to advance new and free technologies around LLMs and generative AI that actually respects these ideals

I am honestly not sure what about MIT-licensed (Deepseek) or Apache 2.0 (Qwen) isn't free enough. Even OpenAI has a OSS model now, if you absolutely insist it being Western-made (it's garbage, though).

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Ok, I didn't expect this to happen.

As this was the one thing that made me boycott the game so far, I wonder if what's left of Civ VII is worth buying, considering I already got Civ VI. Is there anything that's both new and exciting in VII?

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I am starting to develop a serious contempt for devs not releasing the server files when they shut down a game. There is really zero reason not to. You're commercially done with that game, so no harm done.

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What a disappointment...

I couldn't name you a single developer not using AI tools at least in some capacity these days. It's just them accepting reality of software development these days.

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I'm disappointed, I thought they started by replacing the CEO with AI.

AI is less full of crap than pretty much any CEO. It would have been an improvement, really.

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It does to some people. Whether they have a choice or not ? Well, being informed about the inclusion of Ai at least for now will help people make their own ethical choices.

Fair enough. Everyone has their own standards of what they accept and don't. Some people think I am strange, because I boycott games forcing a male character on me, and will continue to do so until the day when there is a halfway equal amount of games with female protagonists out there. I guess there are not a lot of people like me around, because these game still seem to sell very well. :D

that cost of generating those will suddenly be REALLY high

I skimmed that article quick, and while the numbers seem correct, that's because US/Western-made AI models all seemed to have been developed as if resources don't matter at all. Chinese-made models are taking over, among things because they can be trained and run for a fraction of that cost. The top 5 LLMs are all Chinese-made these days and most of them use a fraction of the parameters the Western models use (to the degree you can run them on machines easily within reach even for smaller companies, no AWS needed). Open AI and Anthropic are basically dead in the water, and unless they pull something really amazing out of the hat near year, they will be out of business.
In the end, there is absolutely nothing about that article that made me agree with the "haha, it's going to blow up!" prediction. People will realize that just throwing more computing power at the problem isn't sustainable and develop models cheaper to train and operate. Like China already did.

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The problem isn't just the lack of oversight, it's the ethics of it. People losing jobs due to AI, all the AI generation being trained on the works of others without their consent.

Pretty much every transformative technology destroys jobs and businesses. That's normal. People who feel threatened by said new technology typically turn into haters, thinking they can stop or at least delay it. That has never worked.

Some of the same artists now throwing spite at AI and anyone using it or being even mildly in favor of it, said the exact same thing about Photoshop and why it will kill all art. They're all using it now. And it hasn't killed art. It just made it different.

I wrote a lengthy post a while back why I really don't think that AI will ever replace human art. Or writing. Or coding. But if you guys insist on not buying anything remotely touched by "AI slop", as some of you refer to it, you will soon find yourself unable to buy any games at all anymore. AI will become a tool like Photoshop or a calculator. Everyone will use it at least in some capacity, because the alternative is losing your job or business. You think you can avoid games using AI even now? Think again. I am not aware of any professional software developer not using AI at least for some mundane tasks already. Maybe some are still out there, who knows. But fewer every day. Chances are that the vast majority of games already have at least some AI generated code in them. Just because you can't see it and its less obvious than art doesn't mean it isn't there. And soon you will be unable to identify AI art assets by counting fingers of characters on the images, too. It's hard to enforce "have to declare AI" rules, if not even experts will be able to tell the difference. And we're about 2-3 years away from that.

Technologies always had that tendency of not letting people stop them by hating them or people using them. The more constructive approach would be to talk about how to compensate creators for their works being used for training (just put a tax on the providers of commercial/non-open source models, really). Because in the end it doesn't matter what made a game as long as it's fun to play.

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Caution is always advised when downloading anything from the internet.

While true, this won't help most users one bit. Verifying each and every package in a supply chain is prohibitive for most users, either because they don't possess the necessary tech literacy levels, or simply don't have the time to check fingerprints for each and every package. Not that even that would mean 100% safety, because attackers could also place fingerprints matching their compromised packages while they're in control of the site anyway.

In the end the operators of major, otherwise trustworthy sites really need to treat their resources as what they are: Critical infrastructure.

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Well, they CAN (in theory) ban games with kernel level anti-cheat from their platform. It would be a harsh measure, for sure, but you could argue it with that technology being as intrusive as it is, including for Windows users.

Since most developers can not afford not being on Steam (the ones that left, all came back IIRC), it would be the end of kernel level anti cheat, forcing the devs to make their game cheat resilient instead of slapping lazy bandaid solutions on their games that really don't solve the problem either.

Will they?

Probably not.

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Tbh, I have extremely little faith in the UK government getting anything right, so I wasn't expecting it taking up a fight with American mega-corporations and drawing Trump's ire in the process.

I guess the expectation rather was to send a message to the HQs of said mega-corps, telling them to remain mindful of not creating too much ill will among gamers or risk them doing some more harm to their brand. I am pretty sure they did not expect the reaction being as harsh as it was. Most people are sheep, after all. It takes a bit for so many to show up and sign petitions like this one.

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