 seeing pushback against procedural generation as a result of alleged "AI" and that's really fucking sad good procedural generation is hard. good procedural generation is bespoke and intentional. good procedural generation is artistic and creative. please don't lump it in with the slop generated through machine learning 😞 EDIT: procgen is not AI, it's a 40+ year old game design technique, see: https://peoplemaking.games/@eniko/113158903401769257 120 comments
 Wouldn't surprise me if pro-ai/llm people started that idea intentionally. Like calling LLM AI, and shoving it into everything, and declaring it's in stuff it's not in. It makes it hard to tell sort out the field. It's makes it feel inevitable, like it's already won, cause people to just accept it, etc.  @antijingoist @xgranade @eniko @antijingoist @xgranade @eniko AI is just a overused buzzword! My 2010 piano has AI features: Casio could have named it "Automatic Chord Prediction", but they decided to call it "AI Fingered" mode. :char_Well: @eniko egh... saw that one coming... i loved this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFLZiak5gyc&list=PLPdLkAMVHwZ5cwj7rMOuXMO0egYuqNRXh&index=5 back then this was mind blowing stuff... now some peeps would say in a bored tone "that all it can do? you have to make stuff that it combines then? not even a prompt??" argl...  @eniko this! Also these two things couldn't be more different: procedural generation might take milliseconds on your machine and require nothing more than an algorithm and a random seed, not a datacenter and a bazillion gigabytes of data scraped without consent  @gabrielesvelto @dalias @eniko Demoscene has more than amply demonstrated that procedural generation can be the more resource-efficient option, even.
@eniko even boring procedural generation is better than AI, because no matter how shallow a spore-like character creator is, at least the hand3 asset will have the same number of fingers every time the character is on screen.  @eniko I concur. It's the same with the pushback against "algorithms" on fedi - I wish there were better tools *under my control*, but it all gets ban-hammered because of the exploitative practices pursued by big tech 😕 (And, y'know, it's not like "sort by most recent while applying this list of filters" *isn't* an algorithm already)  You know how complicated is to train a pile of matrix multiplications to make it output what you want? The amount of choices you have available? Data augmentation, saddle points and optimizers, residual connections and architectural modifications, losses, normalization schemes, etc... I understand you are mad at AI grifters like Sam Altman because they are fucking up everything and making people unemployed, but please, that does not mean that training AI systems is trivial. @remenca @eniko No one here is calling the latest generations of AI "trivial", but whether the models and algorithms made using any kind of AI contribute to fairness and sustainability is something each and everyone working with them needs to reflect upon seriously. It is substantially harder for an LLM to be fair and sustainable than a crafted procedure-based generation algorithm, so the latter seemingly receiving backlash as of late is unreasonable. I wish I could reproduce the original toot but it seems I have been blocked. If I'm not wrong it did insinuated that procedural art is more complex than training AI system. So my reply arguing otherwise was appropriate. Now, if we move into whether LLMs can be fair or not compared to procedural algorithms I must concede. But again, this was not the original topic. And ofc there is people working in AI reflect a lot on that and that is why there is a lot of people working in fairness and efficiency. Others only care about money, but that also happens in other fields. Finally, I'd like extend this concern for fairness and the consequences of automation to other fields, such as yours for instance. I see you hold a PhD in computer science. Have you wondered if the impact of all automatization carried thanks to computers? Did anyone gave a fuck about all the people who lost their jobs because an industrial robot replaced them in a factory? Probably not. The only difference is that instead of a poor fucker being the one to lose their job, now it is the turn of intellectual workers who (mistakenly) thought that they were free from being threatened by automatization. And the sheer scale of the problem. But that's all.  Rather more that it's an entirely different class, if they were on a Venn diagram they'd be separate circles. Individuals not understanding either getting hung up on the term generative. You don't have to jump to the defence of LLMs. Sadly, I cannot check it because I have been blocked. If it is not I'll apologize, but my interpretation is that "oh, procedural art is much harder than throwing heaps of data to a GPU". @remenca @glowl "seeing pushback against procedural generation as a result of alleged 'AI' and that's really fucking sad coming into my mentions going "but training machine learning algorithms is hard too weehhhh!" is grounds for a block. do not fucking do it  @eniko harder than procgen and gives worse results? 🤔  @eniko it may be hard, but its not a creative process. thats the important difference  @eniko As a roguelike game developer and player, I have mixed feelings about this. Yes, procedural generation is an incredibly deep topic, and you can use it in your game with intention and skill to make it do what you want. But that's not what happens most of the time. Seeing all the lazy games with random elements in them labeled as "roguelike" gets tiring very fast. At this point Poker qualifies as roguelike.  @deshipu @eniko Well that's more of a game design issue, yeah you can make an amazing procedural generation algorithm and create complex and beautiful worlds, but if the player has nothing to do in it, then it's a bad game.  @eniko omg they have "AI reply guy" in their bio. Points for self-awareness, I guess. this post has rapidly breached containment so im muting this thread for my sanity @eniko The Deep Rock Galactic people recently posted an explanation of their cave generation which goes reasonably deep and shows pretty nicely how much human input is needed there. In short: They do hand-made rooms and modify them, and take into account the mission type, biome and a bunch of other stuff. (edit: link directly to post) @eniko I can not stress enough how AI as a term has completely disrupted the industry entirely. What used to be how we defined npc and enemy behavior in a game is now used in a completely different way. Now anything generated by a computer is considered "AI", even though, as you said, it's something very specifically crafted. We defined it's rules and behaviors. We made the equations. @eniko Going back to the theme of games, the first games I lost literally thousands of hours in were NetHack (<3) and eventually Elite (Frontier) - which counted as a milestone for procedural generation (actually still does) because of how much game play and graphics it allowed them to cram onto a single floppy (yes, me old) disk. Freaking amazing. @eniko In the same vein, let's also not lump in machine learning as a whole into the bunch that is LLMs and """AI art""" 😅 Good examples of machine learning in gaming and gamedev include autonomous TAS, enemy AI, and ML-assisted procedural generation. Other good examples of ML include the development of revolutionary life-saving medicine. Ethical uses of ML being lumped in with unethical uses of ML harms genuine scientific research. 😅  @soulsource @jay @eniko @eniko I've never heard this talking point before, it's quite stupid and nonsensical.  @rosco @eniko @mynameistillian Ye. Meanwhile I study materials science and we use AI models to make new prototypes of composites. The thing is, they're not quite the same things as the corpos are doing (and while they benefited from the boom they were around since like 2013). We don't ask ChatGPT to give us formulas or anything. @maxthefox @eniko @mynameistillian I think the issue is not the generative models per se, it's the insatiable greed of corpos that collect data without consent (yet they have no issues crushing anyone who dare infringe on their copyrights), and hype it up to be the solution to every problem because they can afford to pay for huge datacenters (and waste a hell lot of energy in the process). It's an issue that far predates the "AI craze". @maxthefox @eniko @mynameistillian Of course the tech itself (generative models) should be heavily regulated as it can obviously be used with ill-intent (inpersonation, fake news, etc..). @eniko Rule of thumb: if it existed before the panemic, it's not what you're mad about  @eniko Problem is that most games that use procedural generation are soulless generic and repetitive. I rather have Outer Worlds size of universe with few hand crafted planets than Starfields seemingly endless universe that is full of generic forgettable planets with same outposts and labs everywhere. There is no way Bethesda hand made all the planets. They were all procedurally generated and then they plopped some unique cities or structures on key planets and that's it. @rejzor there are loads of games with excellent procgen like caves of qud and dwarf fortress @eniko The only potential silver lining here is that we can call it PROC-GEN or something like that to avoid the misery that is has been the AI moniker being coopted. We could also differentiate the "bad ai" with something like "GEN AI", LLM AI or something similar. My master's thesis was on PROC-GEN, and people keep mixing it up. also, was making a PROC-GEN course, and it's been put on hold because most will confuse it with the GEN AI or LLM AI crap. I hope it all burns and never comes back.   @eniko I recommend the book "Procedural Generation in Game Design" by Tanya Short and Tarn Adams. Especially Tarn Adams' Dwarf Fortress has demonstrated what procedural generation can do for a game. @eniko I feel like procedural generation (which, as a tool can be fantastic) is often used as a buzzword. For a while in the late '00s everyone was bragging about it in games. Now it mostly comes up mostly when people dislike something. No one talks about the procedural generation in the looter-shooters or roguelikes they enjoy: that is just RNG. Starfield? That is some bad procedural generation. That is just my annecdotal experience though.  @eniko we really need to figure out a better language when discussing/criticizing these things. I have no faith in the LLM’s strictly due to the types of people and organizations running them. ‘AI’ is frankly a poor descriptor, and I strongly believe it will continue to gain boogeyman status. @arclight @eniko The only place I’ve truly found some local LLMs to be useful have been to describe ideas to one and have it ask follow-up questions… because then it isn’t doing any sort of “creation”, it’s instead acting as a prompt for me to think about certain aspects of an idea that I may not have considered, and flesh them out.  @eniko I attempted to explain recently that what computer scientists think of as "artificial intelligence" and what the marketing guys have relabeled "machine learning" are vastly different things. I am not sure I made an impression.  @AndySocial @eniko machine learning has been a sub field of AI since the 1950s when a computer learned to play checkers by trial and error. LLMs are the result of one of the many ways to implement machine learning. AI researchers have always called the things that they develop “AI”, to indicate what field of research produced the things. The problem is that “AI” stands for both the research and the intended result and people are intentionally confusing the two. @eniko @eniko I will stash this toot and link to it if I ever run into this monstrosity of ignorance. @eniko Very good point. Minecraft is an example of brilliant procedural generation, did you catch Corridor Crew's video the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juQASG4Jy-E @eniko This is an excellent example of a term that historically originated in AI research but that has a modern use that is not the same. Harold Cohen conceived of a procedural image generator in the 60s. In the 70s he started developing AARON, an AI procedural image generator and continued until his death. AARON is why procedural generation is associated with AI but most game procgen does not use AI techniques. /1  @eniko It can also be used deterministically for compression: see Exile on the Acorn Electron, which somehow used it to have a map the size of a city and still fit the whole game (which had synthesised speech too, as if the map wasn't enough of a flex) in under 32kB!  @eniko I created a game that is heavily procgen years ago and have had so many people talking to me about it as AI. It's really obnoxious. @eniko Sad to hear about this; where did you see this pushback against proc-gen? I recently made a chart to also try to push to not have proc-gen and gen-AI lumped together:   Not just gaming, I think it's emergent behaviour of computing generally. We were doing it 40 years ago to generate bulk test data for systems because using production data was out of the question, that security/privacy thing.  |
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@eniko The AI con artists have succeeded in part by absorbing shit that already existed and was really cool. It fucking sucks and really saddens me that procgen is yet another thing caught in the crossfire.