Nition

It's a funny situation at the moment because most attempts are just sort of shoehorning LLM chat into a game that doesn't really need it, and then gamers quite rightly mock the results which don't really add anything to the game.

I think there's a bit of a lack of knowledge of game history on both sides, because we already know it can be fun when a game is designed around it. It worked in Façade (2005!) and it worked in Starship Titanic (1998!!), and both of those could have worked even better with the technology we have today.

One type of game that seems like an obvious one to me, is something a bit like The Sims except that the characters' decisions and speech are LLM-controlled. Maybe one of the characters is player-controlled, so you can interact and talk with everyone else. Or to describe it from the other direction, it'd be a kind of interactive fiction like AI Dungeon invented, but grounded in a physically simulated setting.

Yeah I had it all on a CASIO JD-6000 in the jeans pocket.

Unfortunately I left all my easy PHP exploits together with my pre-2023 writing that Pangram flags as 100% AI in Canada with my long-distance girlfriend.

Thought I'd share this because a lot of people still think detecting AI writing is a nigh-unsolvable problem without something like SynthID, but Pangram has become very, very good.

I think blog author's point was that even if AI is faster and better at coding, it's still okay to write code yourself - at least as a hobby - because that's something you enjoy.

I'm much more on your side personally though, because first, when you know there's a better and faster way to do something it does take away from the enjoyment of doing it the old way. Some of the enjoyment for me came from being unusually good at something vs. everyone else.

And second, even my hobby projects are always something that I want to make real, more than they are something that I want to do just for the fun of working on them. Even though I enjoyed the programming and puzzle solving process, the end product is still the main goal. So I'll be using AI at home as well (and it is nice to reify projects faster than before).

And all this also ignores the fact that even "only" losing your enjoyment of paid work, and not your hobby work, still sucks!

Having said all that, I recently read Use Of Weapons (1990) by Iain M. Banks and this passage encouraged me about the future:

  "Can’t machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking
  around the starship shell.
  "Why, of course!" she laughed.
  "Then why do you do it?"
  "It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors
  for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people
  on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think,
  I helped build that.
  The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact
  that it was you who actually did it."
  
  "Hmm," he said.
  "Well, you may 'hmm' as you wish," the woman said,
  approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship,
  where a few other construction workers were standing, 
  pointing inside the model and talking.
  "But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?"
  "Yes," he agreed.
  The woman shrugged. "Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish
  swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?"
  He smiled. "I suppose not."
  "You suppose correctly," the woman said.
  "And why?" She looked at him, grinning. "Because it’s fun."

The food scarcity concern was certainly overblown, I was thinking more about the environmental concern.

You don't have to trust a kids' show, that's just to help build general awareness. The proof is clear enough in rising CO2 levels, global average temperatures, ocean heat content etc.

The power is yours.

I feel like the harms were really drilled into Millennials like myself but then we seem to have assumed that younger Gen Zs and gen Alpha will just receive the climate change wisdom via osmosis or maybe if we're lucky, their parents. I've seen more people worrying about under-population (under population! Remember over-population?) than the environment recently. Maybe we need to bring Captain Planet back.

I suppose at least we can say there is a working car that seems to be able to actually do the things as advertised, which is more than one could ever say for e.g. the Moller Skycar.

The only one I can think that they might mean is the BYD Yangwang U9. It can jump a tiny bit.