On average kind people are just being kind.

And that is great, it is good to be optimistic. My point is being kind has nothing to do with trustworthiness. Hell, someone that is kind can also just be plain wrong. They might think they know something when they do not. The kindness just does not factor in to knowledge. Plenty of experts are not what people would describe as kind, and plenty of misinformation peddlers are kind. It just has nothing to do with expertise

Right? What a strange and dangerous metric

Ah yes, getting angry over someone appealing to fascists is just tribalism. My bad

You mean in 2017 like the article pointed out. And maybe there should have been backlash for it. It was a shitty thing to do then, and an even worse thing to do now

Shit take. There is a difference between seeing something out on the street and choosing not to support a developer because of their shitty behavior

The political implications were the point though. Or do you think he had no idea what he was doing? The “We didn’t know it would be taken as a political statement” BS is just damage control

Because the inverse of that is how people get conned. Someone blowing absolute smoke with a confident tone and a sweet word. Tone is about the worst indicator of trustworthiness

Why do you conflate politeness and trustworthiness? Seems like a weird connection to make.

lol, fair, but I thought it was a smaller part of your post and figured that if it was coming from someone who did not have a dog in the fight it might hammer it home

Pretty much everyone here knows Reddit and Conde Nast are bad for a multitude of reasons, but that does not mean the journalists at Ars are bad at their jobs. They also have nothing to do with any alleged anti-not Conde Nast bias of Reddit mods (I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but the evidence you posted here is a lot of nothing). People can do good work at shitty companies, and a lot of shitty companies don’t have a hand in day to day operations in companies. Hell, in the US, that is becoming the rule and not the exception. Again, I am not saying Conde Nast doesn’t necessarily have a thumb on the scales at Ars, but you have provided no evidence of that.

And once again, even if we take everything you say as true, the fact remains that the journalists at Ars have absolutely nothing to do with Reddit. The heads of Conde Nast might, and for sure read articles from their outlets with a critical eye, but those are two different things.

Finally, bringing your problems with Reddit to a completely different platform is just silly, especially on Lemmy, and especially especially to Beehaw. If you want to have a bitchfest, that is fine. This just isn’t the place to do it.

It is super tough to get more than a ballpark for sure. The 1.4 million players from average daily players over the past year. 30 million is the all time peak, I believe.

As far as how much Epic/Disney is willing to spend, that is another grey area. Do they consider this marketing? Do they consider this a test bed for AI generated actors for shows and movies? The motivation and how much they are willing to spend is even more opaque than the energy use numbers

Sorry, I said “no” because it is clearly not just 6 year olds playing fortnite and interacting with the bots, but did not elaborate at all. Brain fart on my part

If the number of video cards running Fortnite weren’t cause for worry 3 years ago, why would this use of AI be concerning today?

Because it has the potential to be way worse, but it depends heavily on actual energy usage, which we don’t have in this case. What we do have is estimates on ChatGPT, and the estimates are pretty bad

https://web.archive.org/web/20250508224948/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/

We can only speculate, but if 100 words of text takes .14kWh we can assume 100 words of voice production is worse.

And maybe if the novelty does not stick it is not something to be concerned about, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be asking about the energy cost

No, my point is one player on a single video card is going to interact with the bots multiple times to try and get it to say something funny (or racist as real life played out). That takes more than a single interaction

For sure that is true for Vader, bit the point of the article is to roll out several new bots to keep the novelty up

Sure, that is true specifically for Vader, but the whole point of the article is that they are rolling out several new bots to keep the novelty up.

Wat?

Other than the obvious missing numbers, this is also missing scale. Sure, one response likely takes less energy than playing the game, but Fortnite averaged 1.4 million daily players the last year. Granted not all of them are going to interact with the bot, but a whole hell of a lot are going to, and do it multiple times in a row.

1.1 is out on the 10th, so should be even better!

Oh, they are already causing traffic issues in California. Plus the Waymos have been doing a lot of cacophonous honking when they try to park for the evening. Just chaos every where they go

Texas in a couple weeks and California has some trials in San Francisco. Waymo is expanding to other cities, though. They are 100% not ready for live testing, yet here we are