I finally got to read this article and the situation is even better/dumber with more context. I didn’t realize the layering at first.
This CEO used AI to avoid paying human lawyers to help him figure out how to avoid paying human game developers.
This asshole needs to get some kind of “Yo Dawg I heard you like AI” anti-award.
Jail would be nice. Someone shouldn’t be able to drag that many people through that much pain without repercussions beyond having to do the thing they were avoiding to begin with. Banning his stupid ass from running any more companies would be a decent outcome.
Haven’t the last few years made it clear that we live in a word without consequences ?
At least for those who most deserve them.
You can have punitive damages too.
hes one of those that fully believe the bs that is AI being hyped.
So, per the article, mr CEO didn’t want to pay the devopers their well earned extra from hitting a sales goal, so the wooden doll asked chatGePeTo how to avoid that. Even Gepeto said that it was going to “be difficult”, but Kim Becile insisted on a plan.
The first step was posting a message on Subanutica’s website to get fans on his side. According to court documents, Kim said the goal of the message was to “secure public support from fans and legal validation of our legitimacy.” He then suggested that ChatGPT write it for him. It achieved the opposite of his intended goal. Fans found the message bizarre and worried about the future of the game. Those fears were compounded when Kim fired the game’s original creators and entered into a legal battle with them.
I’d like to meet a CEO of a similar megacorp that isn’t both a complete fucking idiot AND an absolute psychopath. Surely there has to be one?
Just make me CEO of a company. Surely I can’t do worse than the crop of people they’re currently finding.
The CEO having the direct ability to post to the company website is wild on its own. Everywhere I have ever worked nothing got on the company website unless it went through the marketing people at a minimum. If it was from someone like the CEO it probably went through the legal team as well first.
Krafton is South Korean. How’s the corporate culture in South Korea? Are they as ritual-suicide-for-going-home-before-the-boss-does as Japan?
Basically same problems as Japan. Low birth rate, unrealistic work life balance that’s helped GDP but now both are facing demographic shock that’ll destroy the economy in a generation.
Considering Moon Channel’s video on South Korea (tldw; he explains around 24:40 in the video how strongly neoconfucianism became the state ideology and that still endures to this day - and how highly important hierarchy is), I would say that yes, an underling would NEVER dare go against someone above them.
More likely those in charge of moderation deliberately allowed him to shoot himself in the foot, given the kind of ass he is.
C-level jobs tend to attract a particular type of personality…
First thing I remember hearing was Krafton announcing that Subnautica would be a live service multiplayer game, and then Unknown Worlds coming right in behind saying No the hellfuck it’s not! It’s going to be a cooperative multiplayer game that players host locally, and we’ll be doing an early access campaign with continuing updates after the 1.0 release just like we did with Subnautica 1.
It has spiraled from there.
I don’t know any CEOs, but I’ve known many business owners in my life and I’ve been one. The majority absolutely despise payroll as their biggest expense. They hate their employees, which will be replaced as soon as technologically and financially possible.
This is why there is a huge push for AI, every one of these greedy bastards would be perfectly fine with replacing every single employee. They see it as an improvement.
We as a society in the USA have gotten businesses backwards and put the cart before the horse, in my opinion. Our goal shouldn’t be “shareholders will get the cream of the crop!”, that road simply leads to a small group of people being fabulously wealthy, they see their employees as a middle man that they would rather eliminate.
We can change how corporations work at any time, but we’ll need to get rid of our government first. They won’t legislate themselves out of generational wealth, it’s a fantasy to think otherwise. Never, ever in the history of Earth has the ruling class decided “hmmm I’m starting to feel guilty about rolling around in a pool full of gold Krugerands maybe this is a little much”
100% accurate. I ran a family owned grocery and the owners never shut up about payroll. As soon as I started managing a department it was “you’re overstaffed” every flipping week. I explained my plan to use the extra hours to have the employees trained on how to make more prepared food instead of buying the premade junk. They complained and complained until the end of the second month when my numbers for prepared food in that single month grossed enough to pay for the extra staff need for over half the year.
They still complained I was overstaffed.
No one is dumber than a rich person, except perhaps the people who are actively being screwed by them and who still believe that having money means the rich person must have earned it.
Thanks for articulating it this way for me. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me, at least in my situation. I reported my boss to the directors. He was (still is) planning to cut a guy from our team, claiming he costs too much. But when I did the math, I found that my boss’ personal expenses on food, gas, phone, vehicle, etc. (with increasingly unaccounted-for amounts) are more than that guy’s pay.
My boss isn’t worried about the financial health of the organization, he’s worried he won’t be able to keep spending it on himself if he has to pay the workers.
I’ve seen “the director” lay off employees on a whim whilst buying a new end table for 30,000 USD. Not a typo, I cut the check.
They’ll take all they can, shareholders will let it go as long as the returns are good. In my opinion, a national minimum wage is stupid, but instead workers should be owners.
The profits shouldn’t all go to a table full of vultures.
If many had their way,they would be perfectly fine with slavery
At my first job, I was told I couldn’t be paid more despite the fact that I was getting the same pay as someone in my position was about 20 years prior. The boss? Massive house in the richest neighbourhood with two elephant statues out front that cost $50k each. He spent his days falling asleep in meetings and generally doing less than nothing. All the department heads were disgustingly rich, everyone else could get fucked.
It’s worth pointing out that the company and CEO in question are South Korean.
It’s a global issue that should be tackled, but American flavour capitalsm is definitely spreading through the world.
American flavour capitalsm is definitely spreading through the world.
It already has spread throughout the world. did you sleep through the post ww2 events?
No, but it’s not quite the same as it was in the 1950’s.
Capitalism now, especially outside the US looks very different.
The union the other day told me that our laws didn’t really account for the kinds of layoffs that America brought here.
Our capitalism is just British empire capitalism rebranded.
Never, ever in the history of Earth has the ruling class decided “hmmm I’m starting to feel guilty about rolling around in a pool full of gold Krugerands maybe this is a little much”
Yeah, reformers have never existed.
Note I said “ruling class” as a whole. Of course there are reformers, madmen, vegetarians, philosophers, and so on sprinkled throughout.
that goes without saying, friend. But, feel free to continue to point out the obvious that everyone knows. It’s fun and not droll at all, I dub thee “captain no fucking shit”
Now, please point out what my goal post was, and how it has been changed IN ANY WAY by your contribution. Go into great detail!
It’s fun and not droll at all, I dub thee “captain no fucking shit”
I want a certificate
It’s in the mail, with your high school diploma
Reformers don’t feel guilty. They’re trying to stave off the inevitable guillotines.
reformers are the exception, they don’t represent the class
Oh well yeah, obviously. Those goalposts are obviously not the target now that they got moved all the way over there, you must be right. /s
For the record this was not a dev company CEO. He’s the publisher company CEO, you know, the usual bastards.
I looked up a similar article without a paywall:
“Krafton recently declared itself to be an “AI-first company,” which led Unknown Worlds to issue a statement indicating that Subnautica 2 will not feature generative AI.”
The “AI first” shit is pure gold. I love the instant karma. Why are these CEOs throwing their money, reputation, etc. away on AI? Either they are even stupider than I thought, or the tech bros have some kind of massive blackmail machine they’re using to take over everything and puppet all the CEOs.
Execs in this sort of company are narrative first, facts a distant second. LLMs speak their language, something agreeable that sounds right whether it is or not.
BTW, investors are largely in the same boat, they are investing with having no realistic way to know whether the nice things being said are backed by reality up front. They only know if/when it goes down in a blaze.
Further in gaming, maybe they tank some headliner properties with bad reviews if the mess them up, but it’s possible that most of the ‘sold’ games barely even get played, thanks to Steam hoarding. A lot of businesses can coast on past glory for years and years before things blow up, if at all.
Yes, this is the reason it’s so popular with them. While the baseline ass-kissing of chatGPT makes me vomit, they think it’s the greatest invention in the world and don’t understand how somebody doesn’t love it
Yeah, I don’t get why people like the default tone of those LLMs, they are so grating on me. When I get slop emailed that so greatly amused the person who prompted it, I can’t believe they are eager to share rather than repulsed at how cringey it was.
The LLM will do whatever they tell it to, including making shit up in order to suit the narrative. They’re the ultimate “yes-man” that’s not even human.
Unfortunately for CEO’s, it turns out that yes-men - or yes-machines - aren’t particularly good developers or legal strategists
It’s because in order to become a ceo, you have to be a very specific type of person, and the role also attracts this trait of putting money above all else, which fits perfectly to the role.
Imagine if you invested in a company that helmed a ceo that didn’t try to make more money. Right? You’d be upset as the investor-role that your money wasn’t working for you, and would take the guy out.
This is the common, public opinion.
So the same goes for the CEO: that maximum money be made by being different and taking good chances and staying on top of the technology curve. And OpenAI has been, at least what they, themselves, purport, overwhelmingly successful.
This is all to say that the role of CEO draws a ton of people who think a lot of themselves and their abilities, because they think fake it until you make it is the role, because it largely is: you have to make bets on decisions to lead like that. Which makes CEOs this sort of hollow, fake-person sort of capitalist sociopath.
And them betting on AI-first, then, makes a ton of sense if you’re that specific type of person. Because, unless you have your own skills and opinions, you will be beholden to the dumbest, fakest, skewed statistical other bullshitters in the world.
Right now, the companies making all these mistakes that all of us with actual skills and opinions can clearly see, those are just the companies that don’t matter, that are leeching off the backs of real industries. Like a group of kids all cheating off each other in a test, and suddenly a bunch of them get the same wrong answer.
They’re literally the people, and boards of people who put them there, who have no fucking idea what they’re doing, and in my personal opinion, are very clearly illustrating a weak point with society and humanity and our values and structures across the world. We’ll get past this one, for sure. But there will be more. That is the both the curse and the gift of existence.
The “AI first” shit is pure gold
It’s a pitch to investors. There’s dumb money being flung left and right like chimpanzee poop in the zoo
Same thing happened with blockchain to a lesser extent. I remember my old company forcing us to put blockchain in something, anything, so they could add it to the sales pitches.
Yeah I remember some companies getting their stock price spiking because they said blockchain. It was same like with dotcom bubble in 2000s. You renamed your company from dogshitidea to dogshitidea.com and money was flung at you like ape faeces.
They’re simply stupider than you thought. They buy into hype so fast without really listening to the experts already on the team.
Ehhh 404 still has a bit more to say on
Either they are even stupider than I thought, or the tech bros have some kind of massive blackmail machine they’re using to take over everything and puppet all the CEOs.
I think it’s a little of each.
The ones not being blackmailed are desperately trying to look like they’re impactful enough to blackmail.
I know the type. They list themselves exclusively on job search sites for high earners like “Ladders”, they don’t listen to their employees ever because they’re a subhuman resource, they are first in line at every ceremony or circle jerk meeting, but nowhere to be found when actual work needs done, they spent the last few years bringing up how badly they want to go back to the office full time, and they unironically speak in corporatese even on Christmas. They like sports teams because they’re popular and a good segway, not because they care about the team, they view it as their duty to keep the ranks broken down and working hard in fear of their jobs.
Further proof of how many CEOs are psychopaths.
OP if you’re gonna post a paywalled article, can you at least copy the full text of it into the thread? Most of us cannot read more than two paragraphs of this piece, ensuring that most participants here are talking around the headline only.
Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/yIkXA
Excellent! Thank you!
Try this:
Here’s a video if you wanna passively listen to it while working out to get all the anger at corporations out: https://youtu.be/T8dIXsS9sZA
Block java on the page :p
Dad you’re on the internet again, you know you’re not supposed to be on the internet, because you say dumb things and then people laugh at you.
You missed the part where that site is using client side code to run a ddos attack against whomever.
that’s a different thread
I was about to tell you that archive is doing that but then I realized that you are talking about paywall circumvention.
I mean this thread didn’t mention archive.today, it’s another reply to the top comment that did
When asked about it AI said “No comment.”
Pretty sure AI would’ve said that with a much longer comment, likely 500 words at least
“That is a great response! Would you like me to look at other great responses that have been posted on Lemmy?”
If there was any justice, he would have to pay out double the entire amount (including bonus) to the devs.
Fuck krafton
Fuck Krafton.
This is a lot of what’s happening. LLM companies have convinced the eagerly selfish that LLMs can empower them to do things they currently rely on others for, faster and better, and the early adopters are making very risky decisions that are blowing up in their faces. The current US admin is one of these groups of eagerly selfish, believing LLMs will empower them to be capable of things they simply aren’t, like seizing power and ruling America forever.
My first reaction is: lmao fuck Krafton
My second reaction is: you absolute fucking idiot, what did you expect when you sold to a mega corpo??
To be fair, $500 million is a lot of money.
You can barely blame them for not wanting to turn that down.
Should it pan out as planned, they’d get another quarter of a billion. That’s money enough that if you’re halfway sensible with it, you and your descendants would never have to work again.
Even when evenly divided across the entire company, it’s still a life-changing amount. ($1.6 - 2.3 million per person)
Where was that half billion going to come from? Each of the previous Subnautica games sold around 5 million copies at $30 a pop, so their entire gross revenue was $300 million, tops. And that’s gross revenue, not net profit.
So, where’s that kind of money going to come from? 5 million people bought copies of Subnautica in better economic times than this, you planning on raising the price or selling the game to more people?
Is that not on Krafton for buying Unknown Worlds for $500 million, and then offering an additional $250 million if they achieve particular goals?
If it was unrealistic, then don’t buy the company for that much, and provide a contract with those terms.
From Unknown Worlds’ perspective, it would have been irresponsible not to take the deal, assuming no other conditions.
That Krafton’s CEO got buyer’s remorse isn’t their problem to deal with. Caveat emptor and all that.
If you’re the CEO of a company, like Unknown Worlds, it’s your job to steer the company around outright fraud, like offers to purchase the company for far, far more money than you’d hope to generate with every planned project.
I liked subnautica quite a lot anyway, but I would buy the second one either way just to contribute to them paying the 250.
Its free on PS plus right now. Or was that last month? Either way I have way too much Thalassophobia for that game.
Finally, AI investments paying off
These days chatgpt is pretty much the worst major model, so he couldn’t even get that part right.
Brutal lmao
