They drew black boxes over the text. The text is still underneath. On OCR'd scanned documents, the text you'd copy is actually stored in metadata and just linked by position to the image.
Anyway, if you click on a "redaction", you're clicking on the box and can't select the text underneath, but if you just highlight the text around it, you can copy all the original text.
But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist. Now they're automated off the back of somebody else's work. And here we have an admission, but how many artists are being sidestepped in major games developers now? It won't be long before the EAs and Ubisofts of the world fire theirs. Then it'll be developers. Then it'll just be a committee of dolphins picking balls to feed into a black box that pumps out games.
It doesn't seem strange that an industry award protects the workers in the industry. I agree, it seems harsh, but remember this is just a shiny award. It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria.
> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist.
Is it really though? After all it's just maybe a junior artist.
I've had to work with some form of asset pipeline for the past ten years. The past six in an actual game though not AAA. In all these years, devs have had the privilege of picking placeholders when the actual asset is not yet available. Sometimes, we just lift it off Google Images. Sometimes we pick a random sprite/image in our pre-existing collection. The important part is to not let the placeholder end up in the "finished" product.
> It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria.
True and I'm really not too fond of GenAI myself but I can't be arsed to raise a fuss over Sandfall's admission here. As I said above, the line for me is to not let GenAI assets end up in the finished product.
> It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria
And up to us to decide whether The Indie Game Awards has impaired their credibility by choosing such a ridiculous criterion.
Do you think AAA game development teams pass on AI despite the fact that it produces better results at a fraction of the cost. I think not. Why would you cripple Indie developers by imposing such a standard on indie developers?
It seems completely out of touch with what's going on in the world of software development.
> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist.
This argument in this industry is problematic. The entire purpose of computers is to automate processes that are labor intensive. Along the way, the automation process went from doing what was literally impossible with human labor to capturing ever deeper levels of skill of the practitioners. Contrast early computer graphics, which involved intensive human intervention, to modern tools. Since HN almost certainly has more developers than graphics artists, contrast early computer programming (where programmers didn't even have the assistance of assemblers and where they needed a deep knowledge of the computer architecture) to modern computer programming (high level languages, with libraries abstracting away most of the algorithmic complexity).
I don't know what the future of indie development looks like. In a way, indie development that uses third-party tools that captures the skills of developers and graphics artists traditionally found in major studios doesn't feel very indie. On the other hand, they are already doing that through the use of game engines and graphics design/modelling software. But I do know that a segment of the industry that utterly ignores those tools will be quickly left behind.
It's bad because it takes someone's job? However, that job was mundane petty work that seniors didn't want to bother with. Were cars terrible for taking all of those stableboy jobs? Is Excel or data engineering terrible for the obliteration of data entry and low level bookkeeping jobs? Or is it not just a slippery slope argument, when what's happening is IMO evolution of tech? IMO People will adapt. While it's up to any event organizers to decide their rules, AI witch-hunts are a Luddite response. AI/LLM can be major tools in the belt of indies to dethrone AAA. I'd like to be clear that I'm arguing in favor of tooling such as the example of placeholder usage and a pipeline to remove it. I wouldn't defend a scumbag leveraging AI to ripoff another game, artist, or dev. It just seems like the lines are being blurred to justify AI witchhunts.
The game industry, especially AAA, is actually having major identity crisis right now as technology evolves and jobs adapt around the new tool of AI/LLMs. The game awards (not indie) should demonstrate this dolphin committee you fear already exists because the limiting factor in all industries are major resources: time, capital, experience. AI/LLMs will enable far more high skill work to be accomplished with less experience, time, and possibly capital (sidestepping ethics/practicality of data centers).
Dark conspiracy... Or collective acknowledgement of the harm of being constantly online has done to a generation of young people. How it amplifies abuse, entrenches deeply negative tribes.
It's not stupid —at a national future-of-society level— to want to do something about this. I agree, it's possible to overreach and just get it wrong, but doing nothing is worse.
Giving Jack Ryan as a example of a sigint analyst is vastly sensationalist for what is essentially —for the non-fictonal majority doing it— an office job, only with security clearance and real world implications.
That aspect wasn't my intent, but in the Red October movie for example, he states that his job is "sitting in an office and writing books", and the story revolves around him doing things that are explicitly not his job, and him confronting how "green" he is for all the field work of the latter half.
I was specifically thinking of that line about sitting in an office writing books, analyzing, strategizing, justifying and criticizing, all of which are crucial guides to action -- hardly something you could describe as "just a tech job", for example.
Do you think the Pfizer CEO lets their kids have unlimited Viagra? Or the Anheuser-Busch CEO's kids have unlimited Bud Light? I don't think this is the gotcha it's painted as.
The hypocrisy is not because they are limiting access to their kids.
It is because they are limiting access to their kids, while actively creating and executing algorithms to increase user engagement even to the point of making people addictive and dependent on their platforms.
And the reason is that those products are (rightly) regulated. Would there be beer marketed to kids if it were legal? Would it be fine if it were the parents' sole responsibility to ensure their kids weren't drinking beer, including at school, at friends' homes where the parents may have different rules, etc., absent a general social consensus that kids shouldn't have beer?
This is anecdotal evidence for the emerging consensus that social media is bad for you and especially for kids. There's a legitimate question whether the people pushing these products know this and don't care or actively suppress evidence.
Tobacco companies famously did this and it caused a lot of harm. It's about that more than just a chance for a cheap shot "hypocrisy" accusation.
I think social media has clear positive and negative aspects. That makes it closer to food than cigarettes in my mind.
We can all immediately conjure up images where food or social media has brought something positive into our lives.
News.yc is something I visit almost every day and it has added value to my life, including introducing me to a few people I’ve met in real life and to interesting tech.
Equally, we can all pretty readily conjure up images where excess food or social media has harmed people.
Indeed, it's still not exactly clear what the right place of social media in society is. Perhaps we could even get rid of some of its pernicious aspects without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Even food is not unregulated! And not because too much food is bad for you, but because bad food can harm you.
A disanalogy with food is that there are natural limits to how much food you can/want to eat at one time. Another is that food is necessary for life. Neither is true of social media.
It’s hypocrisy insofar as neither Viagra nor Bud Light has a child demographic in their market. The CEOs of those companies don’t let their kids have them because they’re not for kids; YouTube designates at least some its product as for kids.
(In this way, it would be hypocrisy if Anheuser-Busch’s executive suite were all teetotalers.)
It’s always some other persons poor kid in their imagination with bad parents.
Basically the only solutions I see suggested is some world where all tech companies in multiple countries band together to ban kid/teens from the internet or that government will start aggressively controlling access to the internet.
A big movement to have better education on parenting with tech and evolving via cultural changes is hard. Writing a law sounds simple.
So the past was shitty too? You don't care? Okay, well some of us do.
Wealth grants power. Opinions from money matter gain greater reach and traction, and these very quickly turn into influence and power. The current US administration clearly shows how wielding power for your own ends gives you money. It's a toxic cycle that rewards grift instead of work.
You don't care, but this is a serious problem for society because it's a negative aspiration. Don't be good, don't try hard, just be rich or die a peasant.
But the peasants have limited appetites for gruel and work when all they see is grift and abuse. They revolted until old money stopped stopped demanding fealty. Will the new masters learn before we peasants eat the rich?
This has been happening for a very long time. The current administration is just worse and/or more blatant about it than previous ones.
So I agree with your sarcasm and I also agree with the parent comment that the current admin is doing a better job "clearly showing" how this works to everyone.
You say blatant, I say transparent. In terms of scale there is no difference, but the honesty is refreshing.
The only problem is it's causing people to focus on the wrong thing (us vs them, D vs R) instead of the oligarchs who continue to line their pockets (and by the way do not get re-elected every 4 years).
Had one anyway, but yes, now I have to use it for cat memes on Imgur. It's plumbed into the router so some websites automatically get routed through the VPN, regardless of device.
Anyway, if you click on a "redaction", you're clicking on the box and can't select the text underneath, but if you just highlight the text around it, you can copy all the original text.
It's a bizarre oversight.
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