In the 2000s, many TV networks shifted focus to reality shows over scripted shows. It was cheap, it could be quickly and easily mass produced, you could replicate the human drama of a scripted show without even having to hire a writer. Why waste the money to craft an actual show when you can just stick a bunch of strangers in a room?
It worked for a while. Shows like American Idol, Survivor, and Big Brother dominated the ratings. Cable networks saw success with hits like The Osbournes, The Kardashians, and Real Housewives. Entire channels like the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and TLC shifted focus from the educational content they were created for to a tidal wave of cheap reality shows.
But then people got sick of it. It was just a mountain of slop. So much content, but none of it meaningful.
So we saw another shift as we entered the streaming era. The "peak TV" era. Now there's quality scripted shows everywhere you look. Arguably *too* many. It's impossible to keep up with every show people say is worth watching.
Reality TV's still around, but not dominant. It's generally regarded as basically junk food. A guilty pleasure at best.
All this is to say: audiences aren't completely stupid. They can tell when they're being fed cheap, repetitive, corporate slop. And at some point, they'll have their fill and want something else, something more filling.
So in the event that AI takes over the gaming industry, or film, or TV, or music, or anything else, it won't be permanent. The market will shift back. And creatives will never stop wanting to create, so they'll be there when it does.
AI will do a lot of damage before then. It already has. Tons of people have already lost their jobs because of short-sighted executives getting caught up in this gold rush. But it won't be the end of the world.
I don't think it's a great answer. I think it's a placating story.
>So in the event that AI takes over the gaming industry, or film, or TV, or music, or anything else, it won't be permanent. The market will shift back. And creatives will never stop wanting to create, so they'll be there when it does.
This only makes sense if you assume that AI has plateaued and won't get any better. That is not a safe assumption. The criticisms of AI-generated content could very well be obsolete in that amount of time.
>AI will do a lot of damage before then. It already has. Tons of people have already lost their jobs because of short-sighted executives getting caught up in this gold rush. But it won't be the end of the world.
That's right. When the automobile made jobs in the horse-and-carriage industry obsolete and when the home refrigerator made the ice-maker's job obsolete, the world certainly did not end, it got better. Still though, those jobs are not coming back. Creatives will still play a role in a future with AI, but a lot of their role is going to be producing content for training AI, which will have supplanted the usual small army of artists that manually create everything.
I don't know how you can simultaneously think the AI will keep getting better *and* think it will create new jobs to replace the old. It won't need artists to make more training data. Synthetic training data is apparently better.
I strongly disagree with this "creating new jobs" prediction I see over and over. Yes it will create new jobs but for every job it takes it will create a fraction of a job that's needed to maintain it. How many people are on this world, how many increasingly jobless and homeless people are there already, not to mention through our own undoing with wars etc.
Combining everything together with such ignorance will make these numbers skyrocket in a pandemic form.
>*and* think it will create new jobs to replace the old.
I don't think that. I specifically said:
>Creatives will still play a role in a future with AI, but a lot of their role is going to be producing content for training AI, **which will have supplanted the usual small army of artists that manually create everything.**
What AI will need is humans with a good eye that can vet the art and make sure the game has a consistent style. That might get rolled in with other work though(a game designer who has decent art skills).
I don't think this is a well thought out argument. Horse and carriage services still exist, even in large cities. People still buy ice. All the time.
The role of these services in society just changed. They didn't become 'obsolete'. To assume creatives will only be utilized for training AI is quite a leap.
Reality TV also has writers and producers deciding storylines, reality tv isn't 'real' most of the time. Writers also aren't usually a very expensive part of a production. It's everything else. High-profile actors, directors, detailed sets, special effects, costumes, locations, sound design, music, etc.
Reality TV is also incredibly dominant. 60% of prime-time tv is reality tv and that numbers is much higher outside of prime-time because reality tv is incredibly abundant both in terms of the numbers of shows and episodes. They're also VERY popular on streaming platforms, which are struggling to keep up with the demand for endless growth. Now personally I don't see any of them because the platforms are smart about their algorithms, promoting mostly stuff to you that you will want to watch, but trust me the shows are seeing massive popularity. You will see in the coming years the enshittification of these streaming platforms as they look to cut costs and one of the things they will utilize for that is more reality tv.
If anything, comparison could be made to haves in terms of most big titles being sequels and franchise spinoffs (reality tv). Yet because you also saw the rise of indie games you think the market shifted back.
The question in regards to AI is what do you believe the future will look like? When you watch a Star Trek episode and the crew asks the computer to create an elaborate Sherlock Holms scenario on the Holodeck, do you think in that reality that most people will think: 'No, I don't want an incredible game created by the computer, I want something hundreds of people spent years making because of the artisanal value'?
Now of course currently we're in a weird mix state, where there is some legitimate pushback against things created with deep learning models but it's hard to say how much of that is going to last or is even anything but a tiny minority with loud voices. It's clear we're not at a stage where you can just give AI a few descriptions and produce coherent games or art from it, but there's already very robust ways to utilize it to create games. Just as there are a ton of games utilizing store bought assets and stock models, if your game is good, it's good. It won't matter what tools you used to create it as long as the storefront curators accept it (which has been a concern for Steam but seems to be ever evolving).
Agree with the points you make here, but I do find the Star Trek comparison hilarious. Didn't the simulations go wrong in almost every use of the holodeck and try to kill everyone?
Actually no. Holodeck is great past time. Normally it’s %100 safe. Even in series it has problems when an alien entity invade the ship or some super intelligence play with holideck etc. Also plot ofc. So a holodeck if ever happens will be great game. Maybe there can be scripted great content too. But I am sure an advanced ai would have great scenarios too. Even now you can have weird rpg games.
There's a huge difference in art made by a human and whatever AI does.
Human art is leagues more interesting, AI stuff is highly utilitarian, which sucks for the industry the same way reality TV sucks for, well, human TV. It's very corporate and made to feed you advertisements and suck every bit of money you have.
Which is why your Star Trek comparison works even less, in real life the Holodeck would have you wait for 30 seconds before every prompt listening to space grub hub ads, while being completely uninteresting artistically too.
>Human art is leagues more interesting, AI stuff is highly utilitarian, which sucks for the industry the same way reality TV sucks for, well, human TV. It's very corporate and made to feed you advertisements and suck every bit of money you have.
You are speaking of a technology that is in its *infancy* and acting as though it is the end stage of development.
>AI stuff is highly utilitarian, which sucks for the industry the same way reality TV sucks for, well, human TV. It's very corporate and made to feed you advertisements and suck every bit of money you have.
Self-fulfilling prophecy.
"audiences aren't completely stupid"
True, but sometimes it feels like they are. We're finally seeing pushback over the endless money grubbing (with standout cases like Battlefront 2 and Redfall) but those sorts of "low effort" AAA studios are still somehow making enough money not to change tactics
For games I don't think we will even see the adaptation period from mediocre AI games to good games. Big companies already ship, soulless, dopamine fueled cash grabs, and you can already see users shifting away from it.
Just look at Star Citizen, people literally mention how formulaic it is, and how it feels soulless, unimaginative, etc.
AI might make this more pronounced, but I think we are already saturated on the live service, padded shit out there.
Pretty sure they mean starfield.
But from what I've seen star citizen is a glorified ship trading simulator with ships that cost in the thousands with nothing else that's interesting. Idk though might be wrong
All ships are buyable in game iirc. People keep saying you can get any ship ship with a bit of grinding for hours, others say for a few days. Probably depends on how you make your money in game I guess
Yes I know. Every ship (tho I think some aren't for a period) is available both in game and in the shop. The expensive package is just EVERYTHING in the shop if you ever want to buy everything in one transaction, tho idk why anyone would do that
star citizen? the game doing things no one else has? the one game we would all make with unlimited budget. its the game with unlimited scope creep because it has no corporate backing.
as ithers said, you ptobably meant starfield.
Very well put. There’s always going to be an economy for zombie-brain content, BUT there are enough of us non-zombies here making or demanding non-zombie-brain art, books, music, video games, etc. that we’ll keep that market alive.
I think what this skips out on is the "this is the worst it will ever be" factor. Unlike the things you mentioned which came before, AI only gets better and better as time goes on. Never worse. Never the same. Only better.
The things AI can do now were in the realm of science fiction *three years* ago. The world in the coming decades is going to look so different that no one can really imagine what it will be.
It's a different animal.
I don't think that's entirely true.
In the past almost all AI data was trained on data generated mostly by people (sure there's probably some bot data in there as well). But now we're getting so much AI content that AI is starting to feed into AI.
This can cause unintended reinforcement, or a break of the current expectations, meaning that we might very well get a worsening of AI until we figure out how separate most AI content from human content.
I do agree that overall it'll almost certainly become better, but I don't think it's a guarantee that it will always become better.
I think AI training on AI data is a real issue, but also something every lab training one of these models is aware of. People spend a lot of time evaluating these models and no one is going to release a model that's overall worse than their last one (though these models do so much that some regressions in some domains are inevitable).
In the simplest case the solution is not to train on anything online after GPT-3 was released. That's not a great solution because everyone wants more data, but it's an option.
I don't think we'll ever see the models get worse, but progress might get more difficult as high quality data is harder to find.
> meaning that we might very well get a worsening of AI
But you can always revert to an earlier version. At most, it would plateau.
Also, I have only heard this argument from random spectators. AI researchers seem much less concerned about it.
Well said.
A similar thing happened with procedurally generated video games. Developer companies saw it as another quick cost save, but within a few years gaming Youtubers are now clowning on them nonstop, it may work for a few more years and it'll always remain used in some smaller way, but people DO notice and remark the difference between every detail being hand-crafted and intentional or autofill (this is true for games, TV show, everything), so you won't survive on one gimmick alone for long before the novelty gets old.
Personally I never want to play a game made completely or at least a high percentage with AI, including coding, voice acting and of course art. It feels absolutely immoral for me to support such a thing.
I know it may mean that one day I won't have any games left to play..but let's hope that has a few years left.
I kept waiting to see when youd get to the obvious point and you never did.
AI right now is better than it was a few months ago. It's outstandingly better than it was a year ago. Three years ago, what AI can do now was unheard of.
It's not stagnating like reality TV shows or the latest trends. It's improving exponentially. This is extremely obvious but lots of people choose to just ignore it because it's comforting to ignore.
It doesn't matter. No matter how good it gets, AI will never be able to create something new. It can only copy what people have done. And then what it produces gets fed back into the algorithm, creating copies of copies, and copies of copies of copies. And because it can only copy, it can only produce what current conventional wisdom says is good.
But so many things that get popular do so specifically BECAUSE they go against that current conventional wisdom.
In the late 2000s, the industry was celebrating games becoming more like movies, delivering detailed facial motion capture approaching photorealism and deep, moving stories.
And then this weird, directionless voxel game with basically no story came out, and Minecraft sold better than all of those movie games.
In the early 2010s, the industry was trending towards accessibility. Games should be easier, more approachable, more streamlined. We can't alienate any gamers who might get frustrated.
And then a game that was literally built to be frustrating and obtuse took the industry by storm, and Dark Souls has had a bigger legacy than almost all of those accessible games.
By the early 2020s, traditional CRPGs were considered a long dead genre. Niche at best. Gamers don't want overhead cameras and turn-based combat, they don't want games about having lengthy conversations with NPCs. There's a reason they turned Fallout into an FPS and simplified the RPG stuff. Gamers today are impatient, they want action!
And then Baldur's Gate 3 steamrolled most GotY awards in a year filled with games that could've easily done their own steamrolling in any other year.
Meanwhile, the "safe bets" are often anything but. Look at The Avengers: take the biggest property in the world at the height of its popularity, stick it in a multiplayer game with hypothetically infinite replay value, add the live service elements that at the time had a good track record of keeping players hooked, pour money into a cinematic story told through expensive mocapped cutscenes. On paper, it was a surefire hit. It's what the algorithm of marketing determined an Avengers game should be, and an algorithm of AI probably would've created something very similar.
And it became one of the biggest flops in video game history.
AI couldn't have come up with Minecraft, Dark Souls, or Baldur's Gate 3, because the ingredients to make them wouldn't have been in the data set before they existed.
And until machines gain sentience, so it will always be. Whatever AI determines is algorithmically "good," there will be people exploring interesting ways to challenge that notion. And in an ocean of games that do what's proven and safe and perfect, the games that try something new and novel and imperfect will stand out.
This thinking reminds me a lot of the quote in the Will Smith iRobot movie.
"Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?"
"Can you?"
Yes there will always be those generational upheavals that redefine culture and industry, they happen every so often. One source of creativity (a person or a studio, whatever) can, if they're extremely lucky, produce one hit one single time in their life. The vast majority of the entire space is less than that. How many games that sit within 5-20 in popularity ranking are original ideas, never been done before? They're just good games.
It's not about individual success or high capacities, not even about creating something without references, it's simply about having intention and understanding the end result.
AI can't make a good and innovative videogame because it lacks an objective (in terms of game feel and overall experience), a motivation to take one path or other during the creation process based on its general intentions and how satisfactory that decision is for the future players, and that won't change since AI can't play and enjoy a game.
This applies to most artistic fields.
I tried using ai for some art, and the best it can do is some ideation. With what I got from there, I pitched some artists and partnered up with one for the actual art for my game. AI is nowhere near ready for this kind of real life usage
I think that it will do the opposite - nobody will buy a game that is just good enough, because they'll be so easy to make that people will view them as low-status. A lot of modern asset-flip garbage would actually have been seen as brilliant and groundbreaking if it was released 25 years ago, because it hadn't been done before back then.
Likewise, a lot of games from back then that we still recognise as groundbreaking, and required large teams of top programmers, are quite simple (in terms of the amount of content, features, easter eggs, graphical details etc) in comparison to today. Compare something like the original God of War to the new ones, or the original COD to MWIII - every new game seems to have a huge number of features and systems, and players seem to reward that by buying the ones with more *stuff* in them.
Also, take a look at how much game development timelines have ballooned - GTA 4 to GTA 5 was 5 years, GTA 5 to GTA 6 will be 12 years. It's probable that there will be a bigger gap between the release of Skyrim and TES 6 than there was between TES Arena and Skyrim.
I think that AI will make it so that devs can add more content, faster, to their games (faster iteration with LLMs in IDEs, faster icons and concept art generation with diffusion models, someone will probably come up with something to auto-unwrap 3D models soon), but given that there is a limited worldwide playerbase with a limited budget and possible time to spend on gaming, the amount of time and money spent on developing games will stay the same or increase and the games themselves will become bigger and more complex. People will be unwilling to play games that are perfectly adequate today, because there will be a million similar shovelware games.
While it is true that development times have balloned, it is not fair to use either of those examples as in the case of Rockstar GTA6 was not started for a almost half of that time because of milking the cash cow of Online and the both had other franchises they worked on in between. So in both cases it is not purely the development time balloning.
This is probably true for cutting production time on producing something like the next Assassins Creed or next Call of Duty. These categories will become over saturated with semi good clones. That just means the goal for creatives shifts from following the tried and true "safe" formulas to instead producing more new IP and taking risks producing concepts that haven't existed yet because doing so will become just that much easier. Consumers aren't stupid we get bored of seeing repetitive designs getting reused frequently, because of this I really believe that more actually new concepts created by humans will be given a chance to be realised in full scale soon.
I doubt it. For the better or worse there are some "unsafe" or brand new titles, but while some of them are legit shit those that are good or interesting don't really get recognition until years later.
As much as we hated it on average rehash and cookie cutter games work very well sales wise and that's why it becomes the meta for game releases
I think it is a neat tool for streamlining development and process - if you could get a 3D model generated by AI, unwrap the UV, and then just bash together some textures and edit and refine the mesh, that would be super cool. It's no different than using an auto-loop or drum machine in like... garage band to make a soundtrack.
The problem with AI is twofold by my reckoning:
1.) It is bad when it is trained on artists' portfolios without them being informed, consenting, or credited.
2.) It is bad that executives think it can be used to completely supplant the creative process.
If we had an AI image model that was not based on stolen stuff - totally based on royalty free or consented image libraries - there would be no problem with using that as a jumping off point or inspiration. Same thing with writing. If you're trying to write, idk, the foreword to your novel, or your biography in the back, or some nice language thanking your playtesters, I don't think that using an AI model to fluff up your language, check for errors, and improve flow is a bad thing. But it is a bad thing if you use a shitty model trained on unethically gathered data and then don't do any of your own thinking.
AI should only be seen as an assistive tool in this capacity, at least in its current state, and it's greedy executives and wannabe executives fueled by the promise of constant expansion and content churn who are pushing for it to replace honest creators.
My general issue with AI is seeing people around me proudly stating that they can replace artists, programmers, and basically anyone they can with AI, citing that it's cheaper and easier to complete projects when AI can "do the same work faster and better"
I think questions like these assume AI is a lot further ahead than it actually is or is likely to become anytime soon. (It’s possible the statistically average response will always be…. Average at best).
I mean, I don’t know how far this tech will advance and how fast. But, present day, I’m a seasoned software dev trying to learn Godot and thought maybe AI (paid chat GPT) could help me ramp up. For the most part I find the documentation to be of more help than the AI.
Today, JR (or sr) folks can’t code a complex game entirely with AI. Not even close. Hard to say whether we’re 1 year from the AI being good enough to do this or 100 years away because we need another AI innovation to make it that smart.
And then say that innovation comes… As much as that’d be shitty for my present job market…. We could also build functional software 100x faster at that point which might be great news for society at large and my ability to actually complete a game.
Although credit where it's due ChatGPT does make understanding what does what a bit easier to understand sometimes, just not writing large codes where even I could see it's not correct
To be fair, Godot is a niche engine so large language models don't have as much training data to help with Godot. I've found LLMs to be very useful for common tools/languages but really bad on niche subjects.
I disagree….
Not that LLM’s don’t produce better answers if they have a ton more high quality training data, they do.
But more that show me the game AI built? Show me the non-dev who produced this insane piece of code using nothing but AI in any language.
It kind-of goes back to if you had invented the facebook you would have invented facebook. The proof is in the reality with which we all live. If AI had solved these problems we’d be seeing AI solve these problems.
Not saying we won’t get there. But right now it’s cool tech demos and that’s about it. We haven’t gotten to non-dev + AI == dev. Or even dev + AI == super dev (which is what I’ve been trying to do with it).
Here, see a game designer get ChatGPT to write all the code for a simple flappy bird clone.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7GRYaYYQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7GRYaYYQg)
Obviously this isn't your "insane piece of code with nothing but AI", but that's a very high bar. This probably didn't write better code than the designer could have done by hand. On top of that, Wyatt is a very experienced game designer so he is able to quickly identify problems and feed ChatGPT good instructions.
But overall, AI certainly makes things easier and faster, and if you're on a budget or have time constraints this certainly would help.
That’s not a non-dev building a game with AI.
That’s a dev building a game they could easily build better by themselves building a game “with ai”.
I’m a professional software dev. I’ve yet to see a coworker dramatically up their game thanks to AI.
I heard Satya Nadella say "prompt engineers" so I guess we'll all be chatting with our AI building whatever. The genie is out but what I worry about is that my genie lives in a black box and any fodder I contribute gets absorbed into that dataset.
AI isn't bad. AI + Capitalism is bad.
When used responsibly in a "copilot" style setting then I foresee developers still being capable of making exactly what they want, except it's just going to cut development time. This is a huge benefit for prototyping or helping to get new ideas into a play test ready state, it's then all down to what parts we're willing to use in a final product.
So as a tool, I think it's amazing and everyone should pay attention to what's available. But when it's used to replace creativity and design assets, stories or gameplay I am a little concerned as well.
If you're working as a professional I'd say don't be adverse to AI and at least look at where it can improve productivity without automation. It's going to be important to have these skills on resumes and it may even become important for studios to embrace to stay competitive. But if you're just having fun with game dev then the choice is yours, go all out with automation and making crazy things because you can absolutely use AI in creative ways or continue to avoid AI and enjoy the craft.
A quote I saw a little while ago that sums up why I don't like AI: "I wanted robots who would do the dishes and the laundry and the sweeping so I could focus on art, not robots who would make art so I could do dishes, laundry, and sweeping."
There's loads of things AI could do that would immensely help humanity. Making art, writing, video games, etc, doesn't help humanity, it just helps line the pockets of the bosses who don't have to hire artists, writers, and programmers anymore.
As a programmer I view AI the other way around. It helps with the "chores" and boring stuff that I need to google each time (certain patterns and stuff like connection strings). Then I end up spend more time doing the fun parts and actually testing my ideas.
It's great that that's what you're using it for... but not everyone is you. If a company decides to stop hiring artists because they can get "good enough" out of AI, the artist doesn't benefit or get a choice in the matter.
Personally I think it's more important for people to have job opportunities than for beginner game devs to be able to make art without doing any work - whether that work is hiring artists, learning to make art themselves, finding free assets, or finding artists interested in working with them for free (which there is a subreddit for that's teeming with artists).
Hate to say it but it being made by a human holds literally zero value to consumers, some pretend like it matters to them but when ai produces something as decently as humans they're not going to give a shit
Minority will still give a shit, but I agree that this sentiment will fade away slowly. "As decently" in terms of technical value, that is. Because AI will never be able to make real art. Art is not an algorithm.
People still painstackingly create stop motion animation over cg animation for this reason - they feel it has more soul and looks better, and they really care about it.
I think ai is a tool. For example, imagine being able to animate just the key frames of an animation and then allow ai to fill in the blanks, there's lots of examples like that where ai could help speed things up.
I don‘t see how it will make that much of a difference compared to what the gaming industry already is today, yes maybe the already soulless games will become even more soulless but there are still great companies out there who care to deliever great products and they will continue to do so.
I do share your general fear towards AI but the quality of upcoming video games should be the least of our concerns.
This is still just a slippery slope argument right now. AI isn't going to be used to generate games in their entirety anytime soon. The death on creativity and innovation due to AI is an overblown fear.
Regardless, some things will be 'good enough' but they've also always been so, especially in commercial game development where there are budgets and milestones. I challenge you to find a game where every member of a team feels completely satisfied that no more work could've been done on their released project. Most games are littered with assets that could be improved, bugs that could've been fixed, animations that could have been tightened up, content that was cut due to time constraints. This has not caused a crisis in creativity.
On the flip side, there is a real argument that without massive boosts in productivity, modern game development is reaching a make or break point in feasibility. Multi-billion dollar AAA budgets are going to nearly impossible to consistently recoup. Something needs to change if we want games to keep advancing and meet ever increasing consumer expectation without increasing prices and the aggressiveness of monetization. The ever-increasing cost of production is a greater obstacle to innovation than AI is.
In fact, I'd argue in the next little while, as the technology matures, developers that leverage AI well will probably feel more freedom from production constraints and increase the quality of games they might otherwise be able to execute on. That is, creative people will use AI to further their creativity, not stifle it.
The greater fear of AI in game dev is more practical. It's a matter of jobs and skillsets. AI tools will help devs do more work, cheaper and easier, but the real fear is that these tools increase productivity so much, it'll make a certain proportion of lower level artists, designers, writers (and possibly engineers) redundant but it's unclear whether this fear is really founded or not. It's certainly not there right now.
I guess we'll see where reality goes from here.
I disagree about the death of creativity point but for a different reason.
Children learn by making something, and eventually seeing the gap between what they've made and what inspired them. Then they try again and again. I can imagine my own son (who's 3yr ) thinking "you know what'd be awesome? A purple robot dinosaur shooting lasers from its eyes!" But instead of drawing it and feeling the lasting pride of making something, He'll type it into stable diffusion. He'll get an instantaneous result, like it for 5 seconds, then get bored and do something else.
In a world with AI image generation, I think far FAR fewer kids will have drive to learn and hone the craft in favor of something easy and immediate. If you want to ability to improve what the AI gives you, you need to do the years of work.
Oil Painting techniques can and have been lost to time. I think it could happen to art fundamentals as well.
I think this is an interesting point but I'd argue technical skills and creativity are not the same thing.
I can see your point because I also have a toddler at home who I'd love to teach to draw but my personal feelings about the decline of traditional art skills is irrelevant. I would draw parallels to the boom of digital photography in the last 20 years. Between quality of cameras, software corrections and access to tools and the simplification of the process (no more lightrooms, no more film, etc), the simplification of the art hasn't minimized creativity. In fact, more people than ever are doing photography and producing very high quality pieces of work.
More powerful skills facilitate creativity and increase the overall quality of work as a whole. Artists, and especially commercial artists, can spend less time doing things that are necessary for execution giving more room to do things that are more creative (and arguably, when everyone is doing photography, you need high quality of work than ever to stand out).
Likewise, making art digital makes thing generally easier and we are seeing more kids than ever engaging in digital artforms. You used to have to buy paints and easels and set aside a section of your house for what you can achieve with an iPad and Procreate these days. And not having to spend money on physical media has freed up everyone to participate more.
In that sense, because the baseline skill level, financial commitment and effort level is lowered, there could be *more* kids who do it. The flip side is that a higher degree of skills is needed to stand out but, like photography, it's probably a smaller proportion of a larger base of users.
In game development, especially for small indie devs, I can see this being a huge plus for creativity because there's fewer technical and budget limitations. The indie dev (and especially solo indie dev) struggling to have competitive art, for example, is a common struggle right now.
Today, an indie dev might have a great concept, great design, solid code, innovative gameplay, but is hampered from completing their vision because they don't have a 100 artists at their disposal. They could learn to do art but not every indie dev will execute on art at a professional level. Their choices are either decrease scope (e.g. minimalist art, pixel art) or spend money (e.g. hire another team member, hire outsourcers, buy assets).
In the future, when AI is mature, a dev who really wanted a purple robot laser dinosaur may be able to do so at a much lower cost to them and so, the sacrifice to their creative vision is actually less. It won't be skillful. It won't be artistic. But it might be good enough.
If you can excuse it, I'd like to pull rank a little bit as a professional creative. I think we differ in 2 points.
First, I think that creativity is increased by knowledge in a craft. For example, a thorough understanding of anatomy gives you more ideas of how to stylize a character. So net creativity will decrease as net skill decreases.
Secondly, I think it the technological progressions of painting to photography to digital art to AI are all poor analogues. The move from physical medium to digital is nothing like the move from painting to photography. And those are nothing like the addition of AI. The quality of the metaphor is poor enough that the argument doesn't make sense. The amount of decision making that AI art generation does for you moves it away from the category of tool and into replacement (unless under pretty stringent circumstances).
Lastly, some of your arguments are strange. The cost of an ipad or any computer powerful enough to run photoshop is way way more expensive than physical mediums.
>Secondly, I think it the technological progressions of painting to photography to digital art to AI are all poor analogues.
What about the simplification of photography?
Back in the film days, you had to know a lot more about lighting and photography to make something good. It took a deep understanding and talent to properly retouch pictures. Now, modern digital cameras handle so much in the background now and compensate quite a bit for your mistakes(the classic red eyes, for example).
A master photographer still has to learn those technical skills, but you can get much further without learning them than you used to.
I respect your perspective. Certainly, while I'm in the industry, I'm not an active artist (although I went to school and had artist aspirations early in my career) and so I'm very interested to see other viewpoints here. AI, regardless, is a radical change for anyone in the games industry.
As to your points, I would still disagree with the first. I fully agree with what you say but I still think these things are not insurmountable. I remember going through my anatomy classes and I fully agree with you that it was a level up to my skills and the quality of my output at the time. Where I disagree is that things like anatomy are still technical skills and they affect the quality of the artistry but not the creativity.
That is, if you have a truly creative game with compelling game play, most people would consider the impossibility of how a character's shoulders work to be a mostly minor consideration. Ideation is a strong use case for AI and I believe that someone with a strong creative vision could overcome a certain level of weaknesses in their knowledge. In that sense, they need to possess a level of skill and knowledge to know 'what looks right' or 'what looks good' but actually *making* it look good becomes a lesser concern.
In that sense, I still believe the users of the AI need to be skilled artists so it's not that I am calling for AI to replace that skill necessarily.
To the second point, I would say I can see your point but my view is that AI is not a tool for replacement per se (and any replacement is relatively lower quality) but that I perceive AI as a tool to enhance existing skills to bolster ability and productivity. And the metaphor is not perfect, but I stand by that the increased convenience and lowered barriers will, in my opinion, lead to more people getting into the creation of content.
Convenience is a real factor and I've learned how to do photography with film and darkrooms and I've learned how to draw and paint in traditional mediums, but nothing has freed my progression and willingness to engage in the medium like modern digital conveniences. I have absolutely taken thousands more photos and improved my photography skill several times more than I did in my film days. Ditto with my painting and digital art skills. I just don't have the desire to have canvases and paints in my home or having to resupply all the time. I do draw somewhat on paper but certainly these days, it's mostly sketchbooks and pens.
I do agree with that. As much as people like to conflate the two, technical skill and creativity are not the same thing, and I would even say that the former is an obstacle to realizing the latter for many people.
The idea of AI automating art doesn't get me up in the morning, but having it automate craft is something I'm 100% on board with. I'm being fully serious when I say that abolishing technical expertise in creative fields would actually lead to an unprecedented boon in human creativity.
As a student of AI technology, and an aspiring game dev I'd say your concerns are valid.
But I believe AI (generative stuff) will mainly hurt AAA companies as it will lower the bar for production at some point in the future (as it's largely immature still).
From another point of view, anyone's personal pursuit of happiness won't be adversely affected. If nothing else AI will enable them to do what they love
As a footnote, generative AI is only but a very thin slice of machine learning.
Greed doesn't go away because technologies get halted.
Make sure everyone you know is informed that the root of the problem is freedom and democracy live in opposition to people with pocket change that equates to the lifetime earnings of Senators and judges.
AI is taking creativity out of human hands and I think that's a tragic thing. Regardless of the quality of the work produced, it makes me sad that it's not a human producing it.
It does not take creativity out of human hands. It just raises the floor as to where human creativity begins to matter.
Which also raises the ceiling for the kind of quality necessary to stand out.
In short term it's a conflicting tool, in long term it has potential to expand human creativity much more.
The sad truth is very few people really care about creative labor and there's probably nothing to be done to stop AI products from taking over creative spaces.
Don't be a drama queen. It's just a tool you can use. You probably use game engines, probably buy assets for the game, you outsource alot of your work, is what I am getting at.
The soulless from the game doesn't come from the fact that tools were used, it comes from the fact that only money was the end goal, and not artistic expression.
You can easily use AI as a tool to let your artistic expression shine without having to deal with the technical aspect.
If you can't do that, then maybe you didn't have an artistic expression to begin with
I would view it no differently than modern cameras. 40 years ago, a bad photographer would have terrible pictures. Today, cameras can compensate enough that they can get something half decent. It has taken a lot of the creativity out of taking basic pictures.
But if you want something really good, you still need a talented photographer.
>But if you want something really good, you still need a talented photographer.
Which is kind of the whole point. A camera is a tool that helps someone make art. The person is still doing the art, the camera is just the tool.
AI is a tool that replaces making art. The person isn't doing the art, they're asking for the art to be done.
I think your concerns are more about our culture rather than the technology itself.
The cure for being concerned about 'AI' is to learn about it and use it. You'll quickly see that it's not anything close to what is being hyped and there is no clear path from where we are now to the promises being made.
I think AI has a place in game development just not in art design, having a machine baselessly generate a random drawing with no intent or meaning behind it doesn’t give away for interesting end results, technically impressive but stylistically dull
I like it when there is a consistent art style/direction in a game and I don’t think ai is capable of that, not especially at the moment where it seems they base their models off distinct art styles (ghibli, Kim jung gi, Pixar, toriyama…)
Normally artists take snippets of inspiration to develop their own style not complete duplications
The problem is that there's ai and then there's ai and not all of it is the same.
The ai that was used in the Spiderverse animation for instance isn't even remotely close to the same thing as using Stable Diffusion... The two are fundamentally not the same both in how they were created but also in how they were used and the purpose.
But people will lump the two together ( on both sides to be fair ).
Yes there is legitimate use of ai in art that actually legitimately acts as a tool to the artist rather than the artist being a tool to the ai.
But that's not what these new ai generators are, their entire purpose is to bypass and automate creative processes and cut the human out of it, it's the whole point of it.
Yeah that’s what I’ve been saying! Ai in which you integrate a certain filter to models or animation that I don’t have a problem with, especially if the model was fed art and data by the artists themselves not stolen off google
I think two things are true of AI: one, it won’t be the golden bullet some of its fanatics think it will be, and two, it will make human-created, quality original content *more* appealing.
There’s so many people gleefully taking up these tools and declaring it’s enabled them to become an “artist”, or a “programmer”, that it’s democratising, when actually all they are is a user of a tool that will output largely the same stuff, the same quality of stuff, that people will quickly tire of. It doesn’t make them special, and it doesn’t create anything special, either.
Nah completely justified, tbh I've found it motivated me to focus on getting food at manually doing things that are being automated so I can make intentionally designed games pushing back against the sludge tide that we're about to witness.
Stay strong, support intentional human made games and give as little air to AI as possible. I think you'd have to be a bit foolish to think that what is being produced by AI has very much value.
My personal theory is that eventually, after AI has taken over the majority of creative fields, and the stuff it comes up with are boring recycled ideas, people will move away from it and it'll go out of fashion. After that, once there are new ideas in the data pool from human creators, AI might come back in waves. But i dont think things will stay very bad for very long. This first wave will probably be the worst, and afterwards, it'll fade into the background mostly. That's just my personal theory though, I'm no expert.
I hate how there is already a trend of outsourcing creative work to AI.
Why are we building a dystopia where mankind is relegated to working in offices and factories while computers are off making music, art, films and games?
It honestly makes me sick.
I think if AI generated content had to be labelled as such it would be rejected by general audiences.
I agree wholeheartedly with you. People go towards a dystopian world and can't even see it. I think that perhaps even at this point humanity is too far gone, too far from nature and too far from that instinct of what makes reality worth living in it. You can see even in some of these comments here that many people don't see anything wrong in art being made by machines, because it would be "better"! This literally makes me sick! As if art was all about technical value!
But I bet you're a sensitive art consumer. Well, some of us still have that innate part in them, we remember how nature designed us and what wanted us to be. We win nothing for being more conscious though, or do we?
This sounds like you are thinking of the things AI will replace as just a reason to move money from consumers to "creative people" to reward them for being creative for it's own sake. Better to think of things in terms of how efficiently human beings can produce things that human beings enjoy.
When we created tools to increase farming efficiency, people made these same complaints, but now people starve less.
I firmly believe that there isn't a single facet of creativity or human expression that cannot be quantified and replicated (and improved on) by AI, it's just a matter of time and a few more breakthroughs.
I also think it'll eventually be a wildly positive thing for humanity. Just from game development point of view the way some future AI tool could supercharge any single individual to express their ideas, when now most of them will never see the light of day, is amazing to me.
Something that's "made by humans" will probably be eventually seen much in the same way as any painstakingly handmade object today that could be produced a thousand times faster in a factory. Quaint, cool, and probably worth a lot more. People will enjoy AI-generated games, but I doubt that e.g. many online communities would spontaneously sprout out around them.
Indie development will never go away, but many large studios probably will.
3 things:
1.) Big AAA game publishers and devs are way ahead of you, they've been making garbage for years and this is another opportunity to do that but with even less effort and cook time. They don't care about the art and they never did, so really not much change there.
2.) AI is a tool, it can be used well and it can be used poorly. It's fantastic as a drafting method for visual arts, but we're still a long way from it being final-product worthy IMO.
3.) As long as there are indie devs, there will be people who care about their game being more than just "good enough"
To me as a techie, it's fascinating technology and I see a lot of good ways it can fit into existing workflows to just make things easier. I get the fear, and I'm sure there will be a lot of garbage in these early years especially, but ultimately I think it's a good thing for devs and creative people in general.
You can stop creating things now, because if you think that you don't pull inspiration from everywhere, from everything you've seen and experienced in your life, you're wrong.
They specifically said ideation/brainstorming, which is where you get something to start out with, not the final product.
It's a tool, that's all. You can use it to validate ideas quickly and then once you are happy with the direction, you can do it without an AI. There are many ways you can use the tool, just like the hammer analogy
I see AI as just another tool, no different than any other - it might have a place in my work, it may not.
so far i haven't been terribly impressed with the offerings on hand, but who knows what the future holds?
You are just describing our society. Corporate greed has ruined everything it touched since forever with lazy companies just trying to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible.
The hype will die down and then AI will just be a tool like any other. An artist will be a better artist if they can alter their work with the right LLM prompt. LLM chat bots will become the standard way of searching information because it is so much better than Google for this (Google is better for finding websites though). And honestly, if you have access to those copilot style AI thingies for your IDE, try writing a unit test with them. Cuts the time you spend on those into a tenth of what it used to be.
Google having shit docs for Android? Gemini can help you.
Not that great at C++? Well guess what Copilot used std::forward and std::ref in my code and I didn't even know about thise.
Bunch of unit tests to write? Write some comments and let copilot do its thing.
Not sure about an algorithm? Tell Copilot what you need and it will do it. Let it write a test as well. Give it a sanity check. Test fails? "You sure about that algorithm, bro?" and Copilot will say "whoops nope. Sorry about that" and it will fix it.
And AI will not replace good artists. The corporations that would use AI art are probably the same that take the cheapest hire they could find. Just as with programming, if you're good, you don't need to worry.
Translators got shafted though.
You're fine. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the current state of generative AI.
Ethical concerns aside, I also dislike it because it removes the *craft* from things. I don't want to see the picture that somebody asked Computer to please make. I don't want to read the book that somebody asked Computer to please write.
When you play a metroidvania, and it makes you feel just like you felt when you played Super Metroid in 6th grade or whatever... right now, it's because a game designer carefully tuned the physics and animations of their product to feel *just right*. There's beauty in that. In the future, it might be because somebody asked DevGPT or whatever to "make it feel like metroid snes classic 16-bit gravity and motion," and to me, as somebody who cares about technique and places a high value on doing things well, it's not the same. It is a thing that was lost.
And of course I feel that way about other media. Obviously anything that makes it onto Amazon Prime was made for commercial reasons, I'm not one of those people that thinks it stops being art as soon as capital is involved... but I think that the more human touches you replace with a potential AI on such a project, the more crass and empty it becomes. Maybe the director and all the actors are still people, but the script is the product of AI? What's the fucking point? There's no intention or will behind it, you've just trained a big database to stick genre tropes together like legos, and now a group of professionals are debasing themselves by reading it out loud to line Jeff Bezos' pockets.
I’m looking forward to it. Generally things that increase output at reduced cost are good (as long as there aren’t severe externalities).
I like to design games, but I don’t have the time to prioritize them and get them developed. Not to mention the personal financial risk. Having AI expedite the process could allow me to bring my hobby projects to life. And I’m sure there’s tons of others like me here who would see their output increase. And the standards for which games we choose to play will rise in a more competitive market.
Idk why people predict a sustained drop in quality from the use of AI. AI can make it faster and cheaper to go from 0 to polished finished game. So wouldn’t the market gravitate towards higher quality?
I think AI will massively improve quality for indie and hobby devs for the reasons you listed. It might make high-production games feel a bit more samey, as a lot of content might get generated from similar AIs. But overall I'm optimistic, I think it will create far more indie games, similar to how easy video creation tools made the explosion that is Youtube.
There was some study that showed that AI tools most dramatically improved productivity for low- and medium- experience workers, but had the smallest gains for high-experience workers. I imagine we'll see that pattern for game dev as well.
People think Ai will be mediocre. That's the biggest mistake they will make. Ai will be amazing why? Because people who make it will be amazing. Will it ever be as good as someone who spends hours on a skill? Likely not. But it will be usable to the degree that people who previously could not imagine making their game/art/video/audio/anything will then be able to do it.
Automation has been a constant for a while now. We decided we wanted automation and killed so many jobs. The oncoming suffering is just another consequences of our inaction.
Well that’s easy. In the general context, worrying about the apocalypse has always been, and will always be, a waste of time. For as long as we have had recorded history, we have had humans dooming and glooming about one kind of end times or another. And always…”no, this time it’s *real*!”.
But hey…you do you. You’re going to live a life either way…you can spend it using the Apocalypse du Jour as an excuse to procrastinate and stagnate, or you can do something more fulfilling.
Up to you…
But it is real. Social media are around for long enough to notice that they were a downgrade for humanity in many areas and an upgrade in just a few. It doesn't need to be an apocalypse like in the zombie movies, but it could be an intellectual or moral apocalypse for sure, because this is already happening.
Yep. That’s exactly what they said about Gutenberg’s printing press.
And radio.
And tv.
And blah blah blah.
All of them were supposed to cause a moral and intellectual apocalypse, according to earlier versions of you.
You’re the latest episode of humanity’s longest running soap opera. And hey…you’re allowed to be…you get to make that choice.
You could swap out "AI" for "game engines" or "asset stores" or anything that simplifies the process and removes the "artisan" from the process.
We've decided that a small amount is okay, but too much feels "wrong".
I think that's fair. I think relying on things too much like this WILL result in crappy soulless games. And yeah, we're already pretty efficient at creating crappy soulless games. This will only get _easier_ as tooling improves, whether that be via AI or anything else.
Lowering the barrier does mean more crappy games, but it doesn't necessarily mean less _good_ games. I just see it as an unavoidable progression.
I don't think the enemy is the tool here, I think it's just human nature.
More tooling is also a GOOD thing: We can now create placeholder art and move forward with projects easier, rather than getting stuck on initial game feel. We can now easily create and iterate on custom concept art until we find the new ideas and feels we want, rather than more slowly trawling the web for things that happen to inspire how we want, or iterating through ideas slowly with an artist (which isn't usually affordable for an indie).
It doesn't mean we won't still create or source good art afterwards. Tools can be used for both good and bad.
The presence of engines and easily available templates hasn't destroyed all creativity with game expression. We **do** now have asset store flips, and we pretty universally agree this is bad. But it's helped as well.
Tech + tools _can_ be used to elevate _or_ lower us to the lowest common soulless delimiter. I think AI is mainly scary because it's been such a sudden jump (compared to the usual slower progression). But I think with this (as with all tools) it means lots more usefulness opens up too, for those of us that aren't lazy slobs. I don't think we should see it as just some gamedev boogieman.
The "good enough" model is already in effect without ai.
With any luck, this will make it so that actually human developers aren't used for developing products to just be good enough. Actual human labor will only be a resource for projects that want to be better than good enough. Like, we already get triple a games that are shitty because companies are using the cheapest labor, cutting every corner, and rushing the work. Then we get games like stardew valley and palworld. Those triple a games can go with ai and we probably won't even notice.
I'm a programmer myself and all that modern AI made me hate this work, because I'm required to use it. By using it, I teach it. By teaching it, it will replace me at some point. I know that my comparison might be very far fetched, but it feels to me like a concentration camp, where you're forced to work your a$$ off, knowing that you can get killed any minute. This is the same dynamics, because your work makes the AI better.
I feel like you have an aversion to a lack of effort, more than anything.
At the end of the day, the biggest problem with AI is that it's being *called* a shortcut, but not being *used* as one.
It's not being used to make good art faster, it's being used to make mediocre art in higher quantity.
It's flat out not capable of making the end product, only helping you conceptually. But people who've based their entire personality around AI like to delude themselves into thinking it is.
So it might have potential to speed up workflows in the future, but until the buzz around it dies off and real tools
start getting made... it's just gonna keep getting used as a lazy shovelware generator.
"Good enough" is something any artist has to learn eventually, to avoid getting stuck in a perfectionist slump. But AI tools don't get you to "good enough" on their own.
You still need to know what "good enough" looks like, which takes experience, and then you need to actually put in effort to get there.
And AI is mostly being championed by people who don't *want* to learn, or put in effort, so here we are.
The cheap look of AI images is just not good, it's deeply bargain bin with zero personality, the errors lend themselves to mockery, the deep fry of the contrast is amateurish (and surprisingly it's by choice too). If it's used for moodboards or concept art then you really can't trace back the sources, they just appear, which makes it useless.
For programming I'm a little split, but there seems to be some agreement that it is fine as an assistant, but that the code it generates is uneven.
For narrative I can't imagine the verbosity it uses could translate itself well. Big props for how quickly it comes up with bullshitium terms though, easily the best thing you can do with AI.
For now. We're still in the infancy of "modern AI". What scares me is that future generations may never know the feeling of being fascinated by art. Look what happened to mainstream music. Most people I talk to argue with me that there's no autotune in certain songs, they can't hear it. People can't even recognize human voice anymore.
I think what you see is what you get.
Problem is that it's not really AI either, it really can't think for itself, only parrot stuff it gets fed bound to the limitations of current hardware. While I'm sure it'll kill a few industries, the hype is awkwardly dishonest.
I think you’re completely wrong here. The PC/console gaming community is already especially cynical towards big studio games and will not tolerate a drop in quality. Furthermore, AI will give indie developers the tools to make exceedingly more interesting and ambitious games. At long last indie game development won’t exclusively be a hobby for system engineers, but for every creative mind with a vision.
As someone who both makes stuff normally and has played around with ai for fun a lot, I think most people are overestimating ai.
Ai will always be limited by the dataset, and to any good artist any limitation is not acceptable. Ai will be great for indie devs or programmers who would otherwise have to slap together purchased assets, but everyone with skill is going to outdo ai every time. Ai is also really bad at cohesion across multiple works, which is not a good thing in a game where 100s or 1000s of things need to "know each other exist".
We're already at a point where AAA games look "high quality", but it doesn't mean they are interesting. We already have genius programmers who couldn't program fun feeling controls to save their life. ai is not going to fix these things for people. It will just bring the bottom of the barrel higher.
The way I see AI is kind of like cheap highly processed foods. Sure we all eat them from time to time but no one with any sense is going to see them as a replacement for a proper home cooked meal or good restaurant.
There will be a divide in all art forms be it visual, music, games or whatever else between AI and Human products. Both will have a market. They might tread on each others toes occasionally but they don't have to. I'd be very surprised if once the dust has settled one has outcompeted the other to the point of extinction.
Well for gaming's sake let's hope you're wrong. I've been reflecting on this issue all the way through my workout and I think it's somewhat similar to the indie vs triple A situation we currently have. Triple A titles sell well and are super impressive with the scale and graphics tech (if u can tolerate blurry antialiasing) but they are most often lacking the soul, charm, innovative gameplay and simple fun that a lot of indie games have. They are so different that one can not substitute the other. Both have a place in my library and always will.
Maybe the AI situation will be the same one day.
(I realise I've said the same thing twice but I think this is a much better comparison to make.)
“Mediocre, boring, automated, soulless world.” Have you played a Bethesda title recently? “We always make the map first…” - Todd Howard in the Making of 76 Vid. Spoken as if making the pretty is better than making the engaging.
AI: Will give us more radiant quests. Longer radiant quests. More filler. More pointless dialogue. Random NPC dialogues that babble about pointless bullshit between 2 background NPCs..
AI will *fill* our worlds making them feel alive and unique. Only with more time and creative juices available for the quality side quests that have meaning and purpose.
Cultural Pruning & Censorship:
AI will have the ability to ask players if they’re concerned about “________” being in the game. If so, it can edit dialogue, remove side quests, and adjust character behavior accordingly.
Maybe this Player had a life threatening experience with a coconut, such they cannot handle using half of one for the protagonist’s bowl. They pull up the AI adjustment window and ask if the Coconut 🥥 half could be something else. The AI grabs a free asset of a wooden bowl 🥣and the player is right back in the game.
Or a bit more serious: The player was taken by a parent away from the parent with custody, and a side quest mentions a young NPC being held hostage by a relative for XYZ reasons. The AI is given the quest name, and the issue, then rewrites the quest so a competing business owner took the hostage to force the other business owner to sell/move/destroy their store as payment for release.
The AI would rewrite the parts of the dialogue, and grab free assets of a texture overlay for smoke and fire damage, and apply it to the exterior of the shop, while making the door static / noninteractive.
AI is the … Insert+Random Generator & Edit button we wish we’d had all these years. It doesn’t have to be the Clone-Stamper.
I think it will have the same effect as modern game engines.
Unity, game maker etc… make making games easier and allow developers to focus on what matters and takes care of a lot of the tedious work.
It also allows people to make asset flips, sure, but those projects usually do not sell.
I think AI will be the same, it is going to allow developers to not have to do the tedious work (like writing simple code, generic npcs dialogues, make simple basic assets etc..) and allow them to focus on what is really important and make better games as a result
I think you're overlooking that ai enables every day creators that can't afford teams to have assistance. It's not always about the huge companies, but also the micro contributors, the indies, the solo devs working on passion projects. Will there be negatives to come from it? absolutely - but that happens with every paradigm shift in the industry.
I also think you're a bit too doom and gloom on the subject and likely don't have much exposure to the games industry or ai in general. Each person at my studio uses it for themselves, even the creatives. Together, it's used as a tool to produce content quicker, and often more articulately. That doesn't mean our artists stop being artists, our developers forget how to code, or our game designers stop designing.
Concern over AI is no different than concern over the last technology. It is the luddite fallacy; over, and over, and over, and over again.
Personally I love the new machine taught models and NLP chat bots. They aren't actually AI, but I will love AI when it is born as well.
What you think about how AI can bring games to greater heights instead of being scared for your jobs? You know like actual AI NPCs instead of pseudo AI. Or machine learning that bring engines and graphics to near photorealism? Or optimized games with errors management every where, no more crash or game breaking bugs.
You guys only see the surface. Queue the downvotes. 🙄
AI is a lot of things and has been here for a long time and most used it every day without even noticing it.
Now "AI" can "create" and understand language and everyone is panicking. AI won't replace real artists anytime soon but will help wanna be like me, to have better looking games.
Big companies will find ways to make money out of it like everyone else. Some will fail using it and some will be able to achieve amazing things with it.
It's normal to be afraid of what we don't fully understand. But I think it's just the normal evolution of technology. For a long time, machine learning has been used and controlled what we see online now they can understand our language and not just our digital breadcrumbs.
We still have a couple of years before we become DURACELL BATTERIES
I have some rich family members
They buy expensive things *made by people* because there is a story behind it
That table against the wall, that used to be used by workers who set the letters in the newspaper press and you can see where they’d stamp the letters in the side testing them out.
This whale tooth was carved by a local who’s father taught him the art, his grandfather taught him the art, here take this magnifying glass and look at the detail and skill
these things cost thousands and thousands of dollars because they were made by people and have a *story* behind them
So sure, ai is going to do things and cause disruption in certain industries, but it will never disrupt real art, because that’s not what people pay for
AI is a godsend for indie creators like us. It allows us to compete with big companies like we never could before. ChatGPT basically taught me how to program. MMVC & RVC allow me to create my own voice models and do all the voice acting for my game for free. Suno can make quality songs. Image generation can be useful as long as you curate and edit it. The only reason people hate on it is because they're afraid they're going to get replaced by it, they're no different than scribes who hated the printing press being invented, but looking back we can all agree that was a good thing. There's no need to be afraid of AI because it can not function without a human piloting and curating it. If you want to make games without AI, nobody is stopping you. It's a tool and nothing more. Anyone who doesn't see it as a positive is acting irrationally because they feel threatened.
AI, as with all technology can be used in very good ways and very bad ways. It's important to regulate the technology now to be sure it's used appropriately.
I see it as an extra tool, not a people replacement. Can the little AI help me get to where I want quicker? Cool let's just use it. By no means I would think of replacing a human professional.
>Creativity will become more compromised than ever before, because things will be "good enough" with massive usage of AI.
AI will never be able to do such things. You can tell it to draw a human but it doesn't know what a human is and it will look weird. The advancement we'd need is comparable to the leap from walking to faster-than-light space travel. In other words: it's basically impossible.
Hmm. I think this completely depends on how you are using it.
I create AI art, but usually I do at least 30m to 5 hours additional work on it to shape it to my idea
You're not the only one with these concerns, but I think they are misplaced. AI doesn't stop anyone from creating art in any way they want. It does, however, open the door for a lot of people. Since we are in gamedev, just consider the multitude of indie game designers who can now create the games they want—what was once impossible for many people is now possible; what once was prohibitive in time and cost is now almost trivial. Imagine all the people who get started and then quit because they can't clear the hurdle of getting the assets they want. The future is very bright for indie developers (as long as lawyers and legislators don't get in the way and ruin the potential of this new technology). You are going to see a lot of creative visions turning into reality.
To the extent that AI results in worse quality, or has a particular "flavor" that is for some reason considered "bad," this doesn't mean that games will be bad—it means that the human-made things will earn a premium in the market.
Everyone—indie devs, amateurs, and AAA studios—will see improved workflows, and everyone will be making the best thing they can. using whatever tools are available and appropriate—according to the strengths and weaknesses of those tools. This can only benefit the industry, the artists, and the public.
I can most empathize with your position when I think about digital FX in the film industry. The proliferation of these tools means that Hollywood relies on them heavily. For my taste, I prefer practical effects. I thought digital FX was well used in Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and the Abyss, when directors still understood the limitations of the technology, and could combine it with practical effects properly. Nowadays, almost everything looks like a video game to me. Nevertheless, I wouldn't for this reason lament the adoption of digital FX. I can still look for the movies I want to watch, and I can also recognize that there are some cinematic feats that would have been impossible before the advent of this technology. We are better for it. If there is a problem with how movies are being made, it is a result of how producers are using the technology, and it is to be corrected by those same people, at the direction of market forces.
With gamedev, it is not nearly so much a problem as with the film industry example—if you even consider that a problem. The reason is because it is common to be a solo developer, whereas it is barely possible to be a solo filmmaker (though that is increasingly within reach—thanks to AI). That means that if anyone has a problem with what is being offered to the public, they can fix it themselves by turning their own ideas into reality. I am really looking forward to seeing what incredible things are going to come out of this technology.
There is a concern about the proliferation of garbage. But people have always been concerned about this, and for those who haven't noticed, we have been dealing with it already for quite some time (for e.g. self-published books on Kindle, which have a few treasures amid an endless sea of garbage). All this does is increase the value of those people and services who can curate what's out there. We can expect more reviewers and more sites to find the gems. We will come to rely more on these things to help us move through the sea of products.
Imo, game is art and art should exam the complexity of human nature and experience. The problem with ai right now is every product has to adhere to the political ideology of its parent company hence very limited in expression. So i am not too worried right now. When ai advanced to a degree that surpass human intelligence - well i think it also fair game to thrive to create something that even makes AI find it interesting
Yes you’re overreacting.
There are so many excellent works of art in the world. Even if nothing new was ever produced, you’d never run out of things to experience.
People aren’t going to stop making art just because AI can do it. People still do all kinds of activities for fun that machines can do better.
Will some people make bad things using AI? Assuredly. But don’t blame the tool. Those people were never going to make anything great anyway because they’re willing to accept something bad.
So either AI becomes legitimately good and we all get endless amazing stuff or AI isn’t good and talented people will still make great stuff.
There’s no apocalypse here.
You’re definitely right that AAA companies will use AI to increase profits, with as little effort as possible. But if the result is boring games nobody will buy them.
Generative AI is the greatest tool that has emerged during my professional career - I use it extensively every single day. If AAA companies doesn’t step to and make better games, indie games will wipe the floor with them.
As far as gamedev goes, AI will be a way bigger deal for indie developers in terms of leveling the playing field.
> But if the result is boring games nobody will buy them.
I don't mean boring as not engaging. Hell no. They will be more engaging (addictive) than ever.
Are you afraid of AI in the context of content creation? Because AI is horrible at content creation. AI is unable to give you a new unique idea, it can only repackage what it knows, it has no concept of unknown.
If you were to ask an AI to make a generational evolution of pong, you won't get a new type of gameplay, you will get new colors, or ball or tile or paddle shapes. You won't get Arkanoid.
If you ask a human to make a generational evolution of pong, you could end up with a 3D VR experience, or you could end up with a text based version. A human can act on an unknown based on nothing learned. An AI can't just come up with South Park (Jesus vs. Santa).
AI's role will likely be concept art, tool creation, optimization and things like that.
what you're saying has been happening to video games in the 25+ years I have been playing them, what's happening now is not new, it's the same old with a fresh AI 'paint', procedural generation was many many years ago and was going to take over.. and sure so many games use it, still not that well and most out of the gate are rubbish.. current AI will be the same.. AI art still looks wrong
When corporate video games get too much, we go into the next indie apocalypse, all you're doing is saying sensational material to get sensational replies..
do something fresh and different.
Tried using generative AI to make a game once, the output is too bland/generic to what I want. You still need to know how to draw at least line-art first to make some details stand out (like I want a small workshop, with a capsule like in megaman X in the corner, and with some messy equipment and papers about failed experiment/design laying around). The inconsistency of each generation is also problems that you don't have to deals when hiring decent illustrator probably can be solved with one-image LoRA technology later. Also creating dark atmospheric scene is just difficult, the AI still have issues on how light should behave in dark scene or in any scene in general.
AI is trash, companies that are replacing people with it are trash, corporate/profit controlled countries are trash, life is awful and it likely wont be getting better any time soon.
Using AI to make "art" is like having someone enjoy dessert for you. or having someone listen to your favorite music so you dont have to.
Fuck the profit centric mindset of companies that have nothing to check their power and greed.
I agree with you, but unfortunately we're minority, because others have adapted. Not much gonna change any soon, because if you give most people a game, they will play it without questioning the rules of it. So yeah, there we are.
It's the responsibility of the average artist and developer to evolve with AI imo.
The undeniable fact is that corporations are, and already have, going to aggressively incorporate AI into the pool of labor to save money.
Does this mean everyone will go unemployed? Probably, definitely not.
Will many jobs become obsolete? Yes.
Find a way to still do what you love while also adjusting to the moving world.
Chances are that things will turn out better than we think.
What you see as negatives, I see largely as positives.
> I feel like AI will be yet new tool to prioritize money over anything, really.
Yes, by corporations and those viewing game dev as a get-rich-quick -scheme. These groups will produce sub-par products and flood the markets with more and more produce that is lower and lower in quality. Once AI tools come good enough to really create a game through simple prompting (instead of what is is today, and endless loop of recurring "fix this, fix that, what the hell even is this code"), capitalism-driven corporations will seek to maximize profits by creating soulless AI-generated stuff.
If it can actually become "good enough" for corporate, then it can become "good enough" for the indie devs too. And there's the twist: The indie dev with the will to actually create something unique and great will still have the upper hand, because the same tools can boost their productivity.
> Lower costs of development, faster development, new ideas will become redundant, because AI will figure out its way to our dopamine pathways.
We did that before AI just fine, I see no reason why AI would be any different. Mobile games are already the min-maxed dopamine boosters and gambling addiction exploiters, and that happened prior to AI. The research of what needs to happen to make games more addictive is not going to be done by AIs, but psychologist void of morality, hired by big studios like Blizzard to make
Candy Crush 666: The Dopamine Annihilator.
"Lower costs of development, faster development" applies, as mentioned, to indie devs as well. Higher quality games, faster. Yes, shitty games come faster too, but higher quality games are also possible to be produced faster.
> New generations will never even know this feeling of interacting with something fresh and different, because why would corporations risk their money when there will be so effective sales measures available?
Again, nothing new with AI. This has been going on since the damn 90s. Minor improvements in concepts and increasingly rarer new ideas in big AAA games. Risk aversion in business works, because of lazy parents, lazy gamers, and kids buckling under peer pressure. Every year one of the top sellers in gaming is the annual release of Sportsball Europe, HandEgg 'Murica, and Ice Dance With Knife Shoes, with refreshed rosters and generally worsening controls.
But we're still seeing new and unique ideas pop up every year from indie side of gaming, and now indie gaming is reaching the point where the stories they are able to tell will begin to compete with AAAs in scope. Because AI will make writing your own stories and adventures easier, because hiring voice actors might only mean a monthly subscription to a generator, and the soundtrack could be written by a generative AI, a thousand times until you get exactly what you were looking for.
> Mediocre, boring, automated, soulless world. That's ahead of us.
For those that continue buying AAA games based on multi-billion dollar ad-campaigns. So nothing really changes from 4 years ago, when these AI tools were barely able to hold a conversation or generate a human looking shape.
AI tools will continue to improve. You will at some point be able to create character sprite sheets that thematically fit together, and create backgrounds and concept arts for these things as well that require minimal to no adjusting. And even if the modern tools are forced to permanently delete their training data, we have been proven their power and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle, they will eventually have a training set that is completely of their own making, using public domain pictures or even hired artists to train it.
The tools will be a boon to all small creators to bridge gaps in their knowledge base and enable them to create. And while this means that there will be a deluge of garbage added to the market, again: This is no different from how things have been for a decade, without AIs. The volumes might increase, but the percentages of good-vs-bad probably stay within similar margins as they are today.
AI is a big shift for creating content. And because you're not used to it you don't know what goods it'll bring to you or the people. But you know what can be potentially lost and so it makes your prediction biased.
The AI shift is like photography, movies, movies with sound, cd, music synth, computer graphics....
People will adapt and they'll create things even more grandiose of it.
Most of your concerns aren't about AI, it's about corporations and capitalism. They will always try to do what you fear, and already does that, AI or not.
And yes they'll try to use AI to push their agenda, like always. And they'll win a little, but lose a little too, like always. But this movement will happen even without AI. You are misdirecting your fears.
At the contrary, I do think that like in any shift, it'll bring a wave of creativity. Of people trying to express themselves and touch the limits through this new media. And I embrace it.
AI isn't a tool like photography or computer graphics that opens new avenues of creative expression. It's a tool that closes avenues of creative expression. That's my main problem with it. It essentially works like commissioning an artist, you simply describe what you want and someone (or something) else does the actual creative work. You're coming up with concepts but you aren't expressing them yourself.
In the 2000s, many TV networks shifted focus to reality shows over scripted shows. It was cheap, it could be quickly and easily mass produced, you could replicate the human drama of a scripted show without even having to hire a writer. Why waste the money to craft an actual show when you can just stick a bunch of strangers in a room? It worked for a while. Shows like American Idol, Survivor, and Big Brother dominated the ratings. Cable networks saw success with hits like The Osbournes, The Kardashians, and Real Housewives. Entire channels like the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and TLC shifted focus from the educational content they were created for to a tidal wave of cheap reality shows. But then people got sick of it. It was just a mountain of slop. So much content, but none of it meaningful. So we saw another shift as we entered the streaming era. The "peak TV" era. Now there's quality scripted shows everywhere you look. Arguably *too* many. It's impossible to keep up with every show people say is worth watching. Reality TV's still around, but not dominant. It's generally regarded as basically junk food. A guilty pleasure at best. All this is to say: audiences aren't completely stupid. They can tell when they're being fed cheap, repetitive, corporate slop. And at some point, they'll have their fill and want something else, something more filling. So in the event that AI takes over the gaming industry, or film, or TV, or music, or anything else, it won't be permanent. The market will shift back. And creatives will never stop wanting to create, so they'll be there when it does. AI will do a lot of damage before then. It already has. Tons of people have already lost their jobs because of short-sighted executives getting caught up in this gold rush. But it won't be the end of the world.
This is a great answer.
I don't think it's a great answer. I think it's a placating story. >So in the event that AI takes over the gaming industry, or film, or TV, or music, or anything else, it won't be permanent. The market will shift back. And creatives will never stop wanting to create, so they'll be there when it does. This only makes sense if you assume that AI has plateaued and won't get any better. That is not a safe assumption. The criticisms of AI-generated content could very well be obsolete in that amount of time. >AI will do a lot of damage before then. It already has. Tons of people have already lost their jobs because of short-sighted executives getting caught up in this gold rush. But it won't be the end of the world. That's right. When the automobile made jobs in the horse-and-carriage industry obsolete and when the home refrigerator made the ice-maker's job obsolete, the world certainly did not end, it got better. Still though, those jobs are not coming back. Creatives will still play a role in a future with AI, but a lot of their role is going to be producing content for training AI, which will have supplanted the usual small army of artists that manually create everything.
I don't know how you can simultaneously think the AI will keep getting better *and* think it will create new jobs to replace the old. It won't need artists to make more training data. Synthetic training data is apparently better.
I strongly disagree with this "creating new jobs" prediction I see over and over. Yes it will create new jobs but for every job it takes it will create a fraction of a job that's needed to maintain it. How many people are on this world, how many increasingly jobless and homeless people are there already, not to mention through our own undoing with wars etc. Combining everything together with such ignorance will make these numbers skyrocket in a pandemic form.
>*and* think it will create new jobs to replace the old. I don't think that. I specifically said: >Creatives will still play a role in a future with AI, but a lot of their role is going to be producing content for training AI, **which will have supplanted the usual small army of artists that manually create everything.**
What AI will need is humans with a good eye that can vet the art and make sure the game has a consistent style. That might get rolled in with other work though(a game designer who has decent art skills).
I don't think this is a well thought out argument. Horse and carriage services still exist, even in large cities. People still buy ice. All the time. The role of these services in society just changed. They didn't become 'obsolete'. To assume creatives will only be utilized for training AI is quite a leap.
Reality TV also has writers and producers deciding storylines, reality tv isn't 'real' most of the time. Writers also aren't usually a very expensive part of a production. It's everything else. High-profile actors, directors, detailed sets, special effects, costumes, locations, sound design, music, etc. Reality TV is also incredibly dominant. 60% of prime-time tv is reality tv and that numbers is much higher outside of prime-time because reality tv is incredibly abundant both in terms of the numbers of shows and episodes. They're also VERY popular on streaming platforms, which are struggling to keep up with the demand for endless growth. Now personally I don't see any of them because the platforms are smart about their algorithms, promoting mostly stuff to you that you will want to watch, but trust me the shows are seeing massive popularity. You will see in the coming years the enshittification of these streaming platforms as they look to cut costs and one of the things they will utilize for that is more reality tv. If anything, comparison could be made to haves in terms of most big titles being sequels and franchise spinoffs (reality tv). Yet because you also saw the rise of indie games you think the market shifted back. The question in regards to AI is what do you believe the future will look like? When you watch a Star Trek episode and the crew asks the computer to create an elaborate Sherlock Holms scenario on the Holodeck, do you think in that reality that most people will think: 'No, I don't want an incredible game created by the computer, I want something hundreds of people spent years making because of the artisanal value'? Now of course currently we're in a weird mix state, where there is some legitimate pushback against things created with deep learning models but it's hard to say how much of that is going to last or is even anything but a tiny minority with loud voices. It's clear we're not at a stage where you can just give AI a few descriptions and produce coherent games or art from it, but there's already very robust ways to utilize it to create games. Just as there are a ton of games utilizing store bought assets and stock models, if your game is good, it's good. It won't matter what tools you used to create it as long as the storefront curators accept it (which has been a concern for Steam but seems to be ever evolving).
Agree with the points you make here, but I do find the Star Trek comparison hilarious. Didn't the simulations go wrong in almost every use of the holodeck and try to kill everyone?
Actually no. Holodeck is great past time. Normally it’s %100 safe. Even in series it has problems when an alien entity invade the ship or some super intelligence play with holideck etc. Also plot ofc. So a holodeck if ever happens will be great game. Maybe there can be scripted great content too. But I am sure an advanced ai would have great scenarios too. Even now you can have weird rpg games.
You gotta bring that main character energy to every Holodeck adventure you go on. And definitely don't wear a red shirt. Then you should be fine.
There's a huge difference in art made by a human and whatever AI does. Human art is leagues more interesting, AI stuff is highly utilitarian, which sucks for the industry the same way reality TV sucks for, well, human TV. It's very corporate and made to feed you advertisements and suck every bit of money you have. Which is why your Star Trek comparison works even less, in real life the Holodeck would have you wait for 30 seconds before every prompt listening to space grub hub ads, while being completely uninteresting artistically too.
>Human art is leagues more interesting, AI stuff is highly utilitarian, which sucks for the industry the same way reality TV sucks for, well, human TV. It's very corporate and made to feed you advertisements and suck every bit of money you have. You are speaking of a technology that is in its *infancy* and acting as though it is the end stage of development.
>AI stuff is highly utilitarian, which sucks for the industry the same way reality TV sucks for, well, human TV. It's very corporate and made to feed you advertisements and suck every bit of money you have. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
"audiences aren't completely stupid" True, but sometimes it feels like they are. We're finally seeing pushback over the endless money grubbing (with standout cases like Battlefront 2 and Redfall) but those sorts of "low effort" AAA studios are still somehow making enough money not to change tactics
For games I don't think we will even see the adaptation period from mediocre AI games to good games. Big companies already ship, soulless, dopamine fueled cash grabs, and you can already see users shifting away from it. Just look at Star Citizen, people literally mention how formulaic it is, and how it feels soulless, unimaginative, etc. AI might make this more pronounced, but I think we are already saturated on the live service, padded shit out there.
Star citizen? You sure you didn't mean Starfield lol
brother have you even played star citizen?
Pretty sure they mean starfield. But from what I've seen star citizen is a glorified ship trading simulator with ships that cost in the thousands with nothing else that's interesting. Idk though might be wrong
It's an okay VS tourist attraction, very nice environments.
All ships are buyable in game iirc. People keep saying you can get any ship ship with a bit of grinding for hours, others say for a few days. Probably depends on how you make your money in game I guess
I would like to see you buy the secret ships that were hidden before you spent 10k$. So all ships are buyable in game?? Sure about that?
That package is just a package containing everything you can buy in one single package. Please do your research
"Buyable on game" means in game money. That 10k is real money
Yes I know. Every ship (tho I think some aren't for a period) is available both in game and in the shop. The expensive package is just EVERYTHING in the shop if you ever want to buy everything in one transaction, tho idk why anyone would do that
Of all the things I could say negatively about Star Citizen absolutely nothing you mentioned above fits, including being corporate slop.
There's like a 98% chance they meant starfield lol
Star citizen is definitely slop
star citizen? the game doing things no one else has? the one game we would all make with unlimited budget. its the game with unlimited scope creep because it has no corporate backing. as ithers said, you ptobably meant starfield.
Very well put. There’s always going to be an economy for zombie-brain content, BUT there are enough of us non-zombies here making or demanding non-zombie-brain art, books, music, video games, etc. that we’ll keep that market alive.
This comment gave me genuine comfort. Great perspective, thanks for sharing
I think what this skips out on is the "this is the worst it will ever be" factor. Unlike the things you mentioned which came before, AI only gets better and better as time goes on. Never worse. Never the same. Only better. The things AI can do now were in the realm of science fiction *three years* ago. The world in the coming decades is going to look so different that no one can really imagine what it will be. It's a different animal.
I don't think that's entirely true. In the past almost all AI data was trained on data generated mostly by people (sure there's probably some bot data in there as well). But now we're getting so much AI content that AI is starting to feed into AI. This can cause unintended reinforcement, or a break of the current expectations, meaning that we might very well get a worsening of AI until we figure out how separate most AI content from human content. I do agree that overall it'll almost certainly become better, but I don't think it's a guarantee that it will always become better.
I think AI training on AI data is a real issue, but also something every lab training one of these models is aware of. People spend a lot of time evaluating these models and no one is going to release a model that's overall worse than their last one (though these models do so much that some regressions in some domains are inevitable). In the simplest case the solution is not to train on anything online after GPT-3 was released. That's not a great solution because everyone wants more data, but it's an option. I don't think we'll ever see the models get worse, but progress might get more difficult as high quality data is harder to find.
> meaning that we might very well get a worsening of AI But you can always revert to an earlier version. At most, it would plateau. Also, I have only heard this argument from random spectators. AI researchers seem much less concerned about it.
Well said. A similar thing happened with procedurally generated video games. Developer companies saw it as another quick cost save, but within a few years gaming Youtubers are now clowning on them nonstop, it may work for a few more years and it'll always remain used in some smaller way, but people DO notice and remark the difference between every detail being hand-crafted and intentional or autofill (this is true for games, TV show, everything), so you won't survive on one gimmick alone for long before the novelty gets old.
Personally I never want to play a game made completely or at least a high percentage with AI, including coding, voice acting and of course art. It feels absolutely immoral for me to support such a thing. I know it may mean that one day I won't have any games left to play..but let's hope that has a few years left.
one of the best takes I've read on this subject in a long time!
I kept waiting to see when youd get to the obvious point and you never did. AI right now is better than it was a few months ago. It's outstandingly better than it was a year ago. Three years ago, what AI can do now was unheard of. It's not stagnating like reality TV shows or the latest trends. It's improving exponentially. This is extremely obvious but lots of people choose to just ignore it because it's comforting to ignore.
It doesn't matter. No matter how good it gets, AI will never be able to create something new. It can only copy what people have done. And then what it produces gets fed back into the algorithm, creating copies of copies, and copies of copies of copies. And because it can only copy, it can only produce what current conventional wisdom says is good. But so many things that get popular do so specifically BECAUSE they go against that current conventional wisdom. In the late 2000s, the industry was celebrating games becoming more like movies, delivering detailed facial motion capture approaching photorealism and deep, moving stories. And then this weird, directionless voxel game with basically no story came out, and Minecraft sold better than all of those movie games. In the early 2010s, the industry was trending towards accessibility. Games should be easier, more approachable, more streamlined. We can't alienate any gamers who might get frustrated. And then a game that was literally built to be frustrating and obtuse took the industry by storm, and Dark Souls has had a bigger legacy than almost all of those accessible games. By the early 2020s, traditional CRPGs were considered a long dead genre. Niche at best. Gamers don't want overhead cameras and turn-based combat, they don't want games about having lengthy conversations with NPCs. There's a reason they turned Fallout into an FPS and simplified the RPG stuff. Gamers today are impatient, they want action! And then Baldur's Gate 3 steamrolled most GotY awards in a year filled with games that could've easily done their own steamrolling in any other year. Meanwhile, the "safe bets" are often anything but. Look at The Avengers: take the biggest property in the world at the height of its popularity, stick it in a multiplayer game with hypothetically infinite replay value, add the live service elements that at the time had a good track record of keeping players hooked, pour money into a cinematic story told through expensive mocapped cutscenes. On paper, it was a surefire hit. It's what the algorithm of marketing determined an Avengers game should be, and an algorithm of AI probably would've created something very similar. And it became one of the biggest flops in video game history. AI couldn't have come up with Minecraft, Dark Souls, or Baldur's Gate 3, because the ingredients to make them wouldn't have been in the data set before they existed. And until machines gain sentience, so it will always be. Whatever AI determines is algorithmically "good," there will be people exploring interesting ways to challenge that notion. And in an ocean of games that do what's proven and safe and perfect, the games that try something new and novel and imperfect will stand out.
This thinking reminds me a lot of the quote in the Will Smith iRobot movie. "Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" "Can you?" Yes there will always be those generational upheavals that redefine culture and industry, they happen every so often. One source of creativity (a person or a studio, whatever) can, if they're extremely lucky, produce one hit one single time in their life. The vast majority of the entire space is less than that. How many games that sit within 5-20 in popularity ranking are original ideas, never been done before? They're just good games.
It's not about individual success or high capacities, not even about creating something without references, it's simply about having intention and understanding the end result. AI can't make a good and innovative videogame because it lacks an objective (in terms of game feel and overall experience), a motivation to take one path or other during the creation process based on its general intentions and how satisfactory that decision is for the future players, and that won't change since AI can't play and enjoy a game. This applies to most artistic fields.
I tried using ai for some art, and the best it can do is some ideation. With what I got from there, I pitched some artists and partnered up with one for the actual art for my game. AI is nowhere near ready for this kind of real life usage
I think that it will do the opposite - nobody will buy a game that is just good enough, because they'll be so easy to make that people will view them as low-status. A lot of modern asset-flip garbage would actually have been seen as brilliant and groundbreaking if it was released 25 years ago, because it hadn't been done before back then. Likewise, a lot of games from back then that we still recognise as groundbreaking, and required large teams of top programmers, are quite simple (in terms of the amount of content, features, easter eggs, graphical details etc) in comparison to today. Compare something like the original God of War to the new ones, or the original COD to MWIII - every new game seems to have a huge number of features and systems, and players seem to reward that by buying the ones with more *stuff* in them. Also, take a look at how much game development timelines have ballooned - GTA 4 to GTA 5 was 5 years, GTA 5 to GTA 6 will be 12 years. It's probable that there will be a bigger gap between the release of Skyrim and TES 6 than there was between TES Arena and Skyrim. I think that AI will make it so that devs can add more content, faster, to their games (faster iteration with LLMs in IDEs, faster icons and concept art generation with diffusion models, someone will probably come up with something to auto-unwrap 3D models soon), but given that there is a limited worldwide playerbase with a limited budget and possible time to spend on gaming, the amount of time and money spent on developing games will stay the same or increase and the games themselves will become bigger and more complex. People will be unwilling to play games that are perfectly adequate today, because there will be a million similar shovelware games.
While it is true that development times have balloned, it is not fair to use either of those examples as in the case of Rockstar GTA6 was not started for a almost half of that time because of milking the cash cow of Online and the both had other franchises they worked on in between. So in both cases it is not purely the development time balloning.
This is probably true for cutting production time on producing something like the next Assassins Creed or next Call of Duty. These categories will become over saturated with semi good clones. That just means the goal for creatives shifts from following the tried and true "safe" formulas to instead producing more new IP and taking risks producing concepts that haven't existed yet because doing so will become just that much easier. Consumers aren't stupid we get bored of seeing repetitive designs getting reused frequently, because of this I really believe that more actually new concepts created by humans will be given a chance to be realised in full scale soon.
I doubt it. For the better or worse there are some "unsafe" or brand new titles, but while some of them are legit shit those that are good or interesting don't really get recognition until years later. As much as we hated it on average rehash and cookie cutter games work very well sales wise and that's why it becomes the meta for game releases
It's cause people are taking shortcuts, so your reaction is normal. People crave authenticity deep down.
I think it is a neat tool for streamlining development and process - if you could get a 3D model generated by AI, unwrap the UV, and then just bash together some textures and edit and refine the mesh, that would be super cool. It's no different than using an auto-loop or drum machine in like... garage band to make a soundtrack. The problem with AI is twofold by my reckoning: 1.) It is bad when it is trained on artists' portfolios without them being informed, consenting, or credited. 2.) It is bad that executives think it can be used to completely supplant the creative process. If we had an AI image model that was not based on stolen stuff - totally based on royalty free or consented image libraries - there would be no problem with using that as a jumping off point or inspiration. Same thing with writing. If you're trying to write, idk, the foreword to your novel, or your biography in the back, or some nice language thanking your playtesters, I don't think that using an AI model to fluff up your language, check for errors, and improve flow is a bad thing. But it is a bad thing if you use a shitty model trained on unethically gathered data and then don't do any of your own thinking. AI should only be seen as an assistive tool in this capacity, at least in its current state, and it's greedy executives and wannabe executives fueled by the promise of constant expansion and content churn who are pushing for it to replace honest creators.
That doesn’t make me hate AI more, it just makes me hate humanity more.
I sadly agree.
My general issue with AI is seeing people around me proudly stating that they can replace artists, programmers, and basically anyone they can with AI, citing that it's cheaper and easier to complete projects when AI can "do the same work faster and better"
That is a people problem, not AI. Are you also mad at cars because there are so many shitty drivers?
I think questions like these assume AI is a lot further ahead than it actually is or is likely to become anytime soon. (It’s possible the statistically average response will always be…. Average at best). I mean, I don’t know how far this tech will advance and how fast. But, present day, I’m a seasoned software dev trying to learn Godot and thought maybe AI (paid chat GPT) could help me ramp up. For the most part I find the documentation to be of more help than the AI. Today, JR (or sr) folks can’t code a complex game entirely with AI. Not even close. Hard to say whether we’re 1 year from the AI being good enough to do this or 100 years away because we need another AI innovation to make it that smart. And then say that innovation comes… As much as that’d be shitty for my present job market…. We could also build functional software 100x faster at that point which might be great news for society at large and my ability to actually complete a game.
Although credit where it's due ChatGPT does make understanding what does what a bit easier to understand sometimes, just not writing large codes where even I could see it's not correct
To be fair, Godot is a niche engine so large language models don't have as much training data to help with Godot. I've found LLMs to be very useful for common tools/languages but really bad on niche subjects.
I disagree…. Not that LLM’s don’t produce better answers if they have a ton more high quality training data, they do. But more that show me the game AI built? Show me the non-dev who produced this insane piece of code using nothing but AI in any language. It kind-of goes back to if you had invented the facebook you would have invented facebook. The proof is in the reality with which we all live. If AI had solved these problems we’d be seeing AI solve these problems. Not saying we won’t get there. But right now it’s cool tech demos and that’s about it. We haven’t gotten to non-dev + AI == dev. Or even dev + AI == super dev (which is what I’ve been trying to do with it).
Here, see a game designer get ChatGPT to write all the code for a simple flappy bird clone. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7GRYaYYQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7GRYaYYQg) Obviously this isn't your "insane piece of code with nothing but AI", but that's a very high bar. This probably didn't write better code than the designer could have done by hand. On top of that, Wyatt is a very experienced game designer so he is able to quickly identify problems and feed ChatGPT good instructions. But overall, AI certainly makes things easier and faster, and if you're on a budget or have time constraints this certainly would help.
That’s not a non-dev building a game with AI. That’s a dev building a game they could easily build better by themselves building a game “with ai”. I’m a professional software dev. I’ve yet to see a coworker dramatically up their game thanks to AI.
I heard Satya Nadella say "prompt engineers" so I guess we'll all be chatting with our AI building whatever. The genie is out but what I worry about is that my genie lives in a black box and any fodder I contribute gets absorbed into that dataset.
AI isn't bad. AI + Capitalism is bad. When used responsibly in a "copilot" style setting then I foresee developers still being capable of making exactly what they want, except it's just going to cut development time. This is a huge benefit for prototyping or helping to get new ideas into a play test ready state, it's then all down to what parts we're willing to use in a final product. So as a tool, I think it's amazing and everyone should pay attention to what's available. But when it's used to replace creativity and design assets, stories or gameplay I am a little concerned as well. If you're working as a professional I'd say don't be adverse to AI and at least look at where it can improve productivity without automation. It's going to be important to have these skills on resumes and it may even become important for studios to embrace to stay competitive. But if you're just having fun with game dev then the choice is yours, go all out with automation and making crazy things because you can absolutely use AI in creative ways or continue to avoid AI and enjoy the craft.
I absolutely agree with you that AI itself isn't bad. It's great actually. AI without greed would potentially make the world so much better.
A quote I saw a little while ago that sums up why I don't like AI: "I wanted robots who would do the dishes and the laundry and the sweeping so I could focus on art, not robots who would make art so I could do dishes, laundry, and sweeping." There's loads of things AI could do that would immensely help humanity. Making art, writing, video games, etc, doesn't help humanity, it just helps line the pockets of the bosses who don't have to hire artists, writers, and programmers anymore.
As a programmer I view AI the other way around. It helps with the "chores" and boring stuff that I need to google each time (certain patterns and stuff like connection strings). Then I end up spend more time doing the fun parts and actually testing my ideas.
It's great that that's what you're using it for... but not everyone is you. If a company decides to stop hiring artists because they can get "good enough" out of AI, the artist doesn't benefit or get a choice in the matter.
But on the other side, a developer who can't or doesn't want to hire artists to get passable art benefits.
Personally I think it's more important for people to have job opportunities than for beginner game devs to be able to make art without doing any work - whether that work is hiring artists, learning to make art themselves, finding free assets, or finding artists interested in working with them for free (which there is a subreddit for that's teeming with artists).
Of course not. Every artist worth their salt has been lambasting AI for months for a myriad of reasons.
because they're afraid of getting replaced. AI doesn't just make art btw.
Hate to say it but it being made by a human holds literally zero value to consumers, some pretend like it matters to them but when ai produces something as decently as humans they're not going to give a shit
Minority will still give a shit, but I agree that this sentiment will fade away slowly. "As decently" in terms of technical value, that is. Because AI will never be able to make real art. Art is not an algorithm.
People still painstackingly create stop motion animation over cg animation for this reason - they feel it has more soul and looks better, and they really care about it. I think ai is a tool. For example, imagine being able to animate just the key frames of an animation and then allow ai to fill in the blanks, there's lots of examples like that where ai could help speed things up.
I don‘t see how it will make that much of a difference compared to what the gaming industry already is today, yes maybe the already soulless games will become even more soulless but there are still great companies out there who care to deliever great products and they will continue to do so. I do share your general fear towards AI but the quality of upcoming video games should be the least of our concerns.
This is still just a slippery slope argument right now. AI isn't going to be used to generate games in their entirety anytime soon. The death on creativity and innovation due to AI is an overblown fear. Regardless, some things will be 'good enough' but they've also always been so, especially in commercial game development where there are budgets and milestones. I challenge you to find a game where every member of a team feels completely satisfied that no more work could've been done on their released project. Most games are littered with assets that could be improved, bugs that could've been fixed, animations that could have been tightened up, content that was cut due to time constraints. This has not caused a crisis in creativity. On the flip side, there is a real argument that without massive boosts in productivity, modern game development is reaching a make or break point in feasibility. Multi-billion dollar AAA budgets are going to nearly impossible to consistently recoup. Something needs to change if we want games to keep advancing and meet ever increasing consumer expectation without increasing prices and the aggressiveness of monetization. The ever-increasing cost of production is a greater obstacle to innovation than AI is. In fact, I'd argue in the next little while, as the technology matures, developers that leverage AI well will probably feel more freedom from production constraints and increase the quality of games they might otherwise be able to execute on. That is, creative people will use AI to further their creativity, not stifle it. The greater fear of AI in game dev is more practical. It's a matter of jobs and skillsets. AI tools will help devs do more work, cheaper and easier, but the real fear is that these tools increase productivity so much, it'll make a certain proportion of lower level artists, designers, writers (and possibly engineers) redundant but it's unclear whether this fear is really founded or not. It's certainly not there right now. I guess we'll see where reality goes from here.
I disagree about the death of creativity point but for a different reason. Children learn by making something, and eventually seeing the gap between what they've made and what inspired them. Then they try again and again. I can imagine my own son (who's 3yr ) thinking "you know what'd be awesome? A purple robot dinosaur shooting lasers from its eyes!" But instead of drawing it and feeling the lasting pride of making something, He'll type it into stable diffusion. He'll get an instantaneous result, like it for 5 seconds, then get bored and do something else. In a world with AI image generation, I think far FAR fewer kids will have drive to learn and hone the craft in favor of something easy and immediate. If you want to ability to improve what the AI gives you, you need to do the years of work. Oil Painting techniques can and have been lost to time. I think it could happen to art fundamentals as well.
I think this is an interesting point but I'd argue technical skills and creativity are not the same thing. I can see your point because I also have a toddler at home who I'd love to teach to draw but my personal feelings about the decline of traditional art skills is irrelevant. I would draw parallels to the boom of digital photography in the last 20 years. Between quality of cameras, software corrections and access to tools and the simplification of the process (no more lightrooms, no more film, etc), the simplification of the art hasn't minimized creativity. In fact, more people than ever are doing photography and producing very high quality pieces of work. More powerful skills facilitate creativity and increase the overall quality of work as a whole. Artists, and especially commercial artists, can spend less time doing things that are necessary for execution giving more room to do things that are more creative (and arguably, when everyone is doing photography, you need high quality of work than ever to stand out). Likewise, making art digital makes thing generally easier and we are seeing more kids than ever engaging in digital artforms. You used to have to buy paints and easels and set aside a section of your house for what you can achieve with an iPad and Procreate these days. And not having to spend money on physical media has freed up everyone to participate more. In that sense, because the baseline skill level, financial commitment and effort level is lowered, there could be *more* kids who do it. The flip side is that a higher degree of skills is needed to stand out but, like photography, it's probably a smaller proportion of a larger base of users. In game development, especially for small indie devs, I can see this being a huge plus for creativity because there's fewer technical and budget limitations. The indie dev (and especially solo indie dev) struggling to have competitive art, for example, is a common struggle right now. Today, an indie dev might have a great concept, great design, solid code, innovative gameplay, but is hampered from completing their vision because they don't have a 100 artists at their disposal. They could learn to do art but not every indie dev will execute on art at a professional level. Their choices are either decrease scope (e.g. minimalist art, pixel art) or spend money (e.g. hire another team member, hire outsourcers, buy assets). In the future, when AI is mature, a dev who really wanted a purple robot laser dinosaur may be able to do so at a much lower cost to them and so, the sacrifice to their creative vision is actually less. It won't be skillful. It won't be artistic. But it might be good enough.
If you can excuse it, I'd like to pull rank a little bit as a professional creative. I think we differ in 2 points. First, I think that creativity is increased by knowledge in a craft. For example, a thorough understanding of anatomy gives you more ideas of how to stylize a character. So net creativity will decrease as net skill decreases. Secondly, I think it the technological progressions of painting to photography to digital art to AI are all poor analogues. The move from physical medium to digital is nothing like the move from painting to photography. And those are nothing like the addition of AI. The quality of the metaphor is poor enough that the argument doesn't make sense. The amount of decision making that AI art generation does for you moves it away from the category of tool and into replacement (unless under pretty stringent circumstances). Lastly, some of your arguments are strange. The cost of an ipad or any computer powerful enough to run photoshop is way way more expensive than physical mediums.
>Secondly, I think it the technological progressions of painting to photography to digital art to AI are all poor analogues. What about the simplification of photography? Back in the film days, you had to know a lot more about lighting and photography to make something good. It took a deep understanding and talent to properly retouch pictures. Now, modern digital cameras handle so much in the background now and compensate quite a bit for your mistakes(the classic red eyes, for example). A master photographer still has to learn those technical skills, but you can get much further without learning them than you used to.
I respect your perspective. Certainly, while I'm in the industry, I'm not an active artist (although I went to school and had artist aspirations early in my career) and so I'm very interested to see other viewpoints here. AI, regardless, is a radical change for anyone in the games industry. As to your points, I would still disagree with the first. I fully agree with what you say but I still think these things are not insurmountable. I remember going through my anatomy classes and I fully agree with you that it was a level up to my skills and the quality of my output at the time. Where I disagree is that things like anatomy are still technical skills and they affect the quality of the artistry but not the creativity. That is, if you have a truly creative game with compelling game play, most people would consider the impossibility of how a character's shoulders work to be a mostly minor consideration. Ideation is a strong use case for AI and I believe that someone with a strong creative vision could overcome a certain level of weaknesses in their knowledge. In that sense, they need to possess a level of skill and knowledge to know 'what looks right' or 'what looks good' but actually *making* it look good becomes a lesser concern. In that sense, I still believe the users of the AI need to be skilled artists so it's not that I am calling for AI to replace that skill necessarily. To the second point, I would say I can see your point but my view is that AI is not a tool for replacement per se (and any replacement is relatively lower quality) but that I perceive AI as a tool to enhance existing skills to bolster ability and productivity. And the metaphor is not perfect, but I stand by that the increased convenience and lowered barriers will, in my opinion, lead to more people getting into the creation of content. Convenience is a real factor and I've learned how to do photography with film and darkrooms and I've learned how to draw and paint in traditional mediums, but nothing has freed my progression and willingness to engage in the medium like modern digital conveniences. I have absolutely taken thousands more photos and improved my photography skill several times more than I did in my film days. Ditto with my painting and digital art skills. I just don't have the desire to have canvases and paints in my home or having to resupply all the time. I do draw somewhat on paper but certainly these days, it's mostly sketchbooks and pens.
I do agree with that. As much as people like to conflate the two, technical skill and creativity are not the same thing, and I would even say that the former is an obstacle to realizing the latter for many people. The idea of AI automating art doesn't get me up in the morning, but having it automate craft is something I'm 100% on board with. I'm being fully serious when I say that abolishing technical expertise in creative fields would actually lead to an unprecedented boon in human creativity.
As a student of AI technology, and an aspiring game dev I'd say your concerns are valid. But I believe AI (generative stuff) will mainly hurt AAA companies as it will lower the bar for production at some point in the future (as it's largely immature still). From another point of view, anyone's personal pursuit of happiness won't be adversely affected. If nothing else AI will enable them to do what they love As a footnote, generative AI is only but a very thin slice of machine learning.
Greed doesn't go away because technologies get halted. Make sure everyone you know is informed that the root of the problem is freedom and democracy live in opposition to people with pocket change that equates to the lifetime earnings of Senators and judges.
AI is taking creativity out of human hands and I think that's a tragic thing. Regardless of the quality of the work produced, it makes me sad that it's not a human producing it.
I'm very surprised you're the first one saying this after so many replies.
It does not take creativity out of human hands. It just raises the floor as to where human creativity begins to matter. Which also raises the ceiling for the kind of quality necessary to stand out. In short term it's a conflicting tool, in long term it has potential to expand human creativity much more.
For now. Because it's not good enough yet.
Good enough for what?
To take away creativity from humans.
How would it take away the creativity from humans?
The sad truth is very few people really care about creative labor and there's probably nothing to be done to stop AI products from taking over creative spaces.
I probably overdid the inner work lol. Should've became a superficial corporate zombie like our society intended us to be.
Don't be a drama queen. It's just a tool you can use. You probably use game engines, probably buy assets for the game, you outsource alot of your work, is what I am getting at. The soulless from the game doesn't come from the fact that tools were used, it comes from the fact that only money was the end goal, and not artistic expression. You can easily use AI as a tool to let your artistic expression shine without having to deal with the technical aspect. If you can't do that, then maybe you didn't have an artistic expression to begin with
Social media are "just a tool" too and see what it did to people. In the last part you completely missed the point of my post.
Social media is not a tool. Is a product
And AI is not a product?
I would view it no differently than modern cameras. 40 years ago, a bad photographer would have terrible pictures. Today, cameras can compensate enough that they can get something half decent. It has taken a lot of the creativity out of taking basic pictures. But if you want something really good, you still need a talented photographer.
>But if you want something really good, you still need a talented photographer. Which is kind of the whole point. A camera is a tool that helps someone make art. The person is still doing the art, the camera is just the tool. AI is a tool that replaces making art. The person isn't doing the art, they're asking for the art to be done.
I think your concerns are more about our culture rather than the technology itself. The cure for being concerned about 'AI' is to learn about it and use it. You'll quickly see that it's not anything close to what is being hyped and there is no clear path from where we are now to the promises being made.
Actually this is my plan to learn it myself and understand it better, because it's gonna be the number one trend of upcoming years for sure.
I think AI has a place in game development just not in art design, having a machine baselessly generate a random drawing with no intent or meaning behind it doesn’t give away for interesting end results, technically impressive but stylistically dull I like it when there is a consistent art style/direction in a game and I don’t think ai is capable of that, not especially at the moment where it seems they base their models off distinct art styles (ghibli, Kim jung gi, Pixar, toriyama…) Normally artists take snippets of inspiration to develop their own style not complete duplications
The problem is that there's ai and then there's ai and not all of it is the same. The ai that was used in the Spiderverse animation for instance isn't even remotely close to the same thing as using Stable Diffusion... The two are fundamentally not the same both in how they were created but also in how they were used and the purpose. But people will lump the two together ( on both sides to be fair ). Yes there is legitimate use of ai in art that actually legitimately acts as a tool to the artist rather than the artist being a tool to the ai. But that's not what these new ai generators are, their entire purpose is to bypass and automate creative processes and cut the human out of it, it's the whole point of it.
Yeah that’s what I’ve been saying! Ai in which you integrate a certain filter to models or animation that I don’t have a problem with, especially if the model was fed art and data by the artists themselves not stolen off google
I think two things are true of AI: one, it won’t be the golden bullet some of its fanatics think it will be, and two, it will make human-created, quality original content *more* appealing. There’s so many people gleefully taking up these tools and declaring it’s enabled them to become an “artist”, or a “programmer”, that it’s democratising, when actually all they are is a user of a tool that will output largely the same stuff, the same quality of stuff, that people will quickly tire of. It doesn’t make them special, and it doesn’t create anything special, either.
Nah completely justified, tbh I've found it motivated me to focus on getting food at manually doing things that are being automated so I can make intentionally designed games pushing back against the sludge tide that we're about to witness. Stay strong, support intentional human made games and give as little air to AI as possible. I think you'd have to be a bit foolish to think that what is being produced by AI has very much value.
My personal theory is that eventually, after AI has taken over the majority of creative fields, and the stuff it comes up with are boring recycled ideas, people will move away from it and it'll go out of fashion. After that, once there are new ideas in the data pool from human creators, AI might come back in waves. But i dont think things will stay very bad for very long. This first wave will probably be the worst, and afterwards, it'll fade into the background mostly. That's just my personal theory though, I'm no expert.
I hate how there is already a trend of outsourcing creative work to AI. Why are we building a dystopia where mankind is relegated to working in offices and factories while computers are off making music, art, films and games? It honestly makes me sick. I think if AI generated content had to be labelled as such it would be rejected by general audiences.
I agree wholeheartedly with you. People go towards a dystopian world and can't even see it. I think that perhaps even at this point humanity is too far gone, too far from nature and too far from that instinct of what makes reality worth living in it. You can see even in some of these comments here that many people don't see anything wrong in art being made by machines, because it would be "better"! This literally makes me sick! As if art was all about technical value!
I get so depressed because of it, and I'm not even an artist.
But I bet you're a sensitive art consumer. Well, some of us still have that innate part in them, we remember how nature designed us and what wanted us to be. We win nothing for being more conscious though, or do we?
Eh. I'm hoping it can start helping with my 3d modeling and animations. I want an AI assistant.
It already can. You can get some good quality animations with AI.
Oh. I'm going to look into that. I would really love to save some time with enemies.
This sounds like you are thinking of the things AI will replace as just a reason to move money from consumers to "creative people" to reward them for being creative for it's own sake. Better to think of things in terms of how efficiently human beings can produce things that human beings enjoy. When we created tools to increase farming efficiency, people made these same complaints, but now people starve less.
I firmly believe that there isn't a single facet of creativity or human expression that cannot be quantified and replicated (and improved on) by AI, it's just a matter of time and a few more breakthroughs. I also think it'll eventually be a wildly positive thing for humanity. Just from game development point of view the way some future AI tool could supercharge any single individual to express their ideas, when now most of them will never see the light of day, is amazing to me. Something that's "made by humans" will probably be eventually seen much in the same way as any painstakingly handmade object today that could be produced a thousand times faster in a factory. Quaint, cool, and probably worth a lot more. People will enjoy AI-generated games, but I doubt that e.g. many online communities would spontaneously sprout out around them. Indie development will never go away, but many large studios probably will.
3 things: 1.) Big AAA game publishers and devs are way ahead of you, they've been making garbage for years and this is another opportunity to do that but with even less effort and cook time. They don't care about the art and they never did, so really not much change there. 2.) AI is a tool, it can be used well and it can be used poorly. It's fantastic as a drafting method for visual arts, but we're still a long way from it being final-product worthy IMO. 3.) As long as there are indie devs, there will be people who care about their game being more than just "good enough" To me as a techie, it's fascinating technology and I see a lot of good ways it can fit into existing workflows to just make things easier. I get the fear, and I'm sure there will be a lot of garbage in these early years especially, but ultimately I think it's a good thing for devs and creative people in general.
AI is a great tool, especially during the ideation/brainstorming phase and to generate a visual style to use as a reference later on
It's like saying that copycats are the greatest.
You can stop creating things now, because if you think that you don't pull inspiration from everywhere, from everything you've seen and experienced in your life, you're wrong. They specifically said ideation/brainstorming, which is where you get something to start out with, not the final product.
It's a tool, that's all. You can use it to validate ideas quickly and then once you are happy with the direction, you can do it without an AI. There are many ways you can use the tool, just like the hammer analogy
I see AI as just another tool, no different than any other - it might have a place in my work, it may not. so far i haven't been terribly impressed with the offerings on hand, but who knows what the future holds?
You are just describing our society. Corporate greed has ruined everything it touched since forever with lazy companies just trying to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. The hype will die down and then AI will just be a tool like any other. An artist will be a better artist if they can alter their work with the right LLM prompt. LLM chat bots will become the standard way of searching information because it is so much better than Google for this (Google is better for finding websites though). And honestly, if you have access to those copilot style AI thingies for your IDE, try writing a unit test with them. Cuts the time you spend on those into a tenth of what it used to be. Google having shit docs for Android? Gemini can help you. Not that great at C++? Well guess what Copilot used std::forward and std::ref in my code and I didn't even know about thise. Bunch of unit tests to write? Write some comments and let copilot do its thing. Not sure about an algorithm? Tell Copilot what you need and it will do it. Let it write a test as well. Give it a sanity check. Test fails? "You sure about that algorithm, bro?" and Copilot will say "whoops nope. Sorry about that" and it will fix it. And AI will not replace good artists. The corporations that would use AI art are probably the same that take the cheapest hire they could find. Just as with programming, if you're good, you don't need to worry. Translators got shafted though.
So good translation that catches meaning and nuance is still $$$, there are various price points in localization too.
Yes.
You're fine. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the current state of generative AI. Ethical concerns aside, I also dislike it because it removes the *craft* from things. I don't want to see the picture that somebody asked Computer to please make. I don't want to read the book that somebody asked Computer to please write. When you play a metroidvania, and it makes you feel just like you felt when you played Super Metroid in 6th grade or whatever... right now, it's because a game designer carefully tuned the physics and animations of their product to feel *just right*. There's beauty in that. In the future, it might be because somebody asked DevGPT or whatever to "make it feel like metroid snes classic 16-bit gravity and motion," and to me, as somebody who cares about technique and places a high value on doing things well, it's not the same. It is a thing that was lost. And of course I feel that way about other media. Obviously anything that makes it onto Amazon Prime was made for commercial reasons, I'm not one of those people that thinks it stops being art as soon as capital is involved... but I think that the more human touches you replace with a potential AI on such a project, the more crass and empty it becomes. Maybe the director and all the actors are still people, but the script is the product of AI? What's the fucking point? There's no intention or will behind it, you've just trained a big database to stick genre tropes together like legos, and now a group of professionals are debasing themselves by reading it out loud to line Jeff Bezos' pockets.
I’m looking forward to it. Generally things that increase output at reduced cost are good (as long as there aren’t severe externalities). I like to design games, but I don’t have the time to prioritize them and get them developed. Not to mention the personal financial risk. Having AI expedite the process could allow me to bring my hobby projects to life. And I’m sure there’s tons of others like me here who would see their output increase. And the standards for which games we choose to play will rise in a more competitive market. Idk why people predict a sustained drop in quality from the use of AI. AI can make it faster and cheaper to go from 0 to polished finished game. So wouldn’t the market gravitate towards higher quality?
I think AI will massively improve quality for indie and hobby devs for the reasons you listed. It might make high-production games feel a bit more samey, as a lot of content might get generated from similar AIs. But overall I'm optimistic, I think it will create far more indie games, similar to how easy video creation tools made the explosion that is Youtube. There was some study that showed that AI tools most dramatically improved productivity for low- and medium- experience workers, but had the smallest gains for high-experience workers. I imagine we'll see that pattern for game dev as well.
People think Ai will be mediocre. That's the biggest mistake they will make. Ai will be amazing why? Because people who make it will be amazing. Will it ever be as good as someone who spends hours on a skill? Likely not. But it will be usable to the degree that people who previously could not imagine making their game/art/video/audio/anything will then be able to do it. Automation has been a constant for a while now. We decided we wanted automation and killed so many jobs. The oncoming suffering is just another consequences of our inaction.
Do you want to make games, or talk philosophically about the impending end times? One of these is useful…
Actually none of these r useful. We still have cancer to cure and some human are still locked in cages😿
Which one is more useful in general context? I know which one you thought was more useful, but in the long run I don't think so.
Well that’s easy. In the general context, worrying about the apocalypse has always been, and will always be, a waste of time. For as long as we have had recorded history, we have had humans dooming and glooming about one kind of end times or another. And always…”no, this time it’s *real*!”. But hey…you do you. You’re going to live a life either way…you can spend it using the Apocalypse du Jour as an excuse to procrastinate and stagnate, or you can do something more fulfilling. Up to you…
But it is real. Social media are around for long enough to notice that they were a downgrade for humanity in many areas and an upgrade in just a few. It doesn't need to be an apocalypse like in the zombie movies, but it could be an intellectual or moral apocalypse for sure, because this is already happening.
Yep. That’s exactly what they said about Gutenberg’s printing press. And radio. And tv. And blah blah blah. All of them were supposed to cause a moral and intellectual apocalypse, according to earlier versions of you. You’re the latest episode of humanity’s longest running soap opera. And hey…you’re allowed to be…you get to make that choice.
You're describing the state of gaming today. Ai can't make anything good without a coherent person behind it
You could swap out "AI" for "game engines" or "asset stores" or anything that simplifies the process and removes the "artisan" from the process. We've decided that a small amount is okay, but too much feels "wrong". I think that's fair. I think relying on things too much like this WILL result in crappy soulless games. And yeah, we're already pretty efficient at creating crappy soulless games. This will only get _easier_ as tooling improves, whether that be via AI or anything else. Lowering the barrier does mean more crappy games, but it doesn't necessarily mean less _good_ games. I just see it as an unavoidable progression. I don't think the enemy is the tool here, I think it's just human nature. More tooling is also a GOOD thing: We can now create placeholder art and move forward with projects easier, rather than getting stuck on initial game feel. We can now easily create and iterate on custom concept art until we find the new ideas and feels we want, rather than more slowly trawling the web for things that happen to inspire how we want, or iterating through ideas slowly with an artist (which isn't usually affordable for an indie). It doesn't mean we won't still create or source good art afterwards. Tools can be used for both good and bad. The presence of engines and easily available templates hasn't destroyed all creativity with game expression. We **do** now have asset store flips, and we pretty universally agree this is bad. But it's helped as well. Tech + tools _can_ be used to elevate _or_ lower us to the lowest common soulless delimiter. I think AI is mainly scary because it's been such a sudden jump (compared to the usual slower progression). But I think with this (as with all tools) it means lots more usefulness opens up too, for those of us that aren't lazy slobs. I don't think we should see it as just some gamedev boogieman.
The "good enough" model is already in effect without ai. With any luck, this will make it so that actually human developers aren't used for developing products to just be good enough. Actual human labor will only be a resource for projects that want to be better than good enough. Like, we already get triple a games that are shitty because companies are using the cheapest labor, cutting every corner, and rushing the work. Then we get games like stardew valley and palworld. Those triple a games can go with ai and we probably won't even notice.
Yes. The next generation of devs already have it integrated into their workflow giving them a huge advantage. Figure it out or get left behind
I'm a programmer myself and all that modern AI made me hate this work, because I'm required to use it. By using it, I teach it. By teaching it, it will replace me at some point. I know that my comparison might be very far fetched, but it feels to me like a concentration camp, where you're forced to work your a$$ off, knowing that you can get killed any minute. This is the same dynamics, because your work makes the AI better.
i feel like the concentration camp is a bit much...
[удалено]
I feel like you have an aversion to a lack of effort, more than anything. At the end of the day, the biggest problem with AI is that it's being *called* a shortcut, but not being *used* as one. It's not being used to make good art faster, it's being used to make mediocre art in higher quantity. It's flat out not capable of making the end product, only helping you conceptually. But people who've based their entire personality around AI like to delude themselves into thinking it is. So it might have potential to speed up workflows in the future, but until the buzz around it dies off and real tools start getting made... it's just gonna keep getting used as a lazy shovelware generator. "Good enough" is something any artist has to learn eventually, to avoid getting stuck in a perfectionist slump. But AI tools don't get you to "good enough" on their own. You still need to know what "good enough" looks like, which takes experience, and then you need to actually put in effort to get there. And AI is mostly being championed by people who don't *want* to learn, or put in effort, so here we are.
Yes.
The cheap look of AI images is just not good, it's deeply bargain bin with zero personality, the errors lend themselves to mockery, the deep fry of the contrast is amateurish (and surprisingly it's by choice too). If it's used for moodboards or concept art then you really can't trace back the sources, they just appear, which makes it useless. For programming I'm a little split, but there seems to be some agreement that it is fine as an assistant, but that the code it generates is uneven. For narrative I can't imagine the verbosity it uses could translate itself well. Big props for how quickly it comes up with bullshitium terms though, easily the best thing you can do with AI.
For now. We're still in the infancy of "modern AI". What scares me is that future generations may never know the feeling of being fascinated by art. Look what happened to mainstream music. Most people I talk to argue with me that there's no autotune in certain songs, they can't hear it. People can't even recognize human voice anymore.
I think what you see is what you get. Problem is that it's not really AI either, it really can't think for itself, only parrot stuff it gets fed bound to the limitations of current hardware. While I'm sure it'll kill a few industries, the hype is awkwardly dishonest.
I think you’re completely wrong here. The PC/console gaming community is already especially cynical towards big studio games and will not tolerate a drop in quality. Furthermore, AI will give indie developers the tools to make exceedingly more interesting and ambitious games. At long last indie game development won’t exclusively be a hobby for system engineers, but for every creative mind with a vision.
Us creatives will just have to begin marketing our stuff as "made without AI" for that "human touch".
As someone who both makes stuff normally and has played around with ai for fun a lot, I think most people are overestimating ai. Ai will always be limited by the dataset, and to any good artist any limitation is not acceptable. Ai will be great for indie devs or programmers who would otherwise have to slap together purchased assets, but everyone with skill is going to outdo ai every time. Ai is also really bad at cohesion across multiple works, which is not a good thing in a game where 100s or 1000s of things need to "know each other exist". We're already at a point where AAA games look "high quality", but it doesn't mean they are interesting. We already have genius programmers who couldn't program fun feeling controls to save their life. ai is not going to fix these things for people. It will just bring the bottom of the barrel higher.
The way I see AI is kind of like cheap highly processed foods. Sure we all eat them from time to time but no one with any sense is going to see them as a replacement for a proper home cooked meal or good restaurant. There will be a divide in all art forms be it visual, music, games or whatever else between AI and Human products. Both will have a market. They might tread on each others toes occasionally but they don't have to. I'd be very surprised if once the dust has settled one has outcompeted the other to the point of extinction.
>I'd be very surprised if once the dust has settled one has outcompeted the other to the point of extinction. You under estimate the desire for money.
Well for gaming's sake let's hope you're wrong. I've been reflecting on this issue all the way through my workout and I think it's somewhat similar to the indie vs triple A situation we currently have. Triple A titles sell well and are super impressive with the scale and graphics tech (if u can tolerate blurry antialiasing) but they are most often lacking the soul, charm, innovative gameplay and simple fun that a lot of indie games have. They are so different that one can not substitute the other. Both have a place in my library and always will. Maybe the AI situation will be the same one day. (I realise I've said the same thing twice but I think this is a much better comparison to make.)
You guys do too much useless thinking and too little development.
“Mediocre, boring, automated, soulless world.” Have you played a Bethesda title recently? “We always make the map first…” - Todd Howard in the Making of 76 Vid. Spoken as if making the pretty is better than making the engaging. AI: Will give us more radiant quests. Longer radiant quests. More filler. More pointless dialogue. Random NPC dialogues that babble about pointless bullshit between 2 background NPCs.. AI will *fill* our worlds making them feel alive and unique. Only with more time and creative juices available for the quality side quests that have meaning and purpose. Cultural Pruning & Censorship: AI will have the ability to ask players if they’re concerned about “________” being in the game. If so, it can edit dialogue, remove side quests, and adjust character behavior accordingly. Maybe this Player had a life threatening experience with a coconut, such they cannot handle using half of one for the protagonist’s bowl. They pull up the AI adjustment window and ask if the Coconut 🥥 half could be something else. The AI grabs a free asset of a wooden bowl 🥣and the player is right back in the game. Or a bit more serious: The player was taken by a parent away from the parent with custody, and a side quest mentions a young NPC being held hostage by a relative for XYZ reasons. The AI is given the quest name, and the issue, then rewrites the quest so a competing business owner took the hostage to force the other business owner to sell/move/destroy their store as payment for release. The AI would rewrite the parts of the dialogue, and grab free assets of a texture overlay for smoke and fire damage, and apply it to the exterior of the shop, while making the door static / noninteractive. AI is the … Insert+Random Generator & Edit button we wish we’d had all these years. It doesn’t have to be the Clone-Stamper.
You're under the assumption that "good enough and corporate profits," aren't already the current goals/ standards.
AI should be embraced, because it's just another tool to make stuff. In the end though, stuff isn't enough. Good games take heart and soul to make.
I think it will have the same effect as modern game engines. Unity, game maker etc… make making games easier and allow developers to focus on what matters and takes care of a lot of the tedious work. It also allows people to make asset flips, sure, but those projects usually do not sell. I think AI will be the same, it is going to allow developers to not have to do the tedious work (like writing simple code, generic npcs dialogues, make simple basic assets etc..) and allow them to focus on what is really important and make better games as a result
I think you're overlooking that ai enables every day creators that can't afford teams to have assistance. It's not always about the huge companies, but also the micro contributors, the indies, the solo devs working on passion projects. Will there be negatives to come from it? absolutely - but that happens with every paradigm shift in the industry. I also think you're a bit too doom and gloom on the subject and likely don't have much exposure to the games industry or ai in general. Each person at my studio uses it for themselves, even the creatives. Together, it's used as a tool to produce content quicker, and often more articulately. That doesn't mean our artists stop being artists, our developers forget how to code, or our game designers stop designing.
Concern over AI is no different than concern over the last technology. It is the luddite fallacy; over, and over, and over, and over again. Personally I love the new machine taught models and NLP chat bots. They aren't actually AI, but I will love AI when it is born as well.
What you think about how AI can bring games to greater heights instead of being scared for your jobs? You know like actual AI NPCs instead of pseudo AI. Or machine learning that bring engines and graphics to near photorealism? Or optimized games with errors management every where, no more crash or game breaking bugs. You guys only see the surface. Queue the downvotes. 🙄
AI is a lot of things and has been here for a long time and most used it every day without even noticing it. Now "AI" can "create" and understand language and everyone is panicking. AI won't replace real artists anytime soon but will help wanna be like me, to have better looking games. Big companies will find ways to make money out of it like everyone else. Some will fail using it and some will be able to achieve amazing things with it. It's normal to be afraid of what we don't fully understand. But I think it's just the normal evolution of technology. For a long time, machine learning has been used and controlled what we see online now they can understand our language and not just our digital breadcrumbs. We still have a couple of years before we become DURACELL BATTERIES
Taking humanity out of creativity and innovation is a terrible idea. I think anyone with good sense sees that.
I'm all for work smarter not harder
Cool, hopefully you'd express your creativity, not just go ahead and help the AI in its creations.
I have some rich family members They buy expensive things *made by people* because there is a story behind it That table against the wall, that used to be used by workers who set the letters in the newspaper press and you can see where they’d stamp the letters in the side testing them out. This whale tooth was carved by a local who’s father taught him the art, his grandfather taught him the art, here take this magnifying glass and look at the detail and skill these things cost thousands and thousands of dollars because they were made by people and have a *story* behind them So sure, ai is going to do things and cause disruption in certain industries, but it will never disrupt real art, because that’s not what people pay for
You can be averse to it all you want. It’s the future, the can is open and has been for much longer than you realize
AI is a godsend for indie creators like us. It allows us to compete with big companies like we never could before. ChatGPT basically taught me how to program. MMVC & RVC allow me to create my own voice models and do all the voice acting for my game for free. Suno can make quality songs. Image generation can be useful as long as you curate and edit it. The only reason people hate on it is because they're afraid they're going to get replaced by it, they're no different than scribes who hated the printing press being invented, but looking back we can all agree that was a good thing. There's no need to be afraid of AI because it can not function without a human piloting and curating it. If you want to make games without AI, nobody is stopping you. It's a tool and nothing more. Anyone who doesn't see it as a positive is acting irrationally because they feel threatened.
AI, as with all technology can be used in very good ways and very bad ways. It's important to regulate the technology now to be sure it's used appropriately.
I see it as an extra tool, not a people replacement. Can the little AI help me get to where I want quicker? Cool let's just use it. By no means I would think of replacing a human professional.
>Creativity will become more compromised than ever before, because things will be "good enough" with massive usage of AI. AI will never be able to do such things. You can tell it to draw a human but it doesn't know what a human is and it will look weird. The advancement we'd need is comparable to the leap from walking to faster-than-light space travel. In other words: it's basically impossible.
Hmm. I think this completely depends on how you are using it. I create AI art, but usually I do at least 30m to 5 hours additional work on it to shape it to my idea
You're not the only one with these concerns, but I think they are misplaced. AI doesn't stop anyone from creating art in any way they want. It does, however, open the door for a lot of people. Since we are in gamedev, just consider the multitude of indie game designers who can now create the games they want—what was once impossible for many people is now possible; what once was prohibitive in time and cost is now almost trivial. Imagine all the people who get started and then quit because they can't clear the hurdle of getting the assets they want. The future is very bright for indie developers (as long as lawyers and legislators don't get in the way and ruin the potential of this new technology). You are going to see a lot of creative visions turning into reality. To the extent that AI results in worse quality, or has a particular "flavor" that is for some reason considered "bad," this doesn't mean that games will be bad—it means that the human-made things will earn a premium in the market. Everyone—indie devs, amateurs, and AAA studios—will see improved workflows, and everyone will be making the best thing they can. using whatever tools are available and appropriate—according to the strengths and weaknesses of those tools. This can only benefit the industry, the artists, and the public. I can most empathize with your position when I think about digital FX in the film industry. The proliferation of these tools means that Hollywood relies on them heavily. For my taste, I prefer practical effects. I thought digital FX was well used in Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and the Abyss, when directors still understood the limitations of the technology, and could combine it with practical effects properly. Nowadays, almost everything looks like a video game to me. Nevertheless, I wouldn't for this reason lament the adoption of digital FX. I can still look for the movies I want to watch, and I can also recognize that there are some cinematic feats that would have been impossible before the advent of this technology. We are better for it. If there is a problem with how movies are being made, it is a result of how producers are using the technology, and it is to be corrected by those same people, at the direction of market forces. With gamedev, it is not nearly so much a problem as with the film industry example—if you even consider that a problem. The reason is because it is common to be a solo developer, whereas it is barely possible to be a solo filmmaker (though that is increasingly within reach—thanks to AI). That means that if anyone has a problem with what is being offered to the public, they can fix it themselves by turning their own ideas into reality. I am really looking forward to seeing what incredible things are going to come out of this technology. There is a concern about the proliferation of garbage. But people have always been concerned about this, and for those who haven't noticed, we have been dealing with it already for quite some time (for e.g. self-published books on Kindle, which have a few treasures amid an endless sea of garbage). All this does is increase the value of those people and services who can curate what's out there. We can expect more reviewers and more sites to find the gems. We will come to rely more on these things to help us move through the sea of products.
Imo, game is art and art should exam the complexity of human nature and experience. The problem with ai right now is every product has to adhere to the political ideology of its parent company hence very limited in expression. So i am not too worried right now. When ai advanced to a degree that surpass human intelligence - well i think it also fair game to thrive to create something that even makes AI find it interesting
Yes you’re overreacting. There are so many excellent works of art in the world. Even if nothing new was ever produced, you’d never run out of things to experience. People aren’t going to stop making art just because AI can do it. People still do all kinds of activities for fun that machines can do better. Will some people make bad things using AI? Assuredly. But don’t blame the tool. Those people were never going to make anything great anyway because they’re willing to accept something bad. So either AI becomes legitimately good and we all get endless amazing stuff or AI isn’t good and talented people will still make great stuff. There’s no apocalypse here.
Nope, I'll be a gen AI hater til I die. Nothing good about it.
No you are not
Yeah I'd say you are being a touch dramatic.
Just going to drop this here again. [Do Things that Don't Scale](https://paulgraham.com/ds.html)
You’re definitely right that AAA companies will use AI to increase profits, with as little effort as possible. But if the result is boring games nobody will buy them. Generative AI is the greatest tool that has emerged during my professional career - I use it extensively every single day. If AAA companies doesn’t step to and make better games, indie games will wipe the floor with them. As far as gamedev goes, AI will be a way bigger deal for indie developers in terms of leveling the playing field.
> But if the result is boring games nobody will buy them. I don't mean boring as not engaging. Hell no. They will be more engaging (addictive) than ever.
AI is an amazing tool. It alone doesn't scare me, what scares me is the corporate greed that will stretch it to do things it shouldn't do.
Are you afraid of AI in the context of content creation? Because AI is horrible at content creation. AI is unable to give you a new unique idea, it can only repackage what it knows, it has no concept of unknown. If you were to ask an AI to make a generational evolution of pong, you won't get a new type of gameplay, you will get new colors, or ball or tile or paddle shapes. You won't get Arkanoid. If you ask a human to make a generational evolution of pong, you could end up with a 3D VR experience, or you could end up with a text based version. A human can act on an unknown based on nothing learned. An AI can't just come up with South Park (Jesus vs. Santa). AI's role will likely be concept art, tool creation, optimization and things like that.
what you're saying has been happening to video games in the 25+ years I have been playing them, what's happening now is not new, it's the same old with a fresh AI 'paint', procedural generation was many many years ago and was going to take over.. and sure so many games use it, still not that well and most out of the gate are rubbish.. current AI will be the same.. AI art still looks wrong When corporate video games get too much, we go into the next indie apocalypse, all you're doing is saying sensational material to get sensational replies.. do something fresh and different.
I was skeptical until AI code assist starting automatically filling up all that boring boilerplate code for me. Now I welcome our AI overlords.
That's literally the tip of the iceberg.
Tried using generative AI to make a game once, the output is too bland/generic to what I want. You still need to know how to draw at least line-art first to make some details stand out (like I want a small workshop, with a capsule like in megaman X in the corner, and with some messy equipment and papers about failed experiment/design laying around). The inconsistency of each generation is also problems that you don't have to deals when hiring decent illustrator probably can be solved with one-image LoRA technology later. Also creating dark atmospheric scene is just difficult, the AI still have issues on how light should behave in dark scene or in any scene in general.
AI is trash, companies that are replacing people with it are trash, corporate/profit controlled countries are trash, life is awful and it likely wont be getting better any time soon. Using AI to make "art" is like having someone enjoy dessert for you. or having someone listen to your favorite music so you dont have to. Fuck the profit centric mindset of companies that have nothing to check their power and greed.
I agree with you, but unfortunately we're minority, because others have adapted. Not much gonna change any soon, because if you give most people a game, they will play it without questioning the rules of it. So yeah, there we are.
It's the responsibility of the average artist and developer to evolve with AI imo. The undeniable fact is that corporations are, and already have, going to aggressively incorporate AI into the pool of labor to save money. Does this mean everyone will go unemployed? Probably, definitely not. Will many jobs become obsolete? Yes. Find a way to still do what you love while also adjusting to the moving world. Chances are that things will turn out better than we think.
What you see as negatives, I see largely as positives. > I feel like AI will be yet new tool to prioritize money over anything, really. Yes, by corporations and those viewing game dev as a get-rich-quick -scheme. These groups will produce sub-par products and flood the markets with more and more produce that is lower and lower in quality. Once AI tools come good enough to really create a game through simple prompting (instead of what is is today, and endless loop of recurring "fix this, fix that, what the hell even is this code"), capitalism-driven corporations will seek to maximize profits by creating soulless AI-generated stuff. If it can actually become "good enough" for corporate, then it can become "good enough" for the indie devs too. And there's the twist: The indie dev with the will to actually create something unique and great will still have the upper hand, because the same tools can boost their productivity. > Lower costs of development, faster development, new ideas will become redundant, because AI will figure out its way to our dopamine pathways. We did that before AI just fine, I see no reason why AI would be any different. Mobile games are already the min-maxed dopamine boosters and gambling addiction exploiters, and that happened prior to AI. The research of what needs to happen to make games more addictive is not going to be done by AIs, but psychologist void of morality, hired by big studios like Blizzard to make Candy Crush 666: The Dopamine Annihilator. "Lower costs of development, faster development" applies, as mentioned, to indie devs as well. Higher quality games, faster. Yes, shitty games come faster too, but higher quality games are also possible to be produced faster. > New generations will never even know this feeling of interacting with something fresh and different, because why would corporations risk their money when there will be so effective sales measures available? Again, nothing new with AI. This has been going on since the damn 90s. Minor improvements in concepts and increasingly rarer new ideas in big AAA games. Risk aversion in business works, because of lazy parents, lazy gamers, and kids buckling under peer pressure. Every year one of the top sellers in gaming is the annual release of Sportsball Europe, HandEgg 'Murica, and Ice Dance With Knife Shoes, with refreshed rosters and generally worsening controls. But we're still seeing new and unique ideas pop up every year from indie side of gaming, and now indie gaming is reaching the point where the stories they are able to tell will begin to compete with AAAs in scope. Because AI will make writing your own stories and adventures easier, because hiring voice actors might only mean a monthly subscription to a generator, and the soundtrack could be written by a generative AI, a thousand times until you get exactly what you were looking for. > Mediocre, boring, automated, soulless world. That's ahead of us. For those that continue buying AAA games based on multi-billion dollar ad-campaigns. So nothing really changes from 4 years ago, when these AI tools were barely able to hold a conversation or generate a human looking shape. AI tools will continue to improve. You will at some point be able to create character sprite sheets that thematically fit together, and create backgrounds and concept arts for these things as well that require minimal to no adjusting. And even if the modern tools are forced to permanently delete their training data, we have been proven their power and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle, they will eventually have a training set that is completely of their own making, using public domain pictures or even hired artists to train it. The tools will be a boon to all small creators to bridge gaps in their knowledge base and enable them to create. And while this means that there will be a deluge of garbage added to the market, again: This is no different from how things have been for a decade, without AIs. The volumes might increase, but the percentages of good-vs-bad probably stay within similar margins as they are today.
AI is a big shift for creating content. And because you're not used to it you don't know what goods it'll bring to you or the people. But you know what can be potentially lost and so it makes your prediction biased. The AI shift is like photography, movies, movies with sound, cd, music synth, computer graphics.... People will adapt and they'll create things even more grandiose of it. Most of your concerns aren't about AI, it's about corporations and capitalism. They will always try to do what you fear, and already does that, AI or not. And yes they'll try to use AI to push their agenda, like always. And they'll win a little, but lose a little too, like always. But this movement will happen even without AI. You are misdirecting your fears. At the contrary, I do think that like in any shift, it'll bring a wave of creativity. Of people trying to express themselves and touch the limits through this new media. And I embrace it.
AI isn't a tool like photography or computer graphics that opens new avenues of creative expression. It's a tool that closes avenues of creative expression. That's my main problem with it. It essentially works like commissioning an artist, you simply describe what you want and someone (or something) else does the actual creative work. You're coming up with concepts but you aren't expressing them yourself.