this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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Epic Games CEO and Fortnite boss Tim Sweeney:
Once again Epic games act like the moronic villains they are.
It's sad how huge companies are basically their CEO. CEO makes decisions and talks - that's the company. Even if the hundreds and thousands of workers below them [largely] disagree and would do differently.
This is especially bad in USA, but usually a bit better in European countries that have representation of the unions on the board.
You can tell most everything you need to know about a company by looking at the CEO. That's because they're the leader, they set the tone, contrary to lemmy beliefs. Happy or unhappy employees? Look to the CEO. Solid earnings, year after year after year? CEO. I ask at every interview, "What's the CEO like?" BUT...
A) Ultimately, CEOs do what the fucking board of directors wants, or they get fired, hence, the golden parachute. Would you take a monster job knowing that you could be forced to fuck your industry reputation and not hedge that bet? Nah. Force me to do something stupid yet needful? I want paid when you fire me on purpose for doing what you said.
B) I think you are in an echo chamber around here. Most CEOs are great folks, you only hear about the major fuck ups at the major companies. Also, the decisions the big dogs make that lemmy tells you are unpopular, really aren't unpopular in the wider world. EA Games still exists after all.
Edit: I wasn’t actually disagreeing with the comment above. You should downvote me too.
Correct. The board defines the company, not the CEO.
CEOs are usually puppets. Whatever role they play, you can bet they were hired specifically to play it, and were incentivized to stick to the script.
Their job (legally, their fiduciary obligation) is to maximize shareholder value, to take the credit or blame, and fuck off.
The board (typically key stakeholders) are so pleased when the public focuses on their CEOs, even if it’s for their shitty opinions, behavior, or obnoxious salaries.
Because the worst thing that could happen to them would be for the public eye to actually follow the money, and it’s easy to see why.
If the rabble truly fathomed just how many of those “golden parachutes” stakeholders stockpile with every disgraced CEO, however ceremoniously disavowed…
Accountability would shift to more permanent targets yes but, more importantly, it would quickly become common knowledge that, all this time, there were in fact more than enough golden parachutes to go around.
As an engineer, tell that to my seat-flattened ass Tim Apple.
Companies that use AI in production are sewing the seeds of their own demise.
Why do they say these stupid things as if they were giving an order?
They can't order people to buy their stuff, they can't order their stuff to work when it doesn't. Having "AI" in it doesn't change the latter part in case they think otherwise, just got this idea.
I suppose they like the change from the old "spend lots of resources, then scale indefinitely" with software development to the more traditional in other spheres "spend constant amount of resources for constant result", and expect it will build hierarchies like everywhere.
Well, companies were going bankrupt long before personal computing.
I don't know about Epic Games, I think I'll play Oolite in free time when I'm done with my EU4 addiction. Or actually make something useful.
True enough! No reason not to say it up front, right?
Look y'all, not 1-in-20 people give a flying fuck about AI like we do on here.
That is true, but for instance Ian M Banks predicted AI being able to make art already back in the 70's in his Culture series of books.
Even accurately simulating famous artists. And his conclusion was that AI should not make art at all, because it would end up detracting from the value of art.
I think the reason the CEO is wrong, is that it will be a legal shitshow, and I think AI art may become illegal, or at the very least required to be clearly labeled as AI art.
We will see how it turns out.
I'll call your bet and say that Sweeny is right. I think AI will become so commonplace that there will be no way around it and the market has already been streamlined in this direction.
I would love it if my "feels" could be seen. But that is not reality. This battle is already long lost. Lemmy and the like can rage about it til their flames die out but it is a lost cause.
There have already been several lawsuits against AI companies, where it is revealed that AI art is copied from existing original works.
You may be right, but I don't think that battle is lost quite yet.
AI is mostly good for memes, beyond that it tends to quickly becomes repetitive, and of little value.
Of course AI art generally has a human "director" guiding the AI on what to do. As I said previously we will see how it turns out.
I'm not sure the end result of this will be within 10 years.
The result is that this is unsustainable unless copyright and IP law except for trademark and authorship are dropped, to avoid imbalance between using AI on existing work to generate commercially clean substance and using your ability, helped by existing culturally meaningful material.
It's basically an IP laundering technology. Supply to satisfy demand.
When libertarians say that regulations make barriers for those more vulnerable, but not for those who can bend those barriers, they are right. Except I doubt many a libertarian expected to be proven right this way 20 years ago.
And I think they might even drop IP laws. When enough elite types are certain that control of computing power and datasets allow them to remain on top in such an environment.
That's also where all the advice to get used to AI in all production comes from, I think, they are already salivating at the thought of just reusing old stuff from enormous datasets, legally, not paying anything, and keeping staff only to do basic control of what the machine generates. Basically people who expect that they'll be able to do the theft of the century and remain elite.
The headlines about AI killing human creativity don't help, they are telling these people what they want to hear.
It won't kill all human creativity. It will kill those relying upon killing it. It's like a gold mine in EU4, except giving inflation 10x the original.
I've just read yesterday what the Russian idiom "red price" means (said about the biggest price one can give for something, and already a robbery). So - the opposite of that was "white price". No, it's not about civil war. It's about copper and silver money. There were not that many silver mines in Russia, so when someone decided to turn the printer on, they'd mint a lot of copper coins. While silver money was mostly foreign ("yefimok", from Joachimstaler, same as taler, dollar, you get the etymology, the international coin of that age, which is also why metropolies had their traditional money and colonies had dollars - dollar meant a silver coin of the same weight as Joachimstaler).
Since I've remembered Russian history, that's also similar to USSR's advertised strong side - instead of relying upon complex evolution process to achieve big things, we'll just build a command system in charge of all our resources and plan the path we already know. As you might see, it doesn't answer where future evolution will come from. It didn't come at all.