowledge that this technology is coming and Steam is too big to be left behind by it. It stands to reason.

I also understand the reasoning for splitting pre/live-generated AI content, but it's all going to go in the same dumpster for me regardless.

I certainly think it's possible to use pre-generated AI content in an ethical and reasonable way when you're committed to having it reach a strong enough stylistic and artistic vision with editors and artists doing sufficient passes over it. The thing is, the people already developing in that way would continue to do so because of their own standards, they won't be affected by this decision. The people wanting to use generative AI to pump out quick cash grabs are the ones that will latch onto it, I can't think of any other base this really appeals to.

Almost as bad as the "Enable new feature? / Not now" options

No, NOT not now; never. Never.

Not gonna lie, that still felt a little dirty. But I already posted it to the internet and there's no going backsies.

Everything is tweets now, on all platforms; hear me out.

It might sound lazy, and I certainly have no loyalty to the Twitter brand, but if Musk isn't going to defend it we have the opportunity to dilute and generalize the term (like zipper or band-aid). We can kill it dead AND reclaim it.

It's a good word! Short, sweet, has familiarity, and is honestly pretty descriptive for the simple bird-like chatter of the discourse. Everything else proposed sounds dumb as hell, not to mention you're doing the marketing for them. Don't sell their brands - suffocate them!

I'd like to see evidence that he understands literally any other, smaller component of the universe first.

There's no reason, and there never, ever, ever will be. Ever.

There's a temptation for a lot of people to shrug their shoulders and admit to themselves that it's a complicated topic outside of their reach, but it's honestly not. Like any technology, there's two sides to it: the implementation and the execution. The implementation is admittedly quite complicated and even honestly a little cool if you're a techie, but the execution is very simple. We know it's an append only database with a fully public history. That's all it is. So ask yourself how you could ever make that an interesting part of a game that would entice players to ... anything really. At best/worst it'll be used to introduce artificial scarcity and value which most people who just want to have fun playing games aren't clamoring for.

But more to the point, anything stored in a database needs to be actionable by a governing body. In terms of videogames, this is the game itself. The game is the authority on what can and can't be done with the data stored in the blockchain, you can't change the rules of the game, they're hard coded. So why bother having it publicly available on the blockchain at all? Sorry, not sure if I'm making my points clear enough, but does that follow? There's zero benefit to the public blockchain vs. an internal database because the game is the final authority and going to action on it the same either way. Owning something on the blockchain is useless, anyone who knows anything about games at all always knew that line about transferring items between games is total BS.

Any cryptobros already furiously typing out a response, don't bother. I'll argue any worthwhile points you might try to make, but I've heard most of the arguments before and they just don't even bear responding to so ya know ...