[HN Gopher] Copying Angry Birds with nothing but AI
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Copying Angry Birds with nothing but AI
Author : hackerbeat
Score : 595 points
Date : 2023-10-31 18:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| NKosmatos wrote:
| We're living in interesting times, especially from AI, ML and
| coding point of view. The possibilities seem endless and the
| reach of such tools is going to lead to an "explosion" of
| creativity.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I would suggest that the past is likely a good guide in this
| case. Personal Computers, easier languages, HTML, World Wide
| Web did not really make non-creative people into creative
| people. I can really speak for myself. I can copy some things,
| but I rarely can glue and remix them together in a way that
| make them desirable. Personally, this is the same way I see the
| AI. There is potential here sure, but I do not think 2 million
| angry bird clones is an actual threat to a creative. Now, it
| will hurt low effort crap, but there is so much low effort crap
| out there already..
| hluska wrote:
| I agree with you with one small reservation. This tech is an
| excellent way to get quick prototypes out. Most people will
| never go beyond that so we will see a lot more crap. But for
| the people that do, being able to prototype something quickly
| could result in some noticeably new ideas.
| conductr wrote:
| It is interesting to watch. Especially as an arch in "my life
| with technology", this time around I'm a bystander watching
| what people can do with it and it is impressive. My tinkering
| as not been as fruitful. I feel like my grandparents that never
| caught on to Google-fu but, just like my grandparents, I'm ok
| with it.
| franze wrote:
| After seeing my son rage-tapping a loading spinner I / GPT coded
| this game on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
|
| https://spinner.franzai.com/
|
| Think it could be an interesting UX pattern. Having interactive
| loading (spinner) games that at least give is feedback that our
| actions (even in between things) have impact.
| mhitza wrote:
| It is an interesting approach to loading screens, and
| personally I would have expected way more games to use such a
| feature. Not AAAs, of course, but indie games.
|
| I clearly recalled having read the news about the patent of
| this having expired a while ago, and from a quick search, a
| while ago, has been 8 years ago
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/loading-screen-game-pa...
| dave84 wrote:
| I remember playing Galaga while Tekken loaded on the PS1.
| thatoneguy wrote:
| Willy Beamish for the Sega CD had something similar, too.
| It was a godsend because that game's scenes took forever to
| load...I've only been able to revisit it thanks to flash
| carts that mostly eliminate the loading speed.
| feirlane wrote:
| For what is worth, my partner and I just had a good laugh
| playing this with four hands and pushing it over 25. Really fun
| fidget, thanks for sharing!
| GalaxyNova wrote:
| I got it to level 7
| 4ninesfine wrote:
| Could only get to level 6 on PC. On mobile with 8 fingers
| tapping got to level 37 pretty easily.
| kuroguro wrote:
| got to 9 with two finger left clicks
| m_kos wrote:
| Finger tapping test:
| https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-37068-023
| leshokunin wrote:
| Fun fact: there's a patent on loading mini games that has
| prevented such developments. I think it's owned by Namco, you
| can see it in Ridge Racer
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Reminds me of watching the Saibamen grow while spamming the
| analog sticks on the loading screen in Budokai 3 (PS2).
| danielvaughn wrote:
| This is more interesting than the deluge of posts that say "I
| created an iOS app in 30 minutes using ChatGPT!" Which doesn't
| mean much because it could've done nothing more than create a
| simple hello world.
|
| This one at least shows the finished product, which is indeed
| pretty impressive.
|
| Some details I'd need to know are (a) how long did it take, (b)
| how many prompts, (c) how many course-corrections were required,
| and (d) how competent this individual was with the technologies
| in question.
|
| I've personally found ChatGPT extremely empowering in lots of
| scenarios, but code generation was not among them.
| cryptoz wrote:
| I've been playing with ChatGPT code generation to make entire
| sites with flask, python, html+js+css, backed with SQLite db
| and it's amazing. I've had it write like 5k lines that are all
| live in prod and working (not much traffic lol but still).
|
| A huge huge factor is knowing the limitations and getting
| better at prompting. And identifying likely hallucinations and
| asking for risks etc.
|
| I've found it best with tech I don't know well (I'm an android
| dev using it to make websites, something I haven't done myself
| in like 15 years).
|
| Most of the coolest stuff for me is help with sysadmin and
| running the server. The ability to debug gunicorn errors is
| great.
|
| I do have to modify the code it outputs as the project grows
| and it loses context, but honestly the context limits are the
| biggest hurdle for bigger projects and those will be lifted
| soon.
|
| Edit: Most recent site I made with like 95% code from ChatGPT
| is https://cosmictrip.space/ which generates prompts with GPT-4
| that are then used to generate space images with DALL-E.
|
| It's a simple site but there is a secret adventure game I'm
| working on (GPT+Dall-E) that is open-ended image+text AI-driven
| game. I'm hoping to launch before Nov 6 with DALL-E 3 API
| (hopefully...!). The adventure game is also written like 95%+
| by ChatGPT.
|
| I've had such great success with it coding that I'm using the
| GPT-4 API with an agent I'm making (everyone is huh). I have
| function calling hooked up to generate structured subtasks that
| the agent can then write the code for, and support for files to
| include context, chat with your code, etc. It's not ready to
| show but the GPT-4 code generation abilities are really
| incredible - but you have to be experienced at prompting. Your
| first prompts aren't likely to be great, which is why I'm
| hoping my agent can have success. The idea of the agent I'm
| writing is a Jira/kanban style board where you have AI coders
| assigned to tasks that you can approve and modify etc. The
| tickets should automatically move across the columns as the AI
| checks the work etc.
| maxwelljoslyn wrote:
| +1 for its suitability in helping with systems
| administration.
|
| One responsibility at my current job is administering a
| Windows server and trying to get it to do things that are
| easy on a Unix -- that should be easy anywhere -- but, on
| Windows, seem to inevitably degrade into nightmares. ChadGPT
| has given me huge amounts of blessed ammo to shoot at the
| nightmares, and there's no way I could do that portion of the
| job in a feasible time frame without it.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| ChadGPT ?
| visarga wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR2JJPxRRWvxy6naePMpsAQ
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I feel that trapping your AI agents in a kanban board isn't
| going to do your survival chances a lot of good when the
| robot apocalypse inevitably comes for us meatbags.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Parents know what's better for they kids, they will
| understand
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Is it at all possible for you (or someone reading who has
| done something similar) to share their chat?
|
| Reading good prompting is probably one of the better ways of
| learning how to do it.
| cryptoz wrote:
| That is a great point and I will definitely share my
| prompting experience and some real prompts in a blog post
| this week. I'll come back here and link to it when ready.
| croes wrote:
| How much of these 95% is boilerplate code?
| cryptoz wrote:
| Some for sure but all the algorithms (simple ones) and such
| is also done successfully by ChatGPT.
| vunderba wrote:
| _adventure game I 'm working on (GPT+Dall-E) that is open-
| ended image+text AI-driven game. I'm hoping to launch before
| Nov 6 with DALL-E 3 API._
|
| Some people have hooked AI dungeon / koboldAI up to stable
| diffusion to generate these kinds of procedural Ender's game
| style interactive graphical text adventures with varying
| degrees of success.
|
| If your game is going to be similar, you'd better get in the
| habit of aggressively caching the generated imagery for it on
| S3 because no way the DALL-E 3 API is going to be cheap.
| vunderba wrote:
| There was a Show HN a few months ago with something similar
| where a GPT agent would open up PRs with corresponding code
| against your GitHub repo.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| You are right about the context window limitation. I
| exclusively use Azure OpenAI GPT-4 32k version and it's been
| a game changer when coding on complex projects.
| strombofulous wrote:
| https://twitter.com/javilopen/status/1719363669685916095 is
| relevant
|
| > Although the game is just 600 lines of which I haven't
| written ANY, [coding the game] was the most challenging part
|
| Not quite hello world, but not too much more difficult than a
| shopping list. The really impressive thing to me is you can
| make angry birds with just 600 loc (and a couple libraries)
| samspenc wrote:
| My guess is that the main parts of the game are physics
| (collisions etc) and the scoring system, so that part wasn't
| too surprising to me.
|
| I was pleasantly surprised at the visual quality, I knew
| Midjourney could produce quality graphics assets, but I guess
| I didn't realize how easy it was to pull into a game.
| gowld wrote:
| 2D sprite Graphics are just files. Game engines are able to
| load files.
| croes wrote:
| There are lots of open source Angry bird clones, so it's not
| quite as impressive as it seems.
|
| Programming a new game without dozens of existing templates
| would be a better litmus test.
| fauria wrote:
| Sumplete would be a good example: https://sumplete.com/
| realharo wrote:
| That's not an entirely new game (though the other versions
| of it are pretty obscure), but super interesting
| https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/sumplete-chatgpt-ai-
| gam...
| realharo wrote:
| Not only are there tons of Angry Birds clones (Angry Birds
| itself is kind of a clone of earlier games), there are also
| tons of step-by-step tutorials for making them, which were no
| doubt included in the training data.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| Honestly, it's kind of difficult to believe.
|
| GPT4 is great at this stuff, but iterative refinement doesn't
| work in my experience.
|
| As the conversation increases, the previous context is lost and
| the generated code deviates from its previous behaviour.
|
| For example, "fix this bug..." can easily result in a solution
| that breaks some other thing. You can also see code generated
| in thread (1) that does exist in the final result (2),
| suggesting that (since this is the very top of the code), they
| were getting chatGPT to iteratively generate 600+ line
| segments.
|
| I severely doubt this.
|
| Creating a new Slingshot on line 20 after it is defined on line
| 500? That is _extraordinarily_ unlikely unless you specifically
| prompted it to do that.
|
| "loadImage('stone2.png');", it just happened to pick the right
| file names? The right sprite sizes? You provided all that in a
| prompt and _it_ wrote the code? Come onnnn... show us the
| actual prompt you used.
|
| It seems much more likely they generated a set of class objects
| relatively independently, then manually assembled them into a
| larger file, copied the entire thing as input and then crafted
| a "code prompt" like "write a function that does such and
| such".
|
| It's not impossible they used prompts like they claim (3), but
| I feel they are (for likes and cred) vastly overstating the "it
| did all the coding" part of this project.
|
| I feel they probably hand wrote some of the code (or assembled
| it) and used it as input + a "now do this also" style prompt,
| so the output was "100% generated", but not in the way people
| are assuming.
|
| This approach tends to make GPT4 rewrite the existing code, but
| unless you specifically ask for (or add) comments describing
| the intent through out the code (missing in most of the
| generated code), it will drift from the previous functionality.
| With no test suite to verify, you won't notice this subtle
| drift and things just break. There's no mention of either of
| these things being done by the author.
|
| Further more, this user has a vested interest (4) in selling
| training materials for AI, so it's in their interest to appear
| to be an expert at this, and has provided (even when asked on
| X) no additional details, no "step by step" git repo with
| history, no _actual prompts_ they've used.
|
| Given the lack of details and the frankly unbelievable results,
| I think there's fair call to be sceptical in this case.
|
| You could generate this kind of thing from models such as
| codellama 34B, or GPT 3.5; but not using the method as
| described.
|
| I'm... not convinced you could do it with gpt4. The prompts
| seem too stupid to be real (5)... but I happy to be proved
| wrong with more details. GPT4 is good.
|
| [1] - https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF9xoI8mXgAAn7v9.jpg
| [2] - https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/sketch.js [3] -
| https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363669685916095#m [4] -
| https://javilopen.substack.com/ [5] - "Now, make the monsters
| circular, and be very careful: apply the same technique that
| already exists for the rectangular ones regarding scaling and
| collision area, and don't mess it up like before. "
| inciampati wrote:
| Context is 8k and it's quadratic. It "sees" everything in
| that window. If you want to have a long conversation try
| Claude or some of the 32k models. Claude uses a strange kind
| of attention that isn't always as precise but it's very good
| at finding key information in huge documents.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| Key information is not relevant for generating code.
|
| You have to generate specific api calls with specific
| semantics not "high level summary" and "key information" .
|
| You have to generate token sequences that are functionally
| equivalent to an exact segment of the input prompt.
|
| A lower precision is _less useful_ for code generation.
|
| How do you maintain existing code functionality when you
| give code + "refactor for x" as an input?
|
| I'm skeptical you've tried this and know what you're
| talking about.
| inciampati wrote:
| You are welcome to be skeptical and I will happily
| continue to use these tools for drafting code and writing
| every day. I usually provide documentation for the
| systems I want to use on input. Then I include source
| code of anything I'm hacking on. If none exists I build
| it up using "let's do this step by step" where the first
| step is outlining or architecture and subsequent steps
| fill out components. The same pattern works for long form
| prose. Having 100k tokens is almost enough. It means the
| model can attend to a ton of relevant information.
|
| Also, this works well when the system gives you patches.
| I wouldn't say "rewrite this entire thing to make this
| one change" because if it's anything non trivial it will
| shift. Again I see the same patterns for code and text.
| Ask for small changes, contained updates. Guide the model
| to work in small increments, using abstraction to deal
| with high level broad topics.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| Seriously?
|
| You wouldn't use it refactor because the implementation
| will drift, but you'd use it to generate a patch to apply
| to the code?
|
| Hm.
|
| Well, I don't think that style is relevant or practical
| for large scale code generation as shown even in this
| ~600 line example.
|
| ...but, I'd love to see the details of how it could done,
| end to end, by someone who has done something like that
| successfully and is willing to prove it by sharing the
| prompts and outputs.
| inciampati wrote:
| It's very hard to ask one of these systems to copy an
| entire piece of text and then change one or two things in
| it. They will often make small errors. So it's easier to
| ask for patches and apply them manually to edit the code
| or text that's being worked on. Happy to talk more how do
| I find you?
| gowld wrote:
| It is extremely suspicious that every time someone gets an
| impressive "no-code" result from GPT like this, they never
| show the actual conversation.
| simonw wrote:
| In case you're interested, I shared the conversations I had
| when I used ChatGPT to build a small custom JavaScript tool
| here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-
| presentations...
| low_tech_love wrote:
| One other interesting question is "how does it work in all the
| other cases not shown in the video?"
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| So AI made a cheap copy of something people made...Can it do
| anything else?
| solardev wrote:
| It's apparently pretty good at annoying people on HN who like
| to downplay its every achievement
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > It's apparently pretty good at annoying people on HN who
| like to downplay its every achievement
|
| It's not really "its" achievement. There are many open source
| repositories of Flappy Bird that it was trained on and there
| are many brilliant engineers at Google and OpenAI who have
| worked on LLM technology. It is their achievement if
| anything. It is a product. A product of others' achievement.
| You don't say Excel had an achievement when it calculates a
| good formula for you? Do you say a neural network that
| produces great speech to text had an achievement? Or do say
| the people who developed it did.
| og_kalu wrote:
| >Do you say a neural network that produces great speech to
| text had an achievement? Or do say the people who developed
| it did.
|
| Sure Why not? The engineers at google and open ai or
| wherever else trained the models but they didn't teach it
| how to do anything it does because they don't know how to
| teach it to do anything it does. So yeah the achievement is
| on the neural network.
|
| Many people gave the likes of alpha go achievement on super
| human Go play.
| throw555chip wrote:
| > So yeah the achievement is on the neural network.
|
| It is? OK, tell them to completely clear the model of any
| angry bird original and clone code, data and assets that
| it scarfed from the Internet.
|
| It can retain scarfed definitions of angry and bird as
| well as scarfed information on making a 2D video game.
|
| Then tell the model to create the game and see what if
| anything it comes up with.
| simonw wrote:
| In terms of the code, I don't think it would be hard to
| create an Angry Bird clone of this quality using a GPT-4
| scale model that had somehow had all knowledge of Angry
| Birds excluded from it.
|
| Most of the Angry Birds mechanics in this demo come from
| the underlying Matter 2D library. Relevant demo here:
| https://brm.io/matter-js/demo/#slingshot
|
| Honestly, that's most of the code part accounted for.
|
| The bigger question is the graphical assets. The
| developer shared their prompts for those here:
| https://twitter.com/javilopen/status/1719363587351740711
|
| Some of them make no mention of Angry Birds - "Wooden
| box. Large skeleton bone. Item assets sprites. White
| background. In-game sprites" - but others do: "Item
| assets sprites. Wooden planks. White background. In-game
| sprites. Similar to Angry Birds style"
|
| My hunch is that a skilled image prompter could still get
| to results that were right for this particular demo even
| with a model that had not seen Angry Birds assets before.
| ben_w wrote:
| We have exactly the same argument on a regular basis about
| whether or not we should say Musk is responsible for the
| success of Tesla; likewise with attributing the
| achievements of the USA[0] (or even just the government of
| the USA[0]) to the specific president of the time rather
| than to the nation as a whole.
|
| And before Musk was born, similar debates about describing
| Armstrong as the first man on the moon, given how even
| saying that inherently brushes aside the contributions of
| all those who worked on the mission without going to space.
|
| [0] In the UK it seems to be half on the Prime Minister and
| half the party of the age; I don't pay enough attention to
| the local opinion of politics elsewhere, though I will say
| the British press seems to blame everything Germany does on
| the German Chancellor personally...
| tw061023 wrote:
| Which, precisely, achievement?
|
| Show all prompts step-by-step and let people reproduce.
|
| Someone claims they did X using a couple of AI instruments,
| without sharing anything to prove the claim, and everyone is
| excited. I understand that the industry needs a new hype to
| keep going, but this is just pathetic.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >Show all prompts step-by-step and let people reproduce.
|
| Read beyond the first tweet.
| tw061023 wrote:
| I see six tweets in the thread, how many do you see?
|
| If you also see six tweets, please reproduce the result
| following instructions in the tweets and share the
| recording of you doing so.
|
| Graphics don't matter, let sprites be colored rectangles.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >Graphics don't matter, let sprites be colored
| rectangles.
|
| Why? Are the sprites and backgrounds too easy to recreate
| with MJ and Dall-e after you realized that the author
| actually provided the prompts for them?
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Come on... I'm fairly cynical when it comes to AI but someone
| building a pretty complete game from scratch entirely using AI
| to generate the code and assets is a little beyond it 'making a
| cheap copy of something else'.
| raytopia wrote:
| I mean while impressive all the art assets were very clearly
| knockoffs of Angry Bird's art.
| bluescrn wrote:
| If you fed a competent human massive quantities of human-
| created code and artwork, they could fairly quickly mash it
| up and produce a clone of a simple game, too.
|
| Have we created real AI, or merely 'AP' - Auto-Plagiarism?
| breakfastduck wrote:
| I doubt it
| tw061023 wrote:
| Except it didn't.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Prob needed to a ton of glue code to have it at quality
| mhitza wrote:
| How do I read the Twitter thread if I don't have an account?
| papercrane wrote:
| You should be able to replace twitter.com with nitter.net
|
| https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363262179938401
| vuln wrote:
| The same way you deal with pay walled news articles. Sign up,
| check archives/cache, or move on.
| smhg wrote:
| I don't have one either but I could read it on Mastodon. If it
| helps someone:
|
| https://fosstodon.org/@javilopen@bird.makeup/111332485943091...
| efitz wrote:
| This was amazing work. I consistently underestimate what
| generative AI can do.
|
| Also: I think you just scared the daylights out of a lot of
| mobile game developers and inspired many more.
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| Mobile games are a mix of half-arsed Steam game ports, polished
| ad-budget-driven exploitation machines and trash. I think the
| trash producers will be excited, not scared. The other two
| kinds won't care.
| xwdv wrote:
| Everyone will think this impressive, but they're not game
| developers.
|
| You could literally make all this in probably 24 hours and not
| spend any time mucking around with prompts.
|
| Like what are we even seeing here? Basically a tech demo of a
| physics engine, a little UI interaction for throwing a collidable
| entity into other entities, and some code for setting up a level?
|
| Show me the maintenance, adding new features, bug fixing, cross
| platform compatibility, shaders, networking code, sound, etc.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| And, most importantly, marketing.
| dan-g wrote:
| You could argue then that this reduces the barrier to entry for
| people to become game developers.
|
| Isn't everything you just listed (physics engine, UI, collide
| entities) how you make a simple game? It doesn't matter that it
| doesn't have networking code, shaders, or sound. Those things
| can be added later.
|
| I don't think it's productive to gatekeep who is and isn't a
| game developer. They developed a game, that makes them a game
| developer--it doesn't matter how they got there.
| raytopia wrote:
| I'm not sure how this reduces the barrier to game
| developement. There are already lots of free assets and game
| engines designed for making arcade games that are a lot
| easier then say Unity or Unreal. Like
| https://arcade.makecode.com/ or https://microstudio.dev/ or
| https://scratch.mit.edu/. And if you don't want to make
| arcade games there are other tools like RPG Maker, RenPy,
| GDevelop, and many more each of which are much easier to use
| then this AI pipeline (not to say it isn't impressive you can
| do this with AI though) and will lead to better outcomes of
| actually understanding game development.
| gowld wrote:
| All of those things require me to write code, in an
| annoying, slow, hard to debug click-drag format. I'd rather
| the AI write the code for me based on my natural language
| description of what I want.
| dan-g wrote:
| My point is there isn't a "correct" way to become a game
| developer-- by your own response you showed that there are
| frameworks you can use, WYSIWYG editors, you can code a
| framework from scratch in a high- or low-level language, or
| you can work with an AI to make something that works.
|
| This person successfully developed a game. Just because it
| isn't how others would have done it doesn't minimize the
| result.
| xwdv wrote:
| I think some gatekeeping is warranted. If I stitch a wound it
| doesn't suddenly mean I'm a doctor.
|
| Similarly, using AI to develop a game makes you as much of a
| game developer as someone who hires someone to make a game
| for them. And some development studios are basically that,
| people hiring developers to make games. But AI can't compete
| well with that.
|
| It's like coming up with a new fusion power plant, but it
| takes more energy to run than what it produces. Inspiring,
| but useless.
| gowld wrote:
| Angry Pumpkins did not exist. Now it does. In time for
| Halloween. You can't refute that.
|
| Using a computer to write a letter makes you as much of a
| writer as someone how hites someone to write a letter for
| you. And some writers are basically that, hiring scribes to
| write for them. Computer can't compete well with that.
|
| Except it does.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Did I miss the link to download the app or something?
| Where does it exist?
| GaggiX wrote:
| https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html (it's
| in the second tweet)
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Oh, I don't have a twitter account so only see the linked
| tweet
| GaggiX wrote:
| I used the nitter link someone linked in the HN comment
| section.
| dan-g wrote:
| Yeah, being a doctor is a certifiable profession-- there
| are tests, governing bodies, standardized curriculum-- are
| you saying the same exists for "game developer", a role
| which could mean a hobbyist, indie developer, or someone
| working at a huge studio?
|
| This really sounds like "real programmers write in
| assembly" to me. An AI is a tool, not dissimilar from a
| higher level language. This person used a tool to create
| something that didn't exist before. The result is right
| there.
| pphysch wrote:
| Yeah the killer feature here is being able to _generate_
| premium-looking game assets without any art team or funding.
| That 's always been the tough part of creating even simple
| games for solo programmers. The rest is whatever.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| >ou could literally make all this in probably 24 hours and not
| spend any time mucking around with prompts.
|
| I couldn't make that art in 24 days.
|
| The big thing about the state of current AI isn't that it does
| a bunch of things, it's that it drastically increases the
| number of people who can do things.
|
| That is, I could not make this game in a day before AI. With
| it, maybe I could. I am far from unique.
| gowld wrote:
| And it drastically increases the number of things a person
| can do.
| rchaud wrote:
| > it's that it drastically increases the number of people who
| can do things.
|
| Giving the whole world blogspot.com 20 years ago didn't
| measurably improve the internet, it just added a few more
| winners and a gigantic increase in low-quality spam
| pollution.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| If you're saying blogspot is in the same ball park as
| generative AI I just don't know how we can continue.
| rchaud wrote:
| Bloggers have broken news well in advance of large news
| outlets, partially because of the ability to publish
| online rapidly, without knowing HTML or administering a
| web server.
|
| But it's mostly been used to pollute the internet with
| useless spam. With generative AI, the same thing will
| happen. The very example shown here is an Angry Birds
| clone, patient zero of the pay-to-win hellscape of mobile
| games. I don't think it's an accident that they had AI in
| their hands and decided to build _that_.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| You don't need to know HTML to send a tweet either. I
| would wager more news has broken there.
|
| > With generative AI, the same thing will happen
|
| I'm not sure what your point is. Of course it will. When
| powerful tools are available and perverse incentives
| exist, humans will follow them.
| phkahler wrote:
| But have you seen most programmer art? This has really nice
| graphics too.
| xwdv wrote:
| Some people are really good at art, some aren't.
|
| Regardless, I can pull down some off the shelf assets from an
| asset store and make a game with them.
| gowld wrote:
| Where are the off-the-shelf Halloween-theme Angry Birds-
| style sprites?
|
| Where are the ones that look different from the ones 50
| other game makers used?
|
| I don't know, and now I don't need to care.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I doubt the asset store has a pumpkin in the style of Angry
| Birds that looks like Red, it doesn't seem a good
| alternative if he wanted to create this game.
| torginus wrote:
| Which imo summarizes what GPT4 is great at - bootstrapping devs
| who have a general idea of what they want, but are not familiar
| with the exact specifics of the technology, or need to freshen
| up their knowledge.
|
| I've learned Kubernetes and Powershell this exact way.
| gowld wrote:
| Does 24 hours include learning how to use a game engine that
| you've never used before? When you've never used ANY game
| enginer before?
|
| Maintenance and new features are more of the same already done.
| Networking code is a library. Sound is a library. Cross-
| platform is a library. Shaders are a library. AI fixed bugs.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Agree. No menus or anything
| furyofantares wrote:
| > Everyone will think this impressive, but they're not game
| developers.
|
| I'm a game developer. It's impressive.
|
| I'm extremely aware of how short a game jam demo is compared to
| an actual product. There's an ocean between the two.
|
| That doesn't diminish how much easier and more approachable it
| suddenly is for someone with little experience to make a game
| jam demo, and with kinda-passing art.
| LastTrain wrote:
| This is interesting, but, the "nothing but AI" part is clearly
| not true and so I'm not exactly sure what was done here.
| Kiro wrote:
| What do you mean?
| carnitine wrote:
| You're saying that based on what? All the code and assets are
| AI.
| LastTrain wrote:
| The music?
| omarfarooq wrote:
| There's AI for that too, now.
| LastTrain wrote:
| But it wasn't used to generate the music in this "game"
| that isn't a game. This was my point - that it is unclear
| exactly what AI did and did not do in this case. Like,
| I'm 100% sure my mom could not have done this, so, not
| "all" AI like the title says.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _" game" that isn't a game._
|
| Why is it not a game? I even played it a bit -- was I
| hallucinating?
| simonw wrote:
| The Angry Pumpkins game doesn't have sound effects or
| music - you can play it here:
| https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html
|
| The Twitter thread shows exactly what the AI made. It was
| used for the JavaScript code and the image assets.
|
| If you don't have a Twitter account you can see the full
| content on Nitter
| https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363262179938401
| or in my Gist copy: https://gist.github.com/simonw/f7ed52
| daaa66f849858d17e0d6c1c...
| somsak2 wrote:
| What music? There is none.
| jpallen wrote:
| This is very cool! It's not as impressive, but here is a video of
| me writing Game of Life only by speaking out loud to VS Code:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NSplhZ0DlY
|
| I did that by building an open source VS Code extension to
| interact with GPT3.5/4 directly from your editor:
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Biggles.....
| It cuts out copy/pasting between ChatGPT and your editor, or
| writing any boiler plate code since you can just ask it to insert
| the code you want, or change the code you have highlighted. You
| can also talk to it directly using the Whisper API!
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| I did a similar exercise recently when I needed to make a fairly
| basic rest API and CRUD frontend using 2 frameworks I wasn't
| particularly familiar with. I used GPT4 to generate ALL the code
| for it. I'll write a blog post about it soon, but a quick
| overview was:
|
| I suspect it was slower than just writing the code/referencing
| the docs, and would be much slower than someone could do if they
| were experienced with the two frameworks. I had to be very
| specific and write a few long and detailed prompts for the more
| complex parts of a the application. It took around 5 hours to
| make the application, with a lot of that time spent sitting
| waiting for the (sometimes painfully slow) ChatGPT output. In a
| framework I'm more familiar with I think I could have easily got
| it done in under 2 hours
|
| It was definitely useful for making sure I was doing it the
| correct way, kind of like have an expert on call for any
| questions. It was also very useful for generating perfectly
| formatted boilerplate code (some frameworks have CRUD generation
| built in, but this one did not).
|
| It was a fun experiment, and I found it useful as a
| learning/guiding/generation tool, but I won't be using it for
| general day to day development any more than I currently do. For
| most instances it's quicker to just learn the framework well and
| write the code yourself.
| jsight wrote:
| > It was definitely useful for making sure I was doing it the
| correct way, kind of like have an expert on call for any
| questions.
|
| I've found it to be shockingly good at this. I end up asking a
| lot of questions like, "what is the best directory structure
| for a project on {foo} platform?" or "What is the idiomatic way
| to do {x} in {language y}?" It has the advantage of having seen
| lots of projects in every language, and for some questions that
| automatically leads to a good answer.
| Spivak wrote:
| I use Sourcegraph a lot for this when GPT can't get a
| satisfying answer.
| dartos wrote:
| I always get the classic "It really depends on your use case
| and neither pattern is exactly better than the other" when
| asking gpt about programming patterns
| sprobertson wrote:
| Put something in your system prompt along the lines of
| "don't waffle"
| bfuller wrote:
| it has such a completionist fetish, I have found it works
| much better when you basically tell it to pick a side and
| not go out of its way to be balanced.
| Kiro wrote:
| Even when it says that it always continues with "but" and
| gives me an answer.
| acedTrex wrote:
| this is how exactly how i use gpt4, i find it very useful
| two_in_one wrote:
| Be careful and don't trust all it says. Sometimes it invents
| API functions which are not there, or doesn't see existing.
| And always very confident till you point it.
| 1f60c wrote:
| And then it's like, "thank you for telling me about this,
| I'll remember that for next time," which is _how a human
| ought to respond_ but not how ChatGPT _actually learns_.
| simonw wrote:
| Hah, yeah that's so frustrating. It's memory is reset
| every time you start a new conversation, but it doesn't
| make that at all clear to people.
| gverrilla wrote:
| It also resets inside a single conversation if you go
| beyond a certain number of tokens, and as far as I know
| there is no warning whatsoever to the user when it
| happens.
| taneq wrote:
| The obvious next thing to try would be to continuously
| fine tune the model on these conversations, so it
| actually fulfills the promises most of these models make
| about "learning continuously". I haven't yet seen any
| actual implementations of this, though. I'm sure
| someone's tried it, I wonder how it went.
| simonw wrote:
| Which models make promises about "learning continuously"?
| simonw wrote:
| I'm finding that code is the area where hallucinations
| matter the least... because if it hallucinates an API
| function that doesn't exist, the mistake becomes apparent
| the moment you actually try to run it.
|
| It's like having an automated fact checker! I wish I had
| the same thing for the other kinds of output it produces.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| It will, however from time to time insert lines and
| variables that do nothing, but could result in bugs or
| confusion if not removed. I've encountered these
| hallucinations a few times. Overall, I agree with your
| sentiment, but I think it's important to note that
| running isn't always the indicator or correctness we
| think it to be.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| You're still supposed to read it, like you hopefully
| wouldn't blindly paste a big code block from SO. A
| useless/unused line or variable doesn't seem that hard to
| spot?
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Of course, but ease of detection can vary relative to the
| complexity of the code being returned. GPT-4, correctly
| prompted, can produce some pretty complicated stuff. But
| it also hallucinates in ways that are more subtle than
| one might think. The example I'm thinking of, it created
| an unused variable in a set of fairly complex ML training
| set up scripts that I mostly caught because I was
| familiar with all the proper inputs. But the unused
| variable was quite plausible if you were not familiar,
| new to the domain etc.
| gowld wrote:
| Compilers automatically detect unused variables. Unused
| variables are the last of your problems. You should be
| far, far more worried about all the _misused_ variables.
| JCharante wrote:
| Don't IDEs highlight variables that aren't read/written
| to?
| lobsterthief wrote:
| In this case "unused" might mean declaring or
| initializing a variable and then assigning or reassigning
| a value to it later. In this case, it is technically
| used, so most linters won't pick that up. But it actually
| does nothing so it's wasted cycles.
| gowld wrote:
| No decent compiler would waste a cycle on that.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I've noticed some other funny things, maybe harmless but
| undesirable.
|
| One example was really really hard to spot. Once I
| queried GPT 3.5 for a function to do X, and it did pretty
| well, when I looked closer though, it had wrapped 90% of
| the code in an unnecessary if statement. I looked at the
| code an thought something was off until I realized.
|
| My point here is, if that was easy to spot, who knows
| what else people are missing because even in a simple
| case, unless you're actually trying to spot issues, you
| likely won't see them.
| two_in_one wrote:
| If it imagines a function it's fine. You can fix it in
| one prompt. But when it doesn't see it may move in the
| wrong way and produce limited solution. And you wouldn't
| know.
| vasco wrote:
| You would know in a similar way to a colleague of yours
| having done this code the previous day, or you joining a
| company with legacy code. It either has tests or you
| can't really trust it anyway regardless. You can ask the
| AI to also write tests for you, inspecting tests is
| usually much faster than understanding all the nuances of
| the code.
| zamfi wrote:
| > because if it hallucinates an API function that doesn't
| exist
|
| Yes, absolutely agree.
|
| And also I'm no fanboy but when it does this and I only
| notice because the code doesn't run, half the time I'm
| thinking to myself that the API function really _should_
| exist because it's so logical!
| smsm42 wrote:
| I see it all the time. Even more annoying is when the API
| exists, but in a different class or with different
| parameters and outputs than you need, and the model would
| claim it does exactly what you need right until the time
| you try to use it and discover it can't work in your case.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Often I find that the hallucinations is how the API or lib
| should have been if it was more sane. Maybe someone could
| turn this into a virtual API critique.
| COAGULOPATH wrote:
| >I had to be very specific and write a few long and detailed
| prompts for the more complex parts of a the application.
|
| This is my experience. You still have to understand
| programming: you're just typing it out in Natural English.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Conversely, doing so has helped me flesh out my thoughts on
| many occasions. As I ran into obstacles with errors or
| imprecise prompting, I realized my design had issues or edge
| cases I hadn't take into account. Perhaps it would be better
| if I wrote out several paragraphs describing my intentions
| before taking up most coding tasks, but I hardly think my
| boss would be in support of this!
| jdironman wrote:
| Like a rubber duck which provides feedback. but since it's
| coming from a rubber duck it's good to verify that duck
| knows what it's talking about.
| jprete wrote:
| > Perhaps it would be better if I wrote out several
| paragraphs describing my intentions before taking up most
| coding tasks
|
| I often do things like this, and if the scale of the
| document was somewhat larger than you describe, it would be
| a design document.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| My role unfortunately doesn't allow for this. I do more
| "in the trenches" data science stuff. The value is quite
| obvious to me for a role where there is more space for
| this or in product planning.
| PeterisP wrote:
| That's a great fit for scenarios where you do know
| programming but don't know the particular language and
| framework on which you suddenly have to do some maintenance
| or improvement.
|
| For many things the available documentation is poor, and
| asking a bot is much more helpful.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| Yes exactly. I had to be very specific and tackle the project
| in the same way I would if I was fully writing the code.
| First data schema, then models, then controllers with CRUD
| and views, then routes, then authentication, then test cases,
| then TS transpiling, etc...
|
| It's definitely not something someone with zero coding
| experience could easily do, and I feel even a junior
| developer would struggle with anything even as complex as
| this. You have to have the concept and structure in your
| head, it's just writing the code for it.
| SamBam wrote:
| > You have to have the concept and structure in your head,
| it's just writing the code for it.
|
| I wonder how far you'd get with the technique of asking
| ChatGPT to lay out its plans first, kind of like the
| improvements in math questions you see when you ask it to
| write down its reasoning before committing to any answer.
|
| "This is what I'm looking for: XXX. What are the different
| pieces of this that I'm going to need to create?"
|
| "Ok, the first thing on your list you gave me was a
| database to store the data. What would the structure of
| that database look like?"
|
| "Can you give me the code to create that database?"
|
| Etc etc. i.e putting the actual code as the last step each
| time.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| This is the best form of prompting for generating code.
| You tell it to first generate a technical spec for
| solving the stated problem problem, consider multiple
| options, return for your review. You then use a trigger
| command like "build" to then implement, once you've
| specified any changes.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| I suspect it would work surprisingly well! But still, I
| think you would have to have a fairly good concept of
| coding to do even that. For example, my mum who has zero
| concept of what a database is (beyond the dictionary
| definition) would not be able to piece together an
| application like this (sorry mum!). But a junior
| developer would probably be able to just about do it
| depending on complexity.
|
| For me, using GPT felt very slow, but for a junior it
| might actually be faster than trial/error and Googling.
| Also, ChatGPT is only going to get better and better, so
| we can expect it to become quicker and easier to do such
| things.
| drcode wrote:
| What I think you're overlooking is that most people can only do
| a few hours of hardcore coding at peak productivity a day
| (3hours for me, maybe)
|
| So you could spend 3hours babysitting GPT4 to write some code
| for you, but then you'd still have 3 hours of peak code
| productivity that day that you haven't "used up" yet
| _delirium wrote:
| I'm the opposite, personally. I can code for 5 or 6 hours
| just fine if I'm "in the zone", but I can't deal with LLMs
| for more than an hour or two max, usually less. I find their
| sweet spot is when I need to ask one or two questions with
| one or two follow-ups, 5-10 minutes ideally. They can
| sometimes be a big win in small doses if you can keep it to
| that kind of interaction. But they are just draining to
| interact with for longer periods. For me they're a _lot_ like
| being a TA stuck in multi-hour office hours with undergrads
| once you get past a few questions. Just a really shitty slog.
| selcuka wrote:
| If it were me, babysitting GPT4 would still spend my peak
| code productivity credits, as it's basically coding (in
| natural language).
| kaba0 wrote:
| It's thinking either way. I would even wager that the trivial
| code that GPT writes may be easier to read for me, than some
| convoluted, human language description of the same thing,
| done with numerous corrections at every point.
|
| The relative uniformity of code is a positive for human
| understanding as well, e.g. a^2+b^2=c^2 is easier to
| parse/transmit the idea over any "spoken" version of the same
| thing.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| True. Although I did find the writing of prompts to be quite
| exhausting due to tedium and waiting for the output to be
| frustrating, so that would dig into my energy for peak
| coding. I would say it uses less concentration, but about the
| same amount or even more effort. But also it was a very
| narrow test, maybe for certain things (especially repetitive
| code or boilerplate code) it could be very beneficial.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > I used GPT4
|
| Do you use the ChatGPT Plus version or the API? If the API,
| what do you usually use to access it?
| marknutter wrote:
| You should actually time how long it takes you to write it
| yourself rather than guess. The results may surprise you.
| burkaman wrote:
| Here's the code: https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-
| pumpkins/sketch.js
| monkpit wrote:
| I realize this comment isn't directly related to the article, but
| it got me thinking... I wonder what effect AI will have on the
| next generation of gaming consoles.
|
| Will they get beefier GPU capabilities to leverage local models?
|
| Will they use cloud capacity to host models and games require
| always-online capability to play as intended?
|
| Some mixture of both?
|
| Also, I hope that AI won't turn into the next way to just ruin
| everything that was already good. A bunch of rehashed unoriginal
| ideas, like "it's Pac-Man, but with AI!" Please, no.
| kevinsync wrote:
| Despite the expected contrarianism in the comments, and I promise
| I'm being positive here, I'm pretty sure GPT-4 did really well on
| this task because a quick Google search shows a bunch of existing
| projects spanning blogs, GitHub and YouTube that it almost
| certainly trained on:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=matter.js+angry+birds+clone
|
| This is not a Bad Thing (tm) -- it's actually really sick because
| you can quickly get out of the weeds and get productive,
| especially if your skillset is not as deep as you'd have needed
| to accomplish even half of this a decade ago.
|
| Nobody ever said paint by numbers was capital-P "Painting", but
| sometimes it's a blast to do one. I remember being 12 and making
| custom WADs for Doom / Hexen; my 6th grade son builds endlessly-
| creative and complicated modded Minecraft worlds with detailed
| machinery and electrical circuits and all this crazy seemingly-
| adherent-to-real-world-physics shit. Angry Pumpkins is arguably
| an order of magnitude better than simply re-skinning a
| Cyberdemon, because lowering the "time-to-screen" with any
| project (and in this case, providing a blueprint) is fun,
| creative, and most importantly ENCOURAGING for the next
| generation.
|
| Anyways, I like it!
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's a really interesting perspective. Thank you for sharing.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Thanks for writing this. This really mirrors my own
| perspective. Yeah, these tools aren't exactly "learning to
| fish," but if this gets someone _excited_ about "fishing',
| then that's a good thing. A lot of my early coding experiences
| were in a similar vein to what you described, altering
| gamemaker projects and things like that. And even now I have a
| lot of fun playing with this AI stuff. It can help me go from 0
| to 20% on something I previously knew nothing about, and
| sometimes that initial boost is all I need to get over the
| friction and actually do something cool. Or sometimes I realize
| that it's not worth the amount of effort it would take to go to
| the next 80%. That's OK too.
|
| I totally understand the cynicism around this stuff, but for me
| it's like... 99% exciting and cool.
| croes wrote:
| Ok, but many of these AI tools are promoted as Programming bots
| with a capital-P
| kevinsync wrote:
| That's just marketing. McDonalds will sell you what it calls
| a Hamburger with a capital-H, but we could argue endlessly
| about the veracity of that.
|
| In the end it doesn't matter -- some people like it, some
| people hate it, it's good, it's terrible, it's whatever you
| at this moment in your life decide it is for you, but
| regardless of opinions, it's still edible.
|
| I just love what this guy made mostly because he followed
| through and made something, anything, and put it out there
| (presumably for the pure joy of creation).. and it got us all
| talking about it lol
| godelski wrote:
| > That's just marketing. McDonalds will sell you what it
| calls a Hamburger with a capital-H, but we could argue
| endlessly about the veracity of that.
|
| Well they can't sell you a quarter pound of horse meat as
| third of a pound of beef. There are laws about this and I
| believe they do deserve criticism. But that criticism is
| completely orthogonal to how good the "hamburger" tastes
| and the nutritional value of it.
|
| But personally I could never do marketing. I feel like
| their skills lay in getting as close to a lie as possible
| without technically being one. But I also think this is why
| people are not happy with a lot of products, because they
| aren't getting what they were expected. But at the same
| time I think companies are in an arms race that has simply
| been a race to the bottom where we're at or near and no one
| can get an economic edge simply by telling the whole truth
| and nothing but the unquestionable truth. The (near) liars
| have the distinct advantage in a world where it is
| impossible to have objective validators. It's why we have
| reviewers but why reviewers also got metric hacked. Idk
| what the solution here is but I definitely understand why
| people are upset and I wouldn't call this a fruitful
| endeavour where we'll argue endlessly. That's more about
| people having difficulties in expressing why they feel
| frustrated.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| And some people think Synthesia is actually teaching them
| piano.
|
| It might get them into the door. It might give them all they
| are seeking and that's all awesome. They might find that they
| hit a wall and need to go learn how to read sheet music. Or
| they don't.
|
| The thing about "it's not real programming" is that I don't
| think it matters. They might just end up a bit surprised that
| they hit a wall and have to go back and learn more of the
| fundamentals.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| AI is good at that too
|
| I learned just enough about "chord progressions" in order
| to ask ChatGPT to make both the lyrics and chord
| progressions for me
|
| I just input them and humans like it
|
| I wouldn't have initially known the terms to use. Nowadays
| I can prompt for that too though "what concepts do I need
| to understand in this field" "tell me more about number 3"
| and I hope it didn't just make something up but it's good
| enough to converse with humans about - who also make things
| up
| nativeit wrote:
| At best, I expect it will maybe reach parity with (more
| likely fall short of) the kind of accessibility that other
| low-code application development tools and WYSIWYG website
| builders have reached. Specifically, I can see where this
| kind of utility will be too limited for professionals and
| skilled amateurs to bother with, beyond maybe doing some kind
| of "boilerplate+", and yet it will remain out of reach for
| the vast majority of laypeople who will quickly realize that
| programming requires more than just a grasp of syntax and an
| IDE. Square Space and Wix haven't meaningfully impacted the
| professional web design market as near as I can tell, and
| Airtable hasn't cost any SQL engineers their jobs.
|
| Just my gut instinct, though, and I've certainly been wrong
| before.
| godelski wrote:
| Sure, and that deserves more critique than this. But the
| critique there is that you're being marketed a product under
| false pretenses. I'll give you an example to help clarify. In
| another thread[0] the OP is showing off their ML programming
| assistant. The project is unquestionably cool and has every
| right to be on the front page of HN. But there are still
| major questions I have. The implicit critique here comes form
| the fact that the author says "beats GPT 4 at coding" but
| then their basis for this claim is simply via HumanEval
| performance. In reality the evidence does not support the
| claim (it doesn't say the contrary either, it simply is
| indeterminate -- not to be confused with
| orthogonal/irrelevant). This is marketing. I'm not sure if it
| is dishonest marketing, but I would not call it honest
| marketing either. It's in the gray. The thread originally had
| an intro from OP who was specifically requesting comments too
| and so the context is appropriate, other than the nature of
| simply being on HN.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38091869
| Aeolun wrote:
| Well, most programming is just doing what was done before
| again?
|
| Anecdotally a lot of my coworkers seem to say they did
| something 'with chatgpt'.
| LastTrain wrote:
| I like it too. I also wrote a negative comment, but it was
| about how the title was not completely honest, which is a
| different issue than whether or not this was an impressive feat
| of AI.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I just like that I don't need to hire designers anymore
|
| I didn't mind designers or their cost, I minded the time and
| the gamble involved with output close to what you imagined, and
| revisions
|
| I also found negotiating rights to be full of hubris and pride
| that caused alot of more friction. Ironclad contracts being too
| heavy handed with that community
|
| I'll take the potential forfeit of copyright in exchange for
| instant output, i can put up a payment portal for royalty free
| works, i can still sell data
| godelski wrote:
| > This is not a Bad Thing (tm)
|
| I wholeheartedly agree. I am often one to critique ML systems,
| especially LLMs and GPT. But this is my training as a
| researcher. I think it is important that we recognize critiques
| and discussions of limitations are not equivalent to calling a
| tool useless or worthless. It does not even devalue the tool.
| Rather the discussions are beneficial for two contexts: we
| learn the limitations to build better tools (since no tool is
| perfect there will always be critiques available) and we learn
| how to use the tool effectively (you're still not going to use
| LLMs to do you differential equations homework despite this
| certainly being within the training set). There's also the
| important context that we are on a tech form in a community
| that is well known to be inhabited by the exact type of people
| that build, test, and deploy these types of systems (myself
| included). These are not the same discussions we'd be having in
| the context of sitting around with my parents who are
| absolutely tech illiterate.
|
| My thoughts as a highly critical person (check my history, or
| even a very recent highly relevant comment in another thread)
| are "this is pretty fucking cool" (same to that very same
| thread btw). I hope to see more stuff like this. It is what
| makes me passionate about ML and it is what keeps me coming to
| HN.
|
| Your work doesn't need to be novel to be useful. Nor does it
| need to be useful to be good. I'm just happy to be seeing
| people do shit and having fun.
| toddmorey wrote:
| Very good perspective from the creator's vantage point.
|
| From the consumer vantage point, I do worry. Even Apple's
| "curated" App Store is already flooded with quickly made
| knockoffs... as close as they can get in the hopes that they'll
| confuse just a few folks into a purchase. It works well enough
| and it's profitable enough that an entire industry does
| factory-style it for every popular title. (Like a digital
| Shein.)
|
| The internet is already full of the quick-launch low-value-add
| content that AI excels at creating. We're about to see a whole
| lot more! The good news is AI can also be very effective at
| prescreening and filtering out all this content vying for our
| eyeballs. Right now it feels like me vs the AI content cannon,
| but soon it will be AI filters battling AI content while the
| machines sort out what makes it to my digital devices.
| simonw wrote:
| Honestly there's enough junk content out there that I don't
| see generative AI making much of a difference.
|
| What we need is better habits around peer-to-peer
| recommendation. I need people I know with good taste to spend
| more time talking about the games that they like!
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Are there Reddit subs for that?
| simonw wrote:
| If anyone can join a subreddit you can't guarantee that
| spammers won't join up to promote junk.
|
| I'm having great recommendations from invite-only
| Discords these days.
| fnimick wrote:
| Not all of us have access to elite invite-only
| communities, nor the name recognition or clout to solicit
| invites to them.
| simonw wrote:
| Create your own and invite people who's opinions and
| taste you respect to join it.
| neilv wrote:
| This statistical plagiarism laundering is pretty neat.
|
| IMHO, stopping the laundering gold rush is a more urgent priority
| for law, than creating market moats for the current big pickaxe
| vendors and pretending it's about preventing HAL.
| matsemann wrote:
| I honestly don't think the coding is that impressive. What sells
| it is the assets. It used to be that all quick demos / gamejam
| like games like these (which it honestly is) looked like crap.
| Now it suddenly can look a bit polished. Not just boxes and
| lines, but actually somewhat nice graphics (which is probably too
| close to what it mimics and would end with a angry letter from a
| bird attorney if was used in an actual game, though).
| djmips wrote:
| new game idea. Angry letters!
| rideontime wrote:
| Are there any plagiarism detection tools for software? Because
| I'm very curious how closely this code matches one of the many JS
| Angry Bird clone tutorials out there.
| notfed wrote:
| There is always GitHub search.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Someone showed me a similar game type thing they had made with
| GPT-4 and I could find the code that it had used just by
| searching Github. It had taken an open source project and made
| some modifications and spliced a few extra bits together -
| which is still impressive but the bulk of it was already out
| there. This matched my limited experience too, unsurprisingly
| it does a lot better for problems where there is already code
| and discussion out there.
|
| I wasn't able to find exact code for the posted game though so
| I think something cleverer may have occurred!
| ThalesX wrote:
| This inspired me to try and get a sprite sheet with the top down
| animations for a paladin for a potential RPG game. See me fail
| here: https://imgur.com/a/2uJyUT3
|
| Actual order was top down variants first, and then the last one
| was the side view as I was curious what it'd show.
| elliottcarlson wrote:
| I've used midjourney to create ttrpg tokens in the past, and
| the best way I was able to do so was to say "aerial view" --
| top down was very flakey in if it would work. I wonder if
| Dall-E 3 needs the same guidance.
| la64710 wrote:
| The real challenge is generating a large code base (think more
| than a JavaScript loaded page) - the front end backend and
| everything in between and then automating the testing and
| deployment ...
| simonw wrote:
| Twitter is a bad place to share original content these days,
| because anyone without a Twitter account not only won't be able
| to see anything more than the first tweet but (crucially) won't
| even see a visual indicator that there IS more content to see.
|
| Here's a screenshot to illustrate:
| https://gist.github.com/simonw/f7ed52daaa66f849858d17e0d6c1c...
|
| For people without a Twitter account, I've pasted the content of
| the thread into a Gist here:
| https://gist.github.com/simonw/f7ed52daaa66f849858d17e0d6c1c...
|
| The most important missing link is the live demo,
| https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| There's Nitter.net for now, thankfully.
|
| Nitter link:
| https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363262179938401
| 1f60c wrote:
| There's a list of Nitter instances here, if the flagship
| instance isn't working (this happens from time to time):
| https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| Oh I wasn't aware there were other instances. Thanks!
| worldsayshi wrote:
| And also, who knows where Twitter will be in a year. This could
| all disappear in a black whole judging by the somewhat chaotic
| developments.
| mackwell wrote:
| I have an account and half the time when I follow a link from
| HN to Twitter / X it just throws an error that something went
| wrong / can't load the tweet. And video content works even less
| often than that. The site seems like it barely works at this
| point and is rapidly becoming a ghost town. What a waste.
| pvg wrote:
| _Twitter is a bad place to share original content these days_
|
| It might be but it's an interminable debate that's mostly HN-
| offtopic since its been long rendered uninteresting through
| sheer repetition.
| simonw wrote:
| I don't think that's the case.
|
| I have seen plenty of complaints on here about Twitter in
| general, but I don't think the specific point that the new
| registration wall makes it a bad place to post original
| content has been discussed much here at all.
|
| Happy to be proved wrong.
|
| Edit: proving myself wrong here: it looks like links to
| nitter show up in comments here every few days, so the fact
| that the Twitter registration wall needs to be bypassed is
| actually pretty well understood. https://hn.algolia.com/?date
| Range=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| pvg wrote:
| It is so much the case there's a site guideline about it
| plus countless mod comments.
|
| The registration thing is just like the paywall thing - if
| there are workarounds, it's fine.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Does it generate the same result for everyone who enters the
| prompts? (Not an AI guy here)
| simonw wrote:
| No, it won't. There's a big random element to this, especially
| when you are prompting GPT-4 directly through the ChatGPT
| interface.
|
| Image generation models can sometimes produce the exact same
| image if you fix the seed they are using - there are different
| procedures for doing that for different image models.
|
| LLMs like GPT-4 can have their "temperature" dialled down, but
| even at 0 they aren't guaranteed to return exactly the same
| response to a given prompt. I believe this is because they run
| floating point operations in parallel across multiple GPUs and
| floating point arithmetic isn't actually commutative - you can
| get back a slightly different result if the multiplications run
| in a different order.
| product-render wrote:
| Always instructional how eager a lot of people are to not pay
| artists.
|
| I'm guessing the mood will be less celebratory when we can stop
| paying most programmers.
| alright2565 wrote:
| This article _is_ about replacing programmers with AI.
|
| I, personally, will celebrate, since it'll allow me to explore
| opportunities I would not have time for on my own. And I'm not
| worried for my career, since 99% of people will still be unable
| to think and write coherently enough to use the AI tools.
|
| And I think the reality here is not so much being unwilling to
| pay artists as the budget being extremely low. If I've got an
| art budget of $10 for a quick experiment like this, I'm not
| going to hire an artist, I'm just going to use the circle tool
| in GIMP.
| tw061023 wrote:
| This article is about precisely nothing, as almost all AI
| articles are.
|
| By the way, I have a nice bridge for sale.
| somsak2 wrote:
| It's interesting how most don't consider programmers artists,
| even though coding requires quite a bit of creativity.
| vunderba wrote:
| Did you read the actual post? They use generative AI to replace
| both programmers AND artists. And if anything programmers have
| been at risk of replacement FAR longer than traditional
| artists. Low code solutions in the form of Squarespace for web
| programming, AirTable for CRUD, Unity for making games, the
| list goes ON AND ON.
| dools wrote:
| I find it interesting that over the past decade so much
| investment has gone into making no code tools, and now ChatGPT is
| so good at writing code that it's probably faster, more flexible
| and approaching the same level of usability for technically
| minded but non coding type folks.
|
| I recently had to create a demo app to consume and publish a REST
| service using Mendix and it took a couple of days to figure out
| all the details, but doing the same thing in any language (bash
| for example) using ChatGPT would have taken minutes.
|
| Deployment and version control can be solved without much
| technical prowess using PaaS/IaaS, especially if you're comparing
| your costs with enterprise no code platforms.
|
| It may be my personal bias talking (I've always disliked no code
| platforms because they feel more cumbersome when you have to do
| anything serious, I dislike ActiveRecord ORMs for similar
| reasons) but it kind of seems like No Code will be obsolete
| pretty soon.
|
| Who wants to drag and drop when you can just ask, copy and paste?
| elicksaur wrote:
| Would it have taken minutes? Can you try and give us real,
| rather than speculative, feedback? Shouldn't take much time!
| dools wrote:
| Sure here you go:
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/f98d04b9-6d93-46b7-9fa9-7c9ec1.
| ..
| silisili wrote:
| I think this solution is about the perfect thing I can come up
| with, conceptually. Nocode is easy but rigid. Coding is
| flexible but tedious and error prone.
|
| Being able to talk out what you want to quickly get the code,
| as long as it's clean, gives you the flexibility to then tune
| as needed. And in some cases, like apparently this one, that
| wasn't even necessary. Exciting times ahead...
| dools wrote:
| I guess the thing that's still lacking from an AI code
| solution is security guard rails. My demo below for example
| is open to injection attacks but I think that could be solved
| with fine tuning or custom instructions.
|
| You can't just have amateurs copying and pasting stuff into
| production environments, but even the task of writing tests
| can be given to an AI. Like you get one AI to write some
| code, then you get another AI to write code to test it. The
| chances of perfectl complementary errors are pretty low, but
| even if that happens you then get an AI to write a frontend
| script to run automated integration tests, and then have some
| human quality control at the end.
|
| Really, I think a code-based AI pipeline has much more long
| term potential than no code does. The interfaces are just so
| laborious.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| The super power of GPT is allowing a generalist to become
| specialists in diverse disciplines just-in-time.
| gverrilla wrote:
| I wouldn't say specialist, because GPT often ignores full
| context of the information. Sometimes, if a system is composed
| of A B C D E, and you only mention the first 4, it will answer
| with no problem as if E was irrelevant. As soon as you
| introduce E, then, it will quickly say sorry and reconsider.
| I'm a true hardcore generalist, and gpt can help a lot, but I
| wouldn't say I can become a specialist with it because it
| doesn't investigate at all - if you don't mention it, a lot of
| times it's as if it doesn't even exist.
| danielbln wrote:
| As a technical generalist I certainly find myself pretty
| empowered by these LLMs. It's never been easier to dive into a
| new problem, figure out the boundaries and solution paths and
| get cracking.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| This is exciting, like we're about to enter a new golden age for
| indie apps and games.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Disclaimer: I was a PM on Angry Birds.
|
| This is such a great demo. The original used Box2D,LUA scripting,
| and of course you had to make enemies and levels.
|
| There's obviously no expectation that you'd make a hit game from
| the tech in its current state. You're bound to be limited by the
| tech, rather than your own skills.
|
| But for rapid ideas, for prototypes, for game jams, this is a
| game changer. I can also see it as a great alternative to Scratch
| for kids to play around with ideas. Hope to see more platforms
| try to turn this into an offering!
| vvoyer wrote:
| Nice, what's the craziest story about your time here
| leshokunin wrote:
| Would derail the thread pretty hard and I'm not sure even
| which one to pick. But my favorite memory was walking the
| streets of Seoul and getting in a little street market. There
| was this kid who was the son of the shop owner, playing on a
| cheap Android device. Super into the last update we shipped.
| You could tell he was gonna sit there on the floor in the
| corner and this would be his day. I was suddenly so self
| conscious about how we made levels and updates. Until then it
| was just the next update at the office, we had to make it
| good and polished and respectful of the player. But now it
| was this kid's world, much like Super Mario Bros had been to
| me. It was important. It was a really humbling moment.
| savolai wrote:
| It would be wonderful if such stories were more prevalent
| and lauded in the overall industry: at the ens of the day,
| it's not about specific tech but about how we end up
| affecting concrete lives. Human-computer interaction as a
| research field is all about this; seeing the others'
| perspective. Sadly it's seems to be largely seen as niche
| activity by the wider community.
| leshokunin wrote:
| I'd argue it's the most important goal of all consumer
| software. It needs to be respectful of the player. To do
| that you need to really, actually care about where they
| are in their lives and what you can do to meet them. We
| had an expression internally: "surprise and delight". On
| a more personal level I've always loved Gunpei Yokoi's
| "lateral thinking, with withered technology".
| generic92034 wrote:
| That might be a good approach for games and other apps
| with a certain level of redundancy and competition. But
| the other approach is having a vital product with high
| vendor lock-in factor, then eliminating the competition
| and consequentially forcing down the throats of customers
| whatever is promising more profit (browsers, "big" ERP,
| ...).
| leshokunin wrote:
| That's just so sad to read. Yes, I'm aware there are
| alternatives to respecting users. You use apps that dgaf
| every day. I'm saying it's important to care, not just
| for yourself and your career and market share, but
| because there's a human who's living their life and you
| can make it a but better with a bit of effort. Besides
| the lack of empathy and respect for humans in your
| answer, there is also just a sadness in giving up trying
| to aspire to do better and just do a bunch of cheap
| tricks to win.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I think many of us would love to hear more. Not looking for
| gossip or anything, just good stories about some technical
| hurdle you've overcome, or a special moment like this one
| you've just described.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Whats a good way to do this, an AMA?
| makapuf wrote:
| That, or a tellHN text story with questions following ?
| skeaker wrote:
| If you wrote your story as a blogpost and linked it as a
| submission, that'd probably be fine. It's how most posts
| here are structured.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Is there something specific to Angry Birds development
| that many of you find appealing?
| simonw wrote:
| It's one of the most successful projects of the early
| mobile games era. That makes me think it must be rich
| with fascinating stories.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Not "one of". It exceeded 2bn downloads.
| tayo42 wrote:
| idk why it wasnt obvious to me before, i never bothered trying to
| make games because i wasnt good at digital art and didn't really
| have the interest to try to be. i should now... lol
| tmountain wrote:
| We are still lacking a reliable method to generate animated
| sprites. I'm very excited about the prospect of that day
| arriving sometime soon.
| two_in_one wrote:
| Cool! The coolest here is not the game, it's the fact that AI is
| being used for software development. Actually ChatGPT is used for
| more serious and practical applications. But I started with games
| too. Having fun makes it easier to start. You can think of AI
| (today) as very knowledgeable and not very smart assistant.
| Complex project requires a lot of prompts. Human's task is to put
| it all together, test, ask for new parts and corrections. And
| this is just a beginning...
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| There have got to be some freelancers/remote workers who have
| 100x'ed their productivity using GPT-4 and AI tools correctly. I
| can't imagine all these cool hacks exist in a vacuum. Imagine
| what we'll have in 2 years. The genie is out of the bottle.
| TheRoque wrote:
| 100x? Well they probably weren't very productive in the first
| place then. If you know tips to use chatgpt and "100x" your
| productivity, please share.
| nobodyiam wrote:
| Pretty impressive! Using AI as a copilot is definitely the right
| way forward.
| klik99 wrote:
| On one hand - there are a lot of angry birds clones and tutorials
| showing you how to code an angry birds game, the choice of game
| here probably greatly helped the outcome.
|
| On the other hand - the way he iteratively programmed it
| (https://twitter.com/javilopen/status/1719363669685916095) I can
| see becoming more and more useful over time.
|
| It's obviously not the most difficult example to use, but it does
| indicate a very interesting future.
| gwoolhurme wrote:
| Every time I see these articles I get more and more worried about
| my employability to be frank... with no backup plan and way too
| much time poured into learning software engineering. It's not
| looking good gang.
| simonw wrote:
| I'm genuinely not worried about that. As others have observed,
| us programmers will be in trouble when regular people learn to
| produce a product spec that's detailed enough that an LLM can
| create the working software that they need.
|
| That sounds a lot like programming to me!
|
| I expect our work will change: we'll be able to spend more time
| thinking about what we are building and less time typing code
| on our keyboards. But if anything, we're going to become more
| valuable - because we'll be able to get a whole lot more done.
| gwoolhurme wrote:
| That's fair and I hope that is the case. That might even be
| fun, and I mean I actually have a lot of fun with gpt-4 now.
| My bigger complaint there then is that you need more money to
| be competitive in this industry now? Until LLMs become
| smaller more efficient? Like back in university the best
| student was a Russian immigrant who learned back in Moscow on
| pen and paper, no compiler to mostly handhold.
| agileAlligator wrote:
| The workflow has shifted a step up:
|
| 1. Define problem
|
| 2. Generate specifications <-
|
| 3. Write the code
|
| Knowing how to do step 3 will get less and less important
| everyday.
| chefandy wrote:
| I think most utility software projects won't even require
| this three step process. More like "define problem, use an
| AI-assisted interface to whip up a few solutions, spit
| shine your favorite, if necessary."
| HPsquared wrote:
| LLMs seem very well-suited to generating written
| specifications, like they do with writing the code itself.
| They can even help with the "define problem" part.
| agileAlligator wrote:
| Steps 1 and 2 are more reliant on human-to-human
| communication if you are developing an application to be
| used by some end user and not something that just ingests
| data and processes it. It takes skill to translate non-
| technical speak into a clear goal and specifications
| required to achieve that goal, to probe the third party
| and ask specific questions to tease out their
| expectations of the application. That, LLMs can't do yet.
| I have no doubt that they'll get better at that in the
| near future though.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Ah, requirements capture.. yeah, not straight ChatGPT but
| "having a directed conversation" doesn't seem like a
| stretch.
|
| EDIT: for example, Character.ai as an example of
| character prompting. You can prime an LLM with a prompt
| so that it asks you certain types of questions.
| chefandy wrote:
| Not having a detailed product spec is a much, much bigger
| problem when you can't change the product to fit your needs
| on a whim. Beyond that, there's a few layers between
| "software developer" and "regular people" that complicate
| your prediction.
|
| While most developers don't hold interface designers in
| particularly high regard, honestly ask average people what
| they think of most developer-made interfaces and you'll find
| out the skill is a lot trickier than it seems. Most
| developers only think they know what developers do, but
| they're like many corporate workers see everyone from the
| head network architect to the community college desktop
| support intern as "computer people who can fix your email."
| Most think interface designers primarily work on aesthetics,
| but most probably _aren 't even invited to meetings_ about
| branding/visual aesthetic/etc...) Going further, many of
| those designers are savvy enough to write some basic code and
| likely bodge something into place, especially if they're
| using some kind of purpose-built interface that can handle
| things like data model consistency between builds.
|
| It's a very unpopular opinion around here, but I think
| designers using the next generation of no-code tools will eat
| front-end and simple app developers' lunches and I think it
| will happen really soon. I'll bet teams at Wix, Webflow and
| other no-code authoring tools are working like mad to develop
| these tools right now, and I'll bet that's a hair's breadth
| from automatically generating electron apps from whatever
| users make there. If your specialty is code, and there are
| people with whole other useful skillsets that could passably
| approximate that capability with a few occasional hours from
| a contractor, the developer isn't going to be the one that
| still has a job.
|
| While the demand for developers is still large, it's not
| infinite, and I look askance at assumptions that there won't
| be a really painful 'adjustment' for a lot of working
| professionals.
| kaveh_h wrote:
| That's assuming frontends need to be "developed" at all in
| the future. There's a possibility intelligent chat bots
| able to generate microfrontends on the fly is going to eat
| our lunch, but what is really going to eat the lunches is a
| failing capitalistic system due too lack of demand for
| labour. I guess overall society is going to balance things
| out somehow, curious if it's going to be a in a civil
| manner or brutal disruption.
| gwoolhurme wrote:
| I can only see brutality personally. I'm not prepared.
| Once I lose my way of making a living I think it's done
| basically. Time will tell, but it's never been kind
| before, why now?
| chefandy wrote:
| Many here seem to think anyone "smart enough" or
| "hardworking enough" could simply pivot into something
| else after their entire category of employment was
| decimated. I assume that:
|
| a: These people are very young and don't understand what
| it takes to invest 3, 4, or 5 decades in a career and/or
| despite their assumptions about their life experiences,
| have never actually experienced significant hardship.
|
| b: They're neurologically or emotionally incapable of
| empathy or lack a usable theory of mind.
|
| or
|
| c: They've read too much inspirational linkedin hustle
| porn about people pulling themselves up by their own
| bootstraps (which is actually supposed to be a joke--
| it's obviously impossible to pull youself up by your own
| bootstraps, but for some reason people repeat it without
| considering its true meaning) and think if they are tough
| and ruthless enough that they'll be one of the ones on
| top. Which is kind of sad.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Or a variant of a: they're forgetting how little their
| first jobs paid.
|
| Even in most lucky case, pivoting your career into an
| entirely different category means reverting to entry-
| level pay, while your age, health and obligations remain
| the same. Imagine just the paycut alone happening to you,
| out of a sudden. And that's the _best case_ for what
| people displaced by AI will experience.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I'd pivot into crime and drugs if I had too survive. I'll
| be eating no matter what. Not too worried.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You know, they send people to jail over that stuff.
| HPsquared wrote:
| He still gets his food in that case.
| mrkstu wrote:
| Hey they'd still have food/shelter in that scenario...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yeah, but a lot depends on where they live. From what I
| heard about the US penal system, someone living there
| would be better off being homeless than jailed.
| chefandy wrote:
| For most people who don't already have an established
| network associated with crime, it would probably be the
| only way you'd get anybody to trust you.
| chefandy wrote:
| As someone who spent quite some time as a young person
| with the fringe end of society, I can assure you that
| saying you'll pivot into crime and drugs is like saying
| you'll pivot into being a plumber. It takes time to build
| a career that pays more then entry level money
| consistently, and good luck developing a network of
| connections to make it happen. It's not like walking down
| the street to pick up an application at Chipotle. And AI
| is probably going to take individual computer criminals'
| jobs even before most other people's.
| chefandy wrote:
| Well, no the point to my comment was that they won't need
| to be developed, and that the real skill will be in
| knowing how people interact with things so you can tell
| the machine what to make, and that is absolutely not a
| technical job. Even in the interim, incidentally gained
| technical skills will suffice rendering the technical
| people in the chain redundant. Surely the human
| understanding component will be whittled down at some
| point, too, but it's a much much further goal than
| automating essentially mechanical processes.
|
| And, of course-- all of the "unpleasant" side effects of
| massive innovation would be totally avoidable if we
| didn't treat people as disposable labor units worth
| nothing more than their market value.
| realharo wrote:
| _> Surely the human understanding component will be
| whittled down at some point, too, but it's a much much
| further goal than automating essentially mechanical
| processes._
|
| Why do you think that?
|
| People used to think that making paintings and poems
| would be one of the most difficult things for AI, and
| look how that turned out.
| gwoolhurme wrote:
| I don't think the above comment disagrees that much with
| you. As far as paintings and poems go those are also
| pulling off of patterns that humans naturally have given
| off too right? An LLM is a bit more than a stochastic
| parrot sure, but it's also a large part of how it
| functions. The real surprise, or maybe not a surprise, is
| how formulaic everything is.
| chefandy wrote:
| Because interfaces require situation-specific reasoning
| that purely expressive art can be imitated without. And
| frankly, I think the slick looking images that AI spews
| out from actual artists' munged up work is a far cry from
| being equivalent. Like interfaces, the people who
| wouldn't pay an artist or designer to begin with probably
| don't care enough about the quality of the art or
| interface for it to matter. Cookie cutter applications
| and stock images are going to suffer, but developers
| making basic crud functionality or simple API
| interactions will suffer soon after.
| ben_w wrote:
| > It's a very unpopular opinion around here, but I think
| designers using the next generation of no-code tools will
| eat front-end and simple app developers' lunches and I
| think it will happen really soon. I'll bet teams at Wix,
| Webflow and other no-code authoring tools are working like
| mad to develop these tools right now, and I'll bet that's a
| hair's breadth from automatically generating electron apps
| from whatever users make there.
|
| I'm sure Wix et al are indeed working on that. Looking at
| their website, they've been at it for 17 years and have a
| whole bunch of high-level things already available --
| meaning "blog" and "eCommerce" and "scheduling", not merely
| "fancy checkbox" or "date widget" -- which will cover the
| needs of a lot of small businesses who neither want nor
| could afford a single full-time web dev for even just 3
| months.
|
| Nevertheless, I disagree with your core claim: I learned
| how HTML worked partly by reading the output of
| Dreamweaver[0], followed by teens working with REALbasic
| (now Xojo) and then VisualBasic. I also spent most of the
| last decade using Interface Builder in Xcode (with 1.5
| years of "why did you do this in C++?" and 1.5 years of
| "why won't Xcode render this SwiftUI like it's supposed
| to?").
|
| I don't understand _why_ the visual editors aren 't more
| popular in our profession -- they _seem_ like they should
| be perfect; SwiftUI and React shouldn 't need to even exist
| -- and it's that gap between how I think the world ought to
| work and how I observe it actually working that contains
| the real problem that means so many of the jobs we do,
| aren't with the no-code tools we already had 25 years ago.
|
| (Of course, one possibility is that Upton Sinclair quote:
| "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends on his not understanding it.", and
| perhaps we're all just in a bubble of belief that can
| collapse at any time...)
|
| [0] I think. Something like that anyway, free demo on a
| Mac[Format|World|User] magazine cover CD.
| TheCleric wrote:
| > I expect our work will change: we'll be able to spend more
| time thinking about what we are building and less time typing
| code on our keyboards. But if anything, we're going to become
| more valuable - because we'll be able to get a whole lot more
| done.
|
| That would be lovely, but not how efficiency works in a
| capitalistic society. We can produce cars much faster in a
| factory then we could in the past due to various factors
| including automation. This doesn't mean the workers get to
| take their time and a do a better job. Instead it means they
| are expected to have a higher volume.
|
| This is what I worry about with the rise of LLM programming
| (especially as someone who is less than impressed with the
| actual output I've seen). It's not that I as a software
| engineer will be replaced by someone using GPT, but rather
| it's I'll be replaced by another software engineer who
| doesn't care, using GPT to produce 3x as much "software" at
| half the quality because the only metric that some will look
| at is volume.
| fareesh wrote:
| Aside from the images I suspect the code is inspired by something
| in the training data since it's quite a common project
| simonw wrote:
| One of the prompts they used was:
|
| "Now, I ask you: do you know how the birds are launched in
| Angry Birds? What the finger does on the screen? Exactly. Add
| this to the game, using the mouse."
| sagarpatil wrote:
| This is brilliant. I also created a ChatGPT plugin using only
| GPT-4. Aardvark AI (Search for Products on Google Shopping in
| Real-Time, No Ads, Only Trusted Stores) It current gets around
| 6000-8000 search queries each month.
|
| BTS: It uses Google Shopping API to get real time results.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Can you give us the link? I m curious.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Unfortunately, there's no direct link. You need a ChatGPT
| Plus subscription. Go to plugin store and search for Aardvark
| AI.
| tehlike wrote:
| Are you monetizing this?
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Yes. It's making around 150/month through affiliate ads. My
| API expenses are around $50. I've listed the plugin for sale
| on Acquire.com as I don't have time to work on it.
| tehlike wrote:
| I searched around and couldn't find it.
| jeswin wrote:
| That AI is transformative for development is not in doubt any
| more. Just this past week, I've been able to build two medium
| sized services (a couple of thousand lines of code in python, a
| language I hadn't used for more than a decade!). What's truly
| impressive is that for the large part, it's better than the code
| I'd have written anyway. Want a nice README.md? Just provide the
| source code that contains routes/cli args/whatever, and it'll
| generate it for you. Want tests? Sure. Developers have never had
| it so easy.
|
| One thing to note is that for code generation, GPT4 runs circles
| around GPT3.5. GPT35 is alright at copying if you provide very
| tight examples, but GPT4 kinda "thinks".
|
| Another piece of information from experience - GPT4 32k contexts
| fail quite often. So if you're generating let's say 10k tokens or
| more (around 30k characters), you'd have to give it a few tries.
| Another, ChatGPT is not the ideal interface for non-trivial work.
| You should use the API directly, or use something like Azure
| OpenAI Chat Playground which lets you use 32k contexts.
|
| Shameless plug: I have this open source app which automates grunt
| work in prompt generation - https://github.com/codespin-
| ai/codespin-cli
| penjelly wrote:
| yep, advent of chatgpt will enable software proliferation before
| anything else, developers have become far more powerful now, they
| can create in more languages and understand complex concepts
| faster. This will only continue until AI is good enough to work
| in an agent-like manner with reliable output, afterwhich, who
| knows what will happen.
| tw061023 wrote:
| I call bullshit. No prompts, no nothing, just the finished
| product and a few claims.
|
| Almost 200 comments and Ctrl-F "repro" is zero.
|
| Also let me be straight: I am full-on believer in AI. But not in
| Midjourney, DALL*E 3 and GPT-4 (or other LLMs) - these are not
| real AI, just VP hype cycle artifacts.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >No prompts, no nothing, just the finished product
|
| Did you read beyond the first tweet?
| tw061023 wrote:
| There are 6 tweets in the thread: announcement, link to the
| game, introduction, graphics, programming, conclusion.
|
| These tweets do not describe the exact and specific steps to
| reproduce the complete result. They only provide rough and
| obvious (for anyone ever interacted with GPT) advice, as is
| par for the course for AI hyping.
|
| This:
|
| > And from there, keep asking for more and more things. And
| every time something goes wrong, clearly explain the mistake
| and let it fix it. Patience!
|
| Is pathetic, and proves exactly nothing.
|
| Yep, I did not do that all the times I tried to actually see
| why GPT4 is so popular, thanks a lot for advice!
| danielbln wrote:
| What is "real" AI to you? And if a lot of people derive real
| value out of this new wave of gen AI, but you don't, does that
| say more about gen AI or more about you?
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Great! Think about all the millions of AI-generated games we can
| now make to complement the millions of other human-made games
| that are released everyday, of which we only manage to play like
| 0.1%!
|
| I can see this being used to maybe accelerate (even more) content
| generation for generic addictive MMOs and gacha games, but
| hopefully not much more.
|
| As if we are not already overflowing with useless, meaningless,
| heartless, superficial content everywhere...
| lofties wrote:
| OK, but tell us how you really feel.
| danielbln wrote:
| What a grumpy cynical take. We are also overflowing with
| useless, heartless, meaningless, superficial book content
| everywhere, doesn't mean Gutenberg should have dropped his
| printing press idea. Cream rises to the top, even if that means
| we have more chaff at the bottom.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Your comparison is completely unrelated. Gutenberg gave
| people the means to distribute their work, not quickly
| generate soulless garbage that looks real on the surface.
|
| Maybe it's just my personal take on gaming, but a good game
| for me is one that is designed with care and with interesting
| human-made content. Something that tells a good story, or
| presents an interesting challenge. Would you read a book
| written by an AI printed with the help of a Gutenberg press?
| If yes, then what is your goal when consuming art?
| psnehanshu wrote:
| There's no use of having such a pessimistic view of the world.
| The 0.1% of games you play are the really good ones. If more
| games are made, that percentage may go down, but in absolute
| terms there will be some games that will be very good to play.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Yes, but sifting through it is really boring and time-
| consuming. That's not the point, though; if this was a tool
| that helped people express themselves better and more
| efficiently, then I'd be totally up for the increased amount
| of output. But what's the gain in giving people the ability
| to quickly generate soulless art and entertainment? Just
| because it's "fast"?
|
| Not all technology is automatically good. LinkedIn sounds
| like a great idea on paper, and look at what it is in
| practice.
| jhoelzel wrote:
| Isn't this largely because there are dozens of angrybird clones
| on github where the ai could learn from?
|
| Do GTA next :D
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Yes it is. Same with flappy birds dude from Tencent. Try to do
| a simple game that is less found on internet, some obscure
| board game and you'll see how ChatGPT fails spectacularly. For
| those who knows Witcher 3 game, try asking ChatGPT to implement
| Gwent board game found within W3 world, or try to implement the
| board game Orlog that is found within the world of Assassin's
| Creed Valhalla game. See those implementations how they go - no
| need to do a GTA complex style one.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I don't see why you'd fail. With a more obscure game, you
| need to elaborate on details some more. E.g. describe the
| specific rule instead of saying "like in Angry Birds".
| jhoelzel wrote:
| Well the fact is that it does not really learn. So yes you
| go ahead and explain in detail what will be forgotten once
| the context exceeds 8k tokens
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Sure, but no one says you have to get it to write you the
| whole game in one session. Divide and conquer! As long as
| you keep the work items small enough to solve them within
| 8k context limit, GPT-4 will be able to help you with all
| of it!
|
| Creating a collection of system prompts to select from,
| as well as plain old _copy-paste_ , are two tools you can
| use to provide the same context to multiple sessions,
| with little to zero effort.
| jhoelzel wrote:
| yes and no. it will forget about your properties and
| structs just the same way it will forget about keys
| design decisions.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Within a session, not unless you stay under context
| window limit. Between sessions, it's up to the user to
| carry over relevant context.
| jhoelzel wrote:
| It would be very interesting to see a post about this
| then please. For me it has definitely been an issue that
| anything meaningful will take multiple files and
| henceforth cap my input for it.
| nutanc wrote:
| Do you think this worked so cleanly because there is a tutorial
| similar to this and its in the dataset?
|
| https://github.com/liabru/matter-js/wiki/Tutorials
| bluescrn wrote:
| I'd be more interested in seeing AI create a game that doesn't
| already exist.
|
| AI auto-plagiarism is a neat party trick, but can it create
| something new?
| haidev wrote:
| +1 for this especially for anything other than CRUD or an
| already exciting game like Angry Birds where the first GitHub
| searches will return several results
| dgb23 wrote:
| Angry Birds itself was sufficiently fresh and well made so
| people liked it.
|
| But it wasn't really original in a true sense.
|
| One of the most appreciated games in nerd culture currently is
| the new Baldur's Gate. It's extremely well made, but not really
| original.
|
| Factorio or The Witness would be games that are both original
| and have been made with great technical and artistic care. But
| how many of these are made in comparison to genre games and
| mashups?
|
| I don't think these tools are necessarily a hindrance to create
| good games. Tools are just tools.
| gumballindie wrote:
| The question is not about a game's freshness. The question is
| wether procedural generators such as chatgpt can generate
| something truly new or is limited to its plagiarised
| parameters - which seems to be the case.
| bluescrn wrote:
| > Angry Birds itself was sufficiently fresh and well made so
| people liked it.
|
| 'Crush The Castle' was an earlier Flash game with the same
| mechanics as Angry Birds. Angry Birds just gave it appealing
| characters and visuals.
| junon wrote:
| > any resemblance is purely coincidental
|
| Err.. no it's not. It's trained on this stuff. It definitely
| knows how those games work after being trained on countless
| articles describing those games in detail.
|
| Cool project nonetheless though!
| qt31415926 wrote:
| FYI, it was sarcasm (the emoji at the end is the giveaway)
| mattkevan wrote:
| I've literally just finished writing a Wordpress plugin with
| ChatGPT.
|
| It took me a few hours to build functionality that would normally
| need a paid plugin, and most of that time was spent working out
| the features. Woocommerce are charging a $50 subscription for
| basically the same thing.
|
| It's fantastic to be able to have an idea for something and
| prototype and iterate it rapidly, without having to struggle with
| the implementation details.
| gowld wrote:
| $50 per what? Month? Year?
|
| https://woo.com/posts/woocommerce-pricing/
|
| "WooCommerce and WordPress are both free, open source
| software."
| KomoD wrote:
| He never said woo itself was paid, he said plugin... Which
| they very much do charge money for.
| mattkevan wrote:
| $49 per year in this instance [0].
|
| Base WooCommerce is free, but a large amount of the
| functionality you need to actually build a working store is
| provided by additional plugins.
|
| Most of these have a freemium model where the features you
| actually need are gated behind a monthly or yearly
| subscription. More than a few of these plugins and the
| monthly price can easily be more than something like
| Shopify, especially when factoring in hosting.
|
| Each of these plugins also feel like they need to justify
| the cost, so often come larded with their own dashboards,
| UIs and other junk, whereas a simple script would often be
| better.
|
| [0] https://woo.com/products/custom-product-tabs-manager/
| ge96 wrote:
| Even if I'm reinventing the wheel I like to create. Idk guess I'm
| a luddite. I wouldn't feel proud/happy that I got a game created
| from a code generator. But it's good it empowers other people to
| make stuff without that wall of learning.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| You can copy Angry Birds with nothing but Google[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=angry+birds+clone
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