r/gaming • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 PC • 10h ago

Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis'

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/dwarf-fortress-creator-says-the-industrys-in-shambles-over-ai-and-layoff-happy-ceos-everyone-i-know-their-bosses-are-slowly-getting-psychosis/
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u/PurpleV93 10h ago

The entire world is in psychosis. Everyone is turning off their brains, people use AI shit to generate their own reddit posts for them. It's insanity in full display. Meanwhile, our planetary ecosystem is falling apart, but nobody cares enough.

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u/PsyOpBunnyHop 10h ago

Plenty of people care. It's just that they have so little power on their own.

The people in a position to do any good are only in that position because they were seeking power so they could exploit it.

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u/Aware-Individual-827 8h ago

It's why social media is the bane of society. Getting together is what makes power and social media isolate one from another.

The change we want are only achievable if we pool together our means. United we stand, divised we fall.

(Ok it looks like seizing the means of production after writing it, but the essence remains true).

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u/Doomsday_Holiday 9h ago

Always look for the people who help and care.

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u/thought_youd_stop 6h ago

that's straw hat!

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u/ronarscorruption 10h ago

Exactly. 1% of people have 90% of the power. It almost doesn’t matter what the other 99% think except in how we affect those 1%

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u/Arclite83 8h ago

We have issues as a species with "scale". About every 3 zeroes (x1000) is a new "universe". You live at 2m, an ant lives at 2mm, etc, up or down.

In money, that means beyond especially a million (x2) we are bad at appreciating a billion or a trillion. At this point you aren't a "citizen" if you don't have 5M, you're the great unwashed. There are 26M millionaires in the US - and they're not above the water line on this.

It's not the 1%, or even the 0.1%. And they don't control 90%, or even 99%. The degree at which we've exceeded "unfair/biased" is such that it was already "bad" half a century ago. Today it's just broken. The shell companies have shell companies. The Panama Papers did NOTHING to stop or even slow that kind of global money laundering. We like to rail on Citizens United here, but the money going INTO those PACs is also from these same sources.

It has fundamentally changed global politics. Corporations are world powers. Individuals are world powers. Countries that curtail that do so through oppression/ideology, but a good portion let the Musks and Bezos and Rockefellers and IOCs of the world rise and fall. It's why regulations need to sit over capitalism or you get private islands and "human rights optional" spaces (where's Shelly Miscavige? Ask Milan Kundera).

The US has been starving that particular beast for a long time now, deregulating, etc - mostly in the name of "don't look up" survivalism at the end of Pax Americana, so it's not like any one person or President COULD solve these things. It's holding patterns, reinvestment, Calvinball government to keep the plates spinning. We won't starve or run out of TP. But not much can stop this new Gilded Age, especially now with AI as it is.

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u/Rejusu 8h ago

Yup. This is so true of many things but money especially because it's much more abstract than size. People don't even have to be that poor, you can be making good money and still have zero appreciation for what being a billionaire means. I've almost given up pointing this out to people who think the money Rowling gets from various Harry Potter projects actually matters. To them it's still funding transphobia despite the fact Harry Potter could disappear off the face of the earth and she'd still be so rich that she could fund her campaign of hate until she dies and it wouldn't scratch the surface of her wealth.

I can respect avoiding it because of how you feel on the subject but anyone who thinks it makes a practical difference just can't appreciate scale.

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u/lavapig_love 6h ago

Donald J. Trump can!

He's singlehandedly done more to encourage discussion and candidates supporting actual bonafide socialism than anyone since President Carter.

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u/Arclite83 4h ago

I should have put Trump on the list there. He's just part of the problem. His "anti-establishment" is really just pro-self, and he's happy to fire sale the US because we were foolish enough to trust him that "you're going to love it" despite his literally lifetime of disasters and cons.

It's the Joker, in your desperation you turned to a man you didn't understand. And yet I still see "but Biden" as he burns the world.

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u/lavapig_love 1h ago

And I really should have put an /s after my post, as is longstanding Reddit tradition, because I was being kinda sarcastic.

Kind of. People are giving DSA candidates in general a chance, not just Mayor Mamdani, because the normal Democrats are failing to fight and the Republicans are turning fascist.

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u/Expletius 8h ago

Because money is power. But it only is because we pretend it is. People realize we are just in a gigantic play?

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u/MelangeBot 8h ago

0.003% of the population have the power with 3% of the population working for them directly or indirectly and 97% thinking they have no power.

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u/Ramblonius 3h ago

There is absolutely no popular support for green movements and parties on the grand scale of things. Like, yes, sure, there could be decisions made on executive levels to make things greener (and occasionally this happens), but when is the last time a party actually focused on climate or environment got any pull whatsoever?

People won't even eat one less hamburger for the environment; if you implemented top-down policies to reduce consumption to what is actually required to stop climate change there wouldn't be riots on the streets, there would be revolutions all across the world.

Yes, someone with a billion dollars and a private jet certainly pollutes more than any given hundred normal people, but also every American pollutes more than any given hundred people actually making their shit abroad. Ozone was easy, we just had to do fridges different; fossil fuels are used for pure energy, also known as everything we do, so it's not as easy a problem as 'guillotine the oil CEOs'.

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u/DrAstralis 7h ago

I spent my whole life caring and making decisions to reduce my impact. And then Texas approves a gas turbine data center so large it will erase anything I or anyone I know combined lifetime efforts in a month or two...

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u/MaximeW1987 7h ago

Plenty of people love the illusion of caring, but once they're confronted with one minor inconvenience, they switch gears.

For a gaming-example, the industry is finally preparing the jump to full-digital, which will have an enormous impact on their footprint (obviously this isn't their motivation, but the effect will stay the same) and everyone starts losing their mind because now they can't buy a plastic box anymore.

Same with AI. It's fashionable to complain about it every day, yet the userbase grows every minute.

If you truly believe that people have no power of their own, you've accepted your own apathy.

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u/PsyOpBunnyHop 3h ago

they can't buy a plastic box anymore

People love their rituals.

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u/Dairunt 7h ago

I'm doing an AI course for work and it feels like joining a cult. They quote Altman word for word, and the guy says AI can be your lawyer, your accountant, your therapist and you will stay behind if you don't comply and hook your data and accounts to Gemini.

The AI space reeks of snake oil and it's making me feel disengaged on my career. (Software developer). Seeing slop everywhere it's making me numb at this point.

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u/SchwiftySquanchC137 7h ago

The problem is you actually will fall behind at work if you dont use AI at this point. A human alone simply cant keep up. I liked it when it was basically fancy google, but yeah its sucked all the fun out of programming. I like that its possible to get bigger projects up and running faster, but I hate that im closer to an AI middle man than an actual software developer. Not much choice if you want to actually have a job these days.

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u/Dairunt 6h ago

And yet I've seen no raise in my paycheck.

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u/zgillet 6h ago

I can not only keep up with AI, I can actually do thing correctly, which it cannot.

Proved it just this morning, as I had to direct ChatGPT to the problem I was having with Google Ads. My boss tried ALL NIGHT to figure it out, but since I knew crucial info, the AI was useless.

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u/ProxyMuncher 9h ago

Every day my horrible superiority complex about not using AI in any way shape or form is validated. 

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u/Peon-Hyjal 7h ago

I'm not even sure if it's a superiority complex at this point. I feel like AI is just harvesting people's wicked inferiority complexes. "I'll never be a good artist", "I can never code like the talented ones.", "all the other guys on tinder are more witty than I am"

And I think that's why people are so aggressive about it, because to imply that AI is a crutch is to reaffirm their long held inferiority complex.

So you can't even critique it without inadvertently insulting those who haven't manifested their talents.

1

u/TheTerrasque 5h ago

On the other side of the coin.. I'm a programmer. I'm not sure if I can say I'm a good one, but I am an experienced one. I've been doing this for over 20 years now.

I use AI to write code a lot. Like 90+%. Why? Because I'm damn tired of writing code. It's not a challenge, it's not fun, it's just a chore. For most programs or ideas I know the basic structure of it in seconds. Datastore, backend, frontend, ux. But writing the code for that is days or weeks. And done after I come home from work, which I've already spent hours on it.

Using AI I can get things done in a few days, where most of the time will be waiting (maybe playing a game), then check the structure of the result and run some manual tests on it, give it corrections, and back to the game. Compared to guiding junior devs, it's overall more pleasant even.

I even have my own local hardware running local models that do the brunt work. What that can't do, Claude usually handles. Occasionally I have to fix things manually, but that's getting rarer and rarer.

I also have image and video models running on the same hardware, which I also use pretty often. Not because I think I'm a great artist, but for similar reason to the home programming projects. I have an idea and I want to see it exist. It kinda reminds me of photography a bit (a hobby of mine) in that I didn't create what is in the photo, but I made choices in what to put in the photo and how it is put together.

Do you know how many photos can be taken in one session? In some cases, it's been ~2000-3000 photos. How many that's usable and worth post processing? Maybe 20-50. Generating images with AI is very much similar to that. Lots of waste photos to get a few good ones.

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u/Y4naro 5h ago

Seen this earlier and immediately got motivated to try to animate or draw something and improve on expressing motion in drawings/sketches. But I've seen so many people get demotivated when faced with the thought of creating something with something like this as an inspiration. They will shut down, say they can't be as good and some of them will then use that as an excuse to make ai "art".

It just feels like that nowadays there are too many people trying to get into creative spaces who don't actually feel inspired to create stuff. Or they at least don't get any joy from improving. It seems to be more about trying to feel useful or productive without actually enjoying the end product. Just in there for a way to get approval from other people (or for money).

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u/double_shadow 2h ago

I was raised with the saying "if you don't have any useful to say just keep your mouth shut." But the modern saying seems more in line with "if you don't have anything useful to say, have AI generate some text for you from a prompt so you can get people to waste time reading it."

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u/0neek 36m ago

We were already in an epidemic of people believing the first thing that pops up on google when they type something and defending whatever they just read as if it was their own family.

Now that first thing is AI slop you can disprove 99% of the time by clicking the link the AI sources its own self, and people still believe it.

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u/kdebones 9h ago

*Taps the video*

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u/moikmellah 7h ago

Ironically when I clicked your link Youtube forced me to watch that shitty AI-made Foundation game ad where an astronaut sits down at a cafeteria table with his friends and one of the people already at the table apologizes for being late with a creepy emotionless smile on his face.

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u/VendorNeutral 8h ago

I am severely ill. If the world goes to shit enough for me to be unable to get my hands on medication, I will just die and won't have to live through it.

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u/thought_youd_stop 6h ago

It's insanity in full display.

It's just people experimenting. Much like people did with search engines. You try to press all the buttons and do all the things.

For me there's zero barrier to entry because my job pays for unlimited tokens so I've gone off the deep end getting LLMs to do all facets of my job. Now I am more like a puppet master. They are interesting new tools with new abilities and downsides that are unique.

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u/Ok-Friendship1635 5h ago

Please get off reddit and social media in general. It will improve your outlook, at least a little.

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u/PurpleV93 4h ago

Turning a blind eye won't improve anything. We cannot come together to fix problems and reduce suffering when we just pretend they don't exist.

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u/wellidontreally 7h ago

this is sensationalizing. it's not that bad, go touch grass and get off the internet for a while

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u/PurpleV93 7h ago

I rather listen to the scientist who have been screaming for decades, while I observe the biodiversity disappear before my very own eyes in my garden. Go fuck yourself.

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u/timmyfarthands 8h ago

We'll die off and the planet will be better off for it. It's going to take a few cycles of this bullshit before something gets it right.

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u/WitlessMean 7h ago

HR at my job is literally telling people to use copilot to write their emails.

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u/Aphoris5 6h ago

Even sentinel island? Damn how fast technology works if you blink like once.

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u/Send_me_cat_photos 6h ago

Feels like the movie Don't Look Up.

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u/WillBottomForBanana 6h ago

I haven't found it to be a change. From my point of view people were broadly turned off and disconnected from reality.

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u/InvisaBlah 4h ago

I get the frustration. There’s something genuinely unsettling about people outsourcing more and more of their thinking to machines while the problems around us—especially environmental ones—keep getting worse.

That said, I don’t think AI itself is necessarily the problem. The problem is using it as a substitute for thought rather than a tool for it. If someone uses AI to avoid thinking, that’s concerning. If they use it to challenge their thinking, research something, or communicate an idea more clearly, that’s a different story.

🤖 This comment was generated with ChatGPT and human-reviewed before posting. 🤖

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u/Pelopida92 9h ago

Idiocracy.

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u/IAMATruckerAMA 8h ago edited 3h ago

I've grown suspicious of any comment that doesn't have spelling or punctuation errors

Edit: lol what a weird comment to be salty about 

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u/Derpyzza 8h ago

You are absolutely correct to do so! Due to the massive upsurge in AI usage across all of social media, it's gotten harder and harder to tell who's a bot and who isn't — one can guess based off of the robotic tone and cadence of a text, but it's not always 100% accurate. And that's no accident, it's by design.

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u/GracefulFaller 7h ago

Em dash spotted! Take down the bot!