I think it’s interesting to watch that we all have to sort of fine tune our own expectations and build the mental model for how impressive this is.

On the one hand I think most of us are incredibly impressed because we know, that quick demo would have taken us months of work to build in the before times.

On the other hand the promise is a cure for cancer and the end of all work.

So when everyone is telling you “skill issue is why you can’t one shot WoW”. It’s hard to know how you’re supposed to feel about Karpathy advertising one shot custom virtual worlds but giving you slop. Incredibly impressive slop when compared to how long it would take to create it just 3 years ago, not so much compared to Elon saying - “by the end of this year, grok will create a version of the odyssey that competes with Nolan’s”

Ironically, they're getting worse at creative work because all the RL is collapsing their distributions.

I don't think this is bad. I want tools that deliver what I envision. The fact that given the same input, I get similar output is something I would rather consider a positive. The imagination should come from the human at the wheel.

Heh, tried it and got a story about raiding trash starring Pip. But yep, I'm well aware of this problem as well. /r/sillytavernAI is a sub dedicated to trying to coax LLMs into good creative writing but it's kinda impossible to do consistently.

While they are bad at creative work*, this reasoning isn't going to show it.

If you took the best, most creative, human writer in the world, and for thought experiment reasons they had amnesia (to mimic AI blank context windows) specifically while you asked them for a story idea 100 times in a row, my expectation is that this human would also give you the same idea at least 80 times out of that 100.

* still better than the mean human, but even the top 0.1% of humans aren't all professional authors.

Seriously, what is the deal with Pip! I was experimenting with childrens' fiction more than a year ago and 9 times out of 10 you'd get a character named Pip unless you were specific in the prompt not to do so.

I think the trick is to use LLMs like scalpels instead of hammers. That said, you can place a scalpel in the hands of a deterministic (or not) robot.

Elias Thorne!

> They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant

That's oddly specific and it'd really hurt my cousins feelings :)

How well encoded is "good game feel" in the weights of an LLM. I am guessing not very well.

> the next question is if they can be made fun without too much additional work

They can't. If you think about how these things are trained it's blatantly obvious fun is an impossible metric to optimize them for

Unfortunately people are saying they are fun for the purposes of ragebait that goes viral, which is half the reason people intentionally post AI slop on social media.

And you could almost always tell a "game construction kit" game from a real one, couldn't you? Whatever was missing from those is always missing from these, and it seems just as rare that the game will reach much beyond its origins.

Whenever I think about AI games I find myself thinking about Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird and Angry Birds. Three simple, elegant games.

It is easy to see what makes Tiny Wings so completely loveable — it has a sculpted, adorable, perfect charm with a cleverly inverted game mechanic that has a calibrated level of exasperation and reward.

But why were Flappy Bird and Angry Birds, very basic games with very old game mechanics, so charming?

It seems equally impossible to imagine an AI coming up with a game with the quality of any of them, even with maximised creativity. But explaining why for Flappy Bird seems quite difficult, especially when you consider it uses some stolen visuals!

I've been hearing similar from a while back, but the blame wasn't being directed at AI, it was directed at Unreal's defaults now making random indies look like AAA in the screenshots.

(It's been a while since I was in the game industry, so IDK quite how accurate this is).

It’s the people spamming these shitty games that lack imagination.