This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
To latch on to this with another recent minor CW-related kerfuffle, I've seen some speculate that this segment from the climax of recently-released video game Mixtape (note that the game footage is real and unedited; the only addition is the guy reacting to it on the left side) was based off an AI-generated script. For me, the negative parallelism "this ain't a catastrophe, it's a warning" feels AI, but I worry that it's become such a commonly known AI "tell" that it's just a false positive. But also, the phrase "this will only be the beginnings of my wicked ways" just feels AI-ish to me in a way that I can't put my finger on. Something about how elaborate and almost forced-poetic it feels, particularly given that it's a teenager in a highly emotionally charged moment. But that could just be bad writing.
Season 5 of Stranger Things was also speculated as having been partially written using AI (apparently the making-of documentary included a shot of the writers having ChatGPT as one of their browser tabs, but the speculation started before, AFAICT), with people making compilations like this one, but beyond the negative parallelisms - which could be false positives - I'm not sure how the other parts feel AI. Again, there's a bit of forced-poetic feel in a lot of it, especially given, again, these are mostly teenagers. But also, awful writing of teenagers that seem way too sophisticated or mature has plagued this series since at least season 4, probably at least season 3.
Does anyone better with words than me have any opinions on this?
Part of the reason language models spit out so much cringe is precisely because they’ve been overtrained on Ao3, fanfiction.net etc human written slop. This seems bad but is it worse than cringe games ostensibly written by humans (Borderlands 3)? No.
Exactly. Redditors and their adjacencies have produced a ton of the sample size of 'organic dialogue' that AI is parsing. Therefore AI dialogue is gonna skew in that direction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My first and immediate question upon learning of the whole Mixtape kerfuffle - how does a small indie company get funds to license 20-something actual songs from I imagine what are pretty fucking big labels? My schizo theory (I know even the wiki article now mentions the industry plant accusations but idc, I thought of it first) is that Mixtape is extremely formulaic, soulless corposlop, made with bare minimum of effort and - yes - some AI for dialogues, then intentionally and skillfully dolled up to look like an artsy indie game.
I agree that dialogue - not all of it, but definitely a lot of it - stinks of AI beyond the tryhard teenage edge factor, especially the way they directly title drop songs along with little summaries or related quips, which starts as Rockford's supposedly endearing quirk (because she's a music nerd ofc) but quickly degenerates into whoppers like
Alternatively, in a rather jarring delivery from otherwise (seemingly) the most "normal" and grounded character of the game,
These kind of out-of-place awkward sentences lace more or less the entire game. You either see it or you don't.
Really, the whole game is ripe for Straussian readings once you get your tinfoil hat on:
the cassette bit is memetic at this point - when selling nostalgia, some actual familiarity with the subject helps; in this case the supposed teenage past the vat-grown creators may or may not have had
many Steam reviews point out the blatantly incongruous PC behavior and fashion sense of designer-dressed hipster MCs compared to actual 90s underground enjoyers, though I can't strongly comment on this due to lack of familiarity (but wouldn't be surprised)
the kissing scene feels deliberately weird/off-putting to stir some waters, but just short and
safe hornyinnocuous enough to not really offend anyone very much (I cannot imagine the restraint it took to not make it a F/F kiss)the disjointed episodic flashback narration is naturally suited to LLMs' limited context windows, generating plot/dialogues is simple since no continuity is required
the big expense/premise of the game (lots of "relatable" licensed songs) makes a lot more sense if you consider that recordings of "gameplay" containing licensed songs can be struck off YT or muted on Twitch with impunity, reducing undesirable exposure to opinions of actual players. Why would you watch a muted raw Twitch VOD, silly? The whole point is in the music! Here, maybe the review of this curated influencer (who knows how to play the DMCA game and can skirt copyright) is more up your alley...
Et cetera. I hope I'm looking into it too much but ehhh... I also had a faint hope that I've finally lived until the second coming of gamergate, but judging by >80% reviews on Steam I'm not holding my breath. Journolist won. Consume product, be excited for next products, etc.
Another theory is that after ungodly amount of years of "writers" marinating in the fanfic cesspool of AO3 this is what they consider normal and appropriate.
More options
Context Copy link
I've heard people hypothesize that this was a pet project of Megan Ellison, who is founder/owner of Annpurna, the publisher of Mixtape (developed by a different Australian company). She is also the daughter of Larry Ellison (a hectobillionaire). I did some basic research, and it seems true, according to what I would consider credible sources, that Megan Ellison owns Annapurna, Annapurna did publish Mixtape, and Megan Ellison did inherit a large trust from her hectobillionaire dad.
Megan Ellison turned 40 this year so she's an elder millennial, though I'd guess that her upbringing wasn't what one would consider typical of a California millennial in the 90s. The narrative I've seen hypothesized is that she wanted a power fantasy where she could live out the stereotypical cliche teenage rebellion that she never could due to her immense wealth and privilege, but that's very much speculative.
EDIT:
I'm a musical philistine, so I didn't quite understand why this was a whopper. Having listened to the song on YouTube just now, it does seem rather repetitive and hitting the same sort of "sound" for the entirety of the song compared to something like, say, Bohemian Rhapsody. Is that why you'd consider it a whopper, possibly generated by an LLM that has no actual understanding of the song and was just putting words together that seem fitting?
I would call it a whopper because it sounds like a music blurb written by Patrick Bateman. That's supposed to be dialog from a teenager?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean I think it's just a by-redditors, for-redditors kinda deal where it's also the passion project of somebody with a lot of money behind them and might have had some soft astroturfing/aligned nicely with the kind of stuff that videogame journalists liked. 'We're in the past but the protagonists somehow land on every social value of a medium-woke 2025 Westerner' barely even merits mentioning as a thing any more. It's dumb, it will always be dumb and yet there's never gonna be a great way of extricating it from media. Atleast weird punk kids being a bit more adventurous sexually is less incongruous than Red Dead Redemption 2's 'I may be a murdering 1800s outlaw but I draw a hard line at racism'
It's not like Mixtape is gonna do COD or Madden sales numbers even if it's the Indie darling, and there's no real glory in chasing a VGA the same way there is in an Oscar or whatever.
I don't know if it's really that incongruous. The average outlaw was probably quite racist, but the average outlaw was also unlikeable in tons of ways that don't apply to Arthur Morgan. One thing about stories is that even if you take the world they're set in as real, they're a selection effect of the world they tell.
You don't hear about all the heroes who set off on their quest to slay the dragon, only to get eaten by a troll hiding under the bridge. You don't get the guy who is just farming all his life except for the one day the dragon came to his town and he hid in some hay until it flew away and then went back to farming. You get the hero who has a likeable personality, interesting relationships both in friendships and rivalries, and fights an intense but ultimately winnable battle against the dragon.
There could be tons of really racist and otherwise unlikeable outlaws in the RDR2 world. Their stories aren't being told. Arthur Morgan, the rare (but still possibly existing!) generally caring, decently although gray in complex ways moral, fair treating outlaw cowboy with an interesting life is the one that gets told.
Yeah but this is retarded since having all of those values at roughly the degrees that makes them equivalent to your 2020s medium-Left player makes him a massive outlier from the social norms of his day. Plus completely overlooks the whole 'there are reasons why historical people had the views they had, they didn't just wake up one morning and decide to be dicks by overriding their natural, god-given 2020s medium-left moral instincts'.
You could have an open-minded, fairness-driven Arthur Morgan by the standards of his day who was a 'good guy', but he's still going to have a vocabulary and assumptions that are still going to shock and appall the playerbase.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I just want to latch on to THIS to say that I don't get the deal with Mixtape at all. Did you see that bit with the cassette tape that makes it really obvious that no one at the studio ever handled a cassette tape in real life before? But it licenses songs from the eighties Transformers animated movie and things like that. Who the hell is there that knows The Touch but doesn't know what an audio tape looked like? I'll bet they had an AI shit out a list of nostalgia songs.
I don't think it's implausible that it was made by 'DAE Born in le wrong generation' redditors in their mid-thirties for fellow people of that class. It's pandering and seems to have received a ton more funding than you'd otherwise expect due to some rich connections, but that's hardly atypical in art terms. Even if it's astroturfing there's no huge pot of gold that comes with launching an indie darling videogame.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd get doing AI for like a serious open world game where you need content on a macro scale that's gonna be broadly samey regardless, but surely you'd think simple output of script/dialogue isn't a gating factor in an experience that's pretty linear and self-contained like a TV show with a massive budget or a visual novel like Mixtape.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link