Claymore-Even if that were true, we're not in an "industry" right now. It's a forum for a competitive niche for an old game and we can police content shared here. We don't have to adopt, encourage or platform this shit here. If someone's paid to shill it, they're welcome to go to Hacker News.
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I do believe we should, because this place isn't a forum for the general public. I believe raising awareness of the socioeconomic and cultural impacts of this technology is more than welcome. AI-boosters conveniently leave out or brush aside conversations regarding the impact and focus on the shiny new tools all the time, and I'm kind of tired of it, when we don't consider the theft that led to it, invasive datacenters disrupting communities, deskilling and psychosis induced by LLMs and GenAI or torrents of slop everywhere an upload form exists.
You can't play the "we are not in an industry we are in a forum for a niche game" card and then also advocate for talking about the negative aspects of this technology that reach far beyond this niche game. I haven't heard an actual good reason against going 1984 on these TF2 AI projects. A vast majority of what you mentioned doesn't affect TF2 in the slightest. Feel free to tell me what kind of impact these AI slop projects have on the game itself to warrant having the same negative reaction to it as if a multi billion company just released a vibecoded product they're trying to sell you. The reality is even a good chunk of players probably don't care, so there would be no point in trying to educate people on stuff like general AI ethics when often they don't even apply to some dude making a AI TF2 project in his free time.
Claymore-"Learn to work with it" as in become an auditor for a non-deterministic, median, stolen answer generator. Got it. Thing is, most people come here after work and they probably don't want to expose themselves to any more bullshit forced on them. It's already hard enough to filter it out from algorithimically-powered feeds (Hacker News is fucking destroyed, 80% of the frontpage is AI, every single day), but this isn't one of them.
I refuse to believe this is an actual take. The implication is that people are actively checking the "projects" section after work, which is obviously not true. On top of that there is a feature to unsubscribe from specific sections of this forum. Projects wouldn't even get any traffic at all if they didn't show up in recent discussion for everyone. Just filter it out if it bothers you, it's the only forum section with AI content.
Claymore-Cars had fairly obvious benefits to using a real animal for transportation and have proven themselves practical and of great utility, even to your average Joe. I do not see the same thing being the case with AI, even if you claim that the whole industry is using it (though not everyone being forced to use it, is that impressed by it). I'm not sure how any of this is worth trillions of dollars or how we should ignore the absurd scale of theft that led to it.
No, they were hated in the beginning and got more popular over time. You think the average joe could afford a car in during that time? Anyway the point being is that you can't stop progress. All this talk about artisan craftsmanship, intellectual theft, ethics, etc. is very noble, but ultimately pointless. The fight is already over. This is why I'm saying learn to work with it. You are gonna get left behind. Your employer only cares about money, your customers only want a working product. Nobody ever cared about the code under the hood being an amalgamation of the worst programming warcrimes known to mankind. So nothing has changed realistically. You are actively worsening your own mental by trying to maintain some sort of principles regarding AI when nobody else in real life does. I'm quite fond of people pushing back against companies that try to integrate AI content, however this ONLY ever happens online.
ZestyOther people have made similar points but I think this is a really poor argument. It basically just boils down to "companies will will use any means to increase its profits and the consumer doesn't care so there's nothing you can do to compel them to stop". You could just as well make the same argument for industries using sweatshops or modern slave labour, but we do make an attempt to regulate these and other things that increase productivity but lower people's working conditions.
Yes they do and yes the consumer couldn't care less.
Also AI is hardly comparable to slave labour. You can't tell me Nike using AI content would be the same as Nike utilizing bangladeshi children to produce cheap sneakers. Also, you are aware that these regulations exist but they only ever get enforced if they get caught, right? And even then they get a slap on the wrist with an arbitrary fine. These regulations exist to appease you, the big companies don't give a fuck about them. On top of that the consumer doesn't care about any of that either. People only speak up if it goes viral so they can feel good about themselves, just to order $200 worth of temu the next day. I don't really see how AI has lowered peoples working conditions anyway? Maybe the expectation for accelerated productivity. But surely you don't believe that a system built on always increasing the bottom line will ever regulate that part, right?
ZestyIf your breadwinning is affected by AI, then if you're lucky your job stays but the expectation becomes that you're far more productive and your job becomes cleaning up large amounts of slop that the AI generates. If you're a person that's spent time building a career in a subject that you're passionate about then this changes your job to kind of a miserable middle management role that also requires far less expertise, so you become inherently more replaceable. If you're one of the unlucky ones your job is replaced entirely, which is the stated goal of AI for around 40% of the population. People love to talk about the industrial revolution and AI creating new kinds of jobs, but historically these new kinds of jobs can take decades to centuries to manifest (often after a lot of public pushback that sometimes gets quite nasty), and in the short term (a working persons remaining lifespan), these types of technological revolutions just push a lot of people into poverty.
This is why I advise that people need to learn to work with it. One of the rare positive aspects of this whole bullshit is that the level of competition is declining rapidly. Because for whatever reason people can only think of two possible ways: 0% AI used or 100% AI used. You rarely hear from people that use it as an addition, as a tool to accelerate their workflow for example. If you manage to use it to enhance your efficiency you are probably already better than 80% of the current workforce. If your only value is to be the meat proxy you already lost. I agree it's annoying that a field you had passion for got sloppified, but to be completely honest your employer didn't ever give a fuck about that anyway. Anybody that actually turned a hobby into a job knows that it is absolutely miserable and kills any passion you have for it.