pouët.net

And now about the super-tragic. Super-tragic is that the employers push AI on senior expert workers. Super-tragic is that clueless HR departments insist on “AI expertise” when seeking new talent. Super-tragic is that, when downsizing, big employers are advised to keep the personnel which entered “AI expertise” into internal questionairres. So, in effect, an inferior and counterproductive tools are being forced on proffessionals. They are forced to use tools they despise, they are forced to use tools that deny them of the very reason they love and excell in their work in the first place. To gain false advantage over their fellow workers. To sell out to survive. They are forced to use tools that offer no measurable gain to nobody but their owners. While the young rookies are incentivised to claim true or false “AI expertise” on entry, coming into environments where they will taste the disgust of the veterans who are supposed to teach them stuff. Yet, we have to over and over again literally draw this picture to people that know nothing, the useful idiots, sitting in their homes, talking crap from up high, feeling all zen and “open to new experiences”, striking the cool “seen all that before” pose, lacking true informed imagination while feeling generous and superior to the “whiners”.

4gentE: can you stop using the term "useful idiots". Hearing your "high horse" opinions actually make me vomit a little (using your phrase). Not that I disagree with you about AI, but man, that pretentious tone of yours ;-P

Yeah, sorry, I meant “useful idiot” as a meme, a well established term for an individual who inadvertently serves a purpose that’s hidden to him/her. By no means have I meant to call anybody a literal idiot.

Why you say pretentious? What I wrote has more or less already been written by a lot of other people who indulged in weighing current and future LLM impact on society and workplace. It’s what I see around me. The “tone”? Is that even measurable? I can’t really feel it.

I guess it’s hard to see my own “high horse”. I look around, and my point of view seems pedestrian to me. But if you say so, I believe you. Perhaps I should run my texts through ChatGPT. Now, Chat, rewrite this text so it’s less high-horsey. I assure, I’m very down to earth guy.

Fwiw I agree that calling people "useful idiots", in the way you intended, is super pretentious. It suggests that while certain other people are mindless drones/sheeple/etc, you got it all figured out. Even if that's actually true, it's still pretentious.

I get it. How it sounds. Thanks.
The root of this “manic activism” is the belief that people are not idiots. That they are perhaps illinformed or didn’t really thing things through. Hence the (grating sounding) hammering I guess. I’d repeat it all in a more humble voice but it seems I perhaps don’t know how.

So also this will leave deep wounds to the scene and subvert the relative importance of compo categories.



A big chunk of the scene is not into new technologies at all. It can also be said that doing things a right way/DIY is an indispensable part of the scene. Already Juggler demo sparked a discussion: animation or a real thing and sizecoding is a central category.

Not at all. This will happen only if you want to give AI a different treatment than all the other tools and techniques that came and went. They all have their legitimacy. Even PCs. AI too. They all can be put to good use.
In that sense I'm full of scars from past injuries caused by what I considered cheating at some point - given all the effort and research, and then some kid uses more RAM, does an animation on a super-fast computer, uses an emulator for debugging, etc. Or just exploits some loophole to win a compo.


I'm totally with you on the DIY aspect and that not everybody is into technology. I just would not ban anybody's work. Some people may be in here for winning compos. Let them. It happened a thousand times for all the wrong reasons.
Juggler was a pure tech-demo for the capabilities of the hardware, and the 3D software Sculpt4d. There was no competition :-)

Why?

He means that Juggler wasn't entered into any democompo.

Oh, it was a general “why?”
It’s all I ever should have written in these “AI & demoscene” threads. Why?

I was a bit naive back in the early LLM/genAI days thinking it will stagnate at some point. But now I'm not so sure. It might be that AI will indeed continuously improve until the point humans may not be able to beat it anymore.
You might have seen Eli Mercer stunt by Rick Beato. It's not directly related to code, but I guess similar principles apply. It's generic, yes, but it's a vicious cycle - creators will have to raise the originality bar, but then next-gen AI will be trained on their new original ideas, and the cycle continues. What's worse it might be very demotivating for newcomers - the entry curve gets super steep.

Spot on. This aspect, I was never fully able to explain in discussions I had with diff people. Only people in direct touch with art understood immidiately. How, when perfected, AI has potential to kill all creativity/artistry. A very large portion of art and its progression came from artists’ initial lack of knowledge and skill, happy accidents and so on. Artistic styles gradually emerge from artistic practices and experiments, they don’t just pop into the world fully formed. All this could be lost when “perfection” becomes the norm for the entry. It could all mean no more doodling and sketching with $1 pencil, coloring the sketches with $2 crayons, seeing where it leads you. Everything has to be overproduced right from the start. No more doodling with music technology you don’t fully understand how it was supposed to be used, inventing new techniques, new expressions, new genres just out of your lack of initial knowledge and luck. Again, everything has to be overproduced right from the start. No more experimenting with modelling and texturing, making mistakes that become new styles. Everything has to be “the final render” right from the start. In other words, no more punky, xeroxy DIY ethos because the entry bar is set to high. No Picasso, no Joy Division, no Skinny Puppy, no Peter Jackson, no John Carpenter, etc.

Yeah, reminds me of this stupid trend on twitter, where someone AI video generated "make first person walk in pixelart fantasy world" and there is the whole drama of "Hey gamedevs, why haven't you did anything that looks that great? You just complain about AI". But we know it's vidgen of mashing up frames from various sources. I don't even see it like a real engine, is it a mashup of sprite layers, voxels, voxel splatting, sprite splatting, 3d polygons? It might look cool but it's not an actual 2d/3d engine that works consistently.

If with such little effort and fake vidgen anyone can make social clout and demotivate actual artists, it's basically annoying and fake. It's like I went around my house with a GoPro camera for a 30 seconds clip, then posted and said "Hey gamedevs what are you doing? Why nobody every produced such realistic 3D graphics? What have you been doing?"

All this could be lost when “perfection” becomes the norm for the entry.
Nah. People still draw with pencils and charcoals and acrylic paint and whatnot, or play music with acoustic instruments and pianos and electric guitars and drums and saxophones and people still act in plays or make their own movies and so on. There will always be an another Dylan or Joy Division or Cobain or Matisse or Warhol or whoever. There will always be people who are not interested in going with the flow du jour.

What might be lost, though, is the sort of mid-tier "practical art" like commercial jingles or graphic design for advertisements and all that sort of stuff. I don't think if that is a very big loss.

Hmm.. isn't like the main source of income for many studios rn? Not to mention, it's a great way you can improve your skills. And all honest artistic endeavours are in side-project category? I thought there is no money in more ambitious art unless you are extremely lucky, hit the public taste, go viral etc... but what do I know.

This is pretty optimistic view and we can hope for that. It’s gonna put lot of creative industries workers and their families livelihoods in danger, so it’s not a nice thing to hope for at all, but I don’t see how it could be avoided at this point.

I get it. The Eli Mercer stunt dooesn’t tell me how great these machines are, but instead tells me how pathetic and soulless the mainstream music industry became past decade or so. LLMs churn out soulless slop because that’s what the average of human output/taste amounts to.

You described the niche for LLMs nicely: mid-tier “practical art” like commercial jingles - I wonder how big a part of the demoscene can be put into this niche?

You try being a junior artist trying to break into an industry some other way.

Jeez.

Yeah, that's a fair point. Also goes for junior engineers. I was thinking more about the "high art" side when I wrote that. But maybe that industry will be doomed in any case, or from a more optimistic standpoint, maybe handmade things will be the next big thing after we all get flooded with slop.

From where I stand, the definition of “high art” largely seems to be “what galleries say is high art”. So it’s indestructible. They can always call for example candy wrappers, data visualisation or AI slop “high art” and voila. But we’re offtopic. Again.

Super experienced graphic designers i know are having massive massive difficulties getting a job. And they have to use AI.

wrighter: the same will happen soon to developers (if not happening already). That's why it's quite sad to see folks here trivializing the issue and giving away even more to entities that are clearly above the law.

I have some real life examples of this too. Some experienced designers that despise AI are not only forced to use it, but even fear speaking freely about this online. Almost no way to land a job if you don’t advertise AI usage. But nooooooo, people here have opinions.

already spotted job offers in the "tech" sphere where it's required in the JD to be positive / open about AI editors (think Cursor, Zed…).