That won't work and will cause worse problems. Nothing stops bad actors from using AIs that don't watermark their output and all you've done is train people to look for watermarks to determine what to trust. All you've done is trained people to turn off their brains and there's absolutely incentive for bad actors to produced AI generated content without a watermark to dupe the population.

Here's a hypothetical video of Locke2005 torturing a kitten. The lack of a watermark must mean it's real. Quick everyone, let's get him!

Oh yeah? Well that's just what they want you to think.

Enabling stupid people to do stupid things faster sounds like a horrible idea. All I've learned from this is to stay far, far away from McKinsey. There's already enough idiocy to put up with and manage in life without having someone else dump even more of it at an accelerated rate on my or anyone else's plate.

I feel bad for the people who are turning AI into a crutch. When the floor falls out on all of this they'll realize that they robbed themselves of years of opportunity to develop their skill set. I hope they've got a jump to conclusions mat, or some other million dollar idea in store or they're going to find themselves up that proverbial creek.

AI is a tool and like any tool it can be used for good or ill and that's entirely down to the individuals using it. Just like any other tool there's no law that can prevent a person from using it improperly. The only thing we can do as a society is to punish those who break the laws after the fact. Even before the advent of LLMs or modern AI it's been possible to use computers to facilitate crimes. You could replace "AI" with "computers", "phones", "automobiles", or any other invention and your post would still make sense, or perhaps it would be easier to spot the flaw in it. What you're grumbling about is nothing new.

I won't celebrate it, but I'll sure as shit acknowledge the fact that the world is slightly better off since he has left it.

It's as if the only value that sort of question has is to further enrage bigots like Scott Adams.

To anyone else it's nonsensical.

All government subsidies are a form of ripping off taxpayers. All companies should operate on a level playing field. If companies don't want to open businesses somewhere then it's a good indication that there are other fundamental problems that need to be fixed. Ignoring them in favor of offering subsidies is only delaying the inevitable and allowing politicians to play favorites or to offer kickbacks to specific donors.

While there's nothing stopping these developers from forming their own studio, if they were capable of making games that people wanted to buy then Ubisoft wouldn't be in the precarious financial situation they currently find themselves in. I think that these people were screwed either way, but they just stuck their necks out a bit further than other teams and made it incredibly easy for the company to decide which of them would be the first on the block.

There's nothing now preventing any of these people from starting their own studio. Game development isn't something that requires highly specialized tools akin to most manufacturing. The lead times for game development can be a bit long so they'd probably need to secure loans to fund their development efforts until they can get a title out the door. However if they were successful the developers who started the new studio certainly wouldn't freely share that with any new hires that join afterwards. Instead they'd retain ownership themselves while paying everyone else a wage. Perhaps they'd offer stock options as a form of compensation, but few people who pour their own blood, sweat, and tears into anything are willing to offer anyone who shows up after the fact an equal ownership share.

For Ubisoft I don't think that would be a problem. They're still bleeding money even after Chinese investment. By the time this would even get through a preliminary court process there's a good chance that Ubisoft won't exist. The valuable IP will have already been carted off to China where Chinese developers will churn out mobile gacha slop titles.

The good news is that all of these developers are the means of production. They can form their own studio and make their own game. They don't need Ubisoft to do that. In fact, last year's big game Claire Obscure Expedition 33 was made by a studio of a few dozen developers, most of whom left Ubisoft around 2020. Of course if most of the Ubisoft developers were that talented the company wouldn't be in this position in the first place. I don't know if this team is worth a damn or not. I haven't played any Ubisoft games in over a decade so I wouldn’t know.

You say that like it's a bad thing. There are some people who are irresponsible with their personal finances and either have no desire to rectify this or perhaps are simply unable to. It's no different than people who have gambling problems or addictive tendencies that mean they need to stay away from alcohol or other substances.

Giving these people a means of destroying their lives and making them perpetual debt slaves is immoral. The only reason that anyone is giving these people loans is precisely because they know they'll be able to extract exorbitant interest payments from them for the rest of their lives. It's no different than offering free beer samples to an alcoholic.

This isn't going to magically solve that problem, but it will enable some people who've learned a hard lesson to have an easier time crawling out of the mound of debt they've buried themselves under.

If it is the case that a lack of exercise can lead to or exacerbate depression then it would be important to make sure that you get regular exercise and that you don't stop. I think that there may be some such effect as it would explain the massive uptick in kids being proscribed anti-depressants (at least in part, I suspect pharmaceutical industry greed as well) at alarming rates. It's quite obvious that kids these days are less active than previous generations were.

A person who's depressed can still exercise. They just have little impetus to do so, or much of anything. Having someone drag them out of bed or off the couch to do it properly also gives them a much needed human connection. Feeling that someone else cares about you may help you to jump start those emotions in yourself.

You're talking out of your ass. The U.S. already has laws in place that allow clean room reverse engineering. If this weren't the case there would be no IBM PC compatible market. The problem is that there's little incentive to go through the trouble of doing this only to be able to produce a more expensive product that has to compete against the original that still subsidizes its initial purchase price by utilizing things like subscription models, selling user data, etc.

What's proposed here won't solve the problem anyway. Enshitification will continue as long as consumers are willing to trade their privacy for lower prices up front or more generally paying a lower cost up front in exchange for a greater cost over time. This is nothing new and has been going on for decades. It's no different than people buying cheap printers only to find that they were locked into buying expensive ink refills or toner cartridges.

Incidentally it's possible that this could have the exact opposite effect because any company that doesn't enshittify their product would now face competition from companies who could more easily reverse engineer what they have and sell an enshittified version that consumers will purchase because it's "free" or less expensive upfront.

The same can be said for most services that exist to collect your personal data and sell it to advertisers. Arguments can be made about not storing this information in the first place, but no company can leak what you don't give them. I e never been able to understand why so many people freely and willingly give all of this away.

If it were that easy then countries without any oil would be implementing it on a massive scale. They have no reason to prop up industries that they don't have. Ignoring the problems that new technologies have or the benefits of the existing solutions that they try to replace doesn't change the underlying reality.

Ask yourself what's more likely: Is the entire world ignoring a perfectly good solution that would save money and improve everyone's lives or are you mistaken in some of your beliefs? Existing industries are disrupted all of the time by those that offer better solutions and consumers will do this entirely of their own volition. If you do really think that you're correct in your own thinking then you should probably invest your money in the companies trying to provide these services because they must obviously be undervalued and in a prime position to disrupt the market and make a killing.

It's not even any different than the R&D work that any large company does. A lot of things that get tried don't pan out or run into various hurdles that prevent it from coming to market. Sometimes things sit in the shed for years until someone else solves a different problem for unrelated reasons that also now makes that previous work viable.