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Comment on Tim Sweeney says Epic Games Store is open to devs using generative AI

TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Big developers don’t have to just increase the scope of their games, they could just as easily make many small teams that can each work on their own smaller games.

There was never anything stopping them from doing that without AI. They don’t do it because their executives and investors want the large Return on Investment that they can only get with big blockbusters. They don’t care to take over the indie scene because it’s often focused on titles that are niche and risky.

Even if you are correct about the capabilities of AI, and to be clear I do believe you are mostly correct, it’s an overstatement to talk of it as if it will replace all other disciplines. It’s almost like saying there is no more purpose for drawing now that we have photography, and nobody can thrive if not for photography. Even if AI is widely adopted there will still be plenty of space for works made without it.

Really, I’m not entirely opposed to AI but the mindset here is definitely one I cannot gel with, one that making more, larger, faster art is more worthwhile than making it yourself. Even if AI could make whole characters and settings in someone’s style, the people working on it often want to make it themselves. An AI can’t condense all your inspirations and personality and the meaning you would put into a work for you. AI does not even truly understand what it does, it’s only providing a statistics-based output. Even the best, most complex, most truly intelligent AI imaginable is not replacement for an artist, because it isn’t that artist.

Ultimately AI still seems to serve better to expansive games that need to be filled with a lot of content than small works of passion.

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Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

There was never anything stopping them from doing that without AI. They don’t do it because their executives and investors want the large Return on Investment that they can only get with big blockbusters. They don’t care to take over the indie scene because it’s often focused on titles that are niche and risky.

There’s a possibility the profit margins could just get that juicy. You could have a skeleton crew work on a game for a shorter amount of time and get it out there making money.

Really, I’m not entirely opposed to AI but the mindset here is definitely one I cannot gel with, one that making more, larger, faster art is more worthwhile than making it yourself. Even if AI could make whole characters and settings in someone’s style, the people working on it often want to make it themselves. An AI can’t condense all your inspirations and personality and the meaning you would put into a work for you. AI does not even truly understand what it does, it’s only providing a statistics-based output. Even the best, most complex, most truly intelligent AI imaginable is not replacement for an artist, because it isn’t that artist.

AI can’t create anything itself, it’s a tool to help artists create explore, expedite, and improve. An AI can’t condense all of your inspirations and personality and meaning in the same way a drawing tablet can’t. It’s all in how you use it. You can infuse it with your learned experiences at training, guidance, inference, and post-processing to make it more closely adhere to your statistics.

Ultimately AI still seems to serve better to expansive games that need to be filled with a lot of content than small works of passion.

We’ve been talking about indie game devs this whole time, but we haven’t even touched on amateur games devs. For small scale, I think this is where we’ll see the biggest impact. People with fewer or no skills might get the helping hand they need to fill the gaps in their knowledge and get started.

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- TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  There’s a possibility the profit margins could just get that juicy. You could have a skeleton crew work on a game for a shorter amount of time and get it out there making money.
  
  This is pure speculation, and a very iffy one at that. Large game companies keep betting on larger and larger projects, distancing themselves from niche genres. It’s a huge leap to go from “maybe they will try to make smaller games with AI”, which is already speculation, to “indie devs won’t be able to survive if they don’t use AI too”.
  
  An AI can’t condense all of your inspirations and personality and meaning in the same way a drawing tablet can’t. It’s all in how you use it.
  
  The tablet can be a neutral medium, an AI is trying to condense the outwardly obvious stylistic choices of countless other artists, without an understanding of the underlying ideas that guided them, while you are trying to wrestle something somewhat close to your vision out of it. I suppose that’s like being a director, but it inherently means the result less personal. What decided the shapes and colors? What decided the wording and tone? Who can say.
  
  People with fewer or no skills might get the helping hand they need to fill the gaps in their knowledge and get started.
  
  I’d say today there are easy enough tools that getting started is fairly easy, but there’s some merit to that. Still… that bumps with the uncomfortable possibility that if AI is widely adopted, there will be less game developer and artist jobs available. Sure, more people could get their start, but could they actually get any further than that?
  
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