feltmonkey

I've never played any of them. Do I start with 1+2 or jump straight to 3+4?

They're both as good as each other in my opinion. There is no reason to play 1+2 first except if you look at the soundtrack and desperately want to hear those songs while your skate man scrapes his face along the tarmac. If you have Game Pass, just go straight to 3+4 I would say. You effectively already own it.

Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3+4 is an amazing day 1 giveaway. It's so good, even if they have changed the structure of THPS 4 quite a bit.

Felt is a spectacular painter, and I always felt anything requiring huge amounts of dexterity and craft might be safe for a long time, but AI accelerated robotics isn't far from ruining even non-digital creative areas now.

First of all, thank you, that's very kind of you to say. I think it will be a while before mini-painting is automated, but it probably will be possible eventually with some form of robotics. It does effect my work a bit too, already, in that people assume that photos of minis are AI for some reason. There have been accusations of photos being touched-up with Photoshop for years, but recently I've seen someone very confidently proclaim that images of miniatures I've seen in the flesh (plastic?) were AI because the paintjob wasn't possible, as the artist had painted bags under the eyes. Also, earlier this year someone on Instagram was posting AI images of models in amongst their actual models they had painted, without flagging them as AI, presumably to bulk out their Instagram feed and satisfy the relentless hunger for new content that the algorithms create.

I've started playing Split Fiction with my son and I'd just like to echo feltmonkey's impressions in that it's absolutely fantastic. It's taken all the best bits of It Takes Two, thrown away the bad bits (excessively long cut-scenes, hateful characters) and ramped everything up to 11. The first proper level, a madcap sci-fi chase through a kind of flying traffic jam, with one player constantly changing gravity and the other hurling objects around, is the kind of OTT set-piece that most games would build up to as a climax; here it's the intro. Then about an hour later we are both trying to work out how to help one sausage put mustard on another sausage. It's just an incredibly well-executed, confident co-op game with what feels like a Mario-style overabundance of ideas and we are absolutely loving what we've seen so far.

Wait until you get to the last level. 😁

I think the problem is that we are at the beginning of a technology that could be transformative, but potentially in either a positive or a negative way, or most likely both. This could be the first step towards an Iain M Banks utopia where AI has created a post-scarcity world in which humans are free to persue whatever dreams they want to, and super-intelligent and utterly fair AIs run all the important stuff for us. Even if that is the path we luck onto though, we've probably got 500 years of utter pain and horror to get there.

The potential of AI to turbo-charge advances in medicine and science is undeniable. Cav has given some examples from his own personal experience. The speeding-up of menial tasks will open incredible possibilities. As another example, remember Elizabeth Holmes, who was jailed for fraud, for raising funds for a fictional machine that could diagnose any illness in minutes from a single drop of blood? That machine she imagined is almost possible now. In a few years it will exist. In ten years there will be one in every hospital.

However, the potentially catastrophic effects on the creative industries is equally undeniable. Every time a company makes a bit of AI art instead of paying an actual artist, the world gets a little bit worse. The fact that the AI art companies used existing artists' work to "train" their AI (as raw materials to steal from if they're honest) is an extra bitter pill. AI could obliterate every creative industry. Not because it is of comparable quality, but because it is cheap and easy shit for lazy people with terrible taste who don't care who they hurt.

Music is already done. There's a reason why a huge amount of "new" pop music sounds so formulaic and unimaginative. Much of the pop music we hear has been effectively written by AI for years now. Music is essentially a "solved" artform. There are only so many notes, and we know why certain combinations of notes, certain keys, chords, sequences elicit particular feelings. So there are now algorithms and programs to make pop songs. There are people who sit at laptops and churn them out and sell them on to the artists and producers. We can do it ourselves now - the programs are available to the masses, and they will even write you the lyrics. I've had a go on a program that allowed you to type "I want a country song about Mario Kart" and in five minutes it would spit out something largely complete. Utterly shit and soulless, but complete.

AI bros will steal from all kinds of artists and condemn us to an utterly uncreative world if left unchecked. I personally think AI should be banned from being used in any creative industry, and I don't care if that is impractical. I would rejoice if every AI art and music company was forced to pay every single artist they stole from in training their machines, leaving that side of the AI industry decimated and their CEOs destitute. Let them suffer the fate they are condemning artists to.

All this doesn't even touch on the problem of AI deep fakes. We can't trust an image, a video, or a voice recording anymore. AI videos could be used to frame people for anything. Even if it was later proved to be fake it would likely be too late to fix in this post-truth world. Conversely, anyone could get away with crimes by claiming that the evidence was AI. When video emerged of the Premier League referee David Coote talking about how much he hated Jurgen Klopp, many people said that he should just claim that the video was AI. I wonder if he could have got away with it if he had. A lot of people seem quite bad at recognising even quite obvious AI images. Some poor saps seem to believe that some kid in Africa has been making massive sculptures out of plastic bottles, or that Noah's Ark has been excavated on top of a mountain. Or perhaps the people who seem to believe this are all AI bots too. Perhaps all of you guys are. That would be embarrassing.