Artificial Intelligence

[one-armed dwarf]

This topic isn't going away soon and isn't just limited to RE9, so more apt here

 

DF have their followup vid on the slop tracing feature, some mea culpa involved

 

Alex makes a good point of how the slop-upscaled Grace feels inconsistent with what is actually happening at this point in the story, wearing makeup and mascara to go to a derelict hotel where her mother was murdered and she's still dealing with trauma. Which only underlines my feeling that Rich doesn't actually play video games, maybe this is unfair, but I think its one of the reasons why that image specifically was so weird to look at for those of us who've played the opening sections of the game

 

I'm really shocked by how fast this has happened. GenAI graphics I mean, I thought it would happen in films before games but I guess cause nvidia are 'the' AI company it makes sense they would introduce it to games first

 

Unfortunately I think this is the direction of travel for game's rendering. Not in the short term, as games need to run on PS6 and it probably isn't doing this. But PS7, I guess probably will

[Maf]

Two things that strike me is the ‘we only just saw it, went straight in to a room, and made a video while we still hyped’ (not a direct quote lol) feels like a pretty inexperienced, amateur journalist mistake to make. Given that Rich has been doing games press for decades. I don’t understand why they’d make such a slip up and not wait to process/digest the info and review the footage more. I wonder if they knew the date of announcement and just wanted to be first with a video? Even then the question is why they weren’t more discerning or put more thought in to it. Most people clocked the issues with this in about 10 seconds. They can ‘apologise’ for that, but it’s not so much the mistake/opinion in and of itself but a display of how out of touch they were with, err, the rest of the world. 
 

Even not consulting the rest of the team is an odd choice. 
 

Secondly Rich and Oliver seem to be conceding the critical, controversial points but they keep walking it back around to “but in the future” which makes me think they are conceding their real opinion to the internet outrage. But repeating the points that the internet is criticising is not the same as showing understanding. I get the feeling this is obligatory concession because of how out of touch they were with everyone else and want DF to be respected still, even though they really enjoyed what they saw.
 

Lastly, if that is the case and they really are excited by it, ultimately that’s fine. You are allowed to be the 1 in 100 people who likes the video game thing. Pretending you’re not and it was a mistake is a bit sad. 
 

I dunno. I didn’t finish the video because I thought the talk was quite boring. It comes off as pained all around and disingenuous from Rich’s part. “The internet’s opinion was mixed”. Lol. Not according to my timeline. DLSS5 got eviscerated. 
 

I made a joke about it yesterday, but the only part where DLSS5 looked better was the Starfield NPC’s. But Starfield is a gormless, bland, soulless looking piece of shit to begin with so literally applying any thing to it made it look better. 

[one-armed dwarf]

I think their credibility has been obliterated by this, even if Alex speaks reasonably on it. This is the worst thing they could have taken a swing and a miss on

 

https://www.resetera.com/threads/insider-gaming-developers-were-left-in-the-dark-about-dlss-5.1466209/

[Maf]

Oh, the thing I forgot to say was the bit where Rich says “We should have waited to gauge audience reactions” err…no. You needed a better process that made your position look credible and considered instead of “They invited us to an event and ooh it’s very shiny”
 

Waiting to give an opinion after the internet has decided its own is an even more skeptical and untrustworthy way to handle topics. 

[DANGERMAN]

How many of these Q&A videos have they done now? 2 of them have been walking back things they've said, which is probably something they need to learn from, That said, put a mic in front of someone, anyone, and let them talk long enough and they'll say something stupid, DF aren't immune from that and it doesn't necessarily mean much, just bad timing to have a couple of examples close together, hopefully

[Maryokutai]

4 hours ago, Maf said:

‘we only just saw it, went straight in to a room, and made a video while we still hyped’ (not a direct quote lol) feels like a pretty inexperienced, amateur journalist mistake to make.

 

Yeah, I found that odd as well. Anecdote, but I did a bit of amateur journalism in my late teens/early 20s and at one point we got invited by SEGA and were able to play Bizarre's The Club a couple of days before it was announced. We thought it was going to be the best thing ever (granted the game is good and underrated, but not at that level) for no other reason than having experienced it in this highly exclusive curated environment. But we were also so young that we had barely stopped pooping in our pants, which Rich isn't.

 

I also agree that the backpedaling makes them look like they're on shaky grounds. If you like this thing, just stand by it. the issue was rushing the content out and having only people talk about it that were on the same page. If some of the concerns voiced by Alex in this second video were mixed into the discussion about it in the original video, there likely wouldn't have been as much backlash. Maybe even none at all, or at least none towards DF. 

 

I'm unsure if this has done long-term damage to the brand though, they're pretty much exclusively covering visual media content, so it's not like they can tell us about something, show us the opposite and make us believe. It was a misfire based on limited subjective opinions, not factually incorrect information. But at the very least this was/is a big bump in their road that'll take some time to recover and I'm also wondering about how they deal with this internally, as it seems that John in particular wasn't were happy about how it was handled, to say the least. And as much as maf hates the guy, he's an integral part of that team and if he feels no longer being on the same wavelength as the rest, then that will be a big loss for them at a crucial time.

 

Anyway, to get a bit on-topic maybe, there's maybe a silver lining about this entire shitshow and that is that, surely, the negative response has reached every suit involved in this disaster and might make them reconsider. I find it appalling, but not in the least surprising, that publishers like Capcom and UbIsoft signed off on this without involving the developers, but if the end result is nothing but bad publicity, that's usually something even those dense clowns at the top see as a red flag. But at the same, it could just go the way of the horse armour, and slowly but surely creep into games until at some point it's such an integral part we handwave it away, while newer generations of players simply don't know anything else. And at that point it's here to stay. But at the same there's always going to be studios strictly against it as well. I can't imagine Remedy, for example, ever embracing this, so if you're firmly against it it'll be a case of putting your money where your mouth is.

[one-armed dwarf]

My John stocks are way up, glad I invested in them when they were flagging after his Metroid Prime 4 review. All in on John

[Maf]

One thing I’ve said particularly about John but also DF is they need to stay away from typical reviews and concentrate on data, which they’re really good at and specialise in. They’re not taste makers. I wonder if this DLSS5 reveal will make them reflect on that (though it won’t for John because he’s too self-unaware and doesn’t realise he’s neither funny or good at talking)

[one-armed dwarf]

I think the problem is that their DLSS5 coverage is exactly that, a focus on the objective data and avoiding the ways in which technology and art can intersect, and how that relationship is jarringly fucked around with by genAI.

 

I'll mention it again, but people should watch the opening minutes of Alex's RE9 path tracing video, which talks about how light and shadow got used to paint a scene in 1920s German Expressionism, 1940s film noir, 80s horror movies and all the way up to the expressionist-influenced RE Remake (2002), how the series departed from this with RE4 which was fully 3D and had flat lighting, then brought it back again with higher contrast light and shadow in the modern RE engine games. It's well informed and structured in a way that makes the strange focus on a faucet for 5 minutes not as disconcerting, it makes more sense with this context cause it's talking about how technology works in microcosm to produce tastefully rendered scenes that are like the 2002 Resident Evil. It's one of their best recent videos (but is also sponsored, which is problematic in its own way)

 

DF should be more like this, focused on data but observing things holistically where it is appropriate. These are visual arts, whether it's film, photography or video games. There's no art in this shit from nvidia

[Maf]

That’s a fair point, actually. Maybe the answer is to recognise that the artistic expression side is a big weakness and pour more thought in to it rather than back away 

[mfnick]

3 hours ago, Maf said:

Oh, the thing I forgot to say was the bit where Rich says “We should have waited to gauge audience reactions” err…no. You needed a better process that made your position look credible and considered instead of “They invited us to an event and ooh it’s very shiny”
 

Waiting to give an opinion after the internet has decided its own is an even more skeptical and untrustworthy way to handle topics. 

This.

 

I also still don’t understand even from a tech & lighting point of view how it’s better? Every scene looks objectively worse. It just cranks the brightness up.
 

It obviously can’t cope with motion too. Have you seen the EAFC comparison? His shirt just turns to a blurry mesh when he’s moving. They’d normally heavily criticise that type of stuff. 

[DANGERMAN]

Something they touched on, but I'm surprised Nvidia called it DLSS 5. I can understand them calling it DLSS in some form, but making it a main number, when it's clearly not suited to most games, and is also clearly demanding to run even when they optimise it. 

 

I was watching Gamers Nexus talk about it this morning. They were highlighting how confused and messed up it gets with motion (which might improve), but there's a clip from EAFC, where Van Dyke scores a goal, his face and then the net merge with the ball at various points. Plus, and this is lost on the Americans tbf, we know what VVD looks like, he's a real person who is on TV every week, so DLSS 5 making him look less like himself than the basic EA FC model isn't a good look for the tech 

[Maryokutai]

One thing I've been wondering about is whether it can even guarantee consistency. Considering DLSS doesn't interpret the game world like the engine does as a 3D wireframe, but rather is applied on the 2D plane the player is seeing at that very moment, a face that can look very different from scene to scene might not even always yield the same results. Would Grace still look like an instagram model in broad daylight when not facing the camera, or rather look like yet another person. Admittedly I haven't looked into it too deeply and maybe there's some form of 'lock' you can apply to certain recurring character models that DLSS then recognises and always 'enhances' in the same way.

 

I dunno, the more I think about it, the less convinced I am this will be the future of real-time rendering, as has been mentioned by some sources like DF (regardless of your personal opinion about it). It doesn't really seem to solve problems but rather add more to the mix, in the broadest of ways.

[one-armed dwarf]

This is interesting. I can't really summarise it very well cause it's complicated, but the AI model is guessing how something should look by inferring it from a screenshot and motion vectors, which I'm not going to attempt to explain cause I don't know, but it's a graphics thing.

 

So, kinda like how chatbots generate tokens based on questions you ask them, the input is the 2D image of the 3D game, I think, which generates the images that we see in nvidia's presentation

 

In the screenshot example, it actually mis-predicted how this Starfield guy should look by giving him hair where there isn't any.

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

OpenAI shut down Sora. Not the Kingdom Hearts character, it's their AI slop video creating thing. Disney have also exited a deal with them, probably a good decision by them cause why cheapen all that IP they have

 

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-shutting-down-sora-ai-video-app-1236546187/

 

Don't know what the implications of that are tbh, but seems like things aren't too good for openAI in particular. Seems like these days all you hear about is Anthropic. 

 

[DANGERMAN]

We got an email from a brand we have the license for at work telling us that we're not allowed to use ai with their brand. It made me smile, hopefully some more follow suit 

[Maf]

14 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

OpenAI shut down Sora. Not the Kingdom Hearts character, it's their AI slop video creating thing. Disney have also exited a deal with them, probably a good decision by them cause why cheapen all that IP they have

 

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-shutting-down-sora-ai-video-app-1236546187/

 

Don't know what the implications of that are tbh, but seems like things aren't too good for openAI in particular. Seems like these days all you hear about is Anthropic. 

 

This is excellent news. The only bad part is Disney didn’t lose their billion dollars first 

[Craymen Edge]

Our workplace is deeply embedded with all the Microsoft tools (Teams, One Drive, Sharepoint, etc.) They've been trying to get people to try to incorporate Copilot into a bunch of office stuff. It's so shit.

 

I thought I'd try it on a boring and repetitive task - converting a text list into a comma separated file to import into a spreadsheet and a database table.

 

The manual method isn't hard, just a lot of macros and find and replace expressions over and over. It did great at extracting only the columns I wanted, but when it came to making the file it inserted a couple of dozen additional made up lines of data (at least that many before I trashed the file).

 

It's completely unsuitable, and potentially really risky to use anywhere that requires accurate data.

[shinymcshine]

Problem will come when some muppet from management sees the efficiency side of Ai and expects you to do a job in a tenth of the time ("because CoPilot now does it for you") irrespective of the accuracy of the Ai results (which you'll still be held accountable for.....)

 

I do wonder how long it'll be before there's a huge corporate scandal where company IP is inadvertently made public because staff use Ai to process business information (unaware of how that is then fed into, and thus potentially accessible, via Ai tools)?

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Fair play to these students: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8pqd54qneo

 

Imagine entering into a degree and in the time it takes to complete it, discover that the skills it was supposed to furnish you with are supposed to be made redundant by the technology a ghoul like this is hyping up. They are more fucked over than we were by the global financial crisis.