noticing it more and more. i like to play retro video games but i don't actually do it that often. 5 years or so ago i got a SNES mini and a playstation classic and one of those anbernac handhelds in the span of a year or two, so I was spending a lot of time reading lists online of games people thought were notable, underrated, good games for genre newbies, etc.
i have been playing games again recently so i have again been looking up games and the difference in content you get now is astounding. five years ago if you searched something like "best nes RPGs" or "obscure ps1 games" you would find lovingly handcrafted lists and articles by people who were passionate about it and wanted to share, make readers laugh, or ignite interest in something. Now there's like 20 different sites that each have ai generated "best (genre) games for (system)" lists for every system and genre combination possible, with generic game descriptions, list orders likely cribbed from one of those ranking sites, and nonsensical filler copy ("every RPG enthusiast loves the N64" type words just mashed together)
photographs are also no fun to take or look at anymore, accelerated by new ai image generation but honestly ever since smartphone cameras started automatically editing the shot out of your picture before it even showed it to you.
when i was a kid i wanted to be an author, glad i just got depressed and useless and never pursued it, considering what that space looks like today.
internet was a mistake
It genuinely pains me how much capitalism has ruined internet spaces.
It genuinely pains me how much capitalism has ruined
internet spaces.
it seems like every time i search for anything it comes up with a million ai-generated wordpress pages with the same basic structure. obviously being churned out as someone's "passive income" scheme. I wonder if there is a search engine with a way to filter out all wordpress sites...
Ugh and they're always thinly veiled advertisements for cookbooks, utensils, etc.
I love to get my STANDARD CITIZEN ISSUE spatula and dollop STANDARD CITIZEN ISSUE sauce on top of my STANDARD CITIZEN ISSUE pasta.
Seriously fuck Orwell with his boring monochrome dystopia bullshit. The real shit is festooned with bright colors and committee-approved names and fake anecdotes and that makes it even more haunting. All of the iron-heeled liberty crushing with gaudy infantalizing Stepford wives aesthetics. The people responsible should all be blindfolded and shot.
This predates LLMs and the current AI fad, but yeah it's a pain in the ass. I think they've gotten worse because at least 10-15 years ago when you searched "X release date" the actual real release date was sandwiched somewhere in the autogenerated garbage.
it
fucking
SUCKS
Like I know people have memed that AI conversation from Metal Gear Solid 2 to death, but my god is it more relevant than ever. Just this unending churn of junk. There is no humanity left online. There's not much in the real world either. Fuck AI.
it is accelerating climate collapse
The contribution is pretty marginal. Still useless though.
With the exception of the cited pre-print on water usage, those article don't seem to quantify the actual use.
Estimated global data centre electricity consumption in 2022 was 240-340 TWh, or around 1-1.3% of global final electricity demand. This excludes energy used for cryptocurrency mining, which was estimated to be around 110 TWh in 2022, accounting for 0.4% of annual global electricity demand.
The water usage is high from including scope-2 water withdrawal and consumption, which is the water usage of power plants used to generate electricity and not primary data centre cooling. Looking only at primary cooling, Google used 25 gigalitres in 2022 - for comparison, Arizona uses 8,600 gigalitres of water a year.
A couple percent is marginal - if the average temperature increase is 4.3 degrees C or 4.28 degrees C in 2100, it doesn't really impact the outcome.
I think the more substantive impact is the billions in resources (financial, material and labour) that are being dumped into yet another bazinga scheme instead of things we know work and will help slow climate change.
It could become less marginal in the future, but I don't know how much juice is left to be squeezed out of AI hype.
Oh well, another $100 billion into GPUs and data centres and maybe they'll find something else to fuel the hype train for a bit longer.
Ai might be the one thing I'm primitivist about. Other Toment Nexi, they might be salvageable under a socialist economy. AI as currently constituted at the ground level of its architecture is an unalloyed evil and I support Big Yud in his quest to get the data centres nuked (though for very different reasons).
AI conversation from Metal Gear Solid 2
I must have missed this. Could you link me
It's this conversation from the end
It's famously pretty prescient with regard to the internet and what it's become since 2001 when the game came out. Not really about AI as we understand it, but AI is accelerating and worsening these trends.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I like the rankings at snesrankings.com. I disagree to some extent or another with basically all of his takes, but I really appreciate that it's just one guy who actually played every last one of the things, and it's not like he's ever so far off that, if you started playing from #1 down, I'd ever be like "oh no don't play that play this other game."
Thank you for sharing that site. I disagree with the order of some of the rankings, but I won't argue that every single game in that top 25 is a masterpiece.
Except for Legend of the Mystical Ninja. What the hell? That game stinks.
I haven't actually played Legend Of The Mystical Ninja, but I have seen it appear near the top of many lists, where not a single one of those lists has done anything to convince me to actually try it.
I am 100% convinced that game is just a bit that's been going on for 30 years, and nobody has actually played it.
I mean, the franchise is really popular in Japan. Maybe that's why it's on the list?
The labour theory of value applies to AI slop.
Nobody wants to use their time on something that someone else wouldn't use their time creating. People unconsciously value it based on the time and skill involved in creating it which is fundamentally fuck all. This is why there has been a very clear and obvious negative trend towards AI over time. Even if the AI became magically good people would still value it as slop.
That reminds me of how AI art is so samey looking. It's like everyone uses the same prompts and the same filters. I get that it was already creatively bankrupt but come on you have the power of the entire internet.
I feel like even when/if it gets into art workflow, it'll eventually be like what procedural generation was for video games. The flaws would just be too obvious and people would end up steering away unless even the "AI" component is bespoke and human crafted. I'm thinking of how the procedural generation if D2 was carefully tweaked so there was some level design consistency.
Yeah sadly you won't get no man's sky, where they work to fix what is broken about the process.
Btw, I feel like the NMS arc is very similar to what ppl will have to do w AI slop. Like, you could take a prompt but then the amount of work to make it good is going to be massive.
Credit to those devs tho, they've really delivered (years later) a great space experience
It's because most people using image generation aren't artistically minded, and aren't putting in effort to get a result better than "close enough" (and corporate ai tools have built-in prompts to give things the "ai look.") If you run an image generator locally you have more control over the output, with loras or whatever.
i dont think this type of seo blog spam is particularly novel, its been a problem for probably 20 years. It’s easier to do now that you dont have to hire a bunch of people in the phillippines to write these articles though.
total, automated, enshittifcation. Truly the glorious innovation humanity needed now more than ever.
https://retro-sanctuary.com/Top%20Games%20Main.html has some good top 100 lists. They have some left-field picks too, which I always appreciated.
Thanks for sharing! Grabbed a few GameCube games from this that I hadn't considered checking out before
