Lately it feels like AI is in everything apps, websites, even stuff at work. Some people say it’s the future, others think it’s just another tech phase. What’s your take? Just hype, or are we really heading into an AI-driven world?
Oh, the bubble will burst sooner or later. It's a bubble, and a bigger one than crypto, NFTs or "web 3". And the longer it takes to burst, the worse it's going to be when that happens.
(Never mind that it's also a big scam, that's ruinous for the environment and the public sphere. That's another story.)
A lot of people in this thread are making predictions based on the current status quo of AI holding, where there's major money being poured into it in an effort to get it good, but the results are diminishing and the Generative AI systems are just never going to be profitable, because nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to pay for it. LLMs are probably here to stay, but image generation AI is never going to pay for itself, and you can forget about video or "game" AI.
I know several people who are paying to use generative AI for images and other content.
We can debate how many of those people need to exist for it to be profitable, but they do exist, and just yesterday, a client asked me if I could help him generate some images for his website using AI and if we had to pay a license fee, and if I could give him a quote (even though that's not my area of expertise).
I've also spoken with other people, and I remember one case of a person in Australia who was thinking of making a game based on a musical group and was looking for people to help him generate images based on AI, and again, he was willing to pay.
Another game I participated in, one created by a fan.
The person leading the development paid a membership fee so they could generate and use AI-generated music to add to the game, so that if people uploaded videos to YouTube, they wouldn't run into copyright issues.
So I'm sorry to say that, as much as we might not like it, there are plenty of users out there willing to pay for generative AI, especially because it's cheaper than paying a human to do same amount of work.
Believe me, I personally would like it to be unprofitable and for all generative AI to collapse, but based on everything I've seen and read, I highly doubt that's the future scenario.
AI is here to stay, whether we like it or not.
AI isn't a passing fad, because it basically enables results that take a normal human years to develop.
Typically in history, when a technology allows for lower costs and mass production of goods (real or virtual), it tends to stay and revolutionize the world, and generative AI follows that pattern.
It's true that there's a hype, comparable to when smartphones or tablets became widespread and there were people who thought the entire future would be just that technology. That hype is a bubble that will eventually collapse. But even if the hype bursts, it won't reverse the entire mass production of AI-generated content, especially in fields like video game creation and programming.
Every day we'll see more and more games created by generative AI of very low quality and fewer and fewer games created by hand, but these will continue to exist, and we'll have to live with this new reality.
Let me clarify, it's not that I'm for or against it, I'm not sharing my opinion, but rather what I think will happen with this technology.
I was gonna bring the smartphone analogy. Beat me to it.
AI is not the first tech that comes along and suddenly is everywhere. The internet itself counts too.
There will be two aspects of AI. How ordinary people use it in their everyday life. And how professionals (and some hobbiests) will use it to do things.
But no matter how it will turn out to be used, we need some type of consensus how to treat AI things. Things like games are one thing. But AI is used to fake politicalized pictures and lie to people. Evil governments can do very nasty things in terms of propaganda. Trust in governments and media is eroding for quite a while now and AI is not helping there. Hmm. Maybe it could, actually. Teach an AI to verify, if something is AI made or something like that.
But yeah, the tech is gonna stay. The question is, how and who will use it for what purpose and in what extent. There was this famous quote about how much memory a computer would need, that did not turn out so well...
I am also not for or against it, in general. But I am very concerned. And I think any shortsighted solution will not do. Like trying to ban AI that was trained with non consented materials.
IMO AI is here to stay. Not only because it is good enough for some people, but also because it's costy to pay artists to make the art.
The trend which could burst is companies making AI based products. This sounds like dot com bubble to me.
I'm not saying I agree with those though but it is what's happening currently.
Nonsense like this post just shows how deceived even tech-savvy people are by AI propaganda. LLM's are not capable of becoming full intelligence, period, end of conversation. They are a more powerful form of autocomplete. If AGI ever exists, LLM's will likely be a component of it, but that's it, a component. This tech does not have limitless potential, it has specific use cases. It cannot become sentient no matter how much hardware you throw at it, just like a car cannot fly to the moon no matter how big of an engine it has.
it feels like the dotcom boom all over again 🤔
right now there is an investor frenzy (which is kind of like a piranha frenzy )
people are not sure how to make a lot of money with AI
but convinced themselves that it will be figured out any day now 👀
in practice it's seems to be just a cost saving tool - speeding up everyday things
but it's also a fad - many people are already tired of it 😓
I definitely don't think AI will render all technical and creative jobs obsolete like some silicon valley types do, but I do think big corps will keep pumping money into it for a few more years at least. I imagine it will be similar to the way streaming has been huge for the past 10-15 years despite seemingly never being profitable, and only recently has started to decline
I think people would tend to use it often, but there will be alternatives and it will become saturated, AI basically takes everything and gives you the most average answer, image, video, you name it. For example, I could've made all of my game assets with AI , instead I gathered friends and like minded students and proceeded to collaborate and gave them experience instead of just gpting it!
Someone above mentioned how like smartphones, it’s “here to stay.”
As AI bots are pushed onto more smartphones, it’s all losing popularity.
Smartphones sales are plummeting. People are relearning how to live better without their phones listening in, tracking their daily activity, and causing stress. Kids embarassed by how quickly and skillfully peers can respond to situations without relying on a phone are going to grow up (if they can) wanting their own kids capability of thinking for themselves.
I used to write stories about life with this technology embedded into people’s bodies as if it were normal, but it was (1) dystopian at its base and (2) on a realistic timeline that’s inconvenient to the current billionaires.
Looking at who’s pushing AI development today strongly highlights the dangers, and many people noticing that are interested in learning how to communicate better without third-party filtering, how cooperate directly on creative projects, and how to learn skills more self-fulfilling than how to write effective keywords.
tl;dr: It’s both. The “AI” everywhere will be around in some form for a long time, but it’s overhyped. Like NFTs/blockchains.
I think it's probably here to stay, but probably not in its current form. It's currently shiny and new, pitched as a solution to everything. I think once the shine has gone, it will probably just be seen part of a tool set and the tooling can be better refined with that goal.
There has also been a recent study (I think it was from MIT?) that reliance on AI is negatively effecting peoples mental capacity (problem solving, attention span and so on), which seems to point toward the benefits of not using AI to "do things for me", but as an additional learning resource, so I'm hoping people pull back from the over reliance on it soon, but who knows? It's hard to tell people that they shouldn't rely on a convenience.
A few thoughts on AI...
Firstly, its not AI. It's called AI because something like "Large data pool analysis algorithms using fuzzy logic" doesn't roll off the tongue easily, which isn't good for marketing... and also because it used to be called that when software could do something that they used to think took intelligence to do. It's not that the software is intelligent, it's that the problem has been better quantified.
Secondly, it's definitely here to stay. Pandora's box has been opened, the genie is out of the bottle. Even if half of the world bans some sort of AI definition, the other half will gleefully offer it in order to take attention and money and personal data.
And that's the third thing. AI imagine generation and chatbots might not be directly profitable, but they are strong vectors for private data gathering. You want to slow them down, get some congressmen or whatever to pass some restrictions there. And good luck with that.
And, ultimately, controlled 'AI' is not a bad thing. Its an incredibly powerful tool for processing large amounts of data... somewhat unreliably, but that will improve. As a species we need that, the next Big Thing that will shift us a bit further towards... I dunno, singularity or wherever we're heading. Anyway, the point is that we need to figure out how to adopt and implement it smoothly, not panic about it.
I think it will be here to stay. When used responsibly it is a very powerful tool, but it really does produce a lot of low quality slop. It's one thing to use it as a reference for the programming language, engine, tool, etc that you don't really understand, but it's another thing to make a game with AI ideas, AI art, AI programming, AI music, etc.
I'm pretty split on it. I think good projects can be made with it, and I don't really like the idea of regulating the industry against AI, as we are already seeing a bit. But at the same time, I don't like the fact that even more slop can be made more quickly and easily.
I don't know, such a hard argument. I think responsible use is the key here. I participated in an AI generated game jam and it was honestly pretty fun. But if I was making a project for Steam, or commercially motivated purposes, I'd feel like I'm cheating my players if I used it for more than, i don't know, maybe backgrounds or loading screens or something like that.
Generative AI is going to change a lot of industries... it automates things that were previously un-automatable, and it enables a lot more flexible automation on top of that. I'm not some big doomsday "ai will destroy society and leave people with no purpose" type person, but it will definitely result in more changes than any technology we have seen in the past decade at least.