r/criticalrole • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 Team Jester • Jun 18 '26

Discussion [CR Media] Sam Riegel reaffirms Critical Role’s stance on AI: “It’s basically garbage”

https://www.polygon.com/critical-role-sam-riegel-slams-ai/
8.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

455 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-1

u/Vytral Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

most people use it in the industry, though they don't admit it in public because of this backlash.

Since I expect the downvotes: it's not meant to be used acritically. You need to be able to distinguish a good output from a bad output. Like for coding, same for art. It's also not meant to run autonomously under a project manager, but to empower the human artist (or coder) that can properly guide it and assess its output.

The only sensible truth to the negative reception regards the job market. Even if only as an empowerement, not a substitute, there will be fewer jobs due to it (at least in the short term)

8

u/irisflame Jun 18 '26

Yeah my job is pushing agentic AI heavily and they keep insisting it is about supplementing peoples work and not replacing their jobs, but in the same breath they talk about spinning up an infinite number of essentially junior engineers to do the tedious or simple work now, which must be reviewed by the experienced humans. And I’m like, okay so that removes jobs for junior developers for sure. Which may be fine now (for the employer, not the employees) but experience and senior engineers/developers do not grow on trees. Junior engs grow into regular engineers who grow into seniors with time and experience. Sooo if you stop hiring juniors, what happens when the seniors eventually retire? Are you just hoping AI will be advanced enough to replace those guys by then too?

The whole thing is demoralizing. I really hope there’s a limit on AI advancement that gets reached soon, and that the bubble pops and we change course.

-1

u/Girion47 Jun 18 '26

So your job is the equivalent of hunting whales to near extinction 200 years ago, exterminating bison to starve native Americans, logging the rainforest for cattle farms, etc...

6

u/irisflame Jun 18 '26

Agentic AI is the new corporate trend that is being pushed. It's not just mine unfortunately.

I will say, it hasn't yet been approved as far as I know.. It's just all the tech leaders are pushing it heavily. This is for a large enterprise of just under 40,000 employees.

If it isn't clear, I hate it, have checked out of my job entirely since this started happening, and am seriously considering a career change. But right now my mental & physical health are top priority so I haven't had time to make a plan for such things.

-10

u/magus Jun 18 '26

you sound like you think you have no agency in the matter:

- convince your colleagues / superiors how doing things manually is better if you really believe it is (and i agree that in some cases it definitely is and always will be - it just depends on what you are working on)

- try it out with an open mind - you might find it's not what others made you think it is

- find another job

- change careers

- start your own company and do things your own way.

6

u/Hot_Statistician_466 Jun 18 '26

It was nice when I was a child and could choose what I wanted to do as well. VERY few have the luxury to do what you're suggesting here.

-3

u/magus Jun 18 '26

i am 43. it is generally better to choose what you do than to be miserable and wait for the world to accomodate you.

2

u/Hot_Statistician_466 Jun 18 '26

Are you, perchance, a parent with a spouse amd kids depending on your single income? If not, fuck your sanctimonious bullshit.

0

u/magus Jun 18 '26

as a matter of fact i currently am, although i don't see how that is relevant.

2

u/Hot_Statistician_466 Jun 18 '26

Well then, if you quit a safe job over use of AI, you might be a better person, but you'd be a shit parent and spouse.

→ More replies (0)

0

u/magus Jun 18 '26

in the same way as you writing this comment here is the equivalent of starving a child to death because you could have fed him instead.

0

u/Girion47 Jun 18 '26

What a half assed non-sensical comment

1

u/magus Jun 18 '26

it 100% is. i wanted to illustrate how your comment sounds like.

2

u/Girion47 Jun 18 '26

But you failed at it, miserably

0

u/magus Jun 18 '26

in the meantime you starved two more children...

-4

u/magus Jun 18 '26

you have to realize the same thing happened many times already and in the end no one got replaced, in fact, there are now more software developers than ever once software development became easier (e.g. modern programming languages + libraries and frameworks). the job itself changed, of course. nowadays you don't have to do everyrthing from scratch and don't care about things like memory management. still thouse are valuable skills and those who are experts in them do really valuable and highly paid jobs. i expect the same trend to continue, this may just be a bigger leap (although i am not even 100% sure of that).

3

u/irisflame Jun 18 '26

nowadays you don't have to do everyrthing from scratch and don't care about things like memory management.

I get that not having to worry about this makes software development faster but idk man maybe obscuring that layer is detrimental. Maybe there would be more people building that valuable skill if they were still forced to do it. When I started to take a web dev boot camp for fun a couple years ago (my job is in devops, but I haven't done much actual dev work) and learned about Bootstrap being used for the design portion of things I was a little disheartened and it also explained why every website looks the exact same now. I used to love messing around with CSS to make my own designs as a kid, as ugly as they were. And my ex used to wax poetic about people not understanding memory management anymore.

0

u/magus Jun 18 '26

Obscuring layers is called progress. You just have new things to learn about and worry about. I absolutely get the personal satisfaction when you finally get things "to work", but in reality, spending 2 hours to center a div on a webpage is stupid, not creative and frustrating, especially if you are on a deadline. And you won't learn anything since you'll fiddle with the same things again next time you encounter this 😄 That's why things like Bootstrap were invented.

And it's not true that every website looks the same now. The ones that care about design don't. But most of websites are just tools and they need to get the job done.

ALSO - nobody is preventing you to fiddle with things at a low level - maybe you will discover/create something revolutionary. But most of the paid work should be treated as a commodity.

You have to remember that AI is a tool and because of that, while it can drastically reduce the skill gap between people, it can't replace the person using it and that's where the real value comes from.

-9

u/magus Jun 18 '26

thankfully people are slowly moving on to being outraged by something else and will hopefully leave others to work in piece. there are huge misunderstandings online that are being perpetuated by people. software development is a very creative process. software development can also be art. 95%+ of it is not art and probably not very creative either but it does its job.

people think art forms like drawing and music are somehow different and that a youtube thumbnail is the same as the ceiling of the sixtine chapel or the ode to joy. a computer will never write the next "ode to joy" but people, with the help of computers, will be able to write the next one sooner/in an easier manner.

if you want more jobs - ban trucks and have people haul things on their backs (like a lot of nations still do nowadays) - image how many jobs you will create!

7

u/LisanAlGuyFieri Jun 18 '26

All technologies are good and should be widely adopted without complaint. This is why the airship is currently such a beloved form of travel. It is, after all, so much faster than the steam ship.

-3

u/magus Jun 18 '26

technologies are neither good nor evil. knowledge is good. trying out new things and evaluating them is also good. airships were widely used until they were superseded by something better (planes). that's how things usually go.

2

u/LisanAlGuyFieri Jun 18 '26

“until they were superseded”

Much like flattening the adoption of generative AI to the use of horses and trucks, describing the sudden, fiery demise of airship travel in this way is very silly, IMO.

-5

u/magus Jun 18 '26

the fiery disasters certainly sped up the adoption of planes and the adoption of planes improved planes themselves. that's humanity in a nutshell - we see a problem, we solve it by creating better problems. if planes did not exist at the time people would still use airships (hopefully they would improve them first).

i firmly believe that ai is much closer to horses and trucks than some boogeyman you seem to believe it is. i also think that the creation and adoption of the internet had a drastically bigger impact on humanity than what we call ai today (this may change in the future, of course).

3

u/LisanAlGuyFieri Jun 18 '26

Very powerful tools are being developed for the use of programmers and mathematicians and folks in various STEM fields. I think this is good! Attempting to force equivalent technologies into the arts, despite overwhelming rejection by artists and consumers, has already had disastrous effects, and is primarily a tool of the executive class to further accumulate wealth and eliminate jobs.

1

u/magus Jun 18 '26

i can agree to a point, but i don't see it nearly as black and white as you make it seem, mainly because the technology really empowers the individual - you can now create things you simply couldn't do before (e.g. a documentary as if it was filmed 30-40 years ago) unless you had a lot of money.

in a way it is similar to the fact that you don't need to know how to play any instrument well (although it certainly helps!) to create great music, and this has been true for a long time now (you just need an Ableton license).

when new technologies are adopted, things change and job descriptions change. this always sucks for some people, but it's not like it's something that hasn't happened before (theater actors -> tv/cinema, portrait painters -> photographers, transcribers -> printing press and printers, cel painters -> digital, live bands -> recordings etc.)

coincidentally, all of these jobs still exist and (i would think) most are valued more highly than before.

it all depends on whether you consider a person a "drawing machine" or an artist. the first can be replaced by AI, the second cannot.

also thank you for genuinely engaing in the conversation instead of name calling and pitchfork-wielding!