That’s why @TurinTur posted it.
I had no idea IGN and Ziff Davis was still a thing. IGN used to be my main gaming website (fist place I ever joined the message boards) but any time I’ve clicked some link (pretty much only searching for a guide for something) to IGN in the last 5 or so years it looked just like every other clickbaity site with basically the same guides and a worse setup with ads ads ads.
Wow. I don’t know why exactly, but this strikes me as even more soulless than AI-bashed visual art. ML-generated images are offensive for many reasons, but in some contexts they are subsidiary to the messages they accompany. Reading the opinion of a CNET journalist is the sole reason I would consider reading an opinion from CNET.
I wish I could remember where, but I recently heard some computer folk compare AI-free content to low-background steel. The idea is that machine learning has been able to use the unprecedented largesse of The Internet–a massive, freely available, and machine-friendly learning corpus–to make astonishing gains in training over a few short years. But once we reach a tipping point where most of the content available (and especially the content machine-optimized to produce the most engagement or revenue) is machine-generated, then learning becomes ineffective. They’ve polluted their ecosystem.
Speaking of, I find amusing that AI generated art is generating so much controversy in regards to using publicly available art without express content of the authors, but somehow the point doesn’t appear in any other big AI thing, like for example chatGPT. No one seems to care about the permission for using text on Internet.
Creators on Etsy use copyrighted IP all the time and sell it – Batman stuff, Spiderman stuff, etc. Etsy doesn’t care. I even emailed Etsy asking about it and I got a terse reply that if the copyright holder asks that something be removed they will remove it, but otherwise they don’t worry about it.
Welp.
It done happened again. How many more times can Gamespot and GiantBomb be bought/sold and hemorrhage staff? The ship of Theseus of games journalism.
Not sure who Game Pressure is, but this is a nice interview with Feargus Urquhart.
Credit to Eurogamer for the link.
HS: The last question, the dangerous one. I have to ask! Is there any chance for this hypothetical new Fallout from Obsidian to occur?
FU: We’re not working on it right now, our plate is pretty full with Avowed, Grounded and Outer Worlds 2. I don’t know when we’re going to start talking about new games, maybe towards the end of next year [conversation took place before Christmas 2022 – ed. note]. We just have to see what’s going on. That’s the best way to say it. There’s nothing in the plans, nothing on the piece of paper that says that. But I’ll stick to what I said. I would love to make another Fallout before I retire.
Come on dudes, let’s make it happen!
I’d rather see a Pillars of Eternity 3…
Jeff Gerstmann’s latest Twitch stream ended with him reflecting that G.B. would’ve likely shut down around 2013 if it wasn’t for Ryan Davis’ death. Tragically it generated huge amounts of interest and traffic to the site and enabled them to hire Dan and Jason. I had no idea that the situation was that unstable back then.
Wow. That was a really dark time for the site too.