Super obvious AI signals:

• buttons and their colors make no sense and aren’t correlated to a real PS3 controller.
• there’s nine status lights and literally status lights on the disk drive.
• the text is spelled “PLAYSTA.TION”.

Yes, I’m aware AI can do “pixel art.” No, this doesn’t invalidate the specific examples and logic from my prior posts. I’ve been discussing this is good faith, but you are not, you’re just reiterating and increasing the volume and insults. Have a nice day.

Buddy, I’m not defending AI, and you making some conspiratorial allegation about my motivation is just weirdly aggressive. You and other people don’t seem to understand what happens with typical generational lossy compression and resizing. Randomly resize and save any image to jpeg 12 times, and see if you don’t see similar artifact noise patterns. That’s a technical literacy thing and not your fault, but the overconfidence here is. The exact thing you’ve marked above is very typical artifacting that occurs for non-AI reasons.

I also know enough to say that I can’t be 100% positive it was or wasn’t AI at some point in the chain. But I can confidently say nobody has identified credible evidence it is AI compared to a multi-generational lossy resize by a lazy designer (and no, posting a screenshot with a vague circle and “that’s obviously AI” is not great evidence - these are not twelve fingers or mush pseudo text, this is pixel level inconsistency).

The things you and others are pointing out here are very explainable without AI, and AI likely would not be reliable enough to create some of the details you see which survived the lossy compression.

Sorry…Again, what should I be taking from this?

What is “ChatGPT font”? ChatGPT and its image tool are distillation models that do not have fonts. They produce images based on per-pixel relational distillation, they are guessing what pixels should be next to each other and do not use fonts. Current models do produce text that can be indistinguishable from fonts, but there is no single “ChatGPT font.” If there is a generic font appearing here, that doesn’t tell us anything new.

For the PS1, I don’t understand what you are referring to. The blurriness and uneven lines happen from compression artifacting and/or resizing to a non-divisible fractional resolution. You can get the same effect now if you go into Photoshop, create a 32x32 pixel image, resize to nearest-neighbor 10x, then set an arbitrary similar but non-divisible resolution with a different resampler (e.g., 56x56 bicubic), and save as JPG at <40 quality. That’s extreme, but you get aliased artifacting, interpolated stepping, and so on.

If you’re taking some other features as evidence of AI, let me know.

There are a lot of oil-related reasons his handlers have convinced him to do it. But I’m surprised nobody has said yet that Trump’s motivation - apart from his handlers and donors - is doing it is to take focus off of the Epstein files. With the new evidence that Trump sent underage girls to Epstein, it seems very likely we’ll find out Trump was actively part of organized trafficking.

Trump is not a smart person, but he knows what works. Whenever things aren’t going his way, he will escalate and distract, delay reckoning until everyone has moved on.

Sorry again, I know I responded below and not trying to just argue for no reason, but pointing out these different things you’re identifying that actually strongly suggest these aren’t AI, or aren’t indicators of AI or not either way.

For example, Switch asymmetry. This is how Switch directional and gamepad buttons look. It should be asymmetrical, and AI probably wouldn’t get that right like it is in the graphic. You can even see the color-distorted remainder of the “-” and “+” symbols above them, blurred to hell from terrible resizing.

Things like proportions and whether controllers are depicted are just choices either a human or an AI could make.

Ok - Yes, Adobe does have insidiously integrated AI tools. But again, nothing you point to here is strongly indicative of AI, and again, just consistent with sloppy & lazy resizing (which you could just as likely see pre-2020, before AI). Adobe also has a very extensive stock library which may be where these came from.

There are some really hard to spot AI generated materials possible now, but the sloppy inconsistency here is - conversely - an indicator that they don’t care much what we do or don’t notice so wouldn’t be spending the time to generate something with all of the consistent details (see list above). Instead, the consistent details suggest human-created versions based on the real systems.

Sorry, none of this is a clear indicator of AI. The “latent noise” you refer to is perfectly consistent with compression and resizing artifacting and noise. Proportions are often off when making “chibi” icon-sized consoles, but notably, they are consistently or coherently off. Other features are strongly suggestive it isn’t AI. For example:

• All of the controllers have consistent layouts, including the correct number and orientation of buttons, player indicators, etc (e.g., the Wii controllers).
• Consistent diagonal step effects, even if blurred from poor resizing (see the PS4).
• Consistent text for all system indicators that is legible without AI artifacting, even if blurred from poor resizing.
• The fact that the 360 and PS3 (didn’t notice initially) are not even pixel art suggests they just grabbed random icons from the web, not ran them through AI generators.

Which is AI-generated? It looks to me like real pixel art (except the 360) very lazily resized in a non-nearest-neighbor fractional scale and anti-aliased to mush.

I do feel like even if they skipped Clair Obscur because of recent controversies, the author should have addressed it. I think it’s certainly deserving of being in the list, so saying nothing kinda seems contrarian at best.

I’m not an expert by any means and find this a little confusing too. The three possibilities seem like:

1. The business needed a cash influx and because CD Projekt and Michał Kiciński still seem to believe in GOG’s mission, “purchasing it” was a way of injecting money while setting a ceiling on risk for CD Projekt versus simply keeping it on the balance sheet and spending more on it.

2. They truly think that separate businesses will operate more efficiently and that the missions weren’t aligned enough to be in the same org structure. This seems possible but no way to really know.

3. They want to make GOG more appealing to developers who may not trust it if it’s tied so closely to CD Projekt. This seems unlikely, since Epic, Valve, etc all have self-published games by the platform owners on their storefronts.

Or some combination of the three… The timing seems to be to do it by end of calendar year to make a clean break on the books, at least.

Ultimately it took ProPublica to pull back the curtain on a computed market where an algorithm was telling landlords how much to charge tenants for a majority of the market. And even then, I don’t think it’s stopped.

This is exactly my point. The ability for companies to gouge consumers is exacerbated by algorithms, sure. But they have power because the regulatory rules are either in their favor or not.

Even exposing it as you note didn’t change it. Likewise individual consumers don’t have the ability to change it. It’s a red herring and false solution to say “AI can fix it.”

I’m always up for a good AI dystopia article, but this is pretty poorly written, taking a very long time to say very little new or interesting. For this reason I wouldn’t be surprised if the author used AI assistance in writing it, which would certainly tell you something about the author’s objectivity. (It has a lot of earmarks of recent-model AI essay writing, like repeated use of the rule of threes, though I admit a human could have produced it. )

The thesis appears to be that AI can be an equalizer to put individuals on equal footing to corporate data processing tasks. But conversely that it may not be because viability, quality and reliability depends on who controls the model and whether it hallucinates in critical or non-critical ways. Thanks for the clarity, article.

None of this is new thought, but just another part of an inherently AI-normalizing line of thinking that AI is just another democratizing technological tool (but that could be used for evil - or good! - or evil!). The author addresses some of the AI flaws but ends almost where it began, with that flawed premise, which elides how unlike other tools, AI actually degrades our abilities to think and communicate once we start relying on it. The article doesn’t address that communication, meaning, thought, and reliability are degraded when either individual or corporate systems integrate AI.

Instead, the author would like you to think individuals can level a playing field by using AI against corporate algorithms. And sure, a person denied a medical claim by a health insurer low effort AI can now write a generic low effort appeal, but that appeal can just a efficiently continue to be denied by better funded AI. It’s a spurious and illusory benefit to the individual.

What truly matters and is unaffected by consumer AI use is power - political and corporate power. AI just floods the zone with more output, but the result of us all adopting AI will change nothing to the power imbalance in our system. The solution to low effort slop won’t be more low effort slop - we’d just be burying ourselves deeper in it.

There’s some similar work done with the Pretendo network for Nintendo systems, but my understanding is it’s just for server-hosted and multiplayer game features and not copyright authentication.

I think it’s inevitable that someone creates an online server that authenticates online games, the lawsuits will be swift and vicious. The best solutions will probably be to create a local network authentication method, but who knows if it’s even possible.

Honestly, this is the best time to snapshot it, because even with the slop already there, the exponential increase that’s about to happen will absolutely dwarf what’s there now.

That’s a great sign.

Welp, time to make a straw doll of Sam Altman and start sticking it with pins. This bubble is taking way too long to burst.

It’s interesting you are disappointed in the art style - it makes more sense, though, if you haven’t played HOMM3. Because the map art style and layout feels very HOMM3, moreso than the other 3D modernization attempt in HOMM5 (which I hated). My guess is you would have really enjoyed HOMM3, if this one plays how it looks.

Thanks for putting this on my radar, it really looks like a return to the HOMM gameplay I enjoyed.

The article is all speculation about RAM availability, but somehow doesn’t even mention AI.

My comment is speculation too, but Nvidia almost certainly has one of the most reliable supplies of RAM. This would suggest they’re doing the obvious thing and putting their supply in enterprise AI products, while leaving the gaming community (who they owe their success to) fighting for price-gouged scraps.

This is the correct list, having lived through it. BBS services in the mid-1980s were the start of Razor1911, Paradox and other distro and cracker groups. I’d edit 2 to include FTP which is what BBS evolved into with secret dropsites for new releases.

IRC is 2.5 on this list. You can group that alongside the pre-web internet services, like AOL which had slightly IRC-like chat rooms dedicated to serving warez and videos in the same way (requesting a list from a chatbot, and then requesting sequential files).

Some light history here, though like all warez-related scholarship, there’s a ton missing that you had to have seen to know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

https://archive.org/details/b904a8eb-9c98-4bb1-bf25-3cb9d075b157/

I don’t know if this meme is fully ironic, but kind of strange to think “torrenting” is considered the OG piracy method now.