At the time of writing a pretty recent trend of fusing several games together with LLM's had made me remember some of my feelings towards the tech and ai-will-replace-us-all retards. There are no acceptable words to describe what I feel about the latter, but there are plenty of things I can say about the technology, so lets do that.
1) Most of those projects do not directly fuse the games, they merely provide a bridge between them (like genuinely two games run at the same time and just have some sort of protocol between them)
2) The projects that do directly fuse games just blatantly copy the already available source code.
3) These projects stand on the shoulders of truly magnificent specialists that have reverse engineered the games in question for years, meaning AI hadn't given out the same amount of "effort" as humans have.
4) These projects are janky, unpolished and don't really go far out of the way of just being a glorified tech-demo. Some more level headed video authors covering these amalgamations have stated that while these experiments are indeed interesting, they are engaging only for a very limited time, 30 minutes at most.
5) HUMANS are the main driver of this trend. HUMANS have decided to do all of this. HUMANS are spearing these projects. The desire to be trendy is what driving these projects forward, not AI.
With that said, the results are still impressive*, so what's my problem with this?
The problem is the assumption that with the usage of LLM's we will prosper as a society, we will accelerate things beyond what we could ever do, we will replace a significant amount of developers, we will... eh, do something and more. Trends like this just accelerate these ideas and in turn cause people to disregard the real work achieved by real humans, the work that these LLM's most often copy and abuse. Aside from that there are several other major reasons why I think LLM's are garbage.
You can not believe just how expensive LLM's are at the scale that ChatGPT, Anthropic and other AI companies operate. There's a reason why the saying "you get X dollars worth of usage out of a Y dollar subscription" is a thing, it's almost a fucking taunt towards the inevitability that these subscriptions will either fade out of fashion, or will become so expensive - NO ONE will be able to buy them anymore. The reason they can afford to be so cheap right now is because current usage is subsidized by billion/trillion dollar companies, all in a deliberate operation to increase their welfare in the long run (hooking people on LLM's and making them pay tenfold at some point; fucking with the economy; probably something else that went over my head).
LLM's are generally pretty mid, and at times are extremely stupid. Due to the core way the technology works (probabilities + data), you end up with a model that gives you the average of everything it consumed: everything good, everything mid, everything bad, everything just outright horrible. It is sadly backed up by my experience of working with frontier models. It may be good enough for some people, but for me - it's trash tier, since I can do everything I'd ever want from an LLM myself.
LLM's can not be selfhosted cheaply if you want a non-trash model. Do you want a 1T parameter model just so it doesn't shit itself in the most simple scenarios imaginable? Too bad, it'll require you to basically deploy a local datacenter. There are many reasons for selfhosting, and the fact that you can not achieve it in todays economy is an outright NO from me.
Current web landscape is fucking depressing. I don't think I've ever seen this many websites just outright not working before. Not to mention the uninspired, boring and sloppified design they all started using makes me wanna claw my eyes out. The web was already a shithole, but with the increasing usage of AI in the development industry - everything started to become simply worse and more unstable. Shit, it also applies to some software, with the most glaring example being windows by microslop. Not to say that linux is saint either, its ai assisted commits have skyrocketed, and some distributions (like ubuntu) opt into vibecoded rust clones of industry tested utilities. Rust is a whole another topic, I may write about it in the future.
This piece by Ed Zitron is a pretty interesting read. You may read that if you want an infinitely more detailed explanation on why ai is le bad. BUT BE CAREFUL, the website doesn't have dark mode.
In the end we will all end up 6 feet deep, even the fancy sand we forced to do meaningful work. Thank you for reading.