343 hiring Generative AI director for next Halo game (Destiny)
https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1725240/Senior-AI-Engineer
Looks like Halo 7 will feature generative AI in multiple facets of its production. Surely this will work and save Halo!
duh.
https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1725240/Senior-AI-Engineer
Looks like Halo 7 will feature generative AI in multiple facets of its production. Surely this will work and save Halo!
//jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1725240/Senior-AI-Engineer
https://openai.com/index/openai-and-microsoft-extend-partnership/
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/23/microsoft-invests-billions-more-dollars-in-openai-extends-partnership/
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
oh boy..
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I’m of two minds about this.
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?
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.
I’m of two minds about this.
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.
I don't disagree with any of that.
Sadly, humans are not rational actors. Remember: Number must go up, no matter what.
I’m of two minds about this.
Oh, I fully agree that enshittification will proceed unabated, but I'm not so confident that it will lead to any sort of revelation on the topic of AI.
I’m of two minds about this.
Oh, I fully agree that enshittification will proceed unabated, but I'm not so confident that it will lead to any sort of revelation on the topic of AI.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2024/07/23/employees-report-ai-increased-workload/
343 about to get some "hampered productivity".
I’m of two minds about this.
Just me thinking in the abstract, but I wonder about the delta between working from scratch to create something (the old way), and working on an endless supply of subpar content in order to make it par or maybe even actually good.
I’m of two minds about this.
Just me thinking in the abstract, but I wonder about the delta between working from scratch to create something (the old way), and working on an endless supply of subpar content in order to make it par or maybe even actually good.
Consider:
The creators of this have since said that literally every shot had to be extensively reworked in post, with tons of visual effects to fix or make work things Sora could not get. There is no shot in there that did not have human VFX artists rework. We aren't just talking about obvious things like adding the balloon, but fixing elements of the video that warp or change over time, or that came out malformed.
They have said it would have been cheaper, and less work to simply shoot it themselves traditionally.
Video games are significantly more complex than films, so you extrapolate the consequences.
I’m of two minds about this.
They have said it would have been cheaper, and less work to simply shoot it themselves traditionally.
That's true for now. Look at the progress OpenAI made within a single year.
Now, 343 is absolutely jumping the gun here. There's no question about that. But my point, economically speaking, is that AI doesn't need to be "as good" as human output in order to cause major disruption; it only needs to be "good enough". Once it gets to a point that consumers are willing to spend money on AI output preferentially over human-generated output, it's over. The cost savings will be too difficult to fight.
Capitalism can be insidious. Money drives decision-making not only on the business side of things, but on the consumer side as well.
I’m of two minds about this.
Now, 343 is absolutely jumping the gun here. There's no question about that. But my point, economically speaking, is that AI doesn't need to be "as good" as human output in order to cause major disruption; it only needs to be "good enough". Once it gets to a point that consumers are willing to spend money on AI output preferentially over human-generated output, it's over. The cost savings will be too difficult to fight.
This is predicated on the idea that it can ever be cost effective though. Many economists and people studying it are saying it is not looking good even decades out.
It's certainly interesting technology, but it won't be able to magically do things it wasn't designed for. A steam engine might power a car, but it can't send you to the moon.
Even if it gets "good enough", that only matters if it is significantly cheaper than human labor, which it is not, and won't be. "Good enough" only matters if it can easily integrate into your project without a human supervising or reworking it which offsets any cost savings.
These technologies offer no actual understanding of what they generate. You cannot say, "Take the exact scene you just generated and move the camera 6 feet to the right". The resulting media is completely different because it has no understanding of what it just made. Yet such corrections are trivial for a human, and a huge part of the iterative process of art.
Economics is everything. The bubble bursts as companies realize it doesn't actually save them money.
I’m of two minds about this.
These technologies offer no actual understanding of what they generate. You cannot say, "Take the exact scene you just generated and move the camera 6 feet to the right". The resulting media is completely different because it has no understanding of what it just made.
Debatable. The bare-bones tech can't, but there are layers of the stuff being built on top of one another now. The end-users says "6 feet to the right" while a hundred layers of LLMs translate that into a descriptive prompt for the generative painter.
Definitely agree about the power consumption, though. We're burning through a lot of "training" while execs keep pushing for crazier tech.
It's definitely not ready for primetime yet.
I’m of two minds about this.
They have said it would have been cheaper, and less work to simply shoot it themselves traditionally.
That's true for now. Look at the progress OpenAI made within a single year.
Now, 343 is absolutely jumping the gun here. There's no question about that. But my point, economically speaking, is that AI doesn't need to be "as good" as human output in order to cause major disruption; it only needs to be "good enough". Once it gets to a point that consumers are willing to spend money on AI output preferentially over human-generated output, it's over. The cost savings will be too difficult to fight.
Capitalism can be insidious. Money drives decision-making not only on the business side of things, but on the consumer side as well.
I'm about to repeat myself a little here. So here is the quick version in the whole of below; It's about the people.
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"343 is absolutely jumping the gun here"... no, no. "Capitalism" ... no, yes? but AH! no. It's a scapegoat, this. Vale in a vale in a vale. The problem with the all round terms is how it, like a net, captures all the ...plastic, as well as the fish. (A SOFFISH? I digress.) A trade off in the ease for speech I suppose.
What have we just so recently learned in example through Bungie? All roads lead to the people who's job up on high is to steer the ship. And I've already indirectly stated the motivations on this topic here which, yes, does blend well into the 2nd part here.
As for the 2nd part? Well, boy alive let's see if I can thread what I see in my head into words here... there is no more choice now. Lines are drawn (heh), and the true believers have pushed their chips on to the table, and now they want a result in that... confidence? And they are doing that much like "AI", by seeing what sticks in the frenzy.
There are no choices here, just gambles. A glory of "What if".
AI doesn't need to be "as good" as human output in order to cause major disruption; it only needs to be "good enough". Once it gets to a point that consumers are willing to spend money on AI output preferentially over human-generated output, it's over. The cost savings will be too difficult to fight.
...
...
No. "It's over"? Such is far too fatalistic a take, me thinks. Disco never died. Vinyl was not destroyed. 2d animation still lives, much as practical effects still do as well. Will there be a shift in the metrics? Yeah, that's pretty much a given at some point I suppose, but... eh. There are still a fair bit of questions in progress which need be answered for.
It's definitely not ready for primetime yet.
Absolutely brilliant the way the MC took out his phone to snap some pics of the Covenant ship.
I’m of two minds about this.
But what if Chief's gun could shapeshift?
'Cause... Disco Elysium? *NM*
But what if Chief's gun could shapeshift?
That game is called Vanquish, and it rules.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/6de73y/vanquish_has_one_of_the_best_weapon_switching/
My 2 cents
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.
My 2 cents
1. AI drastically improves the experience of "getting some code down".
You could fix this by just programming in Jai! It was after all, designed to make programming joyful. 😉
Thanks so much for this perspective!
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My 2 cents
You could fix this by just programming in Jai! It was after all, designed to make programming joyful. 😉
Never heard of it!
*googles*
That's just Go with extra (worse) steps!
lol
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