Epic CEO [Tim Sweeney] says AI disclosures like Steam's make "no sense" because AI will be involved in "nearly all" future game development
![Epic CEO [Tim Sweeney] says AI disclosures like Steam's make "no sense" because AI will be involved in "nearly all" future game development](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dc64ac4a-8c9b-418e-afd3-fe8b3a228acd.jpeg)
https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/tim-sweeney-ai-disclosure-epicOpen linkView original on lemmy.ca414
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Even if that did happen, it wouldn't defeat the point of the disclosures at all. In fact, people will appreciate it all the more if a game is made without any AI involvement and it will become a selling point.
Plus, shouldn’t he want that information to be front and center anyway if he actually thinks it’s a good thing?
He, like the that Microsoft suit, has just enough awareness to realize how AI is being thought of by the general public, and knows it would affect his bottom line. Which is really all he cares about.
I only play organic games.
Indeed, I only play games generated by artificial brains grown in vats.
I think it would be helpful to know how AI is used.
It already is becoming a positive marketing point!
Yeah, there's a solid group of us that hates AI so much we'd do this.
I try to avoid it as best I can. When it comes to art, I won't touch anything that's AI.
At a very near point though, it's likely going to be impossible to do it without AI involvement, or at the very least without proving you didn't somehow.
AI is being baked into almost every dev and art tool. They aren't just talking about using ChatGPT, if your game uses a single texture or model that ever got touched by a machine learning algorithm, you're using AI.
As long as AI doesn't take away our hands, it'll always be perfectly possible to draw our own art, compose our own music and write our own code. And especially in the open-source space, there's plenty of creative software not jumping on the AI bandwagon.
It's becoming nearly impossible to write code in a corporate environment without AI. Everyone has AI auto complete at the minimum, and AI code generation is at a point where it's at least even with an entry level dev.
I'm sure that's the case at some companies, but where I work, I can freely choose which tools I use for coding and whether or not to use AI, despite one of my bosses being obsessed with it.
This is true. My company heavily pushes employees to use AI to write software
eew
I'm glad that Tim Sweeny and its Epig Games Store is not the market leader.
lol I just found my 7 year old post on Reddit (when Reddit was cool) of a Epig Games logo creation: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckepic/comments/bvw5ru/epig_games/
But pigs are cute :(
Why associate them with such a shit company?
Tim Fashy again demonstrates why Steam is as successful as it is without a monopoly.
Also, another reason to never, ever do anything to do with epic, proven by the Chief Enslavement Officer itself.
PC gamers (sample size: at least 1) say they struggle to think of anything valuable that Tim Sweeney has ever said.
App Store policies from Apple and Google are unacceptable. That's Sweeney. Broken clock right twice a day and all.
Information good. Hiding information bad. Nefarious intentions.
Sugars and additives are in nearly all foods, maybe we should stop asking manufacturers to disclose it on the ingredients list.
Waste of ink really
People are all gonna die, eventually. Might as well get it over with.
The funeral services community liked that.
We're seeing the rise of push back against AI gen stuff... https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/827650/indie-developers-gen-ai-nexon-arc-raiders
Doubling down on the glazing of the ai bubble is pretty on brand for him. In before "tim sues steam for spurious claims against ai" or some other bullshit.
Sidenote: IsThereAnyDeal.com has the steam ai declarations as part of the quick reference section on game pages now. https://mastodon.social/@isthereanydeal/115606686918493913
If most games will contain AI content, then an "AI-free" badge couldn't be more important. He must understand that that statement is a complete logical fallacy, right?
It's Tim Sweeney, he doesn't understand where the sun goes at night.
Except every tool used for development is going to have some level of AI in it and unless you are also building your own AI free tool you aren't going to know what's truly AI free. AI is here and the cat's out of the bag. There is no putting it back in at this point. We as a society need to figure out how to use it ethically.
We can't even restrain ourselves on the usage of weapons, the extraction of natural resources, the usage of energy, consumerism, or cars. The way our societies are working will not give much chance to ethics.
LLMs are actually just massively improved spell checks. If you've used an IDE with in line error detection, technically that's AI now.
I do wish we've drawn the line more clearly on what "AI" usage means in terms of "this game was made with AI"
Every single time I think about what LLM are I think about this quote from the game Night in the Woods:
“We're good at drawing lines through the spaces between stars like we're pattern-finders, and we'll find patterns and we like really put our hearts and minds into it and even if we don't mean to.”
LLMs are based on neural networks. They are little brains that have nothing else to deal with than finding patterns in our own logic and can seem to be smarter than what they really are because of it. Evolution has not weighted them with an ego or urgency, but because it has been trained on ours it can sometimes emulate it. But it fundamentally lacks the complexity of our brains, at least for now. It is still amazing what they can do given so little, and it is amazing how convincing they can be with their answers when they are completely wrong. It is a viral form of intelligence.
What I consider sad is that we are really getting no option to run it locally. It's an excuse to turn everything into a live service where not even a subscription saves you because you can run out of "tokens" now. I have absolutely no issue with OSS tools incorporating LocalLLM aids. If people have modern GPUs then they can use local LLMs in some form or another.
As if down voting me is going to make the AI problem go away. Lemmy baffles me. People on here are the most pro FOSS but luddites at the same time when it comes to AI.
There is no going back from anyone this. We are gonna have to figure out how to live with the consequences of AI. We should be making a lot more noise about AI to law makers. It's coming for all of our jobs now matter what sector you work in. At some point people are going to have to accept it and make the best of it.
This is consistent. Do you realize who the Luddites were?
If it's available in "nearly all" development then you can switch the tag to say "no AI" and then I can continue discovering and buying games that don't have that BS.
But we all know, as does Sweeney, that that's a lie. And also that I wouldn't shop for games on Epic Store anyway, for reasons just like this.
I'd, some of these guys seem to be true believers. They are still ghouls to be shunned
Tim continues to not 'read the room'
On the wrong side of nearly everything. Disappointing, he was a gaming pioneer. Now just a petty greedy corpo.
Yeah, it's a shame for sure.
Yes, like we don't have Handmade tags in products...
I dont know about the future, but a "No AI-Art" tag, makes sense to me.
I have seen handmade tags, for stuff that wasn't machine loomed, etc. But handmade clothing is mostly dead in the consumer world, unless you class mass production methods as handmade.. Which they are made by hands in some stage
Handmade clothes may be not the norm but they are not extinct. Dresses, scarfs and accesorising can be found handmade. Luxury market is in majority handmade.
The point is that the label is not pointless. It exist and will exist in the future. I just hope that games with human art won't be considered a luxury.
I think a lot of what was art will die, you have logo generators and random people image generators that used to be done by a graphic artist, or a photgrapher.
https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en
Then put the disclaimer in all games? So what, not like they're limited quantity
This is just one of many examples on why epic is inferior
And CEOs will be the easiest position to replace with AI. Can't wait for the share holders to figure that out.
yea that's just playing on semantics. Of course machine learning will keep assisting many different workflows, thank you Tim.
Go ahead with your ML-assisted procedural animations, your ML-enhanced denoising, your ML-powered stochastic mesh pruning.
What people don't want is generated visuals/music that try and pass off as art. I'd love to summon debility to explain that the ruling class doesn't get it, but they do -it's a convenient way for them to save on human labor that is also... just too tempting to use for replacing art as well.
"it's a convenient way for them to-" insert: exploit all culture, our past and present artists, writers, musicians, etc. . . The offense is utterly incomprehensible. Its like the billion dollar relativity thingy, where you just can't get over the relative size of the comparison to $100,000. The amount of data stolen from past and current IP is too much for the layman to ever consider. It's the heist of the epoch.
AI generated visuals and music are one thing, but one use of AI in that category is giving NPCs actually interesting things to say.
Currently, without AI, they have one or two lines about the weather, or the general state of affairs, but if you can pass an LLM the current state of the world and the player's recent actions, then run the output through a tts model tuned to a distinct voice to, you'd be making the world feel way deeper than it is now with much more insightful interactions. You could maybe go even further and add infinite mini-quests in a similar manner, but it's better to start off small.
AI doesn't have to replace, and the best studios will use it to enhance and add to their art, the average ones will avoid it, and the worst ones will use it to replace art.
And who's going to be powering that NPC's LLM model? Unless all you want is a free hotlinked chatbot window disguised as a character? Because the publishers and developers sure as hell won't power it on their end and if they do you'll be paying out the ass for it. Otherwise that LLM for an NPC will have to run locally on your own hardware....in addition to the game itself.
So yeah, have fun with that.
And dialogue generation is ALL they can do btw. They can't navigate a character around a 3d environment or even play against you in a grand strategy game. So, looking at RAM and GPU prices... yeah the novelty of LLM in games will run it's course pretty quick.
It'd be a small model run locally, taking up maybe half a GB of VRAM
Bruh, that's like 25-50% on an Nvidia card. Too much overhead! /s
In theory they could offer the ability in the settings to use the NPU if one is available.
Basically the same situation as it was with Raytracing.
And wonder why Steam is succeeded but Epic is an AI slop wasteland
And people wonder why Epic games has the smallest market share of all the game stores
Yeah, I can't imagine why people aren't flocking to the Epic Store. Must be Valves fault.
Don't forget all the "web3" games on EGS that are the future, too!
Take the free stuff, give them nothing.
Tim: Valve doesn't understand the market. AI is going to lead gaming industry.
Also Tim: VALVE IS A MONOPOLY AND SHOULD SEIZE TO EXIST.
Valve:
Valve wins.
Valve understands that sometimes less is more
They make sense because we don't want your AI shit Sweeney
"Crypto/NFT disclosures make no sense, because all games will become "Play to Earn" and have NFT objects where you can transfer your Mario hat to COD 2028."
I am being glib, Sweeney probably has a point, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take a critical look at his intentions.
What are his intentions?
Wannabe American oligarch.
The things he allegedly argues against (Apple/Google app store restrictions) is what he would implement (word for word copy/paste arguments) if he was in their position.
Typical corrupt scum.
Using AI to maximize his profits without people criticizing him for it.
Never buy another Epic game again, understood!
Then some clueless person complains that Steam dominates the market. When Epic is constantly shooting their foot.
People like to make informed decisions and those labels help. In proper countries even beer have content labels to say if there is rice or corn with the barley.
One can be concerned by a monopoly even when there are no bad actors. Google used to be good before it was evil, and Gabe Newell will die eventually. Consolidation of market power (Audible for audiobooks, for instance, or Steam for video games) is not ideal. It is a shame Epic is such a piece of shit.
Indeed, but shoving Steam under the bus, instead of critiquing their "rivals" for their lack of consumer-friendly alternatives, when for the most part they're just doing their best seems counterintuitive.
This is why Epic is losing lol
Agreed.
What does it cost them to make a checkbox and show the value to the customer?
If they fear it, they know that the knowledge will make me think twice on buying it.
These guys live in a bubble, huffing each others’ farts
It is useful to know what games i want to avoid and boycott.
Tim can suck my sweaty balls.
Careful, his suction might leave you ball-less
More info = good.
It being ubiquitous does not mean it makes no sense. They can still say how and to what extent gen AI was used.
nahh men. This is why you (Epic) are giving away games every week for free. Nobody likes you
Even giving out great games for free doesn't make Epic more likeable. That is a next level failure.
If anything, other companies need to do the same as Valve does to gain respect and popularity. But, here we are.
Epic CEO [Tim Sweeney] is an idiot
Tim Sweeny doesn't understand the very people he wants to have give him money. Like, at all.
I guess I won't be buying nearly all games.
Super effective slop filter you say? Sign me the fuck up!
Bad title, he's not an epic CEO at all.
Steam is my favourite multi-billion dollar monopoly 😌
Sweeney is not very smart, is he?
No, it fucking won't, Tim Sweeney. Go jump off the OG Fortnite BR map so I can default dance on you while you get sent back to the lobby.
I think it should be more descriptive.
using gpt as a stack overflow replacement should be fine or autocomplete for a simple for-loop
using generative npcs, dialog, voice is another thing entirely
Plenty of folks add what ai was used for in the description of their game. Works well enough.
Personally I just avoid the games outright if ai was used at all, but yeah
would you avoid games with DLSS? if not where exactly is that line since it requires similar workflows as used in creating LLMs and contributes more to model development for nvidia and amd?
The location of the line is for each person to decide for themselves. Mine sits just before ai gets involved in the creation process. Llms for code, genai for art assets or concept art, that sort of thing. Won't buy a game that involved that.
Personally I don't avoid DLSS but I am always overjoyed to see a game not leaning on it to reach playable framerates, since I find the graphical artifacting quite annoying and it doesn't seem like they have a solution to it since I continue to see the swimming haze in modern titles.
Depends on how it's used.
Right now it's used to replace skilled workers, be them artists, actors, or programmers.
I can certainly think of a few good uses for AI in games, but to a Corpo CEO "good use" = wider profit margins at the cost of humanity. And so we need to be informed about such things when we spend money on something that is by all rights an artform.
The problem is that the very capabilities that let a game have "way more of something than it could otherwise have" (say, thousands of unique voices reading context-specific runtime generated text) can be used to reduce the need for workers (so one can just pretty much generate all speech in game by paying a bunch of random people of the street for to come over and read text for 1h and then just clone their voices and used that to generate all in-game speech - the quality way less than pre-prepared lines read by a trained voice actor, but the cost will be a tiny fraction of it).
AI can helps us do things which in practice would otherwise be impossible but many (maybe most) companies are just using it to cut manpower costs even though it delivers inferior results than than trained professionals.
He is funded by tencent. Of course he will push ai.
As a CEO you can decide whether to piss off on what your potential consumers demand and don't. Obviously, there's a reason why the EGS is in the shitty place it is and Steam isn't. EGS focuses on developers and publishers even when it means pissing on consumers. Steam might have spearled modern DRM "subscription"-based marketplaces, but they've also continued to cater to consumer demands even when it opposed their interests and they could have chosen to ignore them anyway.
I'd argue that it was always in their interest to listen to their customers
I've said this before that typically people don't know what they are talking about AI, but I don't expect this from people who SHOULD know what AI is.
There could be technologies that AI can assist with, hell I'm not a game dev but I assume even back in the day, devs used tricks and technologies that today could be considered as AI
However AI as in it will write you code, generate you a game and write you a story? Hell no.
Yes, nuance is important
but
I'd argue that demanding the
customerseller fill out a 20 page form on what the AI was used for (and additionally which model) would result in the opposite sentiment for the seller and customer.Theres a line between too little and too much information.
I like AI, and see no issue with disclosing how it is applied. People who are pro-AI would like to further hone their craft, by understanding what workflows and issues are involved. Anti-AI folk can simply avoid what they dislike. Either way, it is win-win.
The main problem I have besides the ethics is that people keep trying to pass off substandard art as non-ai when it still just looks worse.
Yes but we all know that Tim is a bit of an idiot.
We've all seen AI made games, they are awful. Terrible optimisation (often not optimised at all), programming mistakes that first year junior wouldn't make, glitchy looking art and basic gameplay because AI cannot be original.
Yeah I'm sure they're really going to take off.
there should be a law that says all CEOs must shut the fuck up always and forever
SEC rule update: All stock shares current or future issued, are non-voting shares. Shareholders cannot be trusted to select good operators.
Tax law change: worker cooperatives have 50% reduced tax burden. CEOs are a burden, not a resource.
Idunno. Helps decision making
yeah for example even though I was inactive for years, it took zuck himself to help me make my decision to get the fuck off of fascbook in 2018
Lucky for them, I won't buy any new games. Too many fantastic older games to play that they didn't cheat and cut corners to produce.
And they'll become cheaper as they undoubtedly sack their talent, right?
I think if I buy a game under the pretext of it being entirely "man-made", in 2026. If it then turns out to have been partially AI produced in 2030, I should have the right to earn a refund, even if I 100% it.
Epic fail
Just go ahead and admit you can't sell games anymore sweeney.
The head of the second most child-predatory company that people basically only use for free games is a bad actor. Who could have guessed?
Tim Sweeney can go eat a dick
Entirely off topic: you can block dataharvesting to the epic store from your hosts file.
Is this what you're talking about?
Jup, that’s it.
I think there's more to it as well as every tool or technology has had an impact on human labor. A lot of the complaints against AI I have found are complaints about capitalism.
But on topic of the post I think noting when AI is used is good just like I'd like to know when it's a picture of a painting or an actual painting being sold.
Yeah we are on the losing side of history. The future will be total ai slop. People love it. We will be the grumpy old folks yelling that the tv ruined the world.
Well that's probably true
I think it's a case of literal AI-generated assets vs AI assistants used in the process of work.
Except Steam doesn't really enforce any rules around these disclosures. E.g arc raiders having AI voicelines, and their disclosure being something like "we use some AI during development"
Never thought I'd agree with Tim Sweeney on anything.
John Carmack has a good take on AI in game dev too.
There's a huge difference between AI for behind the scenes things, and AI artwork, animation, and voices.
Technical involvement/assistance: Sure, use whatever tools you have
Artistic: Hm.....Maybe. Tell what it was used for and I can say if I agree with it.
I mean he's not wrong, it's like saying we're going to have a flag for whether the game uses stock/bought assets or like saying whether an animated movie uses cgi.
The real issue is that many are using AI poorly, but as developers become more familiar with the tools and work them more seamlessly into their workflow, it can be beneficial.
Preach!!!
I think I agree. At some point it won't make any difference because it will just be another tool. We can have our knee jerk reactions for now, though. Especially for people like lemmy users.