Anybody who has ever been unfortunate enough to have to apply for any of these healthcare or food stipend programs would know that it’s not as easy as the government makes it seem. In fact, the amount of bureaucracy, means testing, and highly restrictive income limitations means that most people don’t qualify period and people who do qualify have to spend an inordinate amount of time waiting to hear back from the government to know if they have been accepted or not, all the while hoping and praying they don’t get sick and can manage their money long enough to continue feeding themselves.
Case in point, my fiance is out of work right now and actively seeking work. She applied for both MediCAL and SNAP and was denied for MediCAL because she had earned too much already that year to qualify and the SNAP benefits totaled out to $20/month in food stamps, based on historical income, which is insufficient even for the most frugal of individuals to make work. This is for someone currently earning $0/month and being almost entirely supported by me.
After a certain point, it becomes a massive drain on your time and resources that could be spent looking for a job, so you stop bothering with the system altogether because who wants to spend hours doing paperwork and submitting claims just to get enough spare change to buy a bulk bag of rice to feed yourself a struggle meal?
I don’t want to hear shit about “handouts” from anybody. My fiance paid her taxes faithfully for years without ever having to rely on the program, so where are her benefits? She has undoubtedly paid more into the system than she will ever extract.
Just so we're clear, the first pass of localization of every game you've played in the past decade has been machine-generated.
Which is not to say the final product was, people would then go over the whole text database and change it as needed, but it's been frequent practice for a while for things like subtitles and translations to start from a machine generated first draft, not just in videogames but in media in general. People are turning around 24h localization for TV in some places, it's pretty nuts.
Machine generated voices are also very standard as placeholders. I'm... kinda surprised nobody has slipped up on that post-AI panic, although I guess historically nobody noticed when you didn't clean up a machine-translated subtitle, but people got good at ensuring all your VO lines got VOd because you definitely notice those.
As with a lot of the rest of the AI panic, I'm confused about the boundaries here. I mean, Google Translate has used machine learning for a long time, as have most machine translation engines. The robot voices that were used as placeholders up until a few years ago would probably be fine if one slipped up, but newer games often use very natural-sounding placeholders, so if one of those slips I imagine it'd be a bit of drama.
I guess I don't know what "AI generated" means anymore.
I haven't bumped into the offending text in the game (yet), but I'm playing it in English, so I guess I wouldn't have anyway? Neither the article nor the disclosure are very clear.
That said, the game is pretty good, if anybody cares.
Ok? It was a temporary voice file that the devs forgot to remove or replace. And people immediately screamed that Blizzard is trying to sneak AI into the game.
historically nobody noticed when you didn’t clean up a machine-translated subtitle
I don’t know about that, it’s super noticeable when that happens, it’s just that it mostly affects languages other than English, so it did not get noticed by Western media unless there is a review bombing campaign after a particularly atrocious localization
As a non-native English speaker, let me tell you, terrible localization was very much a thing that happened well before machine translation, so that by itself (and more subtle typos or one-off errors) was definitely not enough to infer that someone had forgotten to fix a machine-translated line once.
You can definitely tell when something has been machine-translated and not fixed, but the real challenge is lack of context. This leads to nonsensical localization even today, whether it's human or automated, especially in crowdsourced localizations, which are frequent in open source software. I contribute to some on occassion and maaaan, do I wish well intentioned people in that space would stop contributing to projects they don't use/lines they haven't seen in situ.
I hadn't clicked through to the Reddit thing (for obvious reasons). The example in the article proper is in a Portuguese subtitle, but now that you pointed me at it and I did check the Reddit thread... well, that text is not legible in game unless you really try, so yeah, I hadn't read it. I'm guessing that's the only English instance?
I’ve spent about $125 on this game, and I would definitely get pissed if I bought in for all the promises they made.
However, I bought just to have a really pretty “Fly around in space while exploring my spaceship and listening to music” experience. It’s a vibe game. If they took out all the combat and lofty goals and just focused on making a really dope spaceship sim (with all the ship management, repairs, etc that they’ve promised) I would probably lose my life to it.
Right there with you. Spent about 45$ on an Aurora, got a free Mustang, and did a CCU into a nomad. I’m not upset with the money I spent on the game. Gotten way more out of it just vibing in universe, flying over each new planet at they add it.
I doubt it’ll ever launch though. Those who have invested thousands of dollars into it are bound to be salty when the towel is thrown in.
I have a really old account from man years ago (probably payed $50ish for it). I want the same experience - just mostly vibing around in a ship.
Sometime during covid I had time on my hands so I installed it, logged back in. Tried to get into my ship and a glitched basically got me stuck in the door of the ship. Also couldn’t die. Just stuck there . Restarted the game and tried again. Got stuck in the same spot.
Closed the game and uninstalled. I’ll check back in a few more years lol.
I got the game for free in 2015 as part of a choose-your-own-bundle promo for the AMD R9 270X. Haven't paid a cent for it and I still sorta feel ripped off.
And what was his “merit” again (since that’s how they like to frame it)? Oh right, fooling people into voting for him. Just PR and courting big shots for campaign money.
I’m not concerned about some young videogamer getting free healthcare. I’m more concerned with the DOGE GOBLIN getting BILLIONS in government contracts to build rockets that blow up spectacularly, wasting a billion dollars with every explosion, just so he can quip “Just a scratch.”
That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.
I’m not worried about American citizens getting health care, I’m worried about Foreign Sociopathic Oligarchs getting BILLIONS in government contracts, paid for by taxes on the working class, while calling those same workers/taxpayers “parasites.”
That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.
Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.
I don’t accept the premise that working a job to make someone else rich is axiomatically good.
Many jobs make the world worse. I’d rather someone sit at home and play Tetris than build murder-drones, or work on some sort of AI powered stalking-ad company.
Many of the jobs are just bullshit. Another “AI” company? Another product manager with no real decision making power? A few billion dollars poured into “the metaverse”? Waste of time and resources.
That aside, most jobs make the owners rich while labor gets a few crumbs. You work all day making widgets. The boss pays you $10. They sell your widgets for $1000. That’s a bum deal. But there’s a thousand desperate people waiting to take your spot, plus union busters eager to betray labor and beat you up. Pay people the real value of their labor, and treat them with respect, and you’d likely get more people working.
Johnson is a heretical, hypocritical, piece of shit. No one should take him seriously. His church should – wait, he’s southern baptist? The “we’re going to split off because we want slavery” sect? Not surprising. Those assholes suck.
Gamers who get mad having to wait for company logos to show while games boot: They have to disclose every piece of software they use to make every game! I want my games 100% hand crafted and bespoke. I want to sense the life people spent meticulously crafting mudsplat_texture_1 - mudsplat_texture_500. Also no crunch (and no bugs, obviously)
It’s just reality. Selecting a bunch of textures nobody has seen before through AI but hand crafting the rest of the game would force them to wear the scarlet letters on their front, and open them up to brigading by the brainwashed NeoLuddite mob. That move by steam to appease the pitchfork masses is pretty heavy handed.
even if I accept your premise of a “brainwashed NeoLuddite mob,” you’re still wrong on the simple principle of arguing against a company properly labeling what their product is or how it was made.
When a company makes a product completely by hand, but uses AI for a few translations it gets the same label as a game pumped out of Grok and uploaded untouched. That label is misleading and punitive, not informative.
Showing that even a small non-issue use of AI will be detected is a pretty strong incentive for other games to disclose that willingly. Otherwise, why would they admit to it if no one can tell? Morals??? 😂😂😂
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection https://amzn.to/40kncwB. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Me and the boys being worried for our jobs as automation stretches onwards and just wanting some level of guarantee that good paying jobs will still be available 😭
For the record, the word as a general noun is widely recognized to mean what everybody thinks it means:
Luddite
noun
Ludd·ite ˈlə-ˌdīt
: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest
broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
One of the weirder annoyances of the AI moral panic is how often you see this spiral of pedantry about the historical luddites whenever someone brings up the word as a pejorative.
I mean, fair rhetorical play, I suppose, in that it creates a very good incentive to not bring it up at all. If the goal was to avoid being called a luddite as an insult or as shorthand for dismissing AI criticism as outright technophobia I suppose that is mission accomplished, disingenuous as it is.
It is also correct that someone disagreeing with me can be doing so because of a moral panic. Our agreement is entirely disconnected to whether there is a moral panic at play or not.
For the record, I think "AI" is profoundly problematic in multiple ways.
This is also unrelated to whether there is a moral panic about it. Which there absolutely is.
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