Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis'

Anyone working with AI-other-than-llm is now constantly getting weird looks and stupid comments from LLM bros

Well, "AI" in games was always behavior, rather than having anything to do with AI. It was just marketing.

And even then, artificial stupidity is usually more accurate than AI. FPS bots could easily headshot you immediately on sight but like, what good is that. It's literally more work to make them worse at the game.

Lol I just call it IA (interaction algorithm)

At least the cryptographers could fall back on the full name!

Absolutely, if I can just chime in here and address the elephant in the room, we really have to focus on the low hanging fruit and leverage our KPIs to really drive home any wins. From a 30,000ft view it looks like we have synergy and alignment here, but if we zoom in we can see that there are nothing but roadblocks and pain points with our holistic approach. I propose we circle back and try to realign our core competencies and remember what really made us a rock star team in the first place.

You don't get to COD 49 with original creative ideas.

Nik Suresh said the same thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GOGGzTp3MA

You've hit the nail on the head with the Infinite Growth statement. Most companies see AI as the next way to cut bottom line costs and hit those annual goals. It's an ouroboros that most companies haven't seen the end of yet. Eventually they'll be left with no talent (arguably the most valuable thing a company can acquire) and uninteresting products nobody is interested in.

How do you train newbies into useful employees when you let AI handle the easy stuff. Where's your pipeline of promotions so you're developing your next generation of developers? Once the shit starts to hit the fan, you'll see them crumble and ask how we got here. Human talent takes YEARS to cultivate and is extremely hard to buy, especially when competition builds from reducing the supply when people stop going into these fields for lack of entry-level jobs.

It's near the bottom but Tarn Adams notes the same thing, that it has been happening far longer than just starting when LLMs became popular.

"It's been going on forever. That was before AI—or this form of AI," Adams says, before lamenting: "They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes."

I'm always amazed at people who can't understand that EVERY system is finite.

Respectfully: no.

Psychosis is something that builds over time with many factors and AI is one that can definitely be one of the contributing factors. It can be the one that pushes someone over the edge into psychosis and that may seem as "revealing" it but the psychosis could have been avoided without.

This line of thinking feels dangerous to me.

Like the video game crash of ‘83?

"Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers".

As far as I can tell the individual actors extracting more from a system that its capable to support if everybody does the same (the kind of situation Game Theory calls a Tragedy Of The Commons) always think in one of 3 ways:

• They simply don't think about systemic consequences at all, be it simply that they don't have the kind of intelligence for it or purposefully don't dig down into it because they don't want to think about consequences.
• They expect the "system" (i.e. somebody else, maybe everybody else) will make up for it so it's fine if they take more from it than the put back in, as illustrated in my first paragraph.
• They're aware of what the commulative impact of their actions can or even will have in the future, but they think they themselves and their families will be alright and screw everybody else - essentially that if they can get ahead enough they can ride the wave whilst it crashes.

The same kind of thinking also applies to Ponzi Schemes (like the current AI bubble) - Ignorance (willful or due to lack of knowledge/intelligence), The Many Will Make Up For The Over-Extraction Of The Few and/or I Myself Will Be Alright.

And you know what?

Those people have very good reasons to believe in the second one (that I illustrated at the start) - you look at Neoliberal Capitalism so far that's what's been happening as Money acummulates in fewer hands and sin ce with regulations neutralized and Corruption through the roof, those holding most of the wealth can do whatever the fuck they want so they are increasingly pillaging wealth from the rest, and the "system" - i.e. everybody else - just gets poorer and instead of Revolutions and Guillotines for the rich all we see is passive acceptance so the rest so have been making up for the depredations of the few for decades. Also just look at how Governments the world over sacrificed everybody else to make sure Finance and Asset owners in general came up better of after the 2008 Crash - these people have very good reason to believe that those in power, being very much in their pockets, will use said power to sacrificed the rest in order to deflect away from the Few the consequences of the actions of those very Few.

And if they's CEOs they also have very good reasons to believe the third - just look at corporate governance in the last decades, with getting those jobs being far more abour Cronyism than Merit and incompetence being de facto rewarded with golden parachutes a even failing upwards. From all they've seen their whole lives there is no reason for them to expect to ever personally suffer the consequences of their own depredations and pillaging.

In summary, some don't even realise the problem and as for those who do, given the experience of CEOs for at least the last 3 or 4 decades, it's pretty rational for them to believe that their depredations wont destroy the Whole enough to come back to them and even if they do, they themselves personally will be alright even if the companies they manage are destroyed.

If AI ever reaches the point that it can produce a creative, fun game that feels worth playing - which I doubt, because you gotta have a soul to make art - then anyone can press that button. Why would people buy their game when they can get AI to make their own?

He's right, these people have shit the corporate bed.

It's unfortunately sustainable because people buy things they like before things they need.

For all of us, for everyone 1 person we know who has a decent job and loves to play games they buy with disposable income, we probably know 5 who shouldn't buy the game they're buying because they're already behind on their sewer bill.

Congratulations!!!1 You are the lucky 10000 who discovered copy pasting today!

the real trickle down economics was the psychosis we gained along the way

Just look at our current president. He is the ultimate byproduct of this mentality.

This is why companies should be worker owned cooperatives. Yes, management is a useful skill, and the workers can hire it.

Wishful thinking I know, but so much more sustainable.

That looks suuuper fun to play!

Don't know if I can trust him, since the photo shows he's playing the graphical version of the game.

Yeah, and it's all made up money and value. Capitalism seems to have reached the runaway diesel engine stage, where it ain't going to stop until we cut off its oxygen or it blows the fuck up.

...uh oh. How so?

He probably got his first bill lmao

Network engineer here. My main use case for AI at the moment is for ticket management and as a glorified search engine.

The full name of the game is "Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress"

If you're not familiar with the game, you should look into it, it's incredible. There are tons of great documentaries about it on YouTube

So would Elven Underwear and The Hobbit Belly Band

Oh hell no

You can create systems that generate content without resorting to mass plagiarism.

I'm working on a game that will have 10 million unique levels... due entirely to assets I've created that interact with each other in a variety of ways. I would never taint that with a system that not only plagiarizes but destroys the Earth to do so.

After the great procgen bubble of the 10s I kind of was meh on it being shoved in everything to try to pad play time or replay value. I became much more into finite authored content with like a real story, characters, and most importantly a real ending.

That said, procgen seems like a, uh idk, a cool clockwork contraption that an author actually fussed over and tuned to their vision.

Compared to the gen slop that tells me literally nothing of the person who made it. And can't tell any of their decisions, brushstrokes, or challenges, from what some model that has nothing to do with them "decided" to spew forth.

At best it's a form of curation that disrespects every artist who influenced what just generated.

There are of course LLM ‘games’ that pretend to create a story in which the player does arbitrary actions. They're utter dogshit, because a) they can't keep track of their world for a prolonged time, since LLMs were never made for such cohesive reasoning and keeping track of objects; and b) they just string the player along forever without any particular objectives, since their whole modus operandi is endlessly generating text that seems coherent.