This morning, the news broke that Larian Studios, developer of Baldur's Gate 3 and the upcoming, just-announced Divinity, is apparently using generative AI behind the scenes. The backlash has been swift, and now Larian founder and game director Swen Vincke is responding to clarify his remarks.
This is just the whole robot sandwich thing to me.
If home kitchens were being replaced by pre-filled Automats, I’d be equally repulsed.
A tool is a tool. Fools may not use them well, but someone who understands how to properly use a tool can get great things out of it.
The most expert craftsman won’t get a round peg to fit into a square hole without doing some damage. At some point, you need to understand what the tool is useful for. And the danger of LLMs boils down to the seeming industrial scale willingness to sacrifice quality for expediency and defend the choice in the name of business profit.
Doesn’t anybody remember how internet search was in the early days? How you had to craft very specific searches to get something you actually wanted?
Internet search was as much constrained by what was online as what you entered in the prompt. You might ask for a horse and get a hundred different Palominos when you wanted a Clydesdale, not realizing the need to be specific. But you’re never going to find a picture of a Vermont Morgan horse if nobody bothered to snap a photo and host it where a crawler could find it.
Taken to the next level with LLMs, you’re never going to infer a Vermont Morgan if it isn’t in the training data. You’re never going to even think to look for one, if the LLM hasn’t bothered to index it properly. And because these AI engines are constantly eating their own tails, what you get is a basket of horses that are inferred between a Palomino and a Clydesdale, sucked back into training data, and inferred in between a Palomino and a Palomino-Clydesdale, and sucked back into the training data, and, and, and…
I think artists could use gen AI to make more good art than ever
I don’t think using an increasingly elaborate and sophisticated crutch will teach you to sprint faster than Hussein Bolt. Removing steps in the artistic process and relying on glorified Clipart Catalogs will not improve your output. It will speed up your output and meet some minimum viable standard for release. But the goal of that process is to remove human involvement, not improve human involvement.
I will say, gen AI seems to be the only way to combat the insane BEC attacks we have today.
Which is great. Love to use algorithmic defenses to combat algorithmic attacks.
But that’s a completely different problem than using inference to generate art assets.
If home kitchens were being replaced by pre-filled Automats, I’d be equally repulsed.
The most expert craftsman won’t get a round peg to fit into a square hole without doing some damage. At some point, you need to understand what the tool is useful for. And the danger of LLMs boils down to the seeming industrial scale willingness to sacrifice quality for expediency and defend the choice in the name of business profit.
Internet search was as much constrained by what was online as what you entered in the prompt. You might ask for a horse and get a hundred different Palominos when you wanted a Clydesdale, not realizing the need to be specific. But you’re never going to find a picture of a Vermont Morgan horse if nobody bothered to snap a photo and host it where a crawler could find it.
Taken to the next level with LLMs, you’re never going to infer a Vermont Morgan if it isn’t in the training data. You’re never going to even think to look for one, if the LLM hasn’t bothered to index it properly. And because these AI engines are constantly eating their own tails, what you get is a basket of horses that are inferred between a Palomino and a Clydesdale, sucked back into training data, and inferred in between a Palomino and a Palomino-Clydesdale, and sucked back into the training data, and, and, and…
I don’t think using an increasingly elaborate and sophisticated crutch will teach you to sprint faster than Hussein Bolt. Removing steps in the artistic process and relying on glorified Clipart Catalogs will not improve your output. It will speed up your output and meet some minimum viable standard for release. But the goal of that process is to remove human involvement, not improve human involvement.
Which is great. Love to use algorithmic defenses to combat algorithmic attacks.
But that’s a completely different problem than using inference to generate art assets.