The first part, absolutely. But I think a lot of that is biological so I don’t see fantasy as a problem. You should keep it to yourself though.
The second part I think Id somewhat agree with except the hacker can’t blackmail you with it because it’s just as likely that they created it. And even if they did blackmail you, I would view that as the damage caused by the hacker, not by the individual.
Like if someone put something nasty about me down in their diary where they expected it to be private, and a hacker sent me an email of that diary page, that’s entirely the hackers fault. The diary writer was expressing an emotion or desire or whatever in complete privacy. Was their creation wrong? No, I don’t think so.
And to be clear I’m not saying people should go to this type of fantasy, this is all a thought exercise for ethics, but I think a lot about this stuff because as much potential for bad as it has, it also has some potential for good. All of the women I know experience behaviors such as stalking, obsession, unwelcome sexual advances, etc. on a regular basis. There is a reason those men don’t turn to free porn. Incel behavior is also just as bad in many ways. So could AI and deepfake stuff result in many of those men keeping that stuff to themselves more? Maybe.
And before you say that these perverts will just send fake nudes to you and harass you that way, we should absolutely be prosecuting people that do so. That’s an entirely separate convo tho.
I have a question and I hope that people here will discuss this because I really want to understand the general opinion on this.
Is it wrong to deepfake someone without their consent so long as you don’t share the content and it’s all stored locally? I’ve seen this come up and my general opinion is that it isn’t. I know that isn’t the case in the article, just want to hear why people would disagree.
My angle is that doing a deepfake of someone in private hurts zero people and is an extension of fantasy. I don’t see the creation of fake nudes any different than writing fantasy erotica about someone. And I also don’t see it as different than creating fake nude art of them by hand or with photoshop. Like if you do it in your head anyways, which is completely normal, then aren’t we just worried about the outside effects and not the fantasizing itself?
Alyx did what most Valve games do, it advanced the industry. It is absolutely a half life game and it fits but it isn’t HL3. It isn’t that grandiose.
For people who accuse it of being a glorified tech demo, well, that’s exactly what Half Life 1 and 2 are. The sole reason for the existence of HL2 is just to sell the source engine to devs and to push Steam forward. It is a tech demo. Its puzzles are tech demos.
What Alyx did is implement proper gunplay and looting mechanics and really showcased how possible it is to tell a story in VR without taking your POV from you. I’d argue that there still isn’t a single VR game that nails one of the foundational pillars of Alyx as much as Valve did.
Counterpoint, “originality” almost never really refers to something that has never been done before. Instead it refers to something that the intended consumer has no, or little, reference for. Prime example is stardew valley and Helldivers.
Harvest moon has existed for awhile but few potential consumers have reference for it when playing stardew. So it succeeds. Helldivers is an alt version of many games but earth defense force is one of the genres it’s in. They’re very similar games at the core. Yet most people have no reference for it so it can still be “original” to them.
While I agree these games have heart and care, the success is largely to do with having a genre that already works with some audiences and then polishing it up and adding that heart factor to reskin it and try a new audience.
This is what indie games are great for. Take core ideas from big studios that work. Then don’t skip the part where the heart is ripped out for profit. And bam it’s a good game.
They’re also probably relying on AWS right? I’m assuming the pipeline for serving up prime video would be similar but it’s hard to tell how much that service “makes”. I feel like anything they’re using their own GPUs for is losing quite a bit of money compared to charging their cloud compute customers for it.
If twitch shuts down in a few months I won’t be surprised.
The same can’t be said of the iOS App Store. Still has garbage on it, but I’d bet that games are far more successful on the iOS platform for a multitude of reasons.
I don’t envy the space that fighting games are in. They need to make games that run extremely well on hardware to remain competitive but also need great graphics capability while still having a varied move set with plenty of effects.
And RAM is not scaling the same as storage or graphics so that’s why this is happening.