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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8034 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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At this point the AI doubters should be eating a double serving of Crow. And the best thing about it all is how this is the worst AI will ever be.

In other news, OpenAI released GPT Image 2.5 today as well, representing yet another significant advance in AI generated images. I'd feel bad for the human artists etc., except the've been dead for over a year at this point and we might as well have their eventual replacement AI be as good as possible.

except the've been dead for over a year at this point

What does “dead” mean? Lots of artists still employed at video game and animation studios, lots of artists still taking commissions on patreon and the like, etc.

I’m not trying to be snarky here, but as the claims start getting more insistent and extravagant — “AGI is here”, “AGI has actually been here for a while already”, “X profession is dead” — it’s only fair that those claims start being supported with significant real world impact.

What does “dead” mean? Lots of artists still employed at video game and animation studios, lots of artists still taking commissions on patreon and the like, etc.

Re: video games, I think you're probably going to see a mass die-off in the next year or two. I predict with strong confidence that within the next year, Steam will see an order of magnitude increase in the number of games released. I would be very surprised if the current industry business model survives the flood.

Making predictions is always scary, as it should be, but if I'm wrong on this one by all means quote back at me. I'm currently running AI five or six hours a night, trying to make hay while the sun shines; we'll see how it goes.

I predict with strong confidence that within the next year, Steam will see an order of magnitude increase in the number of games released.

This is going to shift the pendulum back towards "trusted" "publishers" and stuff, where there is some sort of quality gate. Most of this flood of games is going to be games that nobody wants to play.

This is going to shift the pendulum back towards "trusted" "publishers" and stuff, where there is some sort of quality gate.

People have been saying that since Unity first came out. It won't. We have user reviews, no one needs """trusted""" publishers.

And more than just user reviews, you have the ability to look at Twitch or Youtube and watch someone play the game and get a feel for whether it's good and matches your interests.

For all the back and forth about games journalism, I think this was the real devastation to the industry: if you're interested in a game it's far better to actually look at gameplay than to see a X/10 score or a writeup of someone else's experience, and the barrier to entry is so low that you can pick and choose people who are actually good at the game and are choosing to play interesting games rather than terrible ones.

Sponsored streams can get a game exposure but the gameplay has to pass the gate of looking enjoyable, and a streamer who spends too much of their time on sponsored bad games will likely lose chunks of their audience (or the audience will just skip the sponsored videos/timeslots)

Gaming journalism also had a problem with fairly consistently giving high scores to games audiences didn't like. You see it occasionally in film with divergence between critic and audience scores (The Last Jedi was well received by critics), but games are longer than movies and sometimes it was clear the reviewers hadn't played much of the game at all.

Or, alternatively, they simply don’t like or play the genre well enough to engage with a game, à la the infamous Cuphead review.

Yeah, probably a few things here:

  1. Gaming journalists are often journalists first and gamers second, meaning they don't really have the same view of the space as their audience does, and might not actually be any good at playing games.
  2. Even if they are, they often don't have the same amount of time to invest into an individual game, because they have deadlines and their publication is unlikely to be sympathetic to "I need to invest 200 hours into Factorio to really get it enough to write a review"
  3. The classic audience/critic divide where critics are often more interested in niche artistic things that don't correspond to whether the work is actually good (or political considerations because they see themselves as tastemakers).
  4. Financial/access/networking considerations putting a thumb on the scale: even if the new CoD is absolutely awful, how many bridges are you going to burn to make that point?

The streamers that replace them have none of these problems: audience-driven financials can do weird things to political streamers but seem to work fine for gaming ones, they can spend as much or as little time as they want on a game, and they're under constant competitive pressure to provide a competent experience and align with their audience. They can be bought, but when they've got a steady stream of content and there's suddenly a sharp divergence in what they're doing, it's pretty easy to tell when they're being bought, and they can't really stop their audience from switching to another creator, either just skipping the bought content or permanently dropping them.

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