"Replacing Talent" is not what AI is meant for, yet, it seems to be every penny-pinching, bean counting studio's long term goal with it.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Yep AI at best can supplement talent, not replace it.
I'm not a developer, but I use AI tools at work (mostly LLMs).
You need to treat AI like a junior intern.... You give it a task, but you still need to check the output and use critical thinking. You cant just take some work from an intern, blindly incorporate it into your presentation, and then blame the intern if the work is shoddy....
AI should be a time saver for certain tasks. It cannot (currently) replace a good worker.
As a developer I use it mainly for learning.
What used to be a Google followed by skimming a few articles or docs pages is now a question.
It pulls the specific info I need, sources it and allows follow up questions.
I've noticed the new juniors can get up to speed on new tech very quickly nowadays.
As for code I don't trust it beyond snippets I can use as a base.
It's clutch for boring emails with several tedious document summaries. Sometimes I get a day's work done in 4 hours.
Automation can be great, when it comes from the bottom-up.
https://www.cognition-labs.com/introducing-devin There are people out there deliberately working to make that vision a reality. Replacing software engineers is the entire point of Devin AI.
I saw this the other day and I'm like well fuck might as well go to trade school before it gets saturated like what happened with tech in the last couple years.
Not even that, it's a tool. Like the same way Photoshop, or 3ds max are tools . You still need the talent to use the tools.
I do think given time, AI can improve to the level that it can do nearly all of the same things junior level people in many different sectors can.
The problem and unfortunate thing for companies I forsee is that it can't turn juniors into seniors if the AI "replaces" juniors, which means that company will run out of seniors with retirement or will have to pay piles and piles of cash for people just to hire the few non-AI people left with industry knowledge to babysit the AIs.
It's very short sighted, but capitalism doesn't reward long term thinking.
The problem is the crazy valuations of AI companies is based on it replacing talent and soon. Supplementing talent is far less exciting and far less profitable.
Current AI*
I don't see any reason to expect this to be the case indefinitely. It has been getting better all the time and lately been doing so at a quite rapid pace. In my view it's just a matter of time untill it surpasses human capabilities. It can already do so in specific narrow fields. Once we reach AGI all bets are off.
Maybe this comment will age poorly, but I think AGI is a long way off. LLMs are a dead-end, IMO. They are easy to improve with the tech we have today and they can be very useful, so there's a ton of hype around them. They're also easy to build tools around, so everyone in tech is trying to get their piece of AI now.
However, LLMs are chat interfaces to searching a large dataset, and that's about it. Even the image generators are doing this, the dataset just happens to be visual. All of the results you get from a prompt are just queries into that data, even when you get a result that makes it seem intelligent. The model is finding a best-fit response based on billions of parameters, like a hyperdimensional regression analysis. In other words, it's pattern-matching.
A lot of people will say that's intelligence, but it's different; the LLM isn't capable of understanding anything new, it can only generate a response from something in its training set. More parameters, better training, and larger context windows just refine the search results, they don't make the LLM smarter.
AGI needs something new, we aren't going to get there with any of the approaches used today. RemindMe! 5 years to see if this aged like wine or milk.
Yeah LLMs might very well be a dead-end when it comes to AGI but just like chatGPT seemingly came out of nowhere and took the world by surprise, this might just aswell be the case with an actual AGI aswell. My comment doesn't really make any claims about the timescale of it but rather just tires to point out the inevitability of it.
sed “s/studio’s/tech industry c-suite’s/“
As an engineer, the amount of non-engineering idiots in tech corporate leadership trying to apply inappropriate technical solutions to something because it became a buzzword is just absurdly high.
The article doesn't say much. So I checked the source for more information. It doesn't say much more, but IMO in a much better way, in two concise paragraphs. In the sourced financial report, it is in the intro, two paragraphs:
An example R&D initiative, sponsored by the Innovation team was Project Ava, where a team, initially from Electric Square Malta, attempted to create a 2D game solely using Gen AI. Over the six-month process, the team shared their findings across the Group, highlighting where Gen AI has the potential to augment the game development process, and where it lags behind. Whilst the project team started small, it identified over 400 tools, evaluating and utilising those with the best potential. Despite this, we ultimately utilised bench resource from seven different game development studios as part of the project, as the tooling was unable to replace talent.
One of the key learnings was that whilst Gen AI may simplify or accelerate certain processes, the best results and quality needed can only be achieved by experts in their field utilising Gen AI as a new, powerful tool in their creative process. As a research project, the game will not be released to the public, but has been an excellent initiative to rapidly spread tangible learnings across the Group, provide insights to clients and it demonstrates the power and level of cross-studio collaboration that currently exists. Alongside Project Ava, the team is undertaking a range of Gen AI R&D projects, including around 3D assets, to ensure that we are able to provide current insights in an ever- evolving part of the market
The central quote and conclusion being:
One of the key learnings was that whilst Gen AI may simplify or accelerate certain processes, the best results and quality needed can only be achieved by experts in their field utilising Gen AI as a new, powerful tool in their creative process.
Which is obvious and expected for anyone familiar with the technology. Of course, experiments and confirming expectations has value too. And I'm certain actually using tools and finding out which ones they can use where is very useful to them specifically.
Folks really didn't understand how AI will work. It's not going to be some big we're dropping 1000 people.
It's going to reduce demand over time.
I've heard it as "No one is losing their job to AI, but they will lose their jobs to someone who is using AI."
Folks really don't understand how AI will work. It's not going to be ~~some~~ big ~~we're dropping 1000 people.~~
And in that regard it's no different than any other productivity tool or automation, I have seen software being bought that immediately Eliminated 80 odd jobs.
"House made entirely of cement is a failure because you still need doors and windows and stuff."
ai automates the behavior of an average agent, not a talented one
Unless you specify that you want a talented output. A lot of people don't realize that you need to tell AIs what kind of output you want them to give you, if you don't then they'll default to something average. That's the cause of a lot of disappointment with tools like ChatGPT.
Ahhh so the secret to using ChatGPT successfully is to tell it to give you good output?
Like “make sure the code actually works” and “don’t repeat yourself like a fucking idiot” and “don’t hallucinate false information”!
This was extremely ambitious. I am not a C# developer but I was able to get a LLM to build a really simple app for me to take in input and fill out a table in an azure storage account and then use an azure function to update a document with the information to add to a firewall threat feed for a demo. It took me 3 hours where learning and doing the old fashioned way would have taken me a few days. Cool stuff but not magic, it was like working with a really smart idiot.
Using AI to automate super tedious and repetitive tasks is great and everybody should start doing it
Yeah current gen AI is still very much a human tool - an assistant - maybe a companion if you stretch it to it's edge. I for one welcome a personal AI buddy
I look forward to the day it can make a fully functioning game. The best games will mostly be AI created eventually
I respect your opinion, but it's one of the stupidest I've ever heard
You are confidently incorrect and I can respect that.
The reason that your favorite games are your favorite is because they aren't soulless cash grabs. They're made by people with imagination, passion, and ingenuity. AI simply can't create something brand new from existing parts, it can only give it a fresh coat of paint.
Furthermore, AI will always work like this, because that's how the models are trained. I don't think we'll have a model that learns to create on its own within any of our lifetimes, if ever.