EPTAs the kids these days say: American video game employees are cooked.
The Games Industry And ATVI - Page 73
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16673 Posts
As the kids these days say: American video game employees are cooked. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25011 Posts
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Hat Trick of Today
89 Posts
On February 25 2025 02:02 WombaT wrote: For those who’d rather not trawl through an hour and fifteen minutes of Asmongold, what does this refer to? You know exactly what it’ll be about, every Asmongold video is the same. Crying about woke and DEI, trying to blame everything on woke and DEI, crying about how oppressed he is because of woke and DEI. Judging by the first sentence from Asmongold’s mouth and Jimmy’s contentless text post, it’s about recent Chinese AAA successes in contrast to recent Western AAA developer layoffs and how woke and DEI tie into it. Woke and DEI here being the demand for a living wage and decent working conditions. Nevermind Chinese developers and publishers are also engaging in domestic layoffs and project cancelling to boost profits now that a lot of the projects approved during the COVID boom won’t make their investment back. Except in 2025 he might even do some light Nazi revisionism in the process because of course that’s the state the world is in right now. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16673 Posts
There is no video game crash happening. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25011 Posts
If there’s no video game crash happening, what’s the worry? Some folks won’t be immediately familiar with what you’re referencing, and don’t fancy sitting through Asmon bloody gold for like an hour+ to find out. Nobody’s asking for an essay, that would be unreasonable but your ‘summary’ is one that only makes sense to someone who already knows exactly what you’re talking about. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16673 Posts
On February 25 2025 08:02 WombaT wrote: What companies? What is overly militant about their demands? Firstly, what planet are you living on? Maybe it is different where you are... however, in NA tech workers have a general reputation for laziness and arrogance. Kind of a superiority complex. They act like they're all in some exclusive club because they were better at math than their high school classmates. This is the general culture of tech workers. This arrogance is fed by the fact that they can make major cash with AT MOST a 4 year degree. No post graduate time in law school or medical school required. The grads from my school make 150K USD. Any how, Asmongold lists many companies with overly militant employees making bizarro world demands. Also, I've covered it in this thread previously on many occasions. Here is just one example of a great many... -quitting over their name on a whiteboard. LOL. -giving 4 week estimates for stuff that can be done in a couple of hours. -dissatisfied with people yelling Laura Fryer is a former executive producer @ MS. She frequently comments about the war going on between American video game employees and their customers in her analysis of various games. @10:10 "you have to stop insulting gamers. if someone says `hey i don't like this` you have to find ways to listen to that feedback" Keeping up with the Auto Worker analogy going... Concord is the Renault Alliance of video games. A car built in Wisconsin with the UAW at the height of its power as a union. American video game employees are at war with their customers. It is a war they are losing. The employees are lazy and militant. Pretty similar to UAW members. Open hostility to feedback. Unable to adapt... like the UAW in Michigan. Generally speaking, a large portion of tech workers do very little. This is why mainstream comedy skits like this exist. If Tech Workers had the same reputation for work ethic as say, Electricians or Nurses, comedy skits like this would not exist. However, so many Tech Workers are super lazy; as a result, lots of people laugh at these kinds of popular comedy skits. And all this in within the backdrop of a craft that is getting easier. It is easier than ever to make a video game. It is easier than ever to make all manner of software. The video game industry is on track to grow by 6% every year for the next few years. talk about fumbling the bag. When it comes to American incompetence in making video games ... we are back to 1983. Similar to 1983, the rest of the world is doing a solid job making games. The industry is rolling along just fine. | ||
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Hat Trick of Today
89 Posts
It isn’t just American developers eating shit, a lot of European developers small to big have gotten the axe. Embracer Group bought an astronomical number of developers with the apparent goal of selling the business to Saudi Arabia but there’s no appetite anymore so it isn’t a surprise they’re forced to sell or axe the least “productive” studios. Chinese publishers like NetEase and PerfectWorld have also reportedly axed a couple domestically developed projects if I remember the recent Bloomberg article correctly because of current economic conditions. Those that invested in Japanese video game developers like Microsoft (Tango) and NetEase (Grasshopper and whatever Nagoshi created) are also cutting their investment/acquisitions because it’s clear that these Japanese developers are not going to make their investment back. You can’t say those Japanese developers are militant, they were just going to put out middling games (or in Tango’s case, GOTY contenders that had a limited audience) that weren’t going to meet NetEase’s or Microsoft’s short term goal of immediate profit taking. I don’t know the degree of Riot’s independence but I would not be surprised Tencent is putting the screws on them to juice immediate profits if we consider their recent enshittification of League of Legends. The only developers that don’t seem to be eating overwhelming shit post-COVID are Japanese developers and it’s mostly due to Japanese businesses being incredibly slow, conservative, and risk adverse. You can’t cancel investments that never existed. There are no militant video game industry unions in North America, most of the people working in the industry on the biggest games are still going to crunch for months straight when push comes to shove. The comparison to militant unions of old is an odd and incorrect comparison. There are way simpler reasons to why people in the games industry are getting laid off left and right and news of studios getting shut are a regular occurrence in this day and age. What is happening in the games industry isn’t unique, it’s happening in all tech and entertainment. And like in entertainment adjacent industries (eg VFX and Music), there is no job security and poor working conditions are constant because you are a cog in the machine and graduates with stars in their eyes are banging on the door to become cogs to replace you. Doubly so if your company is on the level of the Golden Age of Blizzard, who were infamous for underpaying their employees. These people work in the industry for a few years because they love games; grow to hate the pay and working conditions or get turfed out of the blue despite being a critical part of the game(s) success; and then go work for somewhere out of the entertainment industry like Oracle or Amazon Web Services where pay is much better, hours are consistent, benefits actually exist. Edit: To discuss your point that there is no gaming industry crash, I agree. The last 4-5 years do not constitute a crash. All layoffs and studio closures can be traced to publishers profit taking and/or parring back bad/middling investments. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25011 Posts
Woke is ruining my vidya, Concord is proof of that. Eastern games are better than Western because they’re not woke, etc etc. The problem is not in some of these observations, sure there’s merit in some. It’s when alternative explanations or trends are ignored, or exceptions to the rule or things like that. And now it seems some folks are lumping in unionisation demands with wokeness as if they’re particularly joined at the hip, when they very well not be much crossover at all. Where are these militant unions making ridiculous demands? How prevalent are they? Plenty of folks are entitled, maybe these folks disproportionately are and are making unreasonable demands. However I can’t assess that based on some chick from TikTok and a British comedy show. A show which incidentally was as much about mocking IT guys as weirdos with poor social skills, people’s ignorance of what they do as it was about them being lazy. I also don’t think there are all that many parallels to the UAW back in the day either. Or I dunno, coal miners under Thatcher or whatever. They’re workers in a profitable sector, that’s very competitive both domestically and internationally. They’ve immediately transferable skills to either other tech jobs, those in the creative sector or in some cases, both. Demands more broadly seem to be either basic stuff that should be covered regardless of sector such as ‘yeah can you take harassment seriously please?’ or broadly bringing conditions more into line with equivalent jobs. I haven’t even seen many pay demands outside of ‘if you’re gonna enforce crunch periods, pay us the OT’. Most early unions formed mostly seem to be in the QA domain and not core development workers, least as I’ve seen. Not really making a particular point here, just as an aside. Just as I had to Google all this myself, may as well throw it in. There’s very little there that that I’ve seen could conceivably damage the competitiveness of the US video game industry if adopted. Indeed one could argue it may improve some facets of it. Who knows? If you’re continually having to rely on extended crunch periods, consistently you’re using the crunch crutch it would seem your project management is flawed and could maybe use some work. Maybe publishers end up less cavalier with how they acquire and manage studios if workers have some greater protection. Alternatively maybe not, but there’s little that’s really all that negative either. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25011 Posts
On February 25 2025 16:28 Hat Trick of Today wrote: Or you know, the gaming industry is just parring back their investments during a time where video game engagement was notably higher and interest rates were far lower. Most of this investment were in Western video game developers because that’s where the talent is, it isn’t a surprise that this is also where the majority are being laid off. It isn’t just American developers eating shit, a lot of European developers small to big have gotten the axe. Embracer Group bought an astronomical number of developers with the apparent goal of selling the business to Saudi Arabia but there’s no appetite anymore so it isn’t a surprise they’re forced to sell or axe the least “productive” studios. Chinese publishers like NetEase and PerfectWorld have also reportedly axed a couple domestically developed projects if I remember the recent Bloomberg article correctly because of current economic conditions. Those that invested in Japanese video game developers like Microsoft (Tango) and NetEase (Grasshopper and whatever Nagoshi created) are also cutting their investment/acquisitions because it’s clear that these Japanese developers are not going to make their investment back. You can’t say those Japanese developers are militant, they were just going to put out middling games (or in Tango’s case, GOTY contenders that had a limited audience) that weren’t going to meet NetEase’s or Microsoft’s short term goal of immediate profit taking. I don’t know the degree of Riot’s independence but I would not be surprised Tencent is putting the screws on them to juice immediate profits if we consider their recent enshittification of League of Legends. The only developers that don’t seem to be eating overwhelming shit post-COVID are Japanese developers and it’s mostly due to Japanese businesses being incredibly slow, conservative, and risk adverse. You can’t cancel investments that never existed. There are no militant video game industry unions in North America, most of the people working in the industry on the biggest games are still going to crunch for months straight when push comes to shove. The comparison to militant unions of old is an odd and incorrect comparison. There are way simpler reasons to why people in the games industry are getting laid off left and right and news of studios getting shut are a regular occurrence in this day and age. What is happening in the games industry isn’t unique, it’s happening in all tech and entertainment. And like in entertainment adjacent industries (eg VFX and Music), there is no job security and poor working conditions are constant because you are a cog in the machine and graduates with stars in their eyes are banging on the door to become cogs to replace you. Doubly so if your company is on the level of the Golden Age of Blizzard, who were infamous for underpaying their employees. These people work in the industry for a few years because they love games; grow to hate the pay and working conditions or get turfed out of the blue despite being a critical part of the game(s) success; and then go work for somewhere out of the entertainment industry like Oracle or Amazon Web Services where pay is much better, hours are consistent, benefits actually exist. Edit: To discuss your point that there is no gaming industry crash, I agree. The last 4-5 years do not constitute a crash. All layoffs and studio closures can be traced to publishers profit taking and/or parring back bad/middling investments. Seems reasonable to me. Good point re Japan Nintendo do their own thing, on largely their own timeframes. It’s difficult to find an American analogue outside of Valve I suppose. From invented their own wee genre and continue to be the kings of it. Capcom have been in fine form in recent years. On the flip side, of historical big-hitters, Konami have basically shelved doing anything ambitious with their raft of quality IPs for quite a while in favour of leaning on their other, less risky sources of income. So it’s not all good news from the East for us gamers either. Or, a certain type of gamer anyway. Which brings me to another point. Look I like my fully-fledged console/PC experience and don’t play mobile games myself, but they’re a huge part of the market. It’s remarkable how much analysis of the sector still occurs that basically completely ignores a huge part of it. This is fine if your niche is ‘the state of shit I would like to play’, but if you try and do any ‘state of the industry’ stuff without factoring it in you’ll have a very flawed analysis indeed. Going back to ye olde Japanese stalwarts, and a pointless thought experiment. What if some of them were American companies? Let’s swap locales for say, From and BioWare or something. You can very easily see a world where From has its breakout Soulslike hit, gets acquired and maybe makes another before being turned to a project that doesn’t suit it, and one where BioWare just kept making BioWare RPGs out East. Of things that genuinely confuse me, rather than be things I understand but disagree with, that tendency of Western publishers to do that is pretty high up there. Perhaps it is being less risk-averse and conservative, Western pubs see an emerging trend and think they can jump on it, even if it necessitates putting a studio that isn’t known for that genre, whereas Eastern ones perhaps rightly see both that pitfall plus the ‘by the time this game comes out, that may no longer be the trend’ and are more reticent | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16673 Posts
On February 25 2025 16:28 Hat Trick of Today wrote: There are no militant video game industry unions in North America, most of the people working in the industry on the biggest games are still going to crunch for months straight when push comes to shove. The comparison to militant unions of old is an odd and incorrect comparison. There are way simpler reasons to why people in the games industry are getting laid off left and right and news of studios getting shut are a regular occurrence in this day and age. the tech employees are lazy and militant. it is explained step by step by the creator of Fallout in the video i posted. Employees threaten to quit if their names are put on a white board... taking 4 weeks to do something that should take a couple of hours. Constantly using the "abundance of caution" excuse in taking forever to do something. In general, North American tech workers are as lazy as the assembly line workers that cranked out the 1970s Ford Pinto. A garbage car built by lazy people. OTOH the Corolla , Tercel and Accord were incredibly reliable. The Corolla, Tercel, and Accord ended up taking the market while loud mouth lazy American workers blamed everyone but themselves. Same shit... different decade. Now we got Trump trying to bring in all these new manufacturing jobs. LOL. I can't wait for the UAW to fuck that plan into the ground. BTW, this is not a complaint.. it is an observation. The really weak, whiney workers make it easy for me to succeed. I prolly put in between 15 to 20 hours of real work a week. I hermit-code // crunch about 6 months out of every 3 years. It is easier than being a school teacher. Some Great War Stories + Show Spoiler + I've been making software part time since 2003 and full time since 2010. I've watched a company like Arnica Software ,which is 5 guys, pull off projects fumbled by a 200 employee team the year earlier. I've been part of the 200 member teams that lost and part of the 5 member teams that won. Software development is close to being a Dilbert Cartoon. From 1997 to 2002 Visual Foxpro had a feature set competitive with Visual Basic. MS assigned 34539478 people to Visual Basic and ONE FUCKING GUY to Visual Foxpro. Bizarre as this is: Visual Foxpro 6 is a better product than Visual Basic 6. Calvin Hsia is a God among men. The entire Visual Foxpro 6.0 product IS Calvin Hsia. LOL. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16673 Posts
"Consent to make an AI Version of us in any form" ... this demand by the Union can not be met. Sony/MS/ etc will define "version of us in any form" so tightly that they can replace the human with CPU generated content. NFL players, UFC fighters, WWE stars etc etc have all signed away their life time rights. The "voice actors" are going to get run over on this one. Voice actors have gone out on their own and signed away their lifetime rights. These game companies can just take random employees, like Gearbox did with ClapTrap, and get them to sign away their lifetime voice rights. | ||
Falling
Canada11349 Posts
Big bossman "show" who toughest boss. Big mad. "Much" wow. | ||
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Hat Trick of Today
89 Posts
On March 18 2025 04:23 Falling wrote: Yeah! Screw "voice actors"! Big bossman "show" who toughest boss. Big mad. "Much" wow. He just watched his most recent Asmongold video and had to rush to tell us all about it. The Ford Pinto being the problem of line workers and not the management who wanted the cars to be shoved into the market ASAP is just laughable. There’s class action lawsuit against the Pinto wasn’t because of sub-standard manufacturing quality, it was due to a design flaw in there fuel tank. Something management knew and ignored. The buck apparently never stops at people in charge in Jimmy’s world unless it’s Ubisoft or Canada I guess. | ||
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Fleetfeet
Canada2533 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25011 Posts
On March 18 2025 08:31 Fleetfeet wrote: AI is new technology, expect new legislation and guidelines to control it. It's interesting if/when that legislation gets ratified or contested. It's not interesting when it'd JimmyJ going "'voice actors' arent people LOL *non-sequitur WW2 reference* I’m not sure I would expect that. The whole play was just to do the thing first, hope you don’t get regulated and by the time people actually start to go ‘hold on a minute’ you’re too big and important to regulate There’s a huge contrast to the early doors of the internet and associated movements where the innovators actually factored ethics into the equation. Where various degrees of open source or semi-open source licenses were codified etc. There are folks languishing in prisons in various locales who have committed a fraction, a tiny fraction of the blatant copyright infringement that AI companies can just do with impunity. Regulation just isn’t coming, I think primarily because there’s a perception whatever nation state wins the AI war as it were, will have a huge advantage over competitors. To regulate is to pause the attempt to win that race. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25011 Posts
On March 18 2025 05:45 Hat Trick of Today wrote: He just watched his most recent Asmongold video and had to rush to tell us all about it. The Ford Pinto being the problem of line workers and not the management who wanted the cars to be shoved into the market ASAP is just laughable. There’s class action lawsuit against the Pinto wasn’t because of sub-standard manufacturing quality, it was due to a design flaw in there fuel tank. Something management knew and ignored. The buck apparently never stops at people in charge in Jimmy’s world unless it’s Ubisoft or Canada I guess. I’d love to know what Ubisoft did to hurt Jimmy so. It’s very confusing. A lot of content creators/Redditors who bemoan the modern gaming industry hate Ubisoft, but they also hate companies like Activision-Blizzard who Jimmy loves to extol the virtues of Bobby Kotick’s genius. There’s also no irony here whatsoever given that one of the voice acting sector’s chief complaints is that their voices are being used without consent, arguably illegally to develop models to emulate them. What they’re not arguing is that you can’t consent, or license somehow your voice likeness being modelled and then used. Ultimately if me pirating a film x actor is in could leave me liable to prosecution, but me running all that actor’s films through an AI model so I can replicate their voice for whatever I want, does not, then that is fucked. It’s profoundly ridiculous. | ||
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Fleetfeet
Canada2533 Posts
On March 18 2025 12:43 WombaT wrote: I’m not sure I would expect that. The whole play was just to do the thing first, hope you don’t get regulated and by the time people actually start to go ‘hold on a minute’ you’re too big and important to regulate There’s a huge contrast to the early doors of the internet and associated movements where the innovators actually factored ethics into the equation. Where various degrees of open source or semi-open source licenses were codified etc. There are folks languishing in prisons in various locales who have committed a fraction, a tiny fraction of the blatant copyright infringement that AI companies can just do with impunity. Regulation just isn’t coming, I think primarily because there’s a perception whatever nation state wins the AI war as it were, will have a huge advantage over competitors. To regulate is to pause the attempt to win that race. Companies and/or parties will still be interested in protecting their IP where they can. I expect regulation exactly because of this. Pepsi can't/won't use AI Keanu Reeves to advertise, they'll pay the real one. They also can't/won't use AI John Wick for similar reasons. They know they don't own these properties and know they can't use them freely, even though they could train an AI on it. JimmyJ's supposition that people worked on a video game and then sold their rights to everything forever is dumb. They can make AI generated Aloy dialogue trained on the original voice actor's work. This is certainly a gray area and something that I expect will get ironed out in the contracts moving forward, similar to how it already works regarding contracts for such things. To use wrestling for the memes, the actor who plays The Rock owns the IP/identity of "The Rock" and can license it out for merch deals etc. The merch deals etc can't be like "Hey, we took the thing you let us use, shoved it through AI to make something close but different, and are now going to sell that and not pay you shit!" because that's obviously not how stuff works, and if it's at all unclear that's what contracts and lawsuits exist for. Interestingly (? probably not but oh well) Dwayne Johnson did not own the rights to 'The Rock' until very recently, which honestly is what I'd expect. Even when WWE owned it, they would have been 'free' to tell Dwayne Johnson to fuck off and have someone else come and play 'The Rock', but they would obviously be entering gray area to have someone biologically engineered to look and sound exactly like Dwayne Johnson come and play 'The Rock", assuming that technology existed. Don't get me wrong, AI scraping massive pools of data uncontested and uncredited is horrible, I just trust that in business spheres it will get regulated and controlled on a surface level so that "We made this AI voice of Scarlett Johannsen without her consent" is not allowed, though I expect "We made this AI voice for this character and it sounds cool" will still be, even though that AI voice was made by scraping thousands of hours of uncredited, uncompensated and unconsenting artists. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16673 Posts
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/pc-gamers-spend-92-percent-of-their-time-on-older-games-oh-and-there-are-apparently-908-million-of-us-now/ newer games used to offer better graphics and better AI enemies. Oddly enough, the enemy AI just ain't gettin' any better and neither are the graphics. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16673 Posts
On March 18 2025 15:17 Fleetfeet wrote: Interestingly (? probably not but oh well) Dwayne Johnson did not own the rights to 'The Rock' until very recently, which honestly is what I'd expect. Even when WWE owned it, they would have been 'free' to tell Dwayne Johnson to fuck off and have someone else come and play 'The Rock', but they would obviously be entering gray area to have someone biologically engineered to look and sound exactly like Dwayne Johnson come and play 'The Rock", assuming that technology existed. when Vince Mcmahon owned the WWE it was pretty open about giving their talent their own rights compared to other mega corps like MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, UFC, etc etc. https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/top-selling-wrestlers check out all the old WWE/WWF guys with their own independent merchandise. Papa Shango was an entirely WWE/WWF creation.. and yet Charles Wright has the Merch rights. Pretty generous of Old Vince. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25011 Posts
On March 18 2025 15:17 Fleetfeet wrote: Companies and/or parties will still be interested in protecting their IP where they can. I expect regulation exactly because of this. Pepsi can't/won't use AI Keanu Reeves to advertise, they'll pay the real one. They also can't/won't use AI John Wick for similar reasons. They know they don't own these properties and know they can't use them freely, even though they could train an AI on it. JimmyJ's supposition that people worked on a video game and then sold their rights to everything forever is dumb. They can make AI generated Aloy dialogue trained on the original voice actor's work. This is certainly a gray area and something that I expect will get ironed out in the contracts moving forward, similar to how it already works regarding contracts for such things. To use wrestling for the memes, the actor who plays The Rock owns the IP/identity of "The Rock" and can license it out for merch deals etc. The merch deals etc can't be like "Hey, we took the thing you let us use, shoved it through AI to make something close but different, and are now going to sell that and not pay you shit!" because that's obviously not how stuff works, and if it's at all unclear that's what contracts and lawsuits exist for. Interestingly (? probably not but oh well) Dwayne Johnson did not own the rights to 'The Rock' until very recently, which honestly is what I'd expect. Even when WWE owned it, they would have been 'free' to tell Dwayne Johnson to fuck off and have someone else come and play 'The Rock', but they would obviously be entering gray area to have someone biologically engineered to look and sound exactly like Dwayne Johnson come and play 'The Rock", assuming that technology existed. Don't get me wrong, AI scraping massive pools of data uncontested and uncredited is horrible, I just trust that in business spheres it will get regulated and controlled on a surface level so that "We made this AI voice of Scarlett Johannsen without her consent" is not allowed, though I expect "We made this AI voice for this character and it sounds cool" will still be, even though that AI voice was made by scraping thousands of hours of uncredited, uncompensated and unconsenting artists. Perhaps there may be those lines in the sand, but if they’re merely limited to incredibly famous and powerful celebrities they’re not really regulation. I’m seeing little signs of a proper regulatory framework developing around this tech, and by the time it’s de rigeur you can’t stick Pandora back in her box. Call me a pessimist by all means, I’m not seeing it, I don’t think I will. Ethics were a consideration in the nascent days of the internet, we’ve a lot to thank for that being the case. This current lot? No, it’s not a consideration at all. We still haven’t properly regulated social media, and I don’t think we ever will. AI is an arms race where winning trumps any kind of consideration of ethical issues, and there’s no signs of that flipping. It’s a fucking joke. It’s a gigantic plagiarism machine, with fuck all compensation, or agreement with the people who’ve been plagiarised. | ||
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