Comment on World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit
hisao@ani.social 1 day agoI don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.
Free advertising for their product, free efforts to keep the fandom alive. Don’t downplay marketing - marketing is king. Marketing drives the money. Even when it’s unintentional. This is pure speculation, but in my opinion most private server players would never have bought a subscription if they hadn’t first gotten hooked by playing for free on pservers for a long time. And this is a game where people who enjoy it keep coming back for decades. I’d be very interested to see statistics on “how many players who started on free pservers eventually bought a subscription.” Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story - it’s especially common among people from the third world, Eastern Europe, and so on. Without pservers, WoW might never have become as popular as it is today, and it could have been long dead by now.
They have the resources to be more unethical than you.
What does this even mean in context of deregulation? If nobody has to pay for lawsuits because there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money.
Specifically training it on content without permission?
Under current legal framework, it probably should be illegal, because it’s unfair and inconsistent that derivative works by people are illegal when derivative works by AI are not. But under my perfect legal framework, it all should be legal, and avoiding training on works of people who ask not to, should be a choice not enforced legally, which should be transparently communicated and affect which models people prefer to use or not to use.
AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs,
Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources. And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.
The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool.
Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine. It might not be the game you actually wanted though, if you care about any details at all. Because it’s all in the details to the lowest level, to the level how exactly strokes are made, how colors are blended, etc, and when you start going into the details you need a granular model that you can use step by step, interwined with your manual work, manual sketching, etc - just like it works in programming now. Just like it programming some details and intricacies are pointless trying to describe in words because it’s easier and faster just to write few lines of code yourself, do some strokes yourself, etc.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I think your anecdotal evidence is an outlier. Blizzard used to publish subscriber counts until it started dipping after wrath. They’ve subsequently never publicly posted sub counts again. I don’t know if this means it’s never been as high again, but given how many more options people have these days, I wouldn’t be surprised. Which means sub counts were never as high as they were before private servers took off.
Also, blizzard has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do what it believes will maximize profits, and as a result they’ve chosen to shut down Turtle WoW.
It’s the entire basis for the push for deregulation. You can grift from all the people you have resources to grift, and corpos can grift from all the people they have resources to grift. A completely free market is not a level playing field. The rich get richer. Regulations are how common folk maintain a competitive landscape.
So we should just get rid of all civil lawsuits then, that would create a completely fair playing field? Come on now…
Lol or lack thereof?
Why do you think corpos somehow don’t know how to take advantage of DeepSeek, but the little guys do? Why do you believe the poor have an advantage in that situation? Someone makes a 1000x breakthrough and everyone can use it. Great, before: it was your 1 unit of work vs OpenAI’s 1000, an absolute difference of 999; after: it’s your 1000 vs 1,000,000, an absolute difference of 999,000. They run you out of business even faster! The rich get richer!
You understand that if a model doesn’t expose the training set and training algorithm, there’s no way to know if it has been maliciously trained, right? Their use of the terms “open source” are misnomers. They could be effectively backdoored and there’s no way to know.
That’s not the question at hand. If you can make a tool like that ethically, I’m all for it. But 1) they haven’t demonstrated they can do so ethically, and 2) there’s nothing to indicate that their goal is to create a tool to enable more artists and engineers.
Their stated goal is to completely eliminate as many jobs as possible. Combined with corporate ownership of fusion research, AI does not currently represent any promise of a democratization of creation. It is the water in a Mad Max movie. We
It’s clear you haven’t thought through your positions because you’re just repeating the same trickle-down rhetoric the right has been using to dismantle the US for the last 50 years, all while believing yourself to be anti-corpo. But we’ve fully strayed from the original topic at this point, so i think it’s time we called it. Hope you get some time to seriously re-evaluate your judgments here, cheers.