Good games are orthogonal to AI usage. It’s possible to have a great game that was written with AI using AI-generated assets. Just as much as it’s possible to have a shitty one.

If AI makes creating games easier, we’re likely to see 1000 shitty games for every good one. But at the same time we’re also likely to see successful games made by people who had great ideas but never had the capital or skills to bring them to life before.

I can’t predict the future of AI but it’s easy to imagine a state where everyone has the power to make a game for basically no cost. Good or bad, that’s where we’re heading.

If making great games doesn’t require a shitton of capital, the ones who are most likely to suffer are the rich AAA game studios. Basically, the capitalists. Because when capital isn’t necessary to get something done anymore, capital becomes less useful.

Effort builds skill but it does not build quality. You could put in a ton of effort and still fail or just make something terrible. What breeds success is iteration (and luck). Because AI makes iteration faster and easier, it’s likely we’re going to see a lot of great things created using it.

FYI: Stuff like this is for automated testing, not “playing games for you” 🤣

Also, I won’t consider it realistic until it can type out, “lol git gud scrub” after ganking someone who just spawned.

Yet for some reason it still left me kinda hyped 🤷

I meant that the current reactor designs were made using AI running in big data centers with supercomputers/GPUs.

No! Which is why anyone and everyone should record every little thing they do. Everywhere they go. Everyone they talk to. Even conversations with their lawyers and doctors.

They have nothing to hide so it’s OK! Walk right up behind them and start recording. It’s fine!

When they leave their laptop somewhere without locking it, make sure to upload their browser history for the public to view.

Nothing to hide!

And I thought the gap between Overlord seasons was long!

Clearly, you do not understand THE POWER of corrugated cardboard!

8% of total global aviation emissions doesn’t put it in second place. It’s not even in the top 100. I don’t think it ever will be… Because building huge data centers takes years and by the time there’s enough data centers to make a huge dent, the previous AI data centers will have been used to make fusion power a reality.

Today’s fusion reactor designs were all made thanks to AI. The kind running in big data centers.

It takes a lot of computing power to simulate fusion reactor designs!

Impossible to untangle the knots in it.

Data centers typically use closed loop cooling systems but those do still lose a bit of water each day that needs to be replaced. It’s not much—compared to the size of the data center—but it’s still a non-trivial amount.

A study recently came out (it was talked about extensively on the Science VS podcast) that said that a long conversation with an AI chat bot (e.g. ChatGPT) could use up to half a liter of water—in the worst case scenario.

This statistic has been used in the news quite a lot recently but it’s a bad statistic: That water usage counts the water used by the power plant (for its own cooling). That’s typically water that would come from ponds and similar that would’ve been built right alongside the power plant (your classic “cooling pond”). So it’s not like the data centers are using 0.5L of fresh water that could be going to people’s homes.

For reference, the actual data center water usage is 12% of that 0.5L: 0.06L of water (for a long chat). Also remember: This is the worst-case scenario with a very poorly-engineered data center.

Another stat from the study that’s relevant: Generating images uses much less energy/water than chat. However, generating videos uses up an order of magnitude more than both (combined).

So if you want the lowest possible energy usage of modern, generative AI: Use fast (low parameter count), open source models… To generate images 👍

The power use from AI is orthogonal to renewable energy. From the news, you’d think that AI data centers have become the number one cause of global warming. Yet, they’re not even in the top 100. Even at the current pace of data center buildouts, they won’t make the top 100… ever.

AI data center power utilization is a regional problem specific to certain localities. It’s a bad idea to build such a data center in certain places but companies do it anyway (for economic reasons that are easy to fix with regulation). It’s not a universal problem across the globe.

Aside: I’d like to point out that the fusion reactor designs currently being built and tested were created using AI. Much of the advancements in that area are thanks to “AI data centers”. If fusion power becomes a reality in the next 50 years it’ll have more than made up for any emissions from data centers. From all of them, ever.

Historians of the future will mark this event as the beginning of the end of civilization.

Regulate data centers already! Make it mandatory that they be self-powered by renewable energy. Problem solved.

Finally, a listicle that could save lives Christmas.

👍

It’s even more complicated than that: “AI” is not even a well-defined term. Back when Quake 3 was still in beta (“the demo”), id Software held a competition to develop “bot AIs” that could be added to a server so players would have something to play against while they waited for more people to join (or you could have players VS bots style matches).

That was over 25 years ago. What kind of “AI” do you think was used back then? 🤣

The AI hater extremists seem to be in two camps:

• Data center haters
• AI-is-killing-jobs

The data center haters are the strangest, to me. Because there’s this default assumption that data centers can never be powered by renewable energy and that AI will never improve to the point where it can all be run locally on people’s PCs (and other, personal hardware).

Yet every day there’s news suggesting that local AI is performing better and better. It seems inevitable—to me—that “big AI” will go the same route as mainframes.

Most people—even obsessive gamers—don’t give two shits about AI. There’s a very loud minority that gets in everyone’s face saying all AI is evil like we’re John Connor or something. They are so obsessive and extreme about it, it often makes the news (like this article).

The market has already determined that if a game is fun, people will play it. How much AI was used to make it is irrelevant.

We learned this lesson in the 90s: If you put something on the (public) Internet, assume it will be scraped (and copied and used in various ways without your consent). If you don’t want that, don’t put it on the Internet.

There’s all sorts of clever things you can do to prevent scraping but none of them are 100% effective and all have negative tradeoffs.

For reference, the big AI players aren’t scraping the Internet to train their LLMs anymore. That creates too many problems, not the least of which is making yourself vulnerable to poisoning. If an AI is scraping your content at this point it’s either amateurs or they’re just indexing it like Google would (or both) so the AI knows where to find it without having to rely on 3rd parties like Google.

Remember: Scraping the Internet is everyone’s right. Trying to stop it is futile and only benefits the biggest of the big search engines/companies.

Your comparison is bad. Let’s say you have a religion that mandates all boys wear silly hats. Except that hats (of any kind) aren’t allowed to be worn during school. Especially not in elementary school.

Is the government overstepping by saying that boys cannot wear hats in school just because their religion says so? No.

I’ll just come out and say it: Religion isn’t important in school. That’s a personal thing that should stay at home.

From a government perspective, all religions are entirely made-up and completely arbitrary! You could declare yourself a Jedi and say you’re being discriminated against for not being able to carry dangerous weapons in school. Doesn’t matter: Your religion (Jedi) is completely unimportant to schooling. You don’t get an exception just because it’s a deeply held religious belief (or similar).

Governments should absolutely not give any religion special treatment. Why is it the government/school that must accommodate (sexist) religious beliefs and not the other way around? If your religion can’t handle girls going without their heads being covered that is a flaw in your religion. Obviously! It is completely inflexible and cannot withstand even the tiniest accomodation of not having girls cover themselves in public.

It’s so immodest for girls to put head scarves on in a society that doesn’t typically wear them! It’s like wearing a neon suit; drawing tons of attention to the person. It says, “look at me as I flaunt my religion!”

To some people headscarves represent sexism and oppression of women but that’s not actually the real (government) concern. As much as people want it to be some sort of persecution it’s so much simpler: Head coverings for young children are nothing but trouble (for schools)!

Keep all the (little) kids wearing similar clothes and no one can be singled out for that and teachers don’t have to worry about being accused of giving some kids special treatment because of their religion.

Neos, says the law is a “clear commitment to gender equality”, but critics say it will fuel anti-Muslim feeling…

If a religion is fundamentally incompatible with gender equality it deserves “anti… feelings.”

That goes for all religions. No reason to single out Muslims.

They need a modern equivalent for vaping.