On the one hand, I’m as unhappy as the rest of you about the prospect of AI replacing human jobs and eroding the human element of game development.

On the other hand… I don’t know, it feels kind of inevitable? I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the whole AI question for years now. Maybe we’re finally seeing the beginnings of that.

Inevitable? No. Just the apathy, let's say. It's all preventable, but, well... here I go.

I've made mention a little to this in my chatter with Kerm, and so I now repeat it here for a wider audience... we live in an age of miracles. Issue is, the thing fueling, guiding the miracle is the imbecility of single-mindedness. A wrath of brilliance, all guided to a single bland Machiavellian point of "number go up", resulting into the modern "enshittification" ouroboros nazgûl that is modern tech. At least.

Every law of safety... and if I may include alongside, good sense... has been written in blood or pain more often then not. But unlike so much of history... this is different. The Great Stink! Great Mill Disaster! Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire!

Through instinct of flesh, we know if something burns or stings, is bitter or stinks. But this stuff, "AI" as such is called in marketing, has multitudes in multitudes. Where before we had senses to guide us, we must now have knowledge and perhaps even philosophy to act in knowing the difference between miraculous boon and yet another damnation of our own making. That is far more a resource intensive task that.

Too few of us have the technical or futurist wherewithal to, in my observation of tech in the last 20 years, realize how heavily we are and have been, bleeding. Or bled, rather. Or worse... we just don't care, CAN'T care. And, as a result, we might catch the dragon by the tail and gain by it, but not enough (if any!) of us know what the tail looks like. And so we fill the gaps, both with dreams and nightmares. White hats and Black hats.

To me, we have history to guess with... which, well. Lawd of mercy.

But none of this was inevitable, it just fell to the cards that the odds and wills fell against our general favor. Plenty of folks (and please forgive the general tone) call this crap out, just no one who writes the rules which has allowed for this open season of suckers with power. The right person at the right place at the right time could have made all the difference.

On the other hand… I don’t know, it feels kind of inevitable? I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the whole AI question for years now. Maybe we’re finally seeing the beginnings of that.

What feels inevitable, at least to me, is that companies will invest in and try to integrate generative machine learning. They will discover it makes the process worse. It will be hard to generate things that fit seamlessly, it will be too costly to operate, and it will be less efficient than just directing talented artists.

The company will abandon it after spending millions of dollars on it. And be far behind studios that resort to humans.

It will be a mainstay in shovelware though.

On the one hand, I’m as unhappy as the rest of you about the prospect of AI replacing human jobs and eroding the human element of game development.

On the other hand… I don’t know, it feels kind of inevitable? I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the whole AI question for years now. Maybe we’re finally seeing the beginnings of that.

I've worked in AAA games and have decades of professionally coding. I now manage Software Engineers and this is what I'll say about this.

1. AI drastically improves the experience of "getting some code down".
2. It drastically decreases the quality of a bad software engineer's output
3. It's great for working on things that are highly repeatable and rely on existing knowledge (tooling/tests).
4. It's abysmal at creating something legitimately new and novel
5. It's current approach has no chance at hell at recreating human ingenuity and that's plain as day since it's just grinding up EXISTING work and then deducing patterns in it for spitting back out.

So if 343 is exploring it for 1 and 3, cool more power to them. If they're exploring it in spite of 2, 4, and 5, that's not terribly encouraging.

Either way I hope they sort it out, cause I like Halo and want more cool Halo stuff to enjoy.