2. Trained on opensource vs trained on copyright is a solid rationale.
But yes, LLM have been trained on copyrighted code, as an UnrealEngine user, it's pretty obvious that any LLM has knowledge of the engine source code and patterns, not only the doc. But it might be marginal since the quantity of open source code is gigantic.
Retribution to copyright holders for artistic work would make a lot of sense. It reminds me the shift from emule/kazaa everything towards spotify. Legal streaming has almost totally replaced music pirating. And it looks beneficial for artists since we never had that much production in human history.
I don't believe in LLM replacing devs either, it increases my scope but not in any point allow me to prompt in the morning and collect the money on the evening. It's still a job of full focus, even if I'm braining less. I feel I moved to a managing position instead of a crafter. Pretty happy to leave the webdev world for gamedev since LLM are years away to handle complex abstracts and produce clean code.
> Retribution to copyright holders for artistic work would make a lot of sense.
Yes, but it does not solve everything. Because an artist does have (at least in music) a say in how their work is used. That's usually something contractual, sometimes it's supported at the law level (in France, there's the "droit moral" of the author).
Legal streaming could have replaced music pirating. But what Spotify became is a threat to musicians too: all the pro and non-pro musicians I know crave to remove their tracks from Spotify, because Spotify pays nothing. But UX-wise Spotify is the best thing on the market at moment for exposure (broadly, if people don't find you on Spotify, they assume you don't exist). This becomes even a bigger issue since Spotify trains its own GenAI on music and streams generated music (which get paid back to... Spotify, instead of the original artists). Legal streaming still "could" be a win for artists, it just isn't today. You either tour and sell ridiculously well your merch, or you go broke (or you have the funds to sustain a negative balance for the rest of your life).
The thing, back to software, is that things get abstracted, automated, but on top of these, you will still need: people to understand and manage the abstraction (developers), people to understand/manage the translation machine (more developers), and people to understand/manage the basics/foundations (more developers).
The lie that lies into GenAI is this one: we can replace human work (because it makes us reliant and vulnerable on humans) for a cheaper alternative (it's not cheaper, given the externalities, both in the environment and in society).
Not trolling but def not hanging out on HN as much as twitter. I'm in the gamedev circle and GenAI is the only concern, not LLM code. Despite games being a mix of art and code.
I'm also in the solopreneur / build in public circle where everybody wants to vibe code the next SaaS.
From your feedback, GenAI makes obvious some important problems our society is facing. LLM result is technical, genAI result is emotional because despite being the same exact tools, one produces text and the other produces images.
LLM output isn't always technical though, so I'm not sure if it's as black and white as text vs images. Writing fiction in particular, is quite an artistic endeavor, and just as visual artists typically finds their own style, writers do too.
If someone isn't great at grammar or writing in general, using an LLM to compose an email seems fine to me. I also don't feel strongly about using it for advertising or marketing content, or purely informational cases like technical documentation, as long as it's accurate. Telling an LLM to write a novel in the style of another author however... that's not cool. The use case and intent matters greatly.
I'm not in game dev, so I'm curious where you see people drawing the line for genAI usage? I do have friends in that circle though, but their complaints have mostly been about the industry in general (brutal), and the offshoring of work, particularly in the 3d modeling/asset creation areas.
I will say however, that I've long had dreams of making a game, but the asset generation has always been too big of a hurdle to overcome, so genAI gives me some hope that maybe one day I might be able to attempt something.
I'm genuinely asking what are your input on that, and telling why I can't see a diff.
What would a better AskHN would look like for you, happy to edit to increase the quality of the post.
I obviously see the rants of my own echo chamber, but the complaints about GenAI are mostly about copyright (as you said) but they also make it a moral stand. GameDev using GenAI are accused of being "lazy", of having no vision, etc... unquantifiable.
Your remark about aesthetic would map 1:1 to poor code quality. (LLM code quality can be pretty bad, depends on prompt like always).
"Stealing" is a word aften use to criticize genAI.
>Your remark about aesthetic would map 1:1 to poor code quality. (LLM code quality can be pretty bad, depends on prompt like always).
no it wouldn't, poor code quality would map to hands with 10 fingers on them, aesthetic maps more to if every code generated, no matter the language, looked like it was written by someone who knows all the technical specifications of the language and never makes a bug but because of their personal preference and comfort zone writes everything as though they were a Java expert and preferred writing code in a Java OO idiomatic manner.
The aesthetic complaints about AI art of any sort is it is boring and easily recognizable as AI, boring and easily recognizable coding styles are generally a benefit in code.
Nowadays, almost anyone «armed» with an LLM can beat you if you’re going in with just your bare mind. That’s what I mean by losing my edge. And it’s not just at work, I mean in everyday life. It feels like someone stole my IQ, and I need to be equipped with an LLM all the time. It’s like we have to be cyborgs now just to survive, at least metaphorically.
I'm working on a survival game in the line of MC, Valheim and Vintage Story.
Last months have been focused on developing the survival core mechanics on top of building and fighting. Im now entering in the final phase of wiring all the pieces together. Streaming the process daily on Twitch.
I'm really wondering what happened.
They had a decade of hype and cash, leading into oblivion.
On the meantime, small teams like Vi tage Story or even SOLO like Lay Of The Land deliver.
It's not like the team behind Hytale is low skill, they ARE Hypixel, one of the biggest minecraft server ever and backed (acquired) by Riot...
They had everything, money, talent, network and hype.
From their updates it looks like scope creep starting in 2021 and a lack of leadership.
In 2021
> Even so, we know that half a year is a long time to wait for an update. The reason that answers have not been more forthcoming this year is because, until recently, we did not have them.
2022
> we’ve made the decision to redevelop Hytale’s engine—both the client and the server—in C++
Winter 2023
> This year, we've brought engine development fully in-house and steadily expanded our team
2024
> As we mentioned in our Winter Update, the first half of 2024 has been focused on finishing that process and transitioning our creative teams into the new engine.
They're still transitioning to the new engine.
Summer 2024 future plans
> The rest of the year [...] the goal [...] is to verify that our engine, tools and processes are capable of supporting our gameplay and creative goals.
Ten years of development with 40 employees is basically a guarantee of failure. A lot of the time, putting more people and money into the team makes it less likely to succeed because all those extra resources need to be doing something. You start off with a pretty simple plan and then the scope goes out of control and you burn cash before crashing into the ground.
While you give your process feedback, here is my emotions related one.
When I dev with LLM, I don't face my own limits in term of reasoning and architecturing, but I face the limit of the model to interpret prompts.
Instead of trying to be a better engineer, I'm frustratingly prompting an unintelligent human-like interface.
I'm not fuding LLM, I use it everyday, all the time. But it won't make me a better engineer. And I deeply believe that becoming a good engineer helped me becoming a better human, because how the job make you face your own limits, train you to be humble and constantly learning.
Vibe coding won't lead to that same and sane mindset.
I feel like this is the big question now. How to find the correct balance that lets you preserve and improve your skills. I haven’t yet found the answer, but I feel like it should be in being very deliberate about what you let the agent do, and what kind of work you do in the “artisanal” way, so not even AI-enabled auto-complete.
But in order to be able to find the right balance, one does need to learn fully what the agent can do, and have a lot of experience with that way of coding. Otherwise the mental model is wrong.
Agreed. Auto-complete on steroid isn't what I call using LLM for coding. It's just a convenience.
What I do is to write pure functions with LLM. Once I designed the software and I have the API, I can tell the model to write a function which does a specific job where I know the inputs and outputs but I'm lazy to write the code itself.
Building a melee combat system in UE5 which feels between Sekiro and DeadCells.
Dynamic, explosive, satisfying and with both the ability to smash attack button and i-framing actions. Low barrier to entry, high skill cap.
2. Trained on opensource vs trained on copyright is a solid rationale. But yes, LLM have been trained on copyrighted code, as an UnrealEngine user, it's pretty obvious that any LLM has knowledge of the engine source code and patterns, not only the doc. But it might be marginal since the quantity of open source code is gigantic.
Retribution to copyright holders for artistic work would make a lot of sense. It reminds me the shift from emule/kazaa everything towards spotify. Legal streaming has almost totally replaced music pirating. And it looks beneficial for artists since we never had that much production in human history.
I don't believe in LLM replacing devs either, it increases my scope but not in any point allow me to prompt in the morning and collect the money on the evening. It's still a job of full focus, even if I'm braining less. I feel I moved to a managing position instead of a crafter. Pretty happy to leave the webdev world for gamedev since LLM are years away to handle complex abstracts and produce clean code.