For the past several months, I've been watching academics become righteously angry because AI allegedly solved a bunch of difficult math problems all on its own, only for it to be revealed that it was based on stolen work from human mathematicians all along because it can't reason.
It's like the comic of the grim reaper going from door to door massacring the room's occupants, except the reaper breaks in, steals everyone's shit, cuts them down, then leaves. It's happening now with all the game decomps, years of stolen work from human teams all wrapped up in a slop-coated bow.
Journalism is failing us so hard right now. Journalistic integrity is a perpetual struggle, but in this moment of need, it's failing utterly. I've seen article after breathless article declaring this is a turning point for games, like scrappy underdogs are stealing treasure from corporate dragons.
It's just... going over everyone's heads that this is a kind of settler-colonial violence, individuals imbued with the power of the State or of Company to spread out and destroy anything in their path so it can be claimed. These corporations need not raise armies; the people volunteer themselves.
It's why I believe the defining feature of this tech, the capacity to do harm, is *the feature* that excites these people the most. I'm convinced that if AI somehow hurt no one, they would not use it. That it might produce passable work is secondary to that harm. Harm is the true product being sold.
And media is complicit. Human decomp teams were illuminated with a suspicious light at best, if they were even noticed by outlets at all.
AI decomps now dominate the discussion in a "tee-hee, what is the Big Evil Game Corp gonna do now?" framing, deliberately obscuring what's actually happening.
The laziness of a thousand wannabe journalistic influencers repeats the message over and over again, lone hackers or creatives bucking the system and taking power back for the Little Guys.
Nah, man. They're just assholes, and their mandate is to move into a space and force humanity out of it.
@Adorable_Sergal
> It's why I believe the defining feature of this tech, the capacity to do harm, is *the feature* that excites these people the most. I'm convinced that if AI somehow hurt no one, they would not use it. That it might produce passable work is secondary to that harm. Harm is the true product being sold.
I said a while ago that part of AI excitement is the urge to have an army of slaves and to conquer. Same way military and work conquest games are popular and fun.
One of my anti-AI questions is “how does this not lead to the subjugation of a conscious being, artificial or human?” That’s it’s an intrinsically “colonial” pattern might have something to it too.