Then the video zoomed out, and I saw that the guy had spent like 2 years making it out of individual toothpicks.
Suddenly I was amazed, right?
With AI it's kinda the opposite process, right? You see something, it's impressive, maybe you even like it personally, and then you realize orders of magnitude less effort went into it than it looks like "should" have, based on the result.
So we seem to have here the "direct experience" of the art itself, and then a "narrative layer" which obscures that. And we seem to value the latter more highly.
A related example is those pages selling "handcrafted" leather bags and they have an life story about Grandma Williams and suddenly the bag is worth a billion times more to the buyer.
It could even be faked. There was a clothing brand who said their stuff was all hand made, artisanal, only to be found out they sent their stuff to China to make. Now the Chinese workers are ranting about getting credit for their quality work.
It's why I think it's a sign of maturity to be able to get past all the narratives and spin to a product, all the while living less materialistically.
Here's a video which was discussed by VFX artists at Corridor Digital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43h61QAXjpY
This is so much creative work. But once people know that genAI and ComfyUI might be involved they might beat it down.
But that said, I absolutely expected a high rate because I assumed game devs would be forced to use it by management, just as I am.
This is discussed right in the article.
> For Kanaris-Sotiriou, the question of adopting the use of gen AI to make games was an easy one to answer. “The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork [...] are unfair,” he says.
I personally think using AI assistance for the code is much less intrusive than using AI for the art and music -- the code isn't as directly experienced by the player as the art.
In this atmosphere, I think it's easy to perceive an implied rejection of and threat to AI generated code, even if the focus is on art assets, because people aren't being entirely direct and forthright about exactly what it is they're upset about, and that makes for a landmine field.
If you can actually write stories or create art, you can see the “seams” in generative content and it gets to be quite nauseating. The fact it was trained on your own output by a trillion-dollar megacorp via theft while you scrape money for rent is the injury to the former’s insult.
Now, as for "seams" in generated out: insofar those seem are visible to the general public and not only those with artistic talent of their own, the seams are reassuring to artists concerned about tge future commercial value of their talents. But insofar as those seams are only apparent to the artistically trained, that concerns artists because if the buyers of art won't necessarily perceive it.
"Normal" price for a AAA game is more like $60, and Arc is 40.
Sure, indie/2D can be had for less (like Factorio or Silksong), but I would not expect an <$40 price tag for a 3D game like that.
Helldivers 2 which services the same niche goes for the same price.
I can't remember the last time I cared about voice lines in Quake or Unreal Tournament or any other multiplayer shooter.
It's not an RPG or a rich-story genre game, so who cares.
On the other hand, lots of AI-generated VO is very easy to spot, and sounds awful. It stands to reason it could meaningfully take away from even a completely plot-free game. If I were a voice actor, I'd feel insulted that anyone would find it comparable to my work.
Other voices cloned with the same tech are usually much worse. There's something about the nature of Dagoth Ur's voice in particular that makes it work well.
Maybe that allows for way more niche games.
In other words: It's the whole package. If I get something unique, and the dev used some "AI" for translation or to make some avatar image for a character I am happy this game is allowed to exist.
If I see a AAA studio putting out the hundredth iteration of the same old game, of some franchise that used to be good and interesting in the 90s and then doesn't even bring actually new art to the table it's a huge disappointment.
But here we are. EA cannot even manage to fix their basic bugs (like players running into nets or a new kickoff for less than a second) after a dozen of new expensive releases.
Non-indie games have largely been a complete farce for decades now.
There are a million things AI can do that wouldn't fall into this category (repetitive, time-consuming work) that technically wouldn't make the product "AI free."
It's about as smart as hearing a phone was used to plan a bank heist, therefore we need "phone free" communication.
And the context is that it was 2hrs a week for 9 years, not 9 years of full-time dev.
Turns out you can both fail, and yet succeed in 10 different ways at the same time.
I remember when artisanal Doritos came out. That felt like the end of that.
Sure, you may use a compiler to magically transform your source code into real executable software or use some Adobe product to transform your ugly concept drawing into something amazing, but we draw the vague limit at outsourcing too much to automation at AI generated or curated content.
One can only respect the trade if one works extremely hard, drew blood and shedded tears and sweat from one's very overworked body. AI is just creepy and has no soul. Did the great artists, developers and programmers copy paste a lot of each others work and call it a day? We think not!
Here we do not re-invent the wheel or copy someone else's wheel. You will be obligated to design, develop, program and come up with your own wheel, even if you have a copy of the best wheel possible for your program.
We make hand-crafted traditional software in small batches so the high quality of software is always preserved. Your parents and great-parents will be proud and shed nostalgic tears when using your software. Everything should be as it was and everything should be traditionally awesome.
/s
I see the `\s` but this part at least is literally what we need to do!
The red line is AI cannot be the prime generator of content. For example, the text that is to be localized must be authored by a human. Using ChatGPT to generate scripts from a brief prompt and then feeding that into another AI tool is an example of strictly prohibited use.
You can have an actual human redo the translations or voice lines without much frustration (i.e., if we actually make any money). Anything further than that gets a lot more invasive in terms of rework.
I think you’re making a big mistake with this one. Assuming it’s being used for anything other than eg placeholder before real translation/localization.
Even decent professionally translated games get this stuff wrong sometimes and irritate their audiences, I can’t imagine how badly AI will bungle it
Anecdotally, I have found AI translation to be perfectly acceptable for the languages that I do know, on par with a human translation service, at least. This may be different in a game with e.g. fantasy vocabulary that is made up.
Artists and creators are, broadly, incredibly pissed that their output was used to train these models without compensation or consent by trillion-dollar megacorps and VC-funded startups. That is, and remains, the core grievance. People who already make a pittance by devoting themselves to the creation of art are now forced out of art entirely because programmers just couldn’t be bothered to - GASP - have an original thought and commission someone else to execute it for them.
A distant, but still important, secondary concern is the quality of the slop itself (or lack thereof). Anyone who engages with art sufficiently can see the “seams” in generative content, even in state of the art models: perspectives lack consistency across key frames, anatomy isn’t grounded in reality or bends in ways befitting of a horror movie, geometry and materials that do not “graft” together due to a lack of negative space. These models are garbage because they don’t recognize core artistic concepts, only haphazardly reassemble pieces by prompt.
I challenge the AI crowd to actually go to an art faire, or commission a custom piece of your idea. Have something you had to contribute more than a simple prompt, to. Identify styles you like and artists that work within them. Take the chance to make more human connections and bond over shared creativity.
The artists will thank you, and you’re likely to enjoy the resultant output far more.
I've met enough real humans with completely self-important defenses of it that I know that they exist, so I'm willing to at least give them doubt. But the assumption is that they are AI and they need to prove being human. To assume otherwise is unreasonable.
Why are "artists" special? Why did you feel the need to type these 4 thoughtful (but overdone imo) paragraphs, defending "artisans"? Why are they special, when compared to coders? Why do the artists get to use ever better tools designed to help them, but when the other side gets the same kinds of tools, it's suddenly faux pas? Is it just "AI hate" or is it something else? Can you at least see the double standards that you apply in your post, as I can see it from outside?
It used to be that games were coded by passionate people. People who knew how to code. They'd painstakingly find ways of making ascii characters do silly things on a screen that wasn't necessarily designed for what they were doing. Later, they started playing with pixels. But they were still coders. So they coded away until the pixels started doing funny things on the screen. You talk about "art"? Hah. THAT was art. The ability and tech knowledge to make those early systems do those things with pixels is something that we just don't see today. And we don't see it, in large, because coders did what coders do and made it simpler for anyone else to do those funny things with pixels on a screen.
At every step of the way coders built software to help other people. They built engines. Then they built harnesses for the designers, animators and so on. Then they built simplified engines. The endless RPG generators, and so on. Then they built "no-code" solutions. Here, friend, you take this piece of code, plug in your art and you have a game! And they were happy to do that, because it was enabling other people to do their thing. With code they wrote. And many of them free of charge!
But now, when suddenly coders have a tool that they can use themselves, to empower them with things that they couldn't previously do, now suddenly there's a problem? Why is one artist's output "art", even if the game code is shit, while the opposite isn't? Why can't a coder enjoy creating a game, with help from tools that do something they simply don't care about? They want to do the logic behind the things moving on the screen, and can't / won't spend time creating the art. Why should they be shunned? Why not enjoy the experience for what it is? Is it just AI hate? If so, perhaps you should disclose it. Dunno, this whole take of yours feels mighty high-horsey for my taste.
I question the sincerity of this narrative that the AI companies are doing this to “help” us, when their actions say otherwise at every turn. I also question that diffusion models and LLMs “enable” programmers to somehow create things others could do with a pencil, paper, and practice. I question this notion that a human must be able to be entirely self-sufficient through technology rather than cooperative with their fellow man, or that every skill must be commoditized for maximum extraction of wealth instead of respected as expertise within a community. I do not hate AI because to do so would be to hate a hammer, or a screwdriver.
Where the hate in my heart lies are towards those who demand we reduce humanity, its chaos, its ephemeralness, its qualia, to a mathematical model devoid of entropy. I hate that because these people - not the tools themselves - deign themselves superior men who are somehow above or immune to the fundamental force of reality (entropy), devoid of responsibility or accountability for their actions or harms.
A true AI booster should be screaming angry that this compute capacity is being squandered on shitty image generation and chatbots that convince teenagers to commit suicide or psychologists that they’re discovering inter-dimensional communication. These vaunted tools should be used to balance the economy, uplift the populace, hold the powerful to account, mediate disputes, improve outcomes in quality and longevity of life.
They are emphatically not being used in this capacity, and their owners have made it abundantly clear through their repeated actions that said outcomes have never been, and never will be, their intent.
And that is the source of my personal hate.
In the end, art is about human connection. There's a difference between an print of some generated AI slop found online, a painting made in a Chinese factory for a big store, and the scribble your friend made when they went through depression.
You can make a game with all three process. They are not the same.
Like fairtrade... this code was produced without exploiting enslaved human knowledge ;)
Ie. a vocal and mostly irrelevant small minority.
Never forget who your main audience is.
The main audience isn't going to not buy a game because it doesn't use AI
So it's irrelevant if it uses AI or not. Ie. it's not a sales pitch and not part of decision making process when making the purchase.
There are increasingly more games that use some form of AI generated content, voice lines or otherwise, and nobody could care less, except the people outlined above.
The thing is though, appealing to the pro-AI crowd is much more difficult. They want a game thats a shining example of what AI can be in gaming. The anti-AI crowd doesn't need that, they've got examples of that for decades. A few AI generated voice lines won't do much to appeal to the pro-AI crowd.
If an indie (or even less of an indie) is using AI generation, they are doing so to save costs or work around their very limited budget. Or using it to work around some limitations where voicecasting every line would be infeasible, etc.
And losing the small portion of the miniscule-vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are - wasnt part of their audience to begin with), to be able to use AI-gen is not a loss at all.
Data on Steam is telling, these tools are becoming increasingly prevalent.
Oh yes they are, there's a lot of games (or at least, promises of future games) that promise to be 100% vibe-coded or that make heavy use of AI in a way thats very prominent to the player. There was an example just last week:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3730100/Whispers_from_the...
> And losing the small portion of the vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are, wasnt part of their audience to begin with), is not a loss at all.
That seems like a very different crowd to me. I've been around the industry long enough to see the signs of that, and I don't see that much from the anti-ai crowd, or at least not in any more significant numbers. See: the project zomboid AI art issue
But like I say, for an indie, yes losing a small audience can still be a big loss.
If you use or don't use a tool (your choice), it doesn't make you pro or an anti. It's basic pragmatism, if a tools is useful to you, you use it, if it isn't, you don't.
The consumer base mostly doesn't care, nor should they. They care about end result. Or else nobody would buy iphones, nikes and what not.
The moment you bring up "pros and antis" and tribe dynamics, I smell a brainrot from a mile away. You do you I guess.
it's anyways about gamers and of that only gamers that are reachable for not yet successful indie games
Slop is slop because it's slop. Sounds tautological, but AI is orthogonal to the problem. Before AI, there were and are Unity/Unreal "asset store piles" which grab a bunch of (mostly free) assets from the engine's store and slap them into a game. Nothing looks coherent or cohesive. AI has made that a lot more easy and customizable, of course, but the end result is the same: a bunch of disparate elements coming together incohesively, making for a poor player experience.
In the end it's about taste. People with poor taste will make bad games, whether they use AI or not. AI has certainly accelerated the rate at which bad games can be made, however.
Personally I'd rather play an indie game made by one person who uses GenAI to help build out their coherent, unique, and personal vision, rather than an entirely handmade yet another soulless Roguelite Deckbuilder, 2d pixel art platformer, or extraction shooter.
It's like a carpenter saying they're power tool free.
You have an amazing tool to speed up your work why wouldn't you use it?
The rest of their arguments, however illogical, all stem from this core of the fear of losing their livelihood.
There's a term for that
"Built on the shoulders of giants"
You understand the difference? Instead of improving your skills, you just spin the prompt roulette and hope the AI gods gift you with something palatable.
I'm actually currently in the process of trying to career shift from a "normal" SWE career into indie game development, and starting to navigate this a bit myself. As I become more invested in the indie game space, both as someone who wants to make a living within it, but also as someone who wants to support other indie devs more and more, I feel like what I care about most is when a game has a clear sense of the individual(s) behind the project. I dont think that this strong sense of identity is antithetical to generative AI use, but I definitely think it can become a crutch that hurts rather than helps.
I say all this, but at the same time can't imagine feeling compelled to do without Cursor for development. To me, there is a remarkable difference between AI being used for the software engineering vs. the art direction. But this is just personal preference, I think. Still, it's hard to know if that will mean I can't also use something like a "Gen-AI Free" product label, or where that line will fall. Does the smart fill tool in Photoshop count as Gen AI? How could it not?
In the end, I think there is (or there _can_ be) real value to knowing that the product you purchased was the result of a somewhat painstaking creative process.