[HN Gopher] Copying Angry Birds with nothing but AI
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       Copying Angry Birds with nothing but AI
        
       Author : hackerbeat
       Score  : 210 points
       Date   : 2023-10-31 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | NKosmatos wrote:
       | We're living in interesting times, especially from AI, ML and
       | coding point of view. The possibilities seem endless and the
       | reach of such tools is going to lead to an "explosion" of
       | creativity.
        
         | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
         | I would suggest that the past is likely a good guide in this
         | case. Personal Computers, easier languages, HTML, World Wide
         | Web did not really make non-creative people into creative
         | people. I can really speak for myself. I can copy some things,
         | but I rarely can glue and remix them together in a way that
         | make them desirable. Personally, this is the same way I see the
         | AI. There is potential here sure, but I do not think 2 million
         | angry bird clones is an actual threat to a creative. Now, it
         | will hurt low effort crap, but there is so much low effort crap
         | out there already..
        
           | hluska wrote:
           | I agree with you with one small reservation. This tech is an
           | excellent way to get quick prototypes out. Most people will
           | never go beyond that so we will see a lot more crap. But for
           | the people that do, being able to prototype something quickly
           | could result in some noticeably new ideas.
        
         | conductr wrote:
         | It is interesting to watch. Especially as an arch in "my life
         | with technology", this time around I'm a bystander watching
         | what people can do with it and it is impressive. My tinkering
         | as not been as fruitful. I feel like my grandparents that never
         | caught on to Google-fu but, just like my grandparents, I'm ok
         | with it.
        
       | franze wrote:
       | After seeing my son rage-tapping a loading spinner I / GPT coded
       | this game on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
       | 
       | https://spinner.franzai.com/
       | 
       | Think it could be an interesting UX pattern. Having interactive
       | loading (spinner) games that at least give is feedback that our
       | actions (even in between things) have impact.
        
         | mhitza wrote:
         | It is an interesting approach to loading screens, and
         | personally I would have expected way more games to use such a
         | feature. Not AAAs, of course, but indie games.
         | 
         | I clearly recalled having read the news about the patent of
         | this having expired a while ago, and from a quick search, a
         | while ago, has been 8 years ago
         | https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/loading-screen-game-pa...
        
           | dave84 wrote:
           | I remember playing Galaga while Tekken loaded on the PS1.
        
         | feirlane wrote:
         | For what is worth, my partner and I just had a good laugh
         | playing this with four hands and pushing it over 25. Really fun
         | fidget, thanks for sharing!
        
         | GalaxyNova wrote:
         | I got it to level 7
        
       | danielvaughn wrote:
       | This is more interesting than the deluge of posts that say "I
       | created an iOS app in 30 minutes using ChatGPT!" Which doesn't
       | mean much because it could've done nothing more than create a
       | simple hello world.
       | 
       | This one at least shows the finished product, which is indeed
       | pretty impressive.
       | 
       | Some details I'd need to know are (a) how long did it take, (b)
       | how many prompts, (c) how many course-corrections were required,
       | and (d) how competent this individual was with the technologies
       | in question.
       | 
       | I've personally found ChatGPT extremely empowering in lots of
       | scenarios, but code generation was not among them.
        
         | cryptoz wrote:
         | I've been playing with ChatGPT code generation to make entire
         | sites with flask, python, html+js+css, backed with SQLite db
         | and it's amazing. I've had it write like 5k lines that are all
         | live in prod and working (not much traffic lol but still).
         | 
         | A huge huge factor is knowing the limitations and getting
         | better at prompting. And identifying likely hallucinations and
         | asking for risks etc.
         | 
         | I've found it best with tech I don't know well (I'm an android
         | dev using it to make websites, something I haven't done myself
         | in like 15 years).
         | 
         | Most of the coolest stuff for me is help with sysadmin and
         | running the server. The ability to debug gunicorn errors is
         | great.
         | 
         | I do have to modify the code it outputs as the project grows
         | and it loses context, but honestly the context limits are the
         | biggest hurdle for bigger projects and those will be lifted
         | soon.
         | 
         | Edit: Most recent site I made with like 95% code from ChatGPT
         | is https://cosmictrip.space/ which generates prompts with GPT-4
         | that are then used to generate space images with DALL-E.
         | 
         | It's a simple site but there is a secret adventure game I'm
         | working on (GPT+Dall-E) that is open-ended image+text AI-driven
         | game. I'm hoping to launch before Nov 6 with DALL-E 3 API
         | (hopefully...!). The adventure game is also written like 95%+
         | by ChatGPT.
         | 
         | I've had such great success with it coding that I'm using the
         | GPT-4 API with an agent I'm making (everyone is huh). I have
         | function calling hooked up to generate structured subtasks that
         | the agent can then write the code for, and support for files to
         | include context, chat with your code, etc. It's not ready to
         | show but the GPT-4 code generation abilities are really
         | incredible - but you have to be experienced at prompting. Your
         | first prompts aren't likely to be great, which is why I'm
         | hoping my agent can have success. The idea of the agent I'm
         | writing is a Jira/kanban style board where you have AI coders
         | assigned to tasks that you can approve and modify etc. The
         | tickets should automatically move across the columns as the AI
         | checks the work etc.
        
           | maxwelljoslyn wrote:
           | +1 for its suitability in helping with systems
           | administration.
           | 
           | One responsibility at my current job is administering a
           | Windows server and trying to get it to do things that are
           | easy on a Unix -- that should be easy anywhere -- but, on
           | Windows, seem to inevitably degrade into nightmares. ChadGPT
           | has given me huge amounts of blessed ammo to shoot at the
           | nightmares, and there's no way I could do that portion of the
           | job in a feasible time frame without it.
        
           | isoprophlex wrote:
           | I feel that trapping your AI agents in a kanban board isn't
           | going to do your survival chances a lot of good when the
           | robot apocalypse inevitably comes for us meatbags.
        
             | meiraleal wrote:
             | Parents know what's better for they kids, they will
             | understand
        
           | abdullahkhalids wrote:
           | Is it at all possible for you (or someone reading who has
           | done something similar) to share their chat?
           | 
           | Reading good prompting is probably one of the better ways of
           | learning how to do it.
        
             | cryptoz wrote:
             | That is a great point and I will definitely share my
             | prompting experience and some real prompts in a blog post
             | this week. I'll come back here and link to it when ready.
        
           | croes wrote:
           | How much of these 95% is boilerplate code?
        
             | cryptoz wrote:
             | Some for sure but all the algorithms (simple ones) and such
             | is also done successfully by ChatGPT.
        
         | strombofulous wrote:
         | https://twitter.com/javilopen/status/1719363669685916095 is
         | relevant
         | 
         | > Although the game is just 600 lines of which I haven't
         | written ANY, [coding the game] was the most challenging part
         | 
         | Not quite hello world, but not too much more difficult than a
         | shopping list. The really impressive thing to me is you can
         | make angry birds with just 600 loc (and a couple libraries)
        
           | samspenc wrote:
           | My guess is that the main parts of the game are physics
           | (collisions etc) and the scoring system, so that part wasn't
           | too surprising to me.
           | 
           | I was pleasantly surprised at the visual quality, I knew
           | Midjourney could produce quality graphics assets, but I guess
           | I didn't realize how easy it was to pull into a game.
        
         | croes wrote:
         | There are lots of open source Angry bird clones, so it's not
         | quite as impressive as it seems.
         | 
         | Programming a new game without dozens of existing templates
         | would be a better litmus test.
        
           | fauria wrote:
           | Sumplete would be a good example: https://sumplete.com/
        
       | bigfishrunning wrote:
       | So AI made a cheap copy of something people made...Can it do
       | anything else?
        
         | solardev wrote:
         | It's apparently pretty good at annoying people on HN who like
         | to downplay its every achievement
        
           | WoodenChair wrote:
           | > It's apparently pretty good at annoying people on HN who
           | like to downplay its every achievement
           | 
           | It's not really "its" achievement. There are many open source
           | repositories of Flappy Bird that it was trained on and there
           | are many brilliant engineers at Google and OpenAI who have
           | worked on LLM technology. It is their achievement if
           | anything. It is a product. A product of others' achievement.
           | You don't say Excel had an achievement when it calculates a
           | good formula for you? Do you say a neural network that
           | produces great speech to text had an achievement? Or do say
           | the people who developed it did.
        
             | og_kalu wrote:
             | >Do you say a neural network that produces great speech to
             | text had an achievement? Or do say the people who developed
             | it did.
             | 
             | Sure Why not? The engineers at google and open ai or
             | wherever else trained the models but they didn't teach it
             | how to do anything it does because they don't know how to
             | teach it to do anything it does. So yeah the achievement is
             | on the neural network.
             | 
             | Many people gave the likes of alpha go achievement on super
             | human Go play.
        
               | throw555chip wrote:
               | > So yeah the achievement is on the neural network.
               | 
               | It is? OK, tell them to completely clear the model of any
               | angry bird original and clone code, data and assets that
               | it scarfed from the Internet.
               | 
               | It can retain scarfed definitions of angry and bird as
               | well as scarfed information on making a 2D video game.
               | 
               | Then tell the model to create the game and see what if
               | anything it comes up with.
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | In terms of the code, I don't think it would be hard to
               | create an Angry Bird clone of this quality using a GPT-4
               | scale model that had somehow had all knowledge of Angry
               | Birds excluded from it.
               | 
               | Most of the Angry Birds mechanics in this demo come from
               | the underlying Matter 2D library. Relevant demo here:
               | https://brm.io/matter-js/demo/#slingshot
               | 
               | Honestly, that's most of the code part accounted for.
               | 
               | The bigger question is the graphical assets. The
               | developer shared their prompts for those here:
               | https://twitter.com/javilopen/status/1719363587351740711
               | 
               | Some of them make no mention of Angry Birds - "Wooden
               | box. Large skeleton bone. Item assets sprites. White
               | background. In-game sprites" - but others do: "Item
               | assets sprites. Wooden planks. White background. In-game
               | sprites. Similar to Angry Birds style"
               | 
               | My hunch is that a skilled image prompter could still get
               | to results that were right for this particular demo even
               | with a model that had not seen Angry Birds assets before.
        
         | breakfastduck wrote:
         | Come on... I'm fairly cynical when it comes to AI but someone
         | building a pretty complete game from scratch entirely using AI
         | to generate the code and assets is a little beyond it 'making a
         | cheap copy of something else'.
        
           | raytopia wrote:
           | I mean while impressive all the art assets were very clearly
           | knockoffs of Angry Bird's art.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | Prob needed to a ton of glue code to have it at quality
        
       | mhitza wrote:
       | How do I read the Twitter thread if I don't have an account?
        
         | papercrane wrote:
         | You should be able to replace twitter.com with nitter.net
         | 
         | https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363262179938401
        
         | vuln wrote:
         | The same way you deal with pay walled news articles. Sign up,
         | check archives/cache, or move on.
        
       | efitz wrote:
       | This was amazing work. I consistently underestimate what
       | generative AI can do.
       | 
       | Also: I think you just scared the daylights out of a lot of
       | mobile game developers and inspired many more.
        
         | Dudester230602 wrote:
         | Mobile games are a mix of half-arsed Steam game ports, polished
         | ad-budget-driven exploitation machines and trash. I think the
         | trash producers will be excited, not scared. The other two
         | kinds won't care.
        
       | xwdv wrote:
       | Everyone will think this impressive, but they're not game
       | developers.
       | 
       | You could literally make all this in probably 24 hours and not
       | spend any time mucking around with prompts.
       | 
       | Like what are we even seeing here? Basically a tech demo of a
       | physics engine, a little UI interaction for throwing a collidable
       | entity into other entities, and some code for setting up a level?
       | 
       | Show me the maintenance, adding new features, bug fixing, cross
       | platform compatibility, shaders, networking code, sound, etc.
        
         | Veuxdo wrote:
         | And, most importantly, marketing.
        
         | dan-g wrote:
         | You could argue then that this reduces the barrier to entry for
         | people to become game developers.
         | 
         | Isn't everything you just listed (physics engine, UI, collide
         | entities) how you make a simple game? It doesn't matter that it
         | doesn't have networking code, shaders, or sound. Those things
         | can be added later.
         | 
         | I don't think it's productive to gatekeep who is and isn't a
         | game developer. They developed a game, that makes them a game
         | developer--it doesn't matter how they got there.
        
           | raytopia wrote:
           | I'm not sure how this reduces the barrier to game
           | developement. There are already lots of free assets and game
           | engines designed for making arcade games that are a lot
           | easier then say Unity or Unreal. Like
           | https://arcade.makecode.com/ or https://microstudio.dev/ or
           | https://scratch.mit.edu/. And if you don't want to make
           | arcade games there are other tools like RPG Maker, RenPy,
           | GDevelop, and many more each of which are much easier to use
           | then this AI pipeline (not to say it isn't impressive you can
           | do this with AI though) and will lead to better outcomes of
           | actually understanding game development.
        
             | gowld wrote:
             | All of those things require me to write code, in an
             | annoying, slow, hard to debug click-drag format. I'd rather
             | the AI write the code for me based on my natural language
             | description of what I want.
        
           | xwdv wrote:
           | I think some gatekeeping is warranted. If I stitch a wound it
           | doesn't suddenly mean I'm a doctor.
           | 
           | Similarly, using AI to develop a game makes you as much of a
           | game developer as someone who hires someone to make a game
           | for them. And some development studios are basically that,
           | people hiring developers to make games. But AI can't compete
           | well with that.
           | 
           | It's like coming up with a new fusion power plant, but it
           | takes more energy to run than what it produces. Inspiring,
           | but useless.
        
             | gowld wrote:
             | Angry Pumpkins did not exist. Now it does. In time for
             | Halloween. You can't refute that.
             | 
             | Using a computer to write a letter makes you as much of a
             | writer as someone how hites someone to write a letter for
             | you. And some writers are basically that, hiring scribes to
             | write for them. Computer can't compete well with that.
             | 
             | Except it does.
        
               | gardenhedge wrote:
               | Did I miss the link to download the app or something?
               | Where does it exist?
        
               | GaggiX wrote:
               | https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html (it's
               | in the second tweet)
        
               | gardenhedge wrote:
               | Oh, I don't have a twitter account so only see the linked
               | tweet
        
               | GaggiX wrote:
               | I used the nitter link someone linked in the HN comment
               | section.
        
         | pphysch wrote:
         | Yeah the killer feature here is being able to _generate_
         | premium-looking game assets without any art team or funding.
         | That 's always been the tough part of creating even simple
         | games for solo programmers. The rest is whatever.
        
         | l33t7332273 wrote:
         | >ou could literally make all this in probably 24 hours and not
         | spend any time mucking around with prompts.
         | 
         | I couldn't make that art in 24 days.
         | 
         | The big thing about the state of current AI isn't that it does
         | a bunch of things, it's that it drastically increases the
         | number of people who can do things.
         | 
         | That is, I could not make this game in a day before AI. With
         | it, maybe I could. I am far from unique.
        
           | gowld wrote:
           | And it drastically increases the number of things a person
           | can do.
        
           | rchaud wrote:
           | > it's that it drastically increases the number of people who
           | can do things.
           | 
           | Giving the whole world blogspot.com 20 years ago didn't
           | measurably improve the internet, it just added a few more
           | winners and a gigantic increase in low-quality spam
           | pollution.
        
         | phkahler wrote:
         | But have you seen most programmer art? This has really nice
         | graphics too.
        
           | xwdv wrote:
           | Some people are really good at art, some aren't.
           | 
           | Regardless, I can pull down some off the shelf assets from an
           | asset store and make a game with them.
        
             | gowld wrote:
             | Where are the off-the-shelf Halloween-theme Angry Birds-
             | style sprites?
             | 
             | Where are the ones that look different from the ones 50
             | other game makers used?
             | 
             | I don't know, and now I don't need to care.
        
             | GaggiX wrote:
             | I doubt the asset store has a pumpkin in the style of Angry
             | Birds that looks like Red, it doesn't seem a good
             | alternative if he wanted to create this game.
        
         | torginus wrote:
         | Which imo summarizes what GPT4 is great at - bootstrapping devs
         | who have a general idea of what they want, but are not familiar
         | with the exact specifics of the technology, or need to freshen
         | up their knowledge.
         | 
         | I've learned Kubernetes and Powershell this exact way.
        
         | gowld wrote:
         | Does 24 hours include learning how to use a game engine that
         | you've never used before? When you've never used ANY game
         | enginer before?
         | 
         | Maintenance and new features are more of the same already done.
         | Networking code is a library. Sound is a library. Cross-
         | platform is a library. Shaders are a library. AI fixed bugs.
        
         | gardenhedge wrote:
         | Agree. No menus or anything
        
         | furyofantares wrote:
         | > Everyone will think this impressive, but they're not game
         | developers.
         | 
         | I'm a game developer. It's impressive.
         | 
         | I'm extremely aware of how short a game jam demo is compared to
         | an actual product. There's an ocean between the two.
         | 
         | That doesn't diminish how much easier and more approachable it
         | suddenly is for someone with little experience to make a game
         | jam demo, and with kinda-passing art.
        
       | LastTrain wrote:
       | This is interesting, but, the "nothing but AI" part is clearly
       | not true and so I'm not exactly sure what was done here.
        
         | Kiro wrote:
         | What do you mean?
        
         | carnitine wrote:
         | You're saying that based on what? All the code and assets are
         | AI.
        
           | LastTrain wrote:
           | The music?
        
             | omarfarooq wrote:
             | There's AI for that too, now.
        
               | LastTrain wrote:
               | But it wasn't used to generate the music in this "game"
               | that isn't a game. This was my point - that it is unclear
               | exactly what AI did and did not do in this case. Like,
               | I'm 100% sure my mom could not have done this, so, not
               | "all" AI like the title says.
        
               | ziddoap wrote:
               | > _" game" that isn't a game._
               | 
               | Why is it not a game? I even played it a bit -- was I
               | hallucinating?
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | The Angry Pumpkins game doesn't have sound effects or
               | music - you can play it here:
               | https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html
               | 
               | The Twitter thread shows exactly what the AI made. It was
               | used for the JavaScript code and the image assets.
               | 
               | If you don't have a Twitter account you can see the full
               | content on Nitter
               | https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363262179938401
               | or in my Gist copy: https://gist.github.com/simonw/f7ed52
               | daaa66f849858d17e0d6c1c...
        
       | jpallen wrote:
       | This is very cool! It's not as impressive, but here is a video of
       | me writing Game of Life only by speaking out loud to VS Code:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NSplhZ0DlY
       | 
       | I did that by building an open source VS Code extension to
       | interact with GPT3.5/4 directly from your editor:
       | https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Biggles.....
       | It cuts out copy/pasting between ChatGPT and your editor, or
       | writing any boiler plate code since you can just ask it to insert
       | the code you want, or change the code you have highlighted. You
       | can also talk to it directly using the Whisper API!
        
       | invalidusernam3 wrote:
       | I did a similar exercise recently when I needed to make a fairly
       | basic rest API and CRUD frontend using 2 frameworks I wasn't
       | particularly familiar with. I used GPT4 to generate ALL the code
       | for it. I'll write a blog post about it soon, but a quick
       | overview was:
       | 
       | I suspect it was slower than just writing the code/referencing
       | the docs, and would be much slower than someone could do if they
       | were experienced with the two frameworks. I had to be very
       | specific and write a few long and detailed prompts for the more
       | complex parts of a the application. It took around 5 hours to
       | make the application, with a lot of that time spent sitting
       | waiting for the (sometimes painfully slow) ChatGPT output. In a
       | framework I'm more familiar with I think I could have easily got
       | it done in under 2 hours
       | 
       | It was definitely useful for making sure I was doing it the
       | correct way, kind of like have an expert on call for any
       | questions. It was also very useful for generating perfectly
       | formatted boilerplate code (some frameworks have CRUD generation
       | built in, but this one did not).
       | 
       | It was a fun experiment, and I found it useful as a
       | learning/guiding/generation tool, but I won't be using it for
       | general day to day development any more than I currently do. For
       | most instances it's quicker to just learn the framework well and
       | write the code yourself.
        
         | jsight wrote:
         | > It was definitely useful for making sure I was doing it the
         | correct way, kind of like have an expert on call for any
         | questions.
         | 
         | I've found it to be shockingly good at this. I end up asking a
         | lot of questions like, "what is the best directory structure
         | for a project on {foo} platform?" or "What is the idiomatic way
         | to do {x} in {language y}?" It has the advantage of having seen
         | lots of projects in every language, and for some questions that
         | automatically leads to a good answer.
        
           | Spivak wrote:
           | I use Sourcegraph a lot for this when GPT can't get a
           | satisfying answer.
        
           | dartos wrote:
           | I always get the classic "It really depends on your use case
           | and neither pattern is exactly better than the other" when
           | asking gpt about programming patterns
        
             | sprobertson wrote:
             | Put something in your system prompt along the lines of
             | "don't waffle"
        
           | acedTrex wrote:
           | this is how exactly how i use gpt4, i find it very useful
        
           | two_in_one wrote:
           | Be careful and don't trust all it says. Sometimes it invents
           | API functions which are not there, or doesn't see existing.
           | And always very confident till you point it.
        
       | burkaman wrote:
       | Here's the code: https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-
       | pumpkins/sketch.js
        
       | monkpit wrote:
       | I realize this comment isn't directly related to the article, but
       | it got me thinking... I wonder what effect AI will have on the
       | next generation of gaming consoles.
       | 
       | Will they get beefier GPU capabilities to leverage local models?
       | 
       | Will they use cloud capacity to host models and games require
       | always-online capability to play as intended?
       | 
       | Some mixture of both?
       | 
       | Also, I hope that AI won't turn into the next way to just ruin
       | everything that was already good. A bunch of rehashed unoriginal
       | ideas, like "it's Pac-Man, but with AI!" Please, no.
        
       | kevinsync wrote:
       | Despite the expected contrarianism in the comments, and I promise
       | I'm being positive here, I'm pretty sure GPT-4 did really well on
       | this task because a quick Google search shows a bunch of existing
       | projects spanning blogs, GitHub and YouTube that it almost
       | certainly trained on:
       | 
       | https://www.google.com/search?q=matter.js+angry+birds+clone
       | 
       | This is not a Bad Thing (tm) -- it's actually really sick because
       | you can quickly get out of the weeds and get productive,
       | especially if your skillset is not as deep as you'd have needed
       | to accomplish even half of this a decade ago.
       | 
       | Nobody ever said paint by numbers was capital-P "Painting", but
       | sometimes it's a blast to do one. I remember being 12 and making
       | custom WADs for Doom / Hexen; my 6th grade son builds endlessly-
       | creative and complicated modded Minecraft worlds with detailed
       | machinery and electrical circuits and all this crazy seemingly-
       | adherent-to-real-world-physics shit. Angry Pumpkins is arguably
       | an order of magnitude better than simply re-skinning a
       | Cyberdemon, because lowering the "time-to-screen" with any
       | project (and in this case, providing a blueprint) is fun,
       | creative, and most importantly ENCOURAGING for the next
       | generation.
       | 
       | Anyways, I like it!
        
         | hnlmorg wrote:
         | That's a really interesting perspective. Thank you for sharing.
        
         | epiccoleman wrote:
         | Thanks for writing this. This really mirrors my own
         | perspective. Yeah, these tools aren't exactly "learning to
         | fish," but if this gets someone _excited_ about  "fishing',
         | then that's a good thing. A lot of my early coding experiences
         | were in a similar vein to what you described, altering
         | gamemaker projects and things like that. And even now I have a
         | lot of fun playing with this AI stuff. It can help me go from 0
         | to 20% on something I previously knew nothing about, and
         | sometimes that initial boost is all I need to get over the
         | friction and actually do something cool. Or sometimes I realize
         | that it's not worth the amount of effort it would take to go to
         | the next 80%. That's OK too.
         | 
         | I totally understand the cynicism around this stuff, but for me
         | it's like... 99% exciting and cool.
        
         | croes wrote:
         | Ok, but many of these AI tools are promoted as Programming bots
         | with a capital-P
        
           | kevinsync wrote:
           | That's just marketing. McDonalds will sell you what it calls
           | a Hamburger with a capital-H, but we could argue endlessly
           | about the veracity of that.
           | 
           | In the end it doesn't matter -- some people like it, some
           | people hate it, it's good, it's terrible, it's whatever you
           | at this moment in your life decide it is for you, but
           | regardless of opinions, it's still edible.
           | 
           | I just love what this guy made mostly because he followed
           | through and made something, anything, and put it out there
           | (presumably for the pure joy of creation).. and it got us all
           | talking about it lol
        
             | godelski wrote:
             | > That's just marketing. McDonalds will sell you what it
             | calls a Hamburger with a capital-H, but we could argue
             | endlessly about the veracity of that.
             | 
             | Well they can't sell you a quarter pound of horse meat as
             | third of a pound of beef. There are laws about this and I
             | believe they do deserve criticism. But that criticism is
             | completely orthogonal to how good the "hamburger" tastes
             | and the nutritional value of it.
             | 
             | But personally I could never do marketing. I feel like
             | their skills lay in getting as close to a lie as possible
             | without technically being one. But I also think this is why
             | people are not happy with a lot of products, because they
             | aren't getting what they were expected. But at the same
             | time I think companies are in an arms race that has simply
             | been a race to the bottom where we're at or near and no one
             | can get an economic edge simply by telling the whole truth
             | and nothing but the unquestionable truth. The (near) liars
             | have the distinct advantage in a world where it is
             | impossible to have objective validators. It's why we have
             | reviewers but why reviewers also got metric hacked. Idk
             | what the solution here is but I definitely understand why
             | people are upset and I wouldn't call this a fruitful
             | endeavour where we'll argue endlessly. That's more about
             | people having difficulties in expressing why they feel
             | frustrated.
        
           | Waterluvian wrote:
           | And some people think Synthesia is actually teaching them
           | piano.
           | 
           | It might get them into the door. It might give them all they
           | are seeking and that's all awesome. They might find that they
           | hit a wall and need to go learn how to read sheet music. Or
           | they don't.
           | 
           | The thing about "it's not real programming" is that I don't
           | think it matters. They might just end up a bit surprised that
           | they hit a wall and have to go back and learn more of the
           | fundamentals.
        
             | yieldcrv wrote:
             | AI is good at that too
             | 
             | I learned just enough about "chord progressions" in order
             | to ask ChatGPT to make both the lyrics and chord
             | progressions for me
             | 
             | I just input them and humans like it
             | 
             | I wouldn't have initially known the terms to use. Nowadays
             | I can prompt for that too though "what concepts do I need
             | to understand in this field" "tell me more about number 3"
             | and I hope it didn't just make something up but it's good
             | enough to converse with humans about - who also make things
             | up
        
           | nativeit wrote:
           | At best, I expect it will maybe reach parity with (more
           | likely fall short of) the kind of accessibility that other
           | low-code application development tools and WYSIWYG website
           | builders have reached. Specifically, I can see where this
           | kind of utility will be too limited for professionals and
           | skilled amateurs to bother with, beyond maybe doing some kind
           | of "boilerplate+", and yet it will remain out of reach for
           | the vast majority of laypeople who will quickly realize that
           | programming requires more than just a grasp of syntax and an
           | IDE. Square Space and Wix haven't meaningfully impacted the
           | professional web design market as near as I can tell, and
           | Airtable hasn't cost any SQL engineers their jobs.
           | 
           | Just my gut instinct, though, and I've certainly been wrong
           | before.
        
           | godelski wrote:
           | Sure, and that deserves more critique than this. But the
           | critique there is that you're being marketed a product under
           | false pretenses. I'll give you an example to help clarify. In
           | another thread[0] the OP is showing off their ML programming
           | assistant. The project is unquestionably cool and has every
           | right to be on the front page of HN. But there are still
           | major questions I have. The implicit critique here comes form
           | the fact that the author says "beats GPT 4 at coding" but
           | then their basis for this claim is simply via HumanEval
           | performance. In reality the evidence does not support the
           | claim (it doesn't say the contrary either, it simply is
           | indeterminate -- not to be confused with
           | orthogonal/irrelevant). This is marketing. I'm not sure if it
           | is dishonest marketing, but I would not call it honest
           | marketing either. It's in the gray. The thread originally had
           | an intro from OP who was specifically requesting comments too
           | and so the context is appropriate, other than the nature of
           | simply being on HN.
           | 
           | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38091869
        
           | Aeolun wrote:
           | Well, most programming is just doing what was done before
           | again?
           | 
           | Anecdotally a lot of my coworkers seem to say they did
           | something 'with chatgpt'.
        
         | LastTrain wrote:
         | I like it too. I also wrote a negative comment, but it was
         | about how the title was not completely honest, which is a
         | different issue than whether or not this was an impressive feat
         | of AI.
        
         | yieldcrv wrote:
         | I just like that I don't need to hire designers anymore
         | 
         | I didn't mind designers or their cost, I minded the time and
         | the gamble involved with output close to what you imagined, and
         | revisions
         | 
         | I also found negotiating rights to be full of hubris and pride
         | that caused alot of more friction. Ironclad contracts being too
         | heavy handed with that community
         | 
         | I'll take the potential forfeit of copyright in exchange for
         | instant output, i can put up a payment portal for royalty free
         | works, i can still sell data
        
         | godelski wrote:
         | > This is not a Bad Thing (tm)
         | 
         | I wholeheartedly agree. I am often one to critique ML systems,
         | especially LLMs and GPT. But this is my training as a
         | researcher. I think it is important that we recognize critiques
         | and discussions of limitations are not equivalent to calling a
         | tool useless or worthless. It does not even devalue the tool.
         | Rather the discussions are beneficial for two contexts: we
         | learn the limitations to build better tools (since no tool is
         | perfect there will always be critiques available) and we learn
         | how to use the tool effectively (you're still not going to use
         | LLMs to do you differential equations homework despite this
         | certainly being within the training set). There's also the
         | important context that we are on a tech form in a community
         | that is well known to be inhabited by the exact type of people
         | that build, test, and deploy these types of systems (myself
         | included). These are not the same discussions we'd be having in
         | the context of sitting around with my parents who are
         | absolutely tech illiterate.
         | 
         | My thoughts as a highly critical person (check my history, or
         | even a very recent highly relevant comment in another thread)
         | are "this is pretty fucking cool" (same to that very same
         | thread btw). I hope to see more stuff like this. It is what
         | makes me passionate about ML and it is what keeps me coming to
         | HN.
         | 
         | Your work doesn't need to be novel to be useful. Nor does it
         | need to be useful to be good. I'm just happy to be seeing
         | people do shit and having fun.
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | This statistical plagiarism laundering is pretty neat.
       | 
       | IMHO, stopping the laundering gold rush is a more urgent priority
       | for law, than creating market moats for the current big pickaxe
       | vendors and pretending it's about preventing HAL.
        
       | matsemann wrote:
       | I honestly don't think the coding is that impressive. What sells
       | it is the assets. It used to be that all quick demos / gamejam
       | like games like these (which it honestly is) looked like crap.
       | Now it suddenly can look a bit polished. Not just boxes and
       | lines, but actually somewhat nice graphics (which is probably too
       | close to what it mimics and would end with a angry letter from a
       | bird attorney if was used in an actual game, though).
        
       | rideontime wrote:
       | Are there any plagiarism detection tools for software? Because
       | I'm very curious how closely this code matches one of the many JS
       | Angry Bird clone tutorials out there.
        
       | ThalesX wrote:
       | This inspired me to try and get a sprite sheet with the top down
       | animations for a paladin for a potential RPG game. See me fail
       | here: https://imgur.com/a/2uJyUT3
       | 
       | Actual order was top down variants first, and then the last one
       | was the side view as I was curious what it'd show.
        
       | la64710 wrote:
       | The real challenge is generating a large code base (think more
       | than a JavaScript loaded page) - the front end backend and
       | everything in between and then automating the testing and
       | deployment ...
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | Twitter is a bad place to share original content these days,
       | because anyone without a Twitter account not only won't be able
       | to see anything more than the first tweet but (crucially) won't
       | even see a visual indicator that there IS more content to see.
       | 
       | Here's a screenshot to illustrate:
       | https://gist.github.com/simonw/f7ed52daaa66f849858d17e0d6c1c...
       | 
       | For people without a Twitter account, I've pasted the content of
       | the thread into a Gist here:
       | https://gist.github.com/simonw/f7ed52daaa66f849858d17e0d6c1c...
       | 
       | The most important missing link is the live demo,
       | https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html
        
         | lazycouchpotato wrote:
         | There's Nitter.net for now, thankfully.
         | 
         | Nitter link:
         | https://nitter.net/javilopen/status/1719363262179938401
        
         | worldsayshi wrote:
         | And also, who knows where Twitter will be in a year. This could
         | all disappear in a black whole judging by the somewhat chaotic
         | developments.
        
       | demondemidi wrote:
       | Does it generate the same result for everyone who enters the
       | prompts? (Not an AI guy here)
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | No, it won't. There's a big random element to this, especially
         | when you are prompting GPT-4 directly through the ChatGPT
         | interface.
         | 
         | Image generation models can sometimes produce the exact same
         | image if you fix the seed they are using - there are different
         | procedures for doing that for different image models.
         | 
         | LLMs like GPT-4 can have their "temperature" dialled down, but
         | even at 0 they aren't guaranteed to return exactly the same
         | response to a given prompt. I believe this is because they run
         | floating point operations in parallel across multiple GPUs and
         | floating point arithmetic isn't actually commutative - you can
         | get back a slightly different result if the multiplications run
         | in a different order.
        
       | product-render wrote:
       | Always instructional how eager a lot of people are to not pay
       | artists.
       | 
       | I'm guessing the mood will be less celebratory when we can stop
       | paying most programmers.
        
       | dools wrote:
       | I find it interesting that over the past decade so much
       | investment has gone into making no code tools, and now ChatGPT is
       | so good at writing code that it's probably faster, more flexible
       | and approaching the same level of usability for technically
       | minded but non coding type folks.
       | 
       | I recently had to create a demo app to consume and publish a REST
       | service using Mendix and it took a couple of days to figure out
       | all the details, but doing the same thing in any language (bash
       | for example) using ChatGPT would have taken minutes.
       | 
       | Deployment and version control can be solved without much
       | technical prowess using PaaS/IaaS, especially if you're comparing
       | your costs with enterprise no code platforms.
       | 
       | It may be my personal bias talking (I've always disliked no code
       | platforms because they feel more cumbersome when you have to do
       | anything serious, I dislike ActiveRecord ORMs for similar
       | reasons) but it kind of seems like No Code will be obsolete
       | pretty soon.
       | 
       | Who wants to drag and drop when you can just ask, copy and paste?
        
         | elicksaur wrote:
         | Would it have taken minutes? Can you try and give us real,
         | rather than speculative, feedback? Shouldn't take much time!
        
       | low_tech_punk wrote:
       | The super power of GPT is allowing a generalist to become
       | specialists in diverse disciplines just-in-time.
        
       | dgs_sgd wrote:
       | This is exciting, like we're about to enter a new golden age for
       | indie apps and games.
        
       | leshokunin wrote:
       | Disclaimer: I was a PM on Angry Birds.
       | 
       | This is such a great demo. The original used Box2D,LUA scripting,
       | and of course you had to make enemies and levels.
       | 
       | There's obviously no expectation that you'd make a hit game from
       | the tech in its current state. You're bound to be limited by the
       | tech, rather than your own skills.
       | 
       | But for rapid ideas, for prototypes, for game jams, this is a
       | game changer. I can also see it as a great alternative to Scratch
       | for kids to play around with ideas. Hope to see more platforms
       | try to turn this into an offering!
        
       | tayo42 wrote:
       | idk why it wasnt obvious to me before, i never bothered trying to
       | make games because i wasnt good at digital art and didn't really
       | have the interest to try to be. i should now... lol
        
       | two_in_one wrote:
       | Cool! The coolest here is not the game, it's the fact that AI is
       | being used for software development. Actually ChatGPT is used for
       | more serious and practical applications. But I started with games
       | too. Having fun makes it easier to start. You can think of AI
       | (today) as very knowledgeable and not very smart assistant.
       | Complex project requires a lot of prompts. Human's task is to put
       | it all together, test, ask for new parts and corrections. And
       | this is just a beginning...
        
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