How much will chatgpt replace our work?

zerohootsoliver

Is chatgpt going to make Godot 4 obsolete due to its lack of support compared to unity and unreal and ability to create a full game? Making Godot a less effective tool due to its incompatibility with chatgpt.

And if Godot is fully supported does that make programming obsolete?

Let's say you wanted to build a camera movement system that has arrows on each side of the screen and moves the camera around as it drags the mouse to the edges of the corner. Would I be better off trying to get this prompt to work in chatgpt and maybe switching to unity or is Godot better with the knowledge I have of Godot? Like how to work with meshes, viewport, cameras, saves and loads with data?

If chatgpt will come in and replace things when will it be a viable tool?

I have been practicing years of development and just want some assurance that I'm not missing out on too much.

xyz

zerohootsoliver GPT is a language model. It doesn't do programming. It's unlikely it will replace anything but pasting boilerplate code you can get on the web anyways. So no much reason to worry about it.

SnapCracklins

zerohootsoliver I'll be honest, I've fed prompts for Godot into ChatGPT out of morbid curiosity and the results are mixed (and don't work usually or spit out completely wrong information). Data sets are trained on a lot of existing knowledge - I even fed one prompt into it and it fed me A LOT of code I found in a Youtube tutorial (that actually worked and had the context needed to make said functionality work properly). So there's some ethical concerns for me as well, knowing this is trained on other peoples' work.

Here's the thing about game programming - it's a lot of moving parts that have to work together and it also requires a lot of critical thinking and creativity to get said moving parts to work. If writing out code was the only thing required for game development, then I'd say yeah, your job is over. But it's not. This tech is young and there's always panic the first time a technology that makes a job potentially easier originates. And if you think we freak out now, what do you think people thought when printing presses were invented? All the manuscript writers started setting type and had more time and therefore opportunities to develop things like.... narratives. Poetry. Mythologies.

We still have factory workers (in fact, factories are being BUILT right now, engineers are in desperate need just about everywhere and the robots did NOT take all our jobs after all), we still have programmers (notwithstanding all of Big Tech's layoffs, which are more tied to bloated overhiring, irresponsible management and venture capital than technology's march.)

Joel Haver said it best though - Technology is a cheat code. The job won't vanish if its ever does - it will just be less minutia. Not as many people have to do hand soldering anymore (though once again, engineer shortage) because a lot of small circuits you can just buy assembled now because technology has made all that stuff smaller and easier to build. So there's still someone builds amps somewhere - they're just focusing more on connecting everything than soldering tiny parts. I see AI facilitating this as a tool - but not a replacement for human judgement. If AI keeps me from having to look up some random Godot functionality I forgot how to build, that saves me in the end to move my development energy to something that really needs it. And let's not pretend that there won't be (or already is,) an entire new subset of consumers of media that will only purchase "human-generated content." It will become a thing, if it isn't already. Trust me.

I think AI, ultimately, will make games easier to develop but decisions like creative direction, architechture, etc - those are things that can't be gleaned from data sets (yet). But I also don't think AI is going to go into killer robots and murder us in a decade. Tech backlash is inevtiable - but it's up to people to make the decisions for what it does.

End unsolicited opinion.

Loxidev

zerohootsoliver AI is a tool. I just use it to tell me how I could do something then I adapt what it gave me into a script and even when AI can just generate games on the spot, someone's gonna need to come up with prompts for creative and new games...

until AI is able to do that and someone creates a machine that just automates the whole process of making the prompts, entering the prompts, and uploading the game somewhere...

oh heck looks like we're gonna be obsolete boys.

zerohootsoliver

xyz Will I be losing out on much efficiency by using search engines instead of chatgpt ? Will tasks like the one I mentioned be any easier or am I better of just doing it myself?

It takes me time to work on solutions like for example working out how to get a mesh displayed on the screen as an overlay. This is probably not going to be any easier to do in chatgpt unless the code for it is already available as a snippet online.

xyz

zerohootsoliver If you have a GPT agent that is specialized for what you're doing and it's up to date with its learning data, it could save you from manually searching for code that handles typical tasks or implements well known algorithms. But you can never fully trust it not to produce bugs or really strange mistakes, because it operates on the level of letters and lexicographical tokens. It doesn't have any "clue" about what it's outputting.

For a piece of reliable code that is frequent on the web (or whatever dataset is used for training) a GPT agent's output will be reliable. Otherwise, you can expect all sorts of funky things. If you want it to solve some actual problems - you may end up disappointed. Remember that something that looks like a genuine novel problem to you, might have been solved and coded a million times before, and GPT agent saw all those solutions in its learning process.

Have in mind that programming is not about typing code. It's about designing system architectures, and to a lesser degree devising custom tailored algorithms.

Lethn

If anything much like with how constantly relying on templates and copy-pasting code relying on chatGPT to do everything for you will make you terrible. Even if the chat sometimes gets things perfectly there will be other times it messes up entirely and if there's developers who rely on the chat too much they're not going to be able to understand even basic programming concepts and fix anything that goes wrong with the code.

Cat

I don't think it would. Even if you are giving it 100% complete learning data that covers every possibilities, in the end you still need human to check it. For something that you need but not that important, I think it can be useful definitely. Like replacing "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" with proper paragraph, I think ChatGPT will kill "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" pretty soon

Erich_L

Not to worry, the more we talk about Godot and give eachother good code examples here on the web, the more accurate future iterations of chat-bots will be.

xyz

I've just had a "conversation" with one of the hyped ai bots. Tried to test how well it can handle some basic first-order logic. Things went south quickly:

Lethn

What's very nice is the opinions among people who actually know about how all this AI works is the same, that it's way overhyped. Unfortunately the normies and boomers seem absolutely determined to stoke fear about it even though they clearly barely understand how it works and more importantly how easy it is to break. It's looking to me like AI has become very much the next scare monger fad and insider trading scam and the attitude isn't going away any time soon. Even when you try to explain things to them and you have actually studied AI they got hostile with you because it's almost like they're emotionally invested in being scared.

DaveTheCoder

Lethn What's very nice is the opinions among people who actually know about how all this AI works is the same, that it's way overhyped.

My viewpoint is that it's a lot like Stupid Pet Tricks.

duane

All jobs based on technology will become obsolete when the technology does. All technology becomes obsolete eventually. So yes, software will replace you... eventually.

In my day, no one expected that. Today, it's pretty much a given that you'll have to keep retraining all of your life to keep up.

Bear in mind that chatgpt was developed before the current "AI" craze. Now, everyone and their brother are dumping money into new language models and I've seen a number of papers claiming to get orders of magnitude more efficiency with newer techniques. AI is likely to grow alarmingly fast, but as I say, you're going to have to keep learning new things anyway, so stay zen and go with the flow.

If you're concerned about whether unity is going to be easier with chatgpt, don't be -- it's already easier (as long as you're willing to pay/search for stock modules) -- that's why it's popular. Adding AI to the mix doesn't really change that.

There's no question that chatgpt is useful, just like wikipedia or reddit are, but it's just another tool at the moment. I haven't been tempted to spend any money on it, and you will have to spend money on it eventually to get the best results. Right now, everyone is scrambling to stake a claim, from artists to lawyers.

My concern is whether there will be useful, free (as in freedom) large language models in the future, when they become mandatory for doing productive work. I'm not sure that the open source model will extend to giant datasets that probably infringe on somebody's copyright. Big companies can buy their way out of that, but not free developers. Of course, free software nuts like me will always be out there tinkering, but maybe AI will make our efforts pointless.

If you're currently making money with the games you build in godot, you want to consider how AI will affect that -- there may be a huge boom of AI-generated games soon that makes it really hard for a small developer to get noticed. But, then again, it's already pretty hard. On the other hand, if you're mostly having fun with godot, just keep doing so.

DaveTheCoder

duane you will have to spend money on it eventually to get the best results

Unless some benevolent organization puts funding into providing an equivalent, free, open-source version of it. In an interview, Elon Musk said he was considering that. This article provides some history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

xyz

DaveTheCoder open-source version of it

Source code is almost irrelevant here. Anyone can implement a gpt equivalent network. The problem is in millions of moneys needed to perpetually scoop for data to feed it, and more millions to pay humans to "teach" it (through laborious one-on-one interactions) to look like its output is "natural" and "expected". This becomes obvious if you listen to any interview with Altman or Sutskever and try to pay attention on what is being said between the lines.

DaveTheCoder

The openness applies to those aspects as well as the source code. You can't trust the AI if you don't know where the data is coming from, or how the algorithms are using the data.

Erich_L

I wish chat gtp could replace me right about now.

DaveTheCoder

Erich_L I wish chat gtp could replace me right about now.

That's the next step for AI.

DJM

Erich_L u r irreplaceable

davek

In the long run, an open-source engine like Godot should win out over a closed-source engine like Unity, since the AI can only read the source for one.

However for the near future the AI cant replace a programmer, it's just going to create small garbage games in an already-flooded market.

I'd be FAR more worried as an artist right now.

duane

DJM
Now someone needs to make a sock puppet account with Erich_L_Replacement as the handle. 😉

xyz

duane Wasn't @cybereality mentioning installing a gpt bot onto the forum? If it ever happens I propose we give it that name 😆