We get asked about AI a lot. Whether we’re going to add it to Yarn Spinner, whether we use it ourselves, what we think about it. Fair questions. Time to write it all down.
Yarn Spinner doesn’t use the technology that’s currently being called AI. We don’t have generative AI features in the product, and we don’t use code generation tools to build it, and we don’t accept contributions we know contain generated material. Let’s talk about why.
TL;DR: AI companies make tools for hurting people and we don’t want to support that.
The Past
A little history first. We come from a background that did a decent amount of work with AI and ML (terms we shouldn’t but will use interchangeably because everyone else does).
We gave talks about it for game developers and non-programmers. We wrote little ML bots for games. We did research and academic work. We wrote books about using ML in games, mostly for procedural animation. It was a fun series of techniques to explore, and explore we did.
When we started at university, neural networks and deep learning (the main underlying techniques most AI products use today) were just too slow and hard to work with. By the time we finished our doctorates, that had changed. Tools like TensorFlow made this stuff easier and fun, and the increase in GPU access made training and inference possible for people without Big Tech budgets. For quite a while, we were genuinely excited about the potential.
Then things started to change.
It’s hard to say exactly when. Maybe it was always like this and we just didn’t see it. But by the end of 2020 (a year famous for absolutely nothing world changing whatsoever happening /s) it was clear that the AI we liked was not what the tech companies were interested in. They were increasingly about generative imagery, chatbots writing your material for you, and summaries of art instead of exposure to it. Efforts to mitigate known problems (reinforcing cultural biases, being difficult to make deterministic or explainable) were disparaged and diminished. Researchers and developers who raised concerns were being fired.
Things have only gotten worse since.
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