You can't play the "we are not in an industry we are in a forum for a niche game" card and then also advocate for talking about the negative aspects of this technology that reach far beyond this niche game. I haven't heard an actual good reason against going 1984 on these TF2 AI projects. A vast majority of what you mentioned doesn't affect TF2 in the slightest. Feel free to tell me what kind of impact these AI slop projects have on the game itself to warrant having the same negative reaction to it as if a multi billion company just released a vibecoded product they're trying to sell you. The reality is even a good chunk of players probably don't care, so there would be no point in trying to educate people on stuff like general AI ethics when often they don't even apply to some dude making a AI TF2 project in his free time.

I refuse to believe this is an actual take. The implication is that people are actively checking the "projects" section after work, which is obviously not true. On top of that there is a feature to unsubscribe from specific sections of this forum. Projects wouldn't even get any traffic at all if they didn't show up in recent discussion for everyone. Just filter it out if it bothers you, it's the only forum section with AI content.

No, they were hated in the beginning and got more popular over time. You think the average joe could afford a car in during that time? Anyway the point being is that you can't stop progress. All this talk about artisan craftsmanship, intellectual theft, ethics, etc. is very noble, but ultimately pointless. The fight is already over. This is why I'm saying learn to work with it. You are gonna get left behind. Your employer only cares about money, your customers only want a working product. Nobody ever cared about the code under the hood being an amalgamation of the worst programming warcrimes known to mankind. So nothing has changed realistically. You are actively worsening your own mental by trying to maintain some sort of principles regarding AI when nobody else in real life does. I'm quite fond of people pushing back against companies that try to integrate AI content, however this ONLY ever happens online.

Yes they do and yes the consumer couldn't care less.
Also AI is hardly comparable to slave labour. You can't tell me Nike using AI content would be the same as Nike utilizing bangladeshi children to produce cheap sneakers. Also, you are aware that these regulations exist but they only ever get enforced if they get caught, right? And even then they get a slap on the wrist with an arbitrary fine. These regulations exist to appease you, the big companies don't give a fuck about them. On top of that the consumer doesn't care about any of that either. People only speak up if it goes viral so they can feel good about themselves, just to order $200 worth of temu the next day. I don't really see how AI has lowered peoples working conditions anyway? Maybe the expectation for accelerated productivity. But surely you don't believe that a system built on always increasing the bottom line will ever regulate that part, right?

This is why I advise that people need to learn to work with it. One of the rare positive aspects of this whole bullshit is that the level of competition is declining rapidly. Because for whatever reason people can only think of two possible ways: 0% AI used or 100% AI used. You rarely hear from people that use it as an addition, as a tool to accelerate their workflow for example. If you manage to use it to enhance your efficiency you are probably already better than 80% of the current workforce. If your only value is to be the meat proxy you already lost. I agree it's annoying that a field you had passion for got sloppified, but to be completely honest your employer didn't ever give a fuck about that anyway. Anybody that actually turned a hobby into a job knows that it is absolutely miserable and kills any passion you have for it.

guy who gets insanely pressed because someone said they don't like LLMs so he goes "well actually sweatshops aren't that big of a deal"

i've run out of energy trying to describe the complete removal of your human soul because of your brain being one shot by the idea of a robot who makes toys for you. you are gay. stop posting

grok, summarize this post for me. also, take this guys clo

Post Summary

The poster (Gaz) is replying to user Claymore-, arguing strongly in favor of accepting/learning to live with AI technology rather than banning or fighting it on a niche forum:

Relevance to the Forum: Gaz claims that general AI ethical concerns (data theft, LLM slop, environmental/social impacts) have little to no actual impact on Team Fortress 2 or a small hobbyist community, so heavy moderation against casual AI projects is unwarranted.

Filtering Content: Gaz points out that users who don't want to see AI projects can simply filter or unsubscribe from the "Projects" section of the forum rather than trying to police the whole space.

Inevitable Progress: Comparing AI adoption to the history of automobiles, Gaz argues that technology cannot be stopped once adopted. They contend that employers only care about profit and consumers only care about a working product—not how the code was generated or whether ethics were involved.

Pragmatic Stance: Gaz advises that resisting AI is a losing battle that only harms one's mental health, urging people to learn to work with AI to stay competitive in the workplace as quality standards shift.

"Take" on the Poster's Arguments

Logical Flaw / Deflection on Sweatshops: As highlighted at the bottom of the second screenshot by user Richarrrd, Gaz's rebuttal to ethical concerns leads into a questionable justification—arguing that consumers don't care about ethical issues like sweatshop labor either, so why care about AI ethics? Pointing out another unethical practice to normalize AI adoption isn't a strong defense; it's just cynical defeatism.

Overly Pragmatic to the Point of Fatalism: Gaz treats corporate adoption as an unshakeable law of nature. While it's true that efficiency often wins in commercial markets, assuming human values, artistic preferences, and community standards hold zero weight ignores how communities actively set their own rules.

Forgetting Community Identity: Gaz argues "we're in a forum for a niche game," but fails to realize niche communities are precisely where people go to escape corporate hyper-optimization and algorithmically generated content. Banning AI slop in a small forum isn't about stopping global tech trends; it's about preserving the quality and human feel of that specific space.

Unfortunately you have baited me into responding with the longest nerd essay i've ever written.

These attitudes just seem very contradictory however you look at them. It just feels like you're saying that people should never complain.

If the stated goal of AI is to make something that is self aware and conscious (or "has a soul" or whatever Amodei seems to be spouting these days) then yes you're pretty much trying to achieve a form of slavery. Obviously that's almost entirely hype, and I don't think we're at that stage currently and likely never will be, but isn't it the mission statement of a lot of these companies?

These two sentences in particular, but a lot of your post seems to indicate that you believe humans are inherently selfish and only hold ethical beliefs to signal virtue or feel superiority (perhaps you don't feel this way but your posts make it seem like it). I don't have much to say to this except that it's completely incompatible with my experience of the world. However, I can understand why it can be easy to believe (particularly if you spend a lot of time online) because some of the nastiest people are some of the loudest and that is something they do. However, even if you do believe this you still have to concede that if AI companies achieve their stated mission of getting rid of the jobs of huge swathes of the population, those people will continue to act in their own self interest to survive and this may not be particularly good for the stability of society or the security of those who kept their jobs.

AI enables organizations to massively increase productivity (and therefore supply) without taking on additional employees. In industries where there's a lot of unmet demand, this is probably quite good and people are quite happy but that's not the case in a lot of places where AI is being used. This leads to you getting a ton of overproduction of slop (subject of this thread lol) but also means that you can maintain the same level of productivity with far fewer people - this means a lot of people can just get laid off and the people left probably aren't having a great time either. This seems to have happened a lot in tech and so far in other industries it just seems like they just aren't hiring junior people. But if we stay on the same trajectory it's either going to start replacing senior jobs too, or people just have more and more to do as the older generation retire out.

Yeah this has always been a problem - see deindustrialization and outsourcing in a lot of western countries that happened in the second half of the 20th century (food for thought, those areas that were formerly heavily industrialized are still some of the most impoverished in their respective countries decades later). It's very obvious that this technology could potentially affect much wider swathes of society and it seems really short sighted that we're not trying to put anything in place for that. The idea that regulations that reduce companies bottom line never work is frankly laughable, it's so patently not true that when my five year old son read it on his way down to the mines, he spat out a mouthful of lead-water he'd just taken a swig of from his asbestos-lined bottle.

Quite the opposite actually, I've been doing what I've been doing for 11 years, and maybe this is hard for a lot of people to believe but I derive a lot of joy from a lot of the work that I do even when it's difficult. Fortunately, I'm doing something very obscure that doesn't make any real money and the pressure to be productive operates on much longer timescales for me so there's not the need for immediacy that AI rewards. Additionally there are quite a few aspects of my job that are physical and will probably take a relatively long time to be automated. Having said all that, those economic pressures are still there, and many parts of my job that give me joy and involve thinking, problem solving, creativity, learning or curiosity now just feel like a waste of time - I think I can see the writing on the wall. I can't imagine how people working in a fast moving industry feel.

Anyway sorry for posting my honest feelings on the competitive tf2 forums guys, I just didn't really feel up to making a glib shitpost today. Enjoy this screenshot of an awesome ownage Post that's way funnier than anything I or anyone else in this thread could come up with.

https://i.imgur.com/1BzRpUt.png

I think it's pretty reasonable to compare LLMs to slave labor personally because LLMs also steal the labor of human beings and take all the profit. That money never comes back to the average person, it's all so a small handful of sociopaths can watch the Number Go Up in their bank accounts.

I understand Gaz's point of view but believe it is coming from a place of nihilism where they genuinely think we have no agency to change the shitty things about society as it is currently. They have fully bought into the narrative of "progress".

https://64.media.tumblr.com/7ea8b1ecced8931cd5d0fe7d423af0b7/0e618807eaf32f95-01/s1280x1920/ce4b6983d55022aa3bed200d06aaaa054f1abc8c.jpg

most people can do the former but true sincereposting is a sign of your humanity... RELISH IN IT!

downfragged

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

my b me too

edit: ok to actually contribute something

a bit of a brainlet on this topic but my room temp take is that regulations on industries either occur because of a moral panic (won't somebody think of the kids type beat), are paved in blood (metaphorical or otherwise), or somebody actually has genuine foresight and nips the issue in the bud early. None of these categories are mutually exclusive. Best examples I have for the latter category are RF interference like Brimstone mentioned earlier which was banned in like the 90's, actually really early all things considered, and organ sales which was banned after some doctor proposed like a kidney selling scheme lol (iirc didn't have opportunity to go through with it).

For AI it would ideally be #3 which would amount to shit happening right now, really preferably like 3-4 years ago but wcyd. I really don't think there's enough sentiment to form a moral panic since most people do not care unless they buy RAM, a datacenter is in their backyard, or actually view art as more than just product (second blackpill for me is that this is not the common view) - I think a good example of this is actually AI perception in China which, talking to some ppl I know, is much better in part at least because the datacenter issue is a lot less prominent than here in the states. Also there's arguably more horrible shit on an existential level (factory farming) that isn't nearly regulated enough. And 2 would be ideal to avoid for obvious reasons. My doomer perspective on the third route though is just that it's hard for me to think of examples where people were prescient enough to regulate something before most of its horrible realized consequences are... realized without there already being significant infrastructure in place to do so. For the RF example this was done through the FCC which had already existed for 50 years at that point + had precedent in industry level interference stuff.

anyway this is just me saying i really hope we don't have to have AI 9/11 before things get done.

This is insulting, and completely tone deaf. You don't get to use something people have actual medical struggles with, that require the person to have to fight that crap day in and day out, as a rhetorical tool. You don't understand it, you obviously have never lived it, and you immediately lose the argument by even attempting to pull this emotionally manipulative BS.

The whole rest of your post was ahistorical nonsense too. Tech improvements have never taken "centuries" to increase the conditions of the regular person. They take about 1 to 2 decades to completely settle on average. You're parroting propaganda without any actual understanding of history or what you are attempting to critique, which is why your whole post was emotionally manipulative garbage with no real substance. People, not you particularly, want to talk about being respectful but BS like this doesn't get called out immediately, fuck your respect, if this is the sort of respect you support.

edit for myself so i never do this shit again:
*BAD PINKUSHIN don't say dumb shit again because you are mad, THINK MARK THINK*

What you mean is AGI, which is quite different from what we have now. I wouldn't disagree, but I believe if we ever reach AGI the intelligence can decide for itself wether or not it considers its labor slavery or not. However comparing the current state of models, which are just very good "predictors", to slavery is extremely tone deaf. I would wish you, and everyone else that shares that opinion, would reconsider it. Not for the sake of pro-AI, but because it is extremely tactless.

My stance on the selfish nature stems exclusively from real life experience. Alternatively just look at this thread, how many people here would even reply if upfrags wasn't a feature? The average person drops their values when no one is around to bear witness to practicing them. Just look at some of the people here that lash out emotionally as if a differing opinion on this topic is somehow a personal attack. You telling me they are not inherently selfish?

As for the rest, I don't disagree with you.

No shame in that. I do believe exchange with people that have different opinions can be healthy to the mind, as long as you don't let them get to you emotionally just because their stance differs from yours. Some people in this thread don't have to mental capacity for that, unfortunately.

Please explain in detail how using chatGPT is equivalent to child workers working physically, 12 hours, for chump change, in asia?
This changing society take is not nihilism. Either nothing has changed so far because people hold no power or they do but are fine with their circumstances. I wish things were different as well. But don't pretend we genuinely have any say in what's going on. Ever since epstein it's quite obvious that the demonic goblins at the top realized they can do whatever the fuck they want.

If your takeaway from me questioning this slavery comparison is that I'm trivializing slave labor you genuinely need to get your head checked out. Insanely privileged first world take to put AI exploitation on the same level. No surprise there from people like you tbh

Ran out of energy? From what? You haven't contributed anything so far. Now gay is an insult? Miss me with your performative progressivism. So don't talk about human soul you cretin, how often do you walk past a beggar on the street?

I'm sorry - but that's just genuinely how I feel and my posts have mainly been me venting a bunch of stuff I've been ruminating on in my head for a long while now. I'm not trying to persuade you not to use AI or I'm going to kill myself or something stupid like that (being able to fix demos is actually a genuinely very useful thing). I have just done a lot of thinking about this recently and I think that if I were given the choice between living in a world where AI has made everything substantially worse in the way that I think it will, and just not existing any more, then I would choose the latter. This might be me completely catastrophising (and I really hope it is), but idk the future feels pretty bleak right now man.

I think there's a fair bit of debate as to how long it took the industrial revolution to improve living standards, the later estimates place that improvement in the late 19th century, so yes "a century" would have been better wording. It's hard to quantify because quality of life was pretty awful both before and during the industrial revolution and because that revolution was actually a whole chain of technological shifts, but the immediate effects certainly didn't seem great to live through. I also used deindustrialization as an example of a shift in labour markets where things don't really seem to have improved yet. Either way, I have the feeling it's going to be a rough few decades for a lot of people.

Yeah I don't believe the current state of models make using them anything like slavery because they aren't close to consciousness or sentience. But the stated goal of producing a "perfectly aligned" AGI does raise some alarm bells. Hopefully that's all hype. Honestly your degree of pessimism around the whole thing is pretty similar to mine, you just seem like you want to continue along in this potentially miserable future, whereas I feel like I should at least try as hard as I can to opt out.

You just did the same thing you are accusing zesty of doing. You don't know how they feel, as you only read a short paragraph to describe it, yet you are assuming they are making light of a mental health condition and you are assuming how they feel.

This isn't me telling you off for calling it out, as its a well known bias that It's very hard to feel another person's pain, and very easy to tolerate another's pain, meaning it's an easy mistake to make, especially in an emotionally fuelled post. This is more so a warning to keep it in mind you need to be weary about assumptions about how people feel pain in both a physical and mental condition, especially when you have limited information about it.

I apologize, especially for saying you obviously haven't lived it. I still do not think it was appropriate to bring up in a discussion, but I went too far, I was legitimately angry. I will not be bringing up my history here, you can message me on steam if you really want to know, but vaguely and simply, I've lost too much, but that doesn't excuse me letting my anger cloud my argument. On your claim about the industrial revolution, the average living standards took off in the 1800s, when nations got steam power and more open markets. There were some slowdowns here and there, but over time everyone increased, it really can't be argued we are worse off in material possessions today than we were before. Yes obviously not everyone gets raised at once, nor raised the same amount.

I should specifically apologize for that "ahistorical nonsense" sentence too, it wasn't a good argument, frankly contributed nothing meaningful, and was needlessly mean.

This situation is the main reason I enjoy throwing thoughts into an LLM though, I calm down after writing them, talking through them, and don't go off the rails. Not a reason for anyone else to do it, but it helps me translate my thoughts.

Oh I forgot to let you know one thing about my/our (I don't know if i should use a plural for ownership because its me and Claude or not) tool though, it doesn't really "fix demos." it just plays them, at least all the ones I have come across, although there is a ~2 week period we can never get back because Valve literally destroyed STV demo recording and regular POV demo recording in like 2012, maybe it was 2013, if I remember right, I'd go ask the AI so I know the dates and span for certain, but I don't want to make anyone else mad.

Aware, realized after calming down, which took making the stupid post. I apologized, and I'm going to make sure it doesn't happen again, because it is embarrassing.

Its really fucking offputting when someone posts LLM generated text. The hubris required to believe what you have to say isn't important enough to put into your own words but is somehow important enough for someone else to read is unbelievable. Spaces like forums suffer from this fundamentally unbalanced relationship between "author" and reader in a sorta unique way in that the texts there are by design lower effort and less refined. This means that the knowledge, biases and even mood of the author bleeds through more than it would in something that has had a little more time and editing put into it. That's the whole appeal. Its inherently more social. Even a low effort "Organic" (read: non LLM assisted) shitpost has merit in a niche space like this because it says something about the author and I am guaranteed to have things in common with that author. If nothing else we both sought out "The Home of Competitive Team Fortress 2™". The unintended oddities that a low to medium effort forum post betrays about its author are load bearing. I am not interested in the subtext in LLM generated text because it has none and without subtext 99% of the shit on this and every other social online space is essentially worthless. Anything that appears to be subtext could be some artifact from training data or prompt history or any number of other sources of noise.

People tend to be confused when every response to a post they had ChatGPT write for them is making fun of them or calling it slop or otherwise discussing the merit of AI use in general. But what else would there be to say? The model that wrote the post is probabilistic which makes any content within it unreliable. Any point made isn't useful in crafting a response because the tone is so devoid of any feeling that inferences can't be made about the author's intention. You can't even really make fun of the author for anything other than their use of AI because any idiosyncrasy you could latch onto and run a bit about could just be an artifact from the LLM. So all the discussion below it is about if its AI and whether you think thats based or cringe. The only thing the post really says at all is "THIS IS SOME AI GENERATED TEXT". That's it, that is the only valuable information communicated.

I relate to this deeply enough to double post.

This is starting to become a very ”interesting” overtime episode

Idk, personally I don't find "is X made using Y tools/methods" a very useful frame for determining how I think about X. You see this a lot in software where people will soyface over something because it is written in rust or something. What actually matters is if a tool is useful, the provenance is kind of irrelevant 99% of the time other than as trivia (like yes it is cool that roller coaster tycoon is hand rolled asm, but that doesn't make the game better or worse).

Over the decades, the skill floor of producing software has always decreased. Compiled languages, then garbage collected languages, then high level scripting languages etc, all make writing software much easier and lower barrier to entry. LLMs are another step on this path, decreasing friction even further, allowing more people who have less taste/intelligence/sprezzatura etc create software. Is that net good or bad? Probably good. Does it result in some slop on your feed? Absolutely. But end of the day you probably shouldn't let how some piece of software was created hold too much weight in your thought process.

At the end of the day, there has always been slop. Now there is much more slop, but also quite a few more genuinely interesting and useful projects that wouldn't otherwise exist. I think it's fine to rag on people a bit if what they are making is flat out dumb, but it's wasteful to sneer at something just because someone is using a dev tool that you don't like.

ai is good because it makes my extremely expendable, fake middle class office job easier; anyway, here is a book about how we can definitely recreate a human brain through industrial scale predictive text

my thought on this problem as the namesake of this problem is it kinda takes out the creativity and the spark of life. you can think "man, i wish there was a way to do xyz" and research and do an effective solution and work tirelessly to bring it to life and look back after and be proud of yourself. or u can sit on your ass and scratch ur hairy belly and say "grok can u pls do something to make the masses like me"

It's very dishonest to me to liken LLMs to something like the railroad, steam engine, electricity, etc. as though a software autocomplete machine does anything to elevate the standard of living, despite the fact that the proliferation of software has coincided with a general decline in the quality of life, at least in much of the west. It's obviously not causal but it's certainly true that material energy/industrial/biological problems won't be solved by producing more software faster, since that hasn't been the bottleneck in decades. When it comes to the average person, the roadblocks to a quality software experience have mostly been with discernment and organization rather than generating code per se anyway.

I think the negative responses people have to AI are often really inappropriate (or at the very least disproportionate) and are the result of anxiety with the fact that very serious issues are being dismissed in favor of what is basically a toy outside of the hands of already capable people in industry and academia which make up a relatively small share of the "total addressable market" that the big labs purport to have as the basis for commandeering the entire U.S. economy. The fact that it's a) basically the only thing we have going for us and b) promoted by intensely unlikable people, is bound to ruffle the feathers of people who don't need whatever capabilities it may have and who have to deal with all the friction an increasingly slop-filled internet entails. Considering how much of life is online now for the majority of people, that last part probably isn't as much of a triviality as it sounds to me writing it out. My perception is that there's definitely also an element of resentment that arises from people who have so many tools at their disposal and yet don't really even try to do anything with them.

TF2 and especially TFTV is such a small and dying community that I don't think the costs of having to dismiss or ignore TF2 statistics & News & Pugsite #1723678913 or retarded slop like TF2-in-browser warrant treating interesting projects with hostility. I don't have a use for it but the Demo Salvage doesn't deserve outright hostility, and it makes sense that the author might be prickly in this thread given that was the response to his relatively benign project. On the other hand, AI boosters underestimate the degree to which the value of something (especially in niche communities like this) comes from the person behind it rather than the thing itself. If someone were to manually rewrite TF2 for the browser, it would demonstrate an intense love of the game, dedication large amounts of one's finite personal time, the ability to reconcile complex systems, etc. even if it is completely and utterly useless in and of itself. Telling an LLM to do it means that you can't ascribe that meaning to the author and leaves you with nothing but a completely and utterly useless product. There's often a huge disconnect between the person who asked the LLM to make something broadly useless (to whom it's not useless, it's a great piece of entertainment) and everyone else, who finds it both pointless and meaningless. Projects that aren't useless can still be disheartening because the basis of our socialization is interactions with one another rather than the material outcomes of the interactions themselves, focusing on which would be considered antisocial or sociopathic.

I agree with the sentiment about the feeling of fulfilment and being proud of what you accomplished after solving a difficult challenge. What I am curious about is we all have different standards for what we can consider impressive.
I think we can all agree that simply 1-shotting 'anything' is not impressive. But what some people may be able to achieve by writing code themselves or designing something themselves, can seem unachievable for others who lack the technical skill; but after significant input and many rounds of critical thinking, may still feel like an accomplishment even though they have used "shortcuts" by using AI tooling.

Give an example from my day to day job, in my previous roles we were using analyzing data to create new insights to drive new commercial opportunities for CPG companies (Revenue Growth Management)
Classical cycle:
Data -> Visualization & Dashboarding -> Analysis -> Insights -> Decision

First we would clean the data, build all sorts of dashboarding to visualize it in a meaningful way and then use our own knowledge and our own eyes to spot opportunities. We summarize the insights and finally make a decision what to pursue or what not to pursue.

Now, with agentic AI, we are basically skipping step 2 & 3 and going straight from Data -- -- --> Insights -> Decision
You no longer need to visualize the data yourself and we have a full deterministic layer that performs the analysis on an even better way that humans could do. The insights gets presented to you and the human always stays in control of what decisions you make. Always.

Now back to the sentiment of the last few posts, yes it does bring a bigger level of satisfaction when I clean the data myself, build amazing new dashboarding and perform step A->Z analysis myself before reaching the conclusion.
But the importance of this satisfaction coming from performing these painful steps is now being replaced with much faster and qualitative insights.

One example that pops up to my mind is the calculator, or perhaps the typewriter and then computer?
100's of years ago we did mathematics by hand, then came the calculator, then came the graphical calculator and then personal computers. I am sure there has been a huge shift and rejection throughout history when these shifts took place; because the level of satisfcation decreased a lot. I think we all had it in university as well, solving a difficult math problem on paper (many sheets of paper) and then finally reaching the (correct) answer was fucking good. Then came Wolfram-Alpha and people stopped going through the pain already.
Same for writing; a feather and ink vs type writer vs a computer, and now I literally talk to my computer for hours sometime transcribing shit and having a conversation...

Long story, AI is an instrument that can unlock people who are lacking the technical skills / time investment but who do have the creativity in their head and were simply not finding a way to turn these ideas into something tangible, but now they can.
Should every idea turn into something? Absolutely not, see all the massive amount of slop created...

But outsight rejecting certain work because people have used AI assistance because otherwise they could not have achieved it seems like gatekeeping to me. Be critical: yes, absolutely. Be supportive of each other: also yes

are you sure that's the case?

Please just give us the prompt.

lol Arie...

alright give it to us straight bro, which mega ultra evil consulting firm do u work for