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The Wrong Way
by Kayne Ruse (Ratstail91)
Sometimes, you can be having a great day, then see something that isn’t necessarily “bad”, but is so fundamentally wrong that it leaves you with a kind of indescribable void. Perhaps it’s the same feeling you get when you see an eldritch monstrosity of Lovecraft’s writings, or you see a passerby without a face, or when you find where all those missing socks from the washing machine went.
I need to write this down.
Today was a great day out, I went to the local library to meet up with a friend of mine I haven’t seen in about a month. We (usually) get together each week to chat and work on my game Stepwise: Gates of Yendor. this “jam session” is a big help with keeping me on track, and gives me a kind of momentum that I’m likely to lose if I don’t have someone to answer to.
While I was updating the marketing material, he finished these amazing pen-and-paper illustrations depicting scenes from the game:
These are, I think you’ll agree, pretty friggin’ amazing. I plan on using these when building the promotional images for steam, etc., though that’s not a job for tonight.
I posted these to the discord channel dedicated to Stepwise’s development, since it’s the fastest way to get the files from my phone into the git repository.
When I checked in on the server this evening, one of the regular members (and someone I consider a friend) posted this message as a joke, with the following images attached:
Then the robots invaded and took over all of the artists jobs
This is upsetting. Or disturbing. Or horrifying. I don’t have a word for this, other than “wrong”. Something like this, that comes across almost as a mockery of something that’s very important to me (these illustrations are a gift from a friend!) rendered soulless by imitations of creativity, leaves me with a distinct feeling of the inevitability of AI.
Don’t get me wrong, the discord regular didn’t mean any ill intent, and I don’t have any bad feelings towards them. But seeing these images instills me with some kind of existential dread for the future.
Already, we’re seeing the negative effects of the mass adoption of AI across the internet and the real world - where politicians in US congress can be made to use crass language that have no place in the halls of power, where the faces of the dead are puppeted in courtrooms or for a political agenda, or where works of art that form our cultural heritage has been bastardized and projected across a 360° sphere in the middle of Las Vegas (which is its own kind of gaudy strangeness that I won’t get into here).
Even in the world of programming, something like 30% of programmers have lost their jobs to AI1, while 30% of code is now being written or “vibe coded”, at least according to Microsoft’s recent boasts. And it shows, given the sudden drop in quality across a wide range of products, and a 38% rise in CVEs2 since last year. Anecdotally, I’ve seen so many newbie programmers using GitHub’s Copilot and others as either crutches, or the only option, when building their first programs, and as a result they’re not learning or retaining any skills necessary to actually develop and maintain projects in the long term.
Ten years ago, I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted the sudden boom in AI capabilities, nor the wholesale surrender of control in pursuit of some nebulous concept of… I’m not even sure what.
It’s clear to me that we’ve taken a wrong turn. Even in the worst dystopian futures, nothing quite like this was ever conceived (maybe Wall-E?). Now, as I write this, I’m finally starting to process this feeling. This feeling of inevitability. This feeling of loss. This feeling that, somehow, we’re going the wrong way.
When I’m not running from Shoggoths, I can usually be found on Bluesky or Discord. If you’d like to show your support, I also have a Patreon, and I’d love a Coffee via Ko-fi.
Games & Software
- Stepwise: Gates of Yendor (WIP)
- Toylang (v2, WIP)
- Potion School
- Egg Trainer (former owner)
- Candy Raid: The Factory
- Fiends, Foils & Fallen
- Waterlogged
- Keep It Alive
- Mementos
- MERN-template
- sineQL