Tim Sweeney claims it’s a “Scarlet Letter” which makes players “try to kill the game”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has criticised rival Valve for forcing studios to disclose when they use AI in game development.
Epic recently showed how it was integrating AI into Unreal Engine 6.
Time Sweeney said:
“If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you’ve got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game.
“I think it’s really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn’t do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success. You have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does.”
Which is totally ignoring the factor that the user should know about the purchase it makes and be able to decide for themselves. Transparency for the player is not a bad thing.
I don’t like Tim Sweeney, or Epic Games, but I agree with him in this. In the future everything will use AI to some extent, and labeling it as such is stupid. It’s like having a label for whether electricity was used, or whether computers were used. It will be meaningless in short order, and just slows down the entire industry by painting targets on games that are using modern development processes.
Besides, if the AI is THAT onerous, then you don’t need a tag to identify it. It should be obvious, right? Make decisions based on the quality of a game, not based on what tools were used to create the game.
I would liken it more to the GMO label than electricity. Sure, most foods today are made with some type of GMO ingredient and so requiring food manufacturers to disclose that means that most foods carry the scarlet letter of GMO. Most people don’t care and don’t look for it. For the people who do care, they’re able to find a different product with no GMO ingredients. It will be like the organic label for AI-free products.
That’s a good analogy. I don’t think it should be present for GMO food either, though. It shouldn’t be something that people care about in either case, and labeling it just makes them feel justified to hold onto their prejudice.
How does it slow it down?
AI for Art is basically a way for large companies to profit from other people’s work, and not pay for it (but mixing it up a bit). They could simply pay the artists for the assets, and it would be done faster…
Maybe the people whose work may have been stolen by AI wouldn’t be appreciative to pay for games that potentially use it instead of paying artists…
Also, its not a ban on AI work. It’s simply disclosure. Epic games is just trying to pick a fight about literally everything
It slows it down by causing developers to fear using the most efficient, productive tools because it will anger the irrational mob who down votes anything they disagree with, rather than whether or not it’s adding to a discussion.
If some creation is clearly a copy/paste of someone else’s work with only superficial changes then that is it’s own problem that can be dealt with in the same way that it would if some person had copied someone else’s work, and made superficial changes to claim it as their own. Art created using AI is not necessarily a copy of something existing, and it takes a skilled prompt writer to create their intention. People angry that a different skillset than is traditionally necessary to create art are being awnry gatekeepers in the same way that artists were at the advent of computer assisted drawing or computer generated imagery. New technology, same type of crybabies gatekeeping art creation.
I recognize that it’s not a ban, it’s just an unnecessary requirement in the current implementation. If it’s going to be done, at the very least categorize it so AI code generation is separated from the AI art generation, or other generative tools. I still assert that none of it should be necessary, and if it in some way lowers the quality of the creation then it will be readily apparent and can be judged based on the quality, not the method of creation itself.
AI is only capable of hastening our own murder by these techghouls with the heat and pollution it causes. Sure it’s neat sometimes. Is that worth the entire ecosystem and your food systems? If you say yes, you should seriously seek help.
That’s not true, it can be done using solar energy and closed loop cooling. Be angry with companies that are mismanaging it, not the technology itself.
In the future, exactly. Not quite today.
Yes, and the foot draggers want to keep us out of the future as long as possible, and this helps them to accomplish that.
Out of that future? Yes. Abso-fucking-lutely. You are describing literal hell. You are trying to upend and destroy every single thing that humanity has ever worked for or attained by STAINING AND CORRUPTING it with the hallucinations of rocks.
Get the actual fuck out of here.
Such hyperbole and vitriol. You’re obviously not a rational, thinking individual.
Save that level of hate for the fascists taking over the world, the industry/government leaders exacerbating climate change or something truly horrible. Not technological advancement.
Get the actual fuck out of here with your exaggeration and misplaced aggression.
Have you don’t any research on the environmental impacts of data centers? Please do.
I have. I oppose data centers. Not AI, which I use locally with solar power. The technology shouldn’t be castigated because of the actions of big players using it. That’s like being opposed to plastic surgery because of Mar-a-lago faces, when some use it to recover from debilitating injuries. Being anti-AI casts too large a net and stigmatizes those using it responsibility.
I don’t think that it is a responsible or logical thing to exponentially increase our energy needs while we are desperately (should be anyways) attempting to transition to renewable energy. AI consumes a ludicrous amount of energy for something that could almost always be done with a human.
That list is long. You could say the exact same thing about video games themselves. We should all be playing board games, so we don’t use electricity. We shouldn’t be driving vehicles, even electric ones, because we could walk somewhere instead. We shouldn’t be using computers, because we can calculate with pen and paper. We shouldn’t be using Christmas lights, and should use candles instead. Et cetera.