CEO Asks ChatGPT How to Void $250 Million Contract, Ignores His Lawyers, Loses Terribly in Court
https://www.404media.co/ceo-ignores-lawyers-asks-chatgpt-how-to-void-250-million-contract-loses-terribly-in-court/Open linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com1309
Comments216
Kim: Aw shit I regret my contract. Maybe I can get out of it by lying. I need tons of lies. I need to lie and bullshit like a madman. I need to spout tons of absolute unhinged bullshit with a straight face.
ChatGPT: This. Is. My. Moment.
Sounds like our government. It sounds like our whole fucking modern society.
Too bad ChatGPT lacks the self-awareness (let alone any actual reasoning skills whatsoever) to appreciate it.
This sort of hilarious act of subversion (pun intended) makes me wonder if the loonies who think it's sentient are right.
Nah chat GPT is just a verbal mirror, so the idiot puts his complete lack of legal knoweldge in and gets a complete lack of legal knowledge out.
I was against ChatGPT, but now I think it could be useful as a moron honeypot.
Who would have thought that the workers weren't the real drones?!
Anyone who's met ceos
We know what "C" stands for in that suite
Watching a CEO get fucked by using AI is orgasmic.
The CEO will be fine at the end of the day.
The workers are going to get fucked, though.
At the moment this is a win for the workers. They should get their full share of the payout, now. The main danger is now their parent company may be hostile to them (or even try to close them) until the parent company CEO gets replaced.
One would hope pulling such a boneheaded move ought to make that happen rather quickly.
Of course, if this CEO has been there for more than a year or 2, he would probably get a golden parachute for more than the value of his fuckup...
Yep as soon as the game is launched, LAYOFFS!!!!
Sharing profits with the people who actually did the work is anti-capitalist.
Yeah. These illegal firings happened around 9 months ago. I doubt these guys had the funds to just sit on the sidelines, doing nothing, hoping that the court would rule in their favour. Even if they're offered their jobs back, it could be that by now they've made other commitments.
Or just don't want to contribute to an organization that tried to fuck them over in the past. I'd be much more inclined to get a payout and move on with my life. What's the point of returning to a job and making more money for the people who just tried to get rid of you to save a buck?
With many businesses I'm sure that's true. But, it might be different when you're making something artistic. Subnautica has a lot of passionate fans, and it's a unique kind of game. These guys might really want to finish this game that they poured a lot of themselves into. Maybe not, maybe they just want to move on. But, I think a lot of people who work on games really care about what it is they're doing.
oh god, sounds like Krafton were already assholes. I bet the put the other 250 in and sell it in pieces.
LLMs are fly honey for stupid people.
This is the kind of successful entrepreneur we're supposed to be looking up to, people.
Exactly, the fact this dude at Krafton can sign 250 million dollars deals but is also dumb enough to think a ChatGPT lawyer knows better than his own lawyers... It goes to show that many powerful people were just lucky or inherited their wealth but are definitely not successful because they are smart.
Throughout pretty much all of human history it's been apparent that the "nobles" class has been, at best, more trouble than they're worth; and at worst, the instigating spark that creates a nation-destroying blaze.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read a history book that the American nobleman is equally as useless and destructive as his counterpart anywhere else.
While undoubtedly true, this story is about a South Korean CEO of a South Korean company.
Sure. This comment thread is about class mobility in the West though.
But, fact is, it seems it's the same everywhere.
You just further proved his point
This is why the LLMs are so popular with execs, they are the ultimate yes men. They will feed ego and purport to give a strategy that will support any dumbass idea without challenging them.
That's half of it. The other half is that these execs think that everybody under them is some kind of replaceable cog in the machine with no special skills. They don't think their job could be replaced by AI. But, they think everyone under them is so unimportant that their job can be done by AI. They're managers. They don't know how to do the work of the people they're managing. They can't tell the difference between an accurate result given to them by someone with knowledge and expertise vs. one created by a slop machine that generates plausibly realistic text.
If their $1000/hour lawyers tell them one thing, but the bullshit machine tells them something different, they trust whichever one gives them the answer they prefer.
I mean, "smart" is a relative term. They were smart enough to find the money hose and latch onto it. But the skills necessary to schmooze $250M out of a creditor are fundamentally different than the skills necessary to manage a workforce or meet the terms of the contract.
You can call it the Peter Principle or the Principle-Agent Problem or any number of other business short-hands for "skills mismatch". The bottom line is that "meritocracy" in a capitalist system boils down to rent-seeking effectiveness. That's the skill set that is rewarded. And it produces legions of people who train and compete for the opportunity to maximize rent-seeking returns.
This guy fumbled the ball in a spectacular fashion. But I have no doubt he'll get back on his horse and find another pool of labor to extract wealth from. Because, if he's a CEO, he's honed the skills needed to do exactly that.
What we get to mock him for is his failure, not his decision. If he'd retrieved a useful answer from the ChatGPT answer lottery, or the courts had been stacked with his friends such that any answer he pulled was considered the right one, he'd be hailed as a business genius on the front page of the WSJ rather than scoffed at in the back pages of 404media.
Exactly "being smart" and "acting smart" are two different things. Usain Bolt is the "fastest" man on Earth, but if he's just chilling on the couch watching TV, I can run right past him.
Same with these ivy league CEOs, they probably (not necessarily) were smart when taking their tests in school, but if they just leave the fate of their company to chatgpt responses, they're acting as dumb as possible at the current moment.
You have no idea how ceos work do you....
Capitalist Mysticism at its finest.
Share your insights! Or be quiet, contributing "nah" is just lazy.
what's the point, why bother?
Thomas Piketty agrees with you in Capital
Luck is a factor, but the differentiator is that they have the. Isplaced confidence and drive to just do what they want first. Then the luck let's them get away with it. It's kind of like if you get a million people to flip a coin 50 times. Some of them will get all 50 to be heads. So with billions of people in the world. Some have this drive to be on top, misplaced confidence, luck, and situational oportunities (also a good part luck) to end up able to sign 250 million dollar contract. None of that actually requires they have a clue. Sometimes they do, but it isn't required.
And no one remembers the failures, except maybe their family with that wacky Uncle that had some crazy get rich quick scheme. In some other timeline, some kids think of their crazy uncle Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out of college because he thought he could do better than MySpace, and now he bounces around chasing various hustles that keep failing.
Flipping a coin 50 times has 1.1 quadrillion possible outcomes, only 2 of which are all heads or all tails. I think you'd need more than a few billion to reliably see those results.
I think though, you get the point.
Now here is a bonus question for you. If I give you a coin and ask you to flip it 20 times, and they all come up heads. What are the odds that if you flip it again it will come up heads?
I think it’s higher than a 50% chance of heads, because you have evidence for it being an unfair coin.
Nice that is in fact what I was going to say. I get a lot of people with that joke.
I’m trying to be more Bayesian in life, but it’s a difficult lifestyle change!
yeah that's over a one in a billion chance to get all heads in just a million tries.
Holy hell, the fact that those slack messages and that chatbot history ended up in court is mind blowing. I guess we should be grateful that this time, the bad guy and his hamfisted "Project X" got put in the spotlight.
As a brave Ukrainian defender once said, "We are lucky they are so stupid".
You never go full ChatGPT.
I mean, if this is the way the average CEO is handling ChatGPT, a lot of things start to make sense.
You'd be surprised how many CEOs are absolute morons who have successfully failed their way upwards into the C-suite by simply being agreeable to higher management, and greedy enough to fuck others over.
as someone who deals directly with these CEOs and their startups/small companies, no it doesn't surprise me. I deal with them on a daily basis. they're all collectively idiots that somehow fell into a barrel full of thumbs and came out sucking tits. They learned catch phrases and linkedin buzzwords and have the ability to con investors who are arguably more stupid than the CEOs.
My entire lively hood is based purely off their collective idiocy. they utilize AI/LLM's for builds, they fire virtually all their senior dev teams, then when things naturally go south they hire me to come in and pay me, honeslty, WAY more than I should be paid to code review their AI slop and tell them how fucked they are. that's literally my job now. All they know are buzzwords and the ability to throw money at a problem that will then hopefully vanish but it never does.
I've had conversations with some of these morons where they've openly admitted to me that they "asked chatgpt and it said we should do this and this" so this CEO asking chatgpt for legal advice does not surprise me at all.
What i've learned is to get ahead in life all you need to do is abandon all your ethics and morals, learn some catchy buzzwords, and be a complete moron. The world then rewards you for it.
Your hood is lively? Mine's pretty quiet.
how does one get such a wonderful job
like it or not linkedin and replying to tech bros posts calling them out. eventually a desperate upper manager or cto or ceo will notice and contact me to fix their fuck up. I used to just do contract dev work but I got tired of constantly reading bullshit on linkedin while trying to get work. so I started replying to the bullshit. eventually people seeing my replies figured I knew what I was talking about and would contact me for help. Now I get gigs purely from word of mouth.
fire. how often would you suggest someone use linkedin?
honestly as much as you can tolerate it. But once you start gaining traction then get off it.
I naturally assume there's a distinct lack of humanity and a willingness to act like a psychopath with them.
I think the will to fuck anyone over for more advancement is the biggest factor here.
Yeah, the lack of empathy and selfishness
You misspelled being related to the previous CEO or a good friend of theirs.
Someone straight up getting promoted to CEO from below is a bit more rare. They usually have been a CEO somewhere else before that due to relations.
Im convinced that the CEOs use it to write some emails or brainstorm ideas and suddenly they think it can do everything, so they fire everyone and then everything falls apart because it cant do what they think it can.
I work at a small company of <100 people, and fortunately the CEO is a human that treats his employees like other humans and recognizes that without us, there would be no company anymore. However, all of his emails sound like the most heavily sanitized corpo-marketing-speak. If you were to judge him by his emails alone, you would never guess that. As it turns out, he uses Copilot to draft emails. When I found that out, it made so much more sense.
On a certain level, I get it. I hate writing emails. But the AI slop emails make him seem like a corporate goon and they ultimately dehumanize him to new employees. I don't know if he realizes how impersonal the AI makes him seem. He probably has become slop-blind from using it too much.
Sorry, only tangentially related. Just kind of ranting here.
If your CEO is genuinely a good person, he would want to know that his emails make him less personable. Maybe you could tell him why the emails do not reflect your in person impression of him, that he actually cares about the employees. The reaction would at least give you good insight into who how he thinks.
Unfortunately, a lot of CEOs have crazy schedules, so they are constantly looking for ways to optimize their time. I think this drive is big reason why they love AI so much, in general.
I wish we weren’t obsessed with optimizing profits no matter the cost in the US.
I've been on Lemmy too long, because this is starting to sound like a double entendre.
I know exactly what you're talking about. I sometimes use AI to help get a 2nd opinion on what I've written myself if its for my business, and there's a lot of personalization and human touch in how I write things, especially when writing a blog post or an email to a customer I'm not entirely sure about.
The AI is good for finding areas that might be a little long, or maybe you say something twice and it isn't needed, or you've made a really long run on sentence... but if you were to just take the AI's suggestions at face value and use them, it completely de-perosnalizes it and makes it all trash.
I have to give it explicit instructions nowadays not to do that, and how I'm only looking for minor things to touch up.
These greedy morons are getting high off of their own supply
I finally got to read this article and the situation is even better/dumber with more context. I didn't realize the layering at first.
This CEO used AI to avoid paying human lawyers to help him figure out how to avoid paying human game developers.
This asshole needs to get some kind of "Yo Dawg I heard you like AI" anti-award.
Jail would be nice. Someone shouldn't be able to drag that many people through that much pain without repercussions beyond having to do the thing they were avoiding to begin with. Banning his stupid ass from running any more companies would be a decent outcome.
You can have punitive damages too.
Haven't the last few years made it clear that we live in a word without consequences ?
At least for those who most deserve them.
hes one of those that fully believe the bs that is AI being hyped.
Krafton did promise to be "AI first" for everything going forward. If you haven't already blocked the publisher on Steam or other services, do so now.
Good point!
For others doing the same, there's a little gear icon on the punisher page, with an option " Ignore this creator."
Edit: could also have been on the Publisher page, but I would check both.
When I'm in a "make game unattractive to buyers before it comes out" competition and my opponent is Krafton
I loved Subnautica. I’ve replayed it more than any game I own. I got it for free from Epic (the only way I get games from Epic). I bought it for Switch. I bought Below Zero. The franchise was shaping to be a “here, take my money” deal.
I don’t want Subnautica 2. I mean, I want a Subnautica 2 not Krafton Subnautica 2.
I reserve some blame for the original owners/devs. If they hadn’t sold out, if they had followed more of a Hello Games model, they could’ve coasted indefinitely churning out cool games to loyal fans.
The original owners retained full creative control though. It would have been fine if Krafton didn't try to fuck them over
I looked up a similar article without a paywall:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ousted-subnautica-2-devs-allege-krafton-asked-ai-how-to-avoid-paying-bonus/1100-6536280/
"Krafton recently declared itself to be an "AI-first company," which led Unknown Worlds to issue a statement indicating that Subnautica 2 will not feature generative AI."
The "AI first" shit is pure gold. I love the instant karma. Why are these CEOs throwing their money, reputation, etc. away on AI? Either they are even stupider than I thought, or the tech bros have some kind of massive blackmail machine they're using to take over everything and puppet all the CEOs.
Execs in this sort of company are narrative first, facts a distant second. LLMs speak their language, something agreeable that sounds right whether it is or not.
BTW, investors are largely in the same boat, they are investing with having no realistic way to know whether the nice things being said are backed by reality up front. They only know if/when it goes down in a blaze.
Further in gaming, maybe they tank some headliner properties with bad reviews if the mess them up, but it's possible that most of the 'sold' games barely even get played, thanks to Steam hoarding. A lot of businesses can coast on past glory for years and years before things blow up, if at all.
Yes, this is the reason it’s so popular with them. While the baseline ass-kissing of chatGPT makes me vomit, they think it’s the greatest invention in the world and don’t understand how somebody doesn’t love it
Yeah, I don't get why people like the default tone of those LLMs, they are so grating on me. When I get slop emailed that so greatly amused the person who prompted it, I can't believe they are eager to share rather than repulsed at how cringey it was.
The LLM will do whatever they tell it to, including making shit up in order to suit the narrative. They're the ultimate "yes-man" that's not even human.
Unfortunately for CEO's, it turns out that yes-men - or yes-machines - aren't particularly good developers or legal strategists
It's because in order to become a ceo, you have to be a very specific type of person, and the role also attracts this trait of putting money above all else, which fits perfectly to the role.
Imagine if you invested in a company that helmed a ceo that didn't try to make more money. Right? You'd be upset as the investor-role that your money wasn't working for you, and would take the guy out.
This is the common, public opinion.
So the same goes for the CEO: that maximum money be made by being different and taking good chances and staying on top of the technology curve. And OpenAI has been, at least what they, themselves, purport, overwhelmingly successful.
This is all to say that the role of CEO draws a ton of people who think a lot of themselves and their abilities, because they think fake it until you make it is the role, because it largely is: you have to make bets on decisions to lead like that. Which makes CEOs this sort of hollow, fake-person sort of capitalist sociopath.
And them betting on AI-first, then, makes a ton of sense if you're that specific type of person. Because, unless you have your own skills and opinions, you will be beholden to the dumbest, fakest, skewed statistical other bullshitters in the world.
Right now, the companies making all these mistakes that all of us with actual skills and opinions can clearly see, those are just the companies that don't matter, that are leeching off the backs of real industries. Like a group of kids all cheating off each other in a test, and suddenly a bunch of them get the same wrong answer.
They're literally the people, and boards of people who put them there, who have no fucking idea what they're doing, and in my personal opinion, are very clearly illustrating a weak point with society and humanity and our values and structures across the world. We'll get past this one, for sure. But there will be more. That is the both the curse and the gift of existence.
It's a pitch to investors. There's dumb money being flung left and right like chimpanzee poop in the zoo
Same thing happened with blockchain to a lesser extent. I remember my old company forcing us to put blockchain in something, anything, so they could add it to the sales pitches.
Yeah I remember some companies getting their stock price spiking because they said blockchain. It was same like with dotcom bubble in 2000s. You renamed your company from dogshitidea to dogshitidea.com and money was flung at you like ape faeces.
They're simply stupider than you thought. They buy into hype so fast without really listening to the experts already on the team.
I think it's a little of each.
The ones not being blackmailed are desperately trying to look like they're impactful enough to blackmail.
I know the type. They list themselves exclusively on job search sites for high earners like "Ladders", they don't listen to their employees ever because they're a subhuman resource, they are first in line at every ceremony or circle jerk meeting, but nowhere to be found when actual work needs done, they spent the last few years bringing up how badly they want to go back to the office full time, and they unironically speak in corporatese even on Christmas. They like sports teams because they're popular and a good segway, not because they care about the team, they view it as their duty to keep the ranks broken down and working hard in fear of their jobs.
Ehhh 404 still has a bit more to say on
https://archive.is/yIkXA
I don't know any CEOs, but I've known many business owners in my life and I've been one. The majority absolutely despise payroll as their biggest expense. They hate their employees, which will be replaced as soon as technologically and financially possible.
This is why there is a huge push for AI, every one of these greedy bastards would be perfectly fine with replacing every single employee. They see it as an improvement.
We as a society in the USA have gotten businesses backwards and put the cart before the horse, in my opinion. Our goal shouldn't be "shareholders will get the cream of the crop!", that road simply leads to a small group of people being fabulously wealthy, they see their employees as a middle man that they would rather eliminate.
We can change how corporations work at any time, but we'll need to get rid of our government first. They won't legislate themselves out of generational wealth, it's a fantasy to think otherwise. Never, ever in the history of Earth has the ruling class decided "hmmm I'm starting to feel guilty about rolling around in a pool full of gold Krugerands maybe this is a little much"
100% accurate. I ran a family owned grocery and the owners never shut up about payroll. As soon as I started managing a department it was "you're overstaffed" every flipping week. I explained my plan to use the extra hours to have the employees trained on how to make more prepared food instead of buying the premade junk. They complained and complained until the end of the second month when my numbers for prepared food in that single month grossed enough to pay for the extra staff need for over half the year.
They still complained I was overstaffed.
No one is dumber than a rich person, except perhaps the people who are actively being screwed by them and who still believe that having money means the rich person must have earned it.
Thanks for articulating it this way for me. It's the hypocrisy that gets me, at least in my situation. I reported my boss to the directors. He was (still is) planning to cut a guy from our team, claiming he costs too much. But when I did the math, I found that my boss' personal expenses on food, gas, phone, vehicle, etc. (with increasingly unaccounted-for amounts) are more than that guy's pay.
My boss isn't worried about the financial health of the organization, he's worried he won't be able to keep spending it on himself if he has to pay the workers.
I've seen "the director" lay off employees on a whim whilst buying a new end table for 30,000 USD. Not a typo, I cut the check.
They'll take all they can, shareholders will let it go as long as the returns are good. In my opinion, a national minimum wage is stupid, but instead workers should be owners.
The profits shouldn't all go to a table full of vultures.
If many had their way,they would be perfectly fine with slavery
At my first job, I was told I couldn’t be paid more despite the fact that I was getting the same pay as someone in my position was about 20 years prior. The boss? Massive house in the richest neighbourhood with two elephant statues out front that cost $50k each. He spent his days falling asleep in meetings and generally doing less than nothing. All the department heads were disgustingly rich, everyone else could get fucked.
It’s worth pointing out that the company and CEO in question are South Korean.
It's a global issue that should be tackled, but American flavour capitalsm is definitely spreading through the world.
It already has spread throughout the world. did you sleep through the post ww2 events?
No, but it's not quite the same as it was in the 1950's.
Capitalism now, especially outside the US looks very different.
The union the other day told me that our laws didn't really account for the kinds of layoffs that America brought here.
Our capitalism is just British empire capitalism rebranded.
Yeah, reformers have never existed.
Note I said "ruling class" as a whole. Of course there are reformers, madmen, vegetarians, philosophers, and so on sprinkled throughout.
that goes without saying, friend. But, feel free to continue to point out the obvious that everyone knows. It's fun and not droll at all, I dub thee "captain no fucking shit"
Now, please point out what my goal post was, and how it has been changed IN ANY WAY by your contribution. Go into great detail!
I want a certificate
It's in the mail, with your high school diploma
Reformers don't feel guilty. They're trying to stave off the inevitable guillotines.
reformers are the exception, they don't represent the class
Oh well yeah, obviously. Those goalposts are obviously not the target now that they got moved all the way over there, you must be right. /s
If I have to use AI to argue my case in court, it is because I don't have enough money to hire a lawyer. You would think a CEO would understand their position in life.
This indicates that the CEO in question actually misunderstood their lawyer's position in life. AI-pushers really do think that all workers are expendable. They have absolutely drunk the Flavour-Aid on all of this.
They probably don't even see this as an "oopsie", just an argument to throw even more resources at the AI, because they're SO CLOSE to never having to pay a human for work ever again.
Clearly this CEO only wants to deal with “yes” men etc. If you don’t agree with him then he’ll find somebody else who will.
But, if you’re a CEO, and lawyer tells you, “no, the contract is solid. Honor it,” what are you to do? Why, ask an agreeable LLM for an answer that conforms to your world view because, obviously, you’re right because you’re the CEO.
The stupidest thing is that ChatGPT originally told him to pay them too. He had to get creative with the prompts in order to get actionable suggestions.
Amazing how much they will try to bend reality to their conception rather than the other way around. It’s a mental illness
Or you are too cheap and stupid to pay a lawyer….
In this case even dumber than that: he paid a lawyer (or rather, the company did) then chose to ignore their advice and go with ChatGPT instead.
What's that smell in the air? Is it the smell of Schadenfreude?
THAT is what happened?! Wow, that is hilarious!
I am SO curious what will happen here and what the final verdict will be. Trying to cheat someone out of 250 million has to result in some enormous fine at least right?
We can only hope. Wouldn't be surprised if it follows the age-old "keep appealing to a higher court until you reach dependable corruption" model.
OP if you're gonna post a paywalled article, can you at least copy the full text of it into the thread? Most of us cannot read more than two paragraphs of this piece, ensuring that most participants here are talking around the headline only.
Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/yIkXA
Excellent! Thank you!
Try this:
https://removepaywalls.com/
Here's a video if you wanna passively listen to it while working out to get all the anger at corporations out: https://youtu.be/T8dIXsS9sZA
Block java on the page :p
Dad you're on the internet again, you know you're not supposed to be on the internet, because you say dumb things and then people laugh at you.
You missed the part where that site is using client side code to run a ddos attack against whomever.
that's a different thread
I was about to tell you that archive is doing that but then I realized that you are talking about paywall circumvention.
I mean this thread didn't mention archive.today, it's another reply to the top comment that did
This is so dumb. I never believed the hype around CEOs, but I still thought they needed to have something, anything, to reach their position.
But the artificial dumbness time really reveals how many of them had simply dumb luck and no morals. And that was apparently enough for all of human history because their underlings protected them from acting too stupid. And now they think they don't need those underlings anymore. Well, at least I can laugh myself to death before the climate wars.
The "no morals" part is their main qualifier
A close second is connections to others with money and no morals.
simply being an asshole and not caring about how your actions affect other people can get you surprisingly far in life
just imagine all the time that you save if you never return your shopping cart, or park anywhere you want, or butt to the front of lines
Shareholders care about only one thing, and its not the company or its employees. Of course maniacal idiots are at the top of the list for CEO, their too narcissistic and lack empathy to care.
Oh for sure! I just thought in their heads was a certain kind of business savvyness to reach their position. But it seems they just hear the echo of their own voice.
I mean most ceos went to uni for business and paid others to do their course work it seems. Then got hired on the vibes.
Be tall, handsome, good hair, a deep voice, and exude confidence, and you're halfway there. Looking like a CEO is half the battle.
It's weird, where are all the people who were saying the launch delay was probably for valid reasons? Where are the people saying that it couldn't have all been lies because that would just come out in court? Where are those few vigorous defenders of Krafton now? There's a big plate of shit here and they must be hungry.
To be fair, not to defend the CEO at all but when this story first broke it was so wild that you knew someone had to be making up some serious bullshit but it was just so out there, it could have been either side.
Why anyone decided to pick sides is beyond me, this is why courts exist.
Bro, this is the internet. You don't need to know anything, just pick a position and angrily defend it.
Play both to always come on top
They fired all of the devs before release to miss the release target to avoid paying shipping bonuses. There is only one side to chose. The one with morals.
What a fucking piece of shit.
I have to admit, every time a story like this comes out, it makes me distrust any other large company all the more. When this whole thing first started, I already expected the publisher to be lying. Looks like the pattern holds true!
Paywalled
archive.org link
Note: archive.today kinda sucks.
Thanks! I appreciate the archive link, although I think it's OP's job to provide it.
For the record, you could install the removepaywalls.com browser extension on all your devices and never have this problem again.
A bold lie.
As if paywall removers are "universal".
They use five different removers bundled together into one neat package, with the plugin automatically selecting the one most likely to work on that specific page. Personally, I've never yet found a paywall it couldn't beat. I'm sure some exist, but it's few enough that it's basically a solved problem.
And since archive links are one of the options it tries, if it doesn't work, then getting an archive link from OP isn't gonna happen either.
https://archive.is/20260317034835/https://www.404media.co/ceo-ignores-lawyers-asks-chatgpt-how-to-void-250-million-contract-loses-terribly-in-court/
I can never get past their cloudflare captchas. I guess I must be a bot.
Archive.today implements a custom CAPTCHA unrelated to Cloudflare stylized like a Cloudflare CAPTCHA that used to block Cloudfare DNS users and DDoS a specific blog site
I use them with noscript on Firefox with everything blocked except main domain, because it's a fake bot detection page that actually is doing DDoS on other websites
Tried myself, no browser except chrome worked. Rather infuriating.
Free article, as long as you sign up with an email.
So not free at all
No thanks
So, per the article, mr CEO didn't want to pay the devopers their well earned extra from hitting a sales goal, so the wooden doll asked chatGePeTo how to avoid that. Even Gepeto said that it was going to "be difficult", but Kim Becile insisted on a plan.
I'd like to meet a CEO of a similar megacorp that isn't both a complete fucking idiot AND an absolute psychopath. Surely there has to be one?
The CEO having the direct ability to post to the company website is wild on its own. Everywhere I have ever worked nothing got on the company website unless it went through the marketing people at a minimum. If it was from someone like the CEO it probably went through the legal team as well first.
More likely those in charge of moderation deliberately allowed him to shoot himself in the foot, given the kind of ass he is.
Krafton is South Korean. How's the corporate culture in South Korea? Are they as ritual-suicide-for-going-home-before-the-boss-does as Japan?
Basically same problems as Japan. Low birth rate, unrealistic work life balance that's helped GDP but now both are facing demographic shock that'll destroy the economy in a generation.
Considering Moon Channel's video on South Korea (tldw; he explains around 24:40 in the video how strongly neoconfucianism became the state ideology and that still endures to this day - and how highly important hierarchy is), I would say that yes, an underling would NEVER dare go against someone above them.
Just make me CEO of a company. Surely I can't do worse than the crop of people they're currently finding.
C-level jobs tend to attract a particular type of personality...
First thing I remember hearing was Krafton announcing that Subnautica would be a live service multiplayer game, and then Unknown Worlds coming right in behind saying No the hellfuck it's not! It's going to be a cooperative multiplayer game that players host locally, and we'll be doing an early access campaign with continuing updates after the 1.0 release just like we did with Subnautica 1.
It has spiraled from there.
What a greedy, dumb piece of shit 😂
Publisher for Hi-Fi Rush, and PUBG. Wow...
Not just a wanker, also a pea-brained gibbering dicksplat.
Atlas
ShruggedShartedThat sounds something from one of those "pick 3 insult generator" sites :p
If there was any justice, he would have to pay out double the entire amount (including bonus) to the devs.
Man. Unknown Worlds. I miss what you were. HL mods, NS2 betas, Subnatiuca release, the old forums.
Never really interacted with their content before Subnautica, and based on Below Zero, Subnautica may be the only thing of theirs I play.
Further proof of how many CEOs are psychopaths.
For the record this was not a dev company CEO. He's the publisher company CEO, you know, the usual bastards.
I despise "tech bros" at the best of times
There are too many halfwits with solutions desperately searching for a problem
The fact that him sniffing his own farts was his undoing makes me incredibly happy
He's not even a tech bro. Just your run of the mill Wall Street CEO who only cares about keeping as much of the money his company makes as possible, even at the price of ruining said company.
I bet this will make it into the writing of Hifi Rush 2. (Tango Gameworks got bought by Krafton). The whole game is refreshingly unabashedly anti corporate and dunks on corporate culture in every way they can
this ceo really "worlds smartest baby in 1996"ed himself with this.
Probably didnt spend enough time charging his hat by the magic rock
My first reaction is: lmao fuck Krafton
My second reaction is: you absolute fucking idiot, what did you expect when you sold to a mega corpo??
To be fair, $500 million is a lot of money.
You can barely blame them for not wanting to turn that down.
Should it pan out as planned, they'd get another quarter of a billion. That's money enough that if you're halfway sensible with it, you and your descendants would never have to work again.
Even when evenly divided across the entire company, it's still a life-changing amount. ($1.6 - 2.3 million per person)
Where was that half billion going to come from? Each of the previous Subnautica games sold around 5 million copies at $30 a pop, so their entire gross revenue was $300 million, tops. And that's gross revenue, not net profit.
So, where's that kind of money going to come from? 5 million people bought copies of Subnautica in better economic times than this, you planning on raising the price or selling the game to more people?
Is that not on Krafton for buying Unknown Worlds for $500 million, and then offering an additional $250 million if they achieve particular goals?
If it was unrealistic, then don't buy the company for that much, and provide a contract with those terms.
From Unknown Worlds' perspective, it would have been irresponsible not to take the deal, assuming no other conditions.
That Krafton's CEO got buyer's remorse isn't their problem to deal with. Caveat emptor and all that.
If you're the CEO of a company, like Unknown Worlds, it's your job to steer the company around outright fraud, like offers to purchase the company for far, far more money than you'd hope to generate with every planned project.
When asked about it AI said "No comment."
Pretty sure AI would've said that with a much longer comment, likely 500 words at least
"That is a great response! Would you like me to look at other great responses that have been posted on Lemmy?"
Fuck krafton
Fuck Krafton.
Finally, AI investments paying off
Can anyone share a tldr. The article access requires sign up
Just comment based on the headline like the rest of us
based
These damn stupid ceos using AI slop to make decisions are ruining the world!!!
Based
The headline is pretty accurate.
https://archive.is/yIkXA
I liked subnautica quite a lot anyway, but I would buy the second one either way just to contribute to them paying the 250.
Its free on PS plus right now. Or was that last month? Either way I have way too much Thalassophobia for that game.
These days chatgpt is pretty much the worst major model, so he couldn't even get that part right.
Brutal lmao
I mean, that's gotta be grounds for termination if anything
Follow your attorney's advice
Sheer fucking hubris.
I’m so happy it’s not UWE that is the asshole. I love their games.
This is a lot of what's happening. LLM companies have convinced the eagerly selfish that LLMs can empower them to do things they currently rely on others for, faster and better, and the early adopters are making very risky decisions that are blowing up in their faces. The current US admin is one of these groups of eagerly selfish, believing LLMs will empower them to be capable of things they simply aren't, like seizing power and ruling America forever.
i bet the first thing he looked into is how to push the responsibility for his failure onto chatgpt
But teh Computa said no...
100% deserves it for being both stupid and inexcusably cheap.
What did ChatGPT tell him to do, exactly?
What actually happened, apparently. Fire them to avoid payout.
Unknown Worlds is only one of the top tier niche devs of all time.
At least he dogfooded his vision. Too bad reality happened.
Who knew?
Haha lol
RTFA
Because the article is about Subnautica, and the legal battle between private equity everything ruiner firm Krafton and Unknown Worlds Entertainment, the game dev studio best known for the Subnautica series.