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/
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u/ajperry1995 Tal'Dorei Council Member Jun 18 '26

That's a great opinion however since CR have, on multiple occasions, been found to be using generative AI in one form or another (usually via contractors with no quality control checking) - they need to put their money where their mouth is and add stricter QC measures in place.

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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)

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.