Tag Archives: AI Slop

A Friday the 13th of Unsurprising Bullet Points

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It is Friday the 13th, which either means back luck or a somewhat regrettable series of movies from the 80s, and I can assure you I saw every single one in the theater. (And I can also assure you that I have not seen any of the later entries aside from Jason Goes to Hell, which I saw on VHS.)

What does that mean for the blog?  I don’t know, aside from giving me an opening paragraph and maybe dictating a theme for the entries.  You’ll have to tell me if that is really true or not.

I know, what a surprise?  But I live in a reality where only billionaires and a few greedy minions want Gen AI slop in everything, and those people only want it because they don’t want to pay for human talent.  They want to return to literal serfdom where we have to be grateful for our daily bowl of gruel lest the take even that away.

The key is how much players really do not want AI slop.  Quantic’s survey of 1,799 users found a majority, 62.7% had a “very negative” view of Gen AI, up from Q2 2024 survey where AI generated content had a 45.3% negative response… well short of the 78.6% who responded negatively to blockchain games, but almost three times more negative than… checks notes…. roguelikes!  Did not see the roguelike hate coming.

A dim view of Gen AI

And that number goes up to 85.4% when you rope in all levels of negative responses.

So all those AI ads on Reddit along with Krafton and EA and Tim Sweeney out there defending it at every turn are really having an effect!   If only shitty, disreputable people and organizations support your idea, maybe asking them to shut up is a better course of action.  Also, I down vote every single AI ad on Reddit.

Anyway, the report is linked there and you should take a look.

Discord, which famously can’t keep your data secure, will soon want a scan of your government documents to prove that you are an adult.  Or that was their pitch on Monday, when they were being pretty smug about not caring that they might drive some users away.

Unity through Discord

They told Ars Technica in the interview linked above “we’ll find other ways to bring users back.”

Then the magnitude of user backlash started to hit and by Tuesday they were swearing that most people would not have to submit a scan of an official government ID for them to lose in another data breach… because they were going to us AI!

AI will be going through the meta data of your account… which given how much detail manages to slip into some definitions of meta data ought to cause some concern as well… in order to determine if you are an adult or not.  If only we had some inkling about how end users feel about AI!

Didn’t I say that the whole thing would be going downhill, that enshittification would set in, once the IPO was announced?  Well here we are.

And I get some of this. Australia and the UK and some US states are forcing online services to do this sort of thing  But there is no universal US or EU mandate for checking all of our papers.  This is a company complying with autocracy in advance because there is no penalty for supporting tyrants.

Anyway, failure to prove you are an adult will mean that Discord will assume you are a teen.  I guess they aren’t ready yet to kick non-adults off the service, and there is the rank magical thinking hypocrisy of believing everybody who signs up is 13 years of age or older. (This is related to US law that says they cannot track data for those under 13, so everybody online is at least 13 now.)

All I have to say is that if they are going to tell me I am a teen, then I am going to act like one.  And teens are famously not a demographic with money, so I cancelled my server boost.  In their eyes, after all, I am just a teen.

I often hold up Embracer Group as an example of a video game conglomerate being run by dumb rich people who don’t know or care how video games are made.  They just jumped on board the idea and bought a bunch of gaming studios because they heard at a cocktail party or read in an in-flight magazine that this was what smart people were doing and it sounded like easy money.

Ubisoft, by contrast, and despite all of its problems, is a company founded on the idea of making video games and has successfully done so for coming up on 40 years.

Early Ubisoft Logo – As Designed by Max Headroom before he got famous

If you are reading this then you will likely recognize the names of at least a few of their titles or franchises.  I mean, the list of Ubisoft titles on Wikipedia had to be broken up into four different pages and the list of their cancelled titles is longer than the list of titles most studios manage to ship.  (Though it does make you ask the question “How many Tom Clancy titles can one studio cancel?”  14 appears to be the answer.)

And, as the industry goes so does Ubisoft.  They are big enough to start trends, but that is risky so they much prefer to follow trends or make sequels.  I lack sufficient fingers and toes to count all the variations of Assassin’s Creed they have tried

All of which is somewhat expected.  As a company gets larger, and certainly once the owners decide to take a company public, it becomes more conservative.  Innovation in the industry generally comes from indie projects or by things one might classify as mistakes from larger companies, which the industry then feeds on.

However, Ubisoft seems to be going overboard on the idea that the line must always go up.  Perhaps that is understandable given that the industry is still trying to get over the end of a decade long growth cycle that peaked with Covid and everybody staying home and playing video games.

So Yves Guillemot has taken a break from hating his customers and created a plan to slash and burn the core of the business that actually makes the product they sell with layoffs, cancellations, and closures.  And anybody who is left has to report to the office for work so he can keep an eye on them personally.  Eschewing what brought success to the company in the past, there is now a rush towards AI and outsourcing to China… and nepotism, always have to keep the family in charge of everything so Yves’ son gets a new job… as a way to keep the line going up.

Because he too has caught the Wall Street brain worm and believes success isn’t creating a sustainable business of acknowledging the cyclical nature of the market, but making the line go up every single quarter… which has now put him in the same zone as Lars Wingefors and the Embracer group.  His business isn’t games but making the line go up no matter what.

Now, I notably do not care about Ubisoft, having declared I would never buy another game from them more than 20 years ago, back when they were at one of their customer hating peaks.  But where the major publishers go, and they are a major publisher, the industry tends to follow… though, in this case Ubisoft seems to be more of a follower than a leader.

So we’ll see how that works out I guess.

Friday Bullet Points about Self-Inflicted Problems

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Back again for some Friday summing that is somewhat game related.  I don’t even have much of a preamble, so let’s just get to it.

Six years and $77 billion later it appears that Zuck is finally throwing in the towel on his vision of being a real boy… or the one person with legs in a legless virtual reality.

Zuck… if he can’t be real, he’ll make everybody else wooden!

The metaverse hype wasn’t even a solution in search of a problem like so many tech boondoggles.  It was worse that the Juicero, another solution that solve no problems, but at least it could be described and people could point and laugh at it.

The metaverse was a technology that even those promoting it couldn’t define.  Nobody during that hype bubble could define the metaverse in a way that didn’t either stray into such a specific niche as to be ridiculous or hand wave in such general terms that you were forced to conclude that we already have a metaverse and may have had it for a couple of decades at this point.

You can’t solve a problem if you cannot define it.

But that didn’t stop Mark Zuckerberg from jumping on board with his Reality Labs division which set fire to so much money since Covid… think of all that could have been done.

Well the money wasn’t literally set on fire.  It went to pay people and vendors and stimulated the local economy and put pressure on housing prices and what not.  It is just that the outcome from all that spending… it would have been better to pay people to clean up the streets or, I don’t know… moderate toxic content on Facebook.

And now it will be going to fund AI slop.

The pirates are shouting, “I’m the captain now!” over at Enad Global 7 where a capital management group has taken over the chairman of the board position based on a platform of “how can we milk this cow even harder?”

Enad Global 7

The last couple of earnings reports haven’t looked good, especially on the Daybreak side of the house, which has been the reliable engine of the gaming side of the house.  Ji Ham gets out there and talks about how strong of a brand H1Z1 is and how THJ is hurting their business, but those are all excuses.  They bought Singularity 6, which got a new title under the Daybreak umbrella, but is Palia strong enough to take over from the sagging fortunes of EverQuest and DC Universe Online?

I was pessimistic in my annual predictions post, but was I pessimistic enough?  The Q4 results, which includes expansion and holiday revenue, and the overall 2025 financials will be coming out in the next few weeks.  We shall see what that portends.  Will they embrace AI slop?

We knew this day was coming.  It has just been the economic troubles that have kept Discord and its backers from cashing out.  But even high inflation, insane tariffs, and growing unemployment can’t keep the VCs from trying to squeeze a few more bucks out of the market before the AI bubble bursts and the real recession begins.

Unity through Discord

Not that Discord hasn’t started in on the monetization enshitification already, but once the IPO hits and Wall Street gains full control, the demand for the line to go up every quarter will mean throwing all sense of customer service out the door in favor of turning the monetization dial to 11.

So the question of the moment is where will we find the next Discord and how long do we have to find it and move over before the current business simply becomes glorified malware pushing AI slop?

Suggestions welcome on what might be next!

I mean, what am I going to say about Ubisoft?  I do find it rich that one of the most historically customer hostile developers has declared they are going to become more “gamer-centric” by… cancelling games, firing devs, and doubling down on AI slop.  I’m already 25 years in on refusing to buy anything they publish, and it looks like I’ll go to my grave holding onto that vow.

I thought that one of the benefits of Activision Blizzard selling out to Microsoft was going to be no longer having to hear about that shitheel Bobby Kotick.  But there he is again, so we get layoffs, less competition, and poorer conditions for consumers AND we have to hear him whine about not being richer than he already is?  Another argument for this being the on the worst timeline.

Anyway, he showed up like pet vomit you’ve stepped into in the middle of the night to throw stones at Embracer Group, a collection of awful shitheels on their own who can’t even run a successful business without wrecking almost everything they touch, for possibly objecting to the acquisition of his company by Microsoft.

That sound like it might be the only good thing Lars from Mars and the inbred board at Embracer Group might have ever done.  I mean, they did it for asinine and selfish greed, but at least it was in the direction of something that was pro-consumer in that “a broken clock is right twice a day” fashion.  I am sure they’ll plead the nobleness of their intentions to Saint Peter on this, as in so many things that were selfish, hurtful greed, before he sends them to hell.

Anyway, I can only hope they sue each other or something.