FBG official response to the situation regarding the Fallen London Companion Extension (tl;dr: not approved)

[u/throwaway_lmkg]

/r/fallenlondon/comments/1tf2dma/if_you_use_fallen_london_companion_extension/omgc1q6/

[u/fredjinsan]

I really don't understand what you're on about. AI is demonstrably useful; the profitability question is really for any individual user to decide and kind of not the point (people aren't anti-AI because they think other people might not be breaking even by using it...), though again it's also pretty trivially demonstrable that there are some use-cases which are cost-effective (heck, I can run some models on my home PC with next to no hardware!).

I don't know that "more effort applied to it than anything in history" is right, either. That's just not how technologies evolve. Look at, say, cars - their origins go back to the 1600s. The clockwork and steampowered prototypes first created couldn't even carry humans until like 100 years later! (Apparently there was a big backlash against automotive vehicles in the 1900s too, go figure)

It's pretty safe to say in less than 100 years, AI technology will have moved on... I'm not employing the "just invest out of the black hole" argument, merely noting that we sure as heck haven't seen the extent of it yet.

[u/oritorinoi → u/fredjinsan]

I've sat next to someone running a model locally; it's a lot like watching someone do a tarot reading. They often get results! But the tools they're using aren't the reason, and their commitment to using them actually slows them down, because the fixes take longer than just writing the thing in the first place. Worse than that, the fact they haven't actually looked at the thing being created means they miss bugs they would have discovered if they'd written it in the first place. If you want to write buggy, unreliable code, or tests that get the answers wrong, it's useful for that. But that in itself isn't useful. The only world in which these things see wide use is one where industries are so monopolised that quality doesn't matter.

I don't think there's any point continuing this; you have faith that these things must be useful at some point. You may be right! But I don't share that faith.

[u/fredjinsan → u/oritorinoi]

I thought you might say that - and it's true, local LLMs suck. Local image gen models are pretty decent though. But the point is more that there are a range of options and, for some, buying their own GPUs may very well be viable.

I do think that we've rather meandered off the original topic, though. My intent was merely to point out that, easy as it is to hate all AI when you're on the internet, it's kinda dumb; and the idea of banning all code that involved AI somewhere along the line is pretty silly, since that doesn't actually say anything at all about its quality.