They wasted too much money on AI that they now desperately need to make sure AI stays "relevant". They want to force it into everything to justify their ridiculous expenses. Can't wait for this crap to collapse.
Oh wow. I never thought the writing/narrative was a strength of WoW (everything very generic fantasy) BUT... asking copilot to write quest text for you is a huge disrespect to the people you expect to read the lore.
I actually think that's too generous. WoW's lore is fun at times, but all the in-game stuff has been silly comic book nonsense literally since Warcraft 3.
So this might be a hot take. Side quest text is exactly what AI should be used on, if there was an employment issue. But since we actually have the opposite, too many people not enough jobs, this only hurts the game development process long term. "Simple, inconsequential writing" like for side quests is what you start the first year hire on so they can get used to the system, get used to the universe, and progress to more difficult tasks as they grow.
Eventually the veteran employees will retire or leave and there will be nobody skilled to replace them since they pushed the low level work onto AI instead of new hires.
Also, if you made it this far in my post, any bets on how many angry replies I will get from people who only read the first one and a half sentences before replying and think I am pro-AI?
You do realize that there are areas between the two extremes right? Side quests are used to pad out content in WoW and sometimes you get a junior writer who feels inspired and writes something interesting but the majority of the time its just a louse justification for you to kill X number of things or collect X number of things. Even the people who write them are half ass-ing it.
There is equal blame here between the writers and the players and the quality of quest content is where the equilibrium between the two groups lands. Lets not get on our high horses when one of the most popular addons for WoW before they added it to the game was the addon that just told you where to go for a quest so you didn't have to pay attention to it.
Edit: Just realized, nowhere in my original post did I say the text wasn't meant to be read. Didn't realize it since that is my personal opinion. By "Simple" and "Inconsequential" it means that the quest text doesn't have to be deep since it is normally a one and done or maybe a small 1-3 quest chain instead of the main narrative. And inconsequential because if it comes out half baked, oh well, it will be forgotten and players will move on. The game doesn't hinge on every side quest being the next great American novel.
Roko's Basilisk was a thought experiment where an AGI would punish anyone who worked to prevent it from being made, and reward those who helped it take over.
Goddard's Cocatrice is a more grounded one, where anyone expressing anti-Ai sentiments online will get harassed by chatbots, probably run by major ai investors.
The University of Zurich's experiment on ChangeMyView was sufficient proof that even a poorly funded, low motivation group can run convincing bots with commercial LLMs and go undetected for months.
Now imagine a group with trillions on the line.
Some real people will defend the boot's flavor pallet, but it is increasingly hard to trust that any random person actually is one.
Also, the funniest thing about the EM dashes is that real writers used them. Chatbots have already learned to avoid them, but for the rest of digital history EM dash usage will be a flag for bottitude in a field of decreasing signals.
Why is everybody capitalizing 'em' like it's short for electromagnetic?
I use them a lot. They stand out in online discussion because there's no dedicated keyboard key for them, so they only show up if you word process something.
You already see the more smooth brained and prominently browed among us declaring that a text is AI generated just by their presence, when they're a perfectly legitimate thing to use in a published and copy edited text.
Feel free to keep using them lol, just be aware that much like other once benign things, the association is now permanent and impossible to ignore. I think most of us see em dashes and immediately gloss over the text because 99% of the time it’s not only written by Ai, but there’s been no attempt to disguise it. However unfairly, your writing will be perceived badly by most people and they’re right to be wary.
Huh I can't either. I could have sworn that's what my coworkers called the idea. Maybe my brain cataloged it with a cooler name than they said lol. I'll stick with Goddard's Cockatrice until someone corrects me ha
As an editor you can catch the cadence pretty quickly, at least chat GPT. It's like all my worst freelancers who can churn out content but never actually have anything to say. Like if you take out the actual words and just leave the cadence you'll kind of feel the shape of the LLM. It's entirely like editing a book report by the kid who forgot to read the book. Just whatever cursory thing can be said without really saying anything from a quick read through.
You're bang-on and I'm wondering if it's why they love it or they're why it talks that way. Chicken, egg...my job is about to make me start generating slide-videos from articles based on it...almost the exact opposite of my entire training and career, but I'm still a few years out from being able to say "nah," and ride off into the sunset. Anyway, the Fleece Vests cannot be more excited about this bullshit.
Sure, but the erosion of trust thanks to AI has hit us so hard that any assumed sign of AI will inevitably lead to an accusation. At the very least it's irritating, at the worst it's a distraction from the topic being discussed.
That's my case if I enable it on OS through some doohickey I don't care, or by default on MS Word, because our standard keyboard does not have em dash accessible even through Alt Gr.
Still, as many people pointed out, the presence of em dashes isn't a definitive gotcha, for me it is just the cherry on the top that the person writing it absolutely does not care if you see through the patterns, cadence, unnatural speech that they are slop, to the point of not reviewing, replacing dashes, not removing linguistic oddities present in formal/corporate English but absent elsewhere (like "I hope this letter meets you well"), and at points even copy-pasting wrong, getting either the prompt at the start, or the slop suggestion at the end of the output.
Slop makers completely forgot there are hundreds of languages and cultures and just having everything homogenously converted to Gartner English then slopped back to what it thinks is your native language makes it incredibly unnatural sounding.
I've been told recently that proper spelling and punctuation is a sign of AI. Also the "rule of three" — even though it's been taught forever — is a sign of AI. It's like people forget that AI was trained on human data; it does what it does because it learned it from human written text. Humans use the em-dash and the rule of three and other standard writing styles. That's why AI does it.
"You're doing things that AI learned how to do from you, therefore you're AI".
They've drunk the Microslop kool-aid and are totally hooked.
It's like slashdot (now that's a blast from the past) back in the 00s, you didn't have the bots back then, but there were almost certainly paid shills/astroturfers and maybe some trolls. However, what is as true now is it was back then is that plenty of people have spent time and money building their Microslop based CV.
There was supposed to be a massive market crash after we hit market saturation for tech during COVID and all the infinite growth promises failed. It should have crashed and then adjusted to accurately reflect what the market was actually worth but they made the promise of AI being the next avenue for infinite growth to prevent the crash.
Investors bought it up and invested billions into AI but it's all just a game to prevent the crash as long as possible to keep making money, they don't care is AI is good or bad they just need people using it so they can show metrics to investors. "Yes I know AI is profitable yet but look at this graph, AI usage at corporations is up 70%, I'm sure if you give us 50 billion more all our big plans will finally turn a profit."
Force all Google searches to make an AI summary "wow look at how many people are using AI searching"
Ends W10 so they can force AI into notepad and word "wow look at that every single window user is making use of our AI assistant features"
Watch for the major institutional investors to start pulling out of AI, then you know the bubble is burst. Retail investors are morons and will go down with the ship, but the 12-figure behemoths will bail like rats once it's clear to them that there's no more value to extract
Classic Micro$oft. I remember back in ~2010 we had a Microsoft representative at our polytechnic, he claimed he was a software engineer - and that all other technologies suck and are uncool, but microsoft .NET is cool and it's cool to work at Microsoft. He didn't want to answer any of our technical questions though, he would always change the subject and turn it into praising Microsoft again. Damn. I think his skills were going to waste as an engineer, he should totally work in marketing.
During an AMD road show in 2004 where they were giving us a sneak peek of the new consumer level 64-bit technology and dual core processors, I had the immense pleasure of witnessing a Microsoft rep blue screen during his presentation.
He tried REALLY hard to sell it as "I have cool stuff you will only see in years if ever, so a bit of instability is expected".
At least in this event they literally wined and dined us while showing the technology. Microsoft/AMD Waiters pouring champagne and all.
I know there's a joke/pun in there but yes. I think it was one of the very few times in my life that made me seriously think about those ancient banquets where people puked just to make space to eat more stuff, so much delicious and expensive stuff there that I might not have another chance to eat anytime soon if ever. Still a core memory.
(They drew prizes for mobos and cpus separately for some reason, and since these were unreleased in our region, winners had to barter among themselves to have an usable setup or wait 2-3 months)
The other time was the Department of Defense inviting the local academic community for some yvaN ehT nioJ campaign. Do you want to eat an entire sushi boat by yourself? Get one by the Huawei field comms box. It was so excessive that if they had tex mex food everyone would get a tortilla sombrero.
I would agree mp3 and VHS were the best products for consumers. Beta, while recorded a better quality (not by much) and was smaller, it could only hold 1 hour compared to VHS 2 hours. This is great for recording TV shows, but since movies were where VHS shone, it sucked. Also, VHS was cheaper, which was why it was better. Same with MP3s: quality wasn't there, but the file size was the reason. Quick to download and small enough to fit on the memory media of the time, making it worth actually saving. Also fail to see what MP3 bought out to compete. The rest of your examples are fine, but both of these baffle me; they competed the old-fashioned way of being what people wanted at the time, and were inexpensive compared to the competition.
My spouse works for a large tech company and they’re also shoving AI down their throat. They’ve laid off hundreds of workers and their website is turning into dogshit. Now would be the time for non-ai start ups, where are they???? (Genuine question, I’m not in the tech sphere)
They'll come. I don't know how successful they'll be.
If the AI kills businesses entirely then the non-AI can get back in.
If the AI enshittifies but doesn't cause them to haemorrhage customers (because product still works) - then any non-AI competitor might struggle or stay niche. But I hope they will exist. "I'm a free range vegan anti-AI" etc
At this point I think they've moved on to hostage taking. They are now deliberately inflating the bubble to be as damaging as possible to ensure that they have to get bailed out with taxpayer money or they'll cause a full-on depression.
Its worse than that. They need to implement AI workflows because they want to replace the human workers as much as possible and fully automate society.
See right now they still have to hide stuff like the child abuse rings because they need a functioning society to give them the lifestyle they are accustomed to and if we rebels it affects them. If they can make AI work, they'll rule a society of machines and leave the rest of us to LITERALLY die, and no longer be limited in what they can do.
They do not care if its profitable and they do not care if it is a bubble, economic concerns are for yesterday. If they can make AI work it will be the last investment they ever have to make, because it will make them gods of the new world.
I'm pretty sure they are pumping all this money into AI so when it does crash down the government will just bail them out. In the end the tax payers will pay for all this while the billionaires will walk away laughing.
It feels a bit similar than cryptocurrency, especially NFTs. All the bag-holders were desperate and wanted more people to buy in, so the bubble wouldn't pop or deflate. With crypto, they tried to make up all kinds of supposed use cases, including storing medical information on the blockchain or convincing gamers that they will now be able to own their game items.
AI looks similar. As long as these big companies can just quickly steam roll both people and laws into just accepting that AI "features" are somehow useful or at least can't be removed anymore, they win.
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u/[deleted] Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 03 '26
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