AI slop is not art. Art is communication, human expression, AI content is mindless and meaningless.

And it absolutely making people's lives worse, it's a driver of anxiety, depression, psychosis, and other mental health issues: the destruction of jobs, the devaluation of art, the enshittification of society, these all contribute to poorer mental health outcomes.

It's being used by authoritarians for surveillance and coercion of the population, it's driving up prices at a time when people are already struggling to make ends meet, it's threatening to crash the economy, it is dumbing down and rotting people's critical thinking skills, people are being forced from their homes to build unnecessary data centres, it's wasting colossal quantities of resources, the list goes on.

It is overwhelmingly bad for society, humanity, and the planet, the few benefits are negligible compared to its multiplicity of harms.

I mean AI is ubiquitous in coding now so pretty much all video games going forward are going to have it involved in the creation process. In general though my point was that more good creations will happen as a result of that and to me that's well worth the larger increase in bad creations. If you don't think that's worth it that's fine so we can just agree to disagree on that.

For the 2nd part I said in general. It's improved my life and same goes for a lot of other people but I'd rather not debate that aspect in depth again so I'll say no more on that part. To get back to my main point here regardless of the ratio of good to bad people will be doing good things with this technology so when that happens it's best to support that while criticizing the bad uses.

Like for video games I'll cheer on people who know what they're doing benefiting from the huge productivity boost to do things like game decompilations a lot faster while criticizing people who don't know what they're doing sharing poorly made stuff. That works far better than reacting positively or negatively regardless of the context basically, especially when it's now ubiquitous in the field.

Yeah I feel like we'll just have to agree to disagree at this point; the way I see it, the harms just outweigh the useful cases so overwhelmingly and the way it functions through stealing people's output, wasting resources, etc. just make it fundamentally unethical.

Props to you for keeping things civil, it is nice to be able to disagree without things getting personal.

Thank, I do try to remain civil. If nothing else I hope these discussions have done a bit to help you understand the perspective of people like me who have a more positive and optimistic view of AI. 

I do have one more thing to ask though if that's alright and it's about the fundamentally unethical part cause my issue with that mindset is due to how broad the technology is. Like I'm sure you wouldn't consider a disabled person using a self driving car to travel or in the future people using AI developed treatments for their diseases unethical so I guess I'm wondering where your line is. That's probably the crux of this whole thing.

A warning from the field of mathematics. What can be wrong about AI solving problems?

AI is solving mathematical problems that have resisted some of the world's greatest mathematicians for decades. Why are mathematicians concerned instead of celebrating? The answer reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes mathematics valuable. From Euler's seven bridges of Königsberg to the race to the Moon, I explain why solving a problem is not necessarily the same as advancing science, and why the real value of mathematical research often lies in the discoveries made along the way. More importantly, I explore a potentially devastating consequence of AI's growing capabilities: what happens when the next generation of talented students no longer sees a reason to become mathematicians? The implications could extend far beyond mathematics and affect the future of scientific progress itself.

Does this apply to coding as well? Sure the current crop of great coders are using AI to work faster, yet kids nowadays are learning just to let AI do all the work. Should AI be used to write entire essays, write entire programs or should it be restricted to help speed up mundane tasks.

The 1:1000 ratio (or whatever it is) might only get worse as where is the motivation to become a good coder and really understand how the code works. (And thus apply that knowledge to new projects and improve on it) Outsourcing critical and creative thinking is a bad idea.

As for ethics, who gets held accountable when a self-driving car kills their passenger or someone else. Same for AI developed treatments. Probably why Anthropic wants AI personhood so the AI can be blamed, just like blaming corporations rather than holding individuals accountable. As of now a case can be made against the AI developers when an AI developed treatment turns out to be harmful.

I mean I wouldn't attack the disabled person for using the self-driving car, but the thing, you actually do not need AI to make cars drive themselves or to cure disease (which is something AI has never done and may never do, actually) kinda like how yes, you can cure diseases by experimenting on humans against their will, but it's still better if you don't. 

Not playable yet, but it's scary to see a game that was just released getting booted on an emulator.

The purpose of emulators like these are little more than piracy. I don't like Sony at all due to their braindead decision to kill physical games. So I'm not really upset about these newer emulators. If someone wants to write an emulator for the purpose of preservation then they need to wait until that console is off the market. Back in 2017 people erroneously claimed that immediately writing an emulator for Wii U was needed to preserve BoTW. Here we are nearly 10 years later and copies of BotW are easy to come by as well as a working Switch. Nintendo even went as far as to make a Switch 2 edition of the game. People developing a Switch 1 emulator were caught red handed pirating games on their own personal discord. This was discovered years after I had a huge argument with several users and mods over the issue. They all claimed that preservation needed to start right away and that people who developed Nintendo emulators didn't have piracy in mind at all. History proved them all wrong. 

Just writing this now because I don't want people to conveniently forget what the Yuzu devs did once a Vibe coded Switch 2 emulator comes out. 

Also I'm of the opinion that unless you make an exact 1:1 recreation of how a console operates you aren't preserving anything. If all the original Sega Genesis systems were destroyed and all the well written FPGA Genesis cores were lost then we would have effectively lost the true behavior, sound, reaction and graphics of Genesis games.

My biggest fear with all this vibe coding is that Gen Alpha loses all interest in any semblance of true preservation and 50 years after a system is gone there are multiple emulators for one system all with their own inaccuracies and quirks. Even the best human coded PS3 emulators only work right with 75% of the games. And by work right I mean work well enough for someone that hasn't played countless hours of a specific game on a PS3 system to miss all the errors. 

And just like news on the Internet, vibe coded emulators will value clicks over accuracy. It will be a race to see who can make something the fastest and accuracy will fly out the window. So we will wind up with the majority of people playing on even more janky emulators than the best human coded PS3 emulators. I think that goes for vibe coded decompilations too. 

Then we have the issue of AI making ram and other computer parts unaffordable. If you can't even afford local hardware then all preservation goes out the window. Sharing tons of roms of ancient expensive games is only possible because we all have our own personal computers. Imagine an age where personal hardware is unaffordable for 90% of consumers. Even the storage required to save all these games is becoming unobtainium. I can't buy a new SD card anymore thanks to AI. So moving my rom files to a fresh storage medium before a the old storage dies goes bad becomes a real preservation issue. 

I'm sure intelligent people will use AI to eventually make an FPGA PS3 core or a perfect PS3 to PC decompiler (if someone hasn't already done that in regular coding methods) but preservation is also about getting people to care about accuracy and preservation. It doesn't matter if a traditional coder uses AI to make a perfect decompiler if everyone is just using slop coded emulators. Also a perfect decompiler doesn't matter if personal computers and storage become unaffordable to 90% of consumers. Does anybody really think the Epstein class will let us run emulators, decompilers or save roms to their AI data center cpus or HDDs?

Anyway I just don't think AI will be good for the preservation of videogames at all. 

The scary part is, that the security of the games was basically millions of codes that AI easily can bypass recreate whatever you call it.....It means that it can do the same with apps/popular programs/bank accouns/private messages and so on..

Emulation is the best way to play old games, especially native ports. Higher resolution, 120 fps, QoL and texture packs are excellent. Dusk Realm was way better than what Nintendo has ever done with TP.

I think AI is a great match for emulation. It will speed up ports, allow for more options and help remedy bugs. PM Recut works well.

The only personal policy I have, I dont emulate hardware that is currently available in retail. I only emulate discontinued hardware.