Hello AI!

It’s been really nice to be able to type a plain question (in any language) into Google and receive a concise answer before scrolling down to confirm with more trustworthy sources. In particular it’s been very good for solving annoyances with UI options by directing me to exactly what I’m looking for. A traditional search will often conflate my search with synonyms (even when using quotations, which is some bullshit), and even ignore what language my search was in.

e: Also you should be careful when clicking on any links provided by an LLM because they can accidentally send you phishing links.

The difference between “generative AI” and “procedural generation” cannot be meaningfully nailed down.

I think it can - procedural generation consist of procedures, that is elements designed by humans, which are just connected into a bigger structure. Every single template, rule and atomic object (e.g. a single room in a generated house) is hand-designed, and as such no matter what comes out the elements and connections were considered by a real human. On the other hand, generative AI is almost always some sort of machine learning, that is an approximation of what a good structure of something should be, but it is only a very poor, randomised approximation. You have absolutely no guarantees nor constraints on what might pop out of the model - that is my main concern with genAI, though the whole outputted thing looks reasonable, upon closer inspection it has a lot of inconsistenties.

Nonsense. Procedural generation is a rule-based deterministic system while generative AI is probabilistic and data driven. It’s fundamentally different.

“We might deal in derivative IP, but it’s our derivative IP!”

Where are all these prompt based image generators that identify themselves as procedural generation?

I am really praying for the day corporate drops this foolish nonsense of foisting it on their company and employees - maybe even gasp enabling their teams to access and use the tools that help them do better and more creative jobs.

Because AI can fit into a lot of people’s toolsets really nicely, especially in creative fields like game design. Just need to drop the idea that AI is an authoritative final answer to our design problems and instead realize that it’s just another tool to help us get to those solutions.

I think you are reading in the “designed by humans” part. Even when that is nominally true, the whole point of procedural generation is to create a level of complexity and emergence that the outputs are surprising and novel. Things no one expected are desirable. I think the distinction being drawn is not meaningful; in both cases, it is entirely possible and likely that no human being understands how a given output was arrived at.

Okay, but (ignoring that procedural generation can also be probabilistic) what is the functional difference? The point I’m getting at is that you cannot banish the one without necessarily limiting the other.

My anecdote for AI and coding is that it’s a good replacement for google searching, especially when you are learning a new language.

You need to understand the fundamentals first, but asking the AI how to do a task in C when you’ve only coded in JS is very helpful. It’s still wrong, but it’s not like Stack Overflow is more accurate.

It’s less of a functional different and more of a moral one.

Derivative over generative any day if you ask me.

Markov chains are both probabilistic and data-driven. For example. LLMs are not that far removed from markov chains. Should game developers be allowed to use latent spaces or is that too sloppy AI?

Content theft is a separate issue. We can agree to ban the fruits of content theft without drawing arbitrary technical taboos.

We don’t believe in AI, says the developer of AI Art Impostor

With how badly that game was received, maybe they understood the point. Maybe

You don’t need any preexisting training data for procedural generation

Pocketpair Publishing boss John Buckley

Any relation to loss guy?

Isn’t that Garfield’s owner