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.
There are about 250k games on Steam and over 125M users. What happens when full sloppification means there's 250M games on Steam? You scroll forever without reaching a game that more than a few other humans have played. But you can't distinguish it from the thousands of other similar games. Choice is a fatigue all of its own.
(Well, maybe Steam itself will do that — VALVE's been researching brain computer interface entertainment for years :)
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.
Yes it is true that some may try to trick people with fake information about the process of producing something, but that does not mean that the reason people may be interested in the process itself is marketing. It is part of the human condition and experience imo that some may try to take advantage of, but is important otherwise.
I generally think this doesn't apply to most people unless it affects the result they want out of the product. But hey, more power to you!
However it doesn't mean they will actually pay more for the process. At the end, money talks, thoughts and prayers don't.
This is why affects like 'limited run', 'hand-made', 'artisanal' tend to imply a higher price than the equivalent temu slop.
Ever heard the japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi? It's the philosophy of beauty in imperfections.
Considering things at face value is wasting a good opportunity to truly appreciate what’s in front of you. I think that being more discerning makes you more mindful about the things you surround yourself with. That might mean buying less junk, and loving what you end up buying.
Generally, the majority of humanity is too tied up in their personal troubles to think deeply about their products. So the best thing is to accept the narrative of the marketing of the best marketed product, then deviate comparisons from there.
My 6 year old iPhone 11 is still trucking along fine. I did opt for a new battery recently, but the old battery was still at 78%. Quite frankly, its pretty incredible that a device that lives in my pocket, has been frozen and exposed to extreme heat, has gotten wet, and is probable my most used possession is running great, and probably will be supported by the manufacturer for another 4 years.
Lock in seems exaggerated to me, but if that's what worries you, then the Fairphone is promising a decade of support, and Samsung is offering 7 years now on the s24.
So is was hand-made (in China) as the advertising claimed.
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.
Take, for contrast, the original Matrix. The reason the effects in that movie were revolutionary is not because of them just looking neat, but because they fit extremely well into the movie, and were supplemented by other effects that bumped them up to the next level. CG tends to age horrrrrribly (for anybody over 40, watch the original Jurassic Park again...) but the original Matrix lobby scene [1] still actually looks pretty decent, and I think that's because it had spirit. Note how so much love is put into the choreography, even small things like the footsteps being on beat with the background audio at the start of the scene, the military style marching drums when the paramilitary forces enter the scene, and more. It's just great.
There's no reason AI can't play a major role in these artistic pipelines, but that's the thing - there's a huge difference between making something showy, and making something that feels like it has spirit, like something that is art. And it's for this reason that I don't think artists are going anywhere.
As they explain this required tons of work to tell the AI what to do. It's sad that in the sibling comment this is marked as lazy.
People are just going to lie about using AI and honestly that's fine. An even older idiom is that you don't want to see how the sausage gets made. Not if you enjoy sausage.
AI isn’t good enough yet to make things autonomously, so someone who harnesses AI to make something can, at least in my eyes, claim they made it (AI isn’t just a tool).
If and when AI becomes autonomous, the human ceases to be the creator in my view since they are no longer in the creation loop. Then you cannot pretend you made the thing.
Which is why we need regulations that create obligations to disclose AI usage
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.
Ever since Skyrim was advertised with the early promise of "If you break this lumber mill it would change the local economy"...which obviously never happened, I've loved the idea of dynamic systems in games.
For a truly dynamic system you'd need to build in more than a dev team can manually build - so you need AI for these systems. And where you have dynamic systems, sometimes you'll need dynamic assets.
However, the human touch on art is still far better than AI (at the moment, who knows what the future holds). So I think something like how character creators work is the best solution; handmade art but with morph targets etc and where sliders would be, it's an AI creating dynamic NPCs.
Aha! Even ChatGPT couldn't find this: https://youtu.be/O0zPYpEGpVI?t=324 "we have a working economy you can sabotage this wood mill if you want" LIES TODD, LIES!
I don't think this is true; we've had games build dynamic systems using procedural generation long before generative AI. Look at something like Dwarf Fortress.
There are some where the AI is used to add dynamic content, pretty cool actually.
This one in particular is pretty popular: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631
I've never heard of anyone complaining about use of AI for mods freely given to the community. Paying mods would likely be different.
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.
But even for those scenario where "AI" helps, I still believe there exists other alternatives that doesn't consume unreasonable amount of energy and are not megacorp controlled blackbox. Usually it's just better tooling, and/or a change in the process.
The reason why "AI" is simply bad is way beyond malicious abuse of these stochastic models, thus the analogy of banning phone doesn't actually work.
On the creative side, I feel like punk act like this, fighting back against all these throat-shoving and gaslighting, is pretty artistic.
Joining a moral panic mob isn't punk; it's just irrationality. The "AI is evil" crowd is just as idiotic as the "AI will do everything perfectly" crowd. They're married to ideology and are more than willing to bury themselves alive for it.
There are plenty of good reasons to not want to use gen AI (and many stupid ones as well). If someone wants to market their product that way, who cares
Well yeah, but in very many cases it has more to do with virtual signalling.
"AI" assets all look the same.
I personally don't mind AI use to write code, and while I haven't seen AI art that conveys much in me, I'm open to the idea that it could be used in interesting ways.
The real issue is that people's livelihoods are being automated. This can be fixed with sensible policies and things like universal healthcare and universal basic income.
There are some additional policies I'd like involving AI automation gains compensating workers losing their jobs to AI, and laws making all AI open-source due to their nature of being trained on public data.
With those policies, it wouldn't hurt so much to lose your job to AI. I would think there would be leas hostility at that point.
I must say it is all very confusing to me. If someone likes a game, why does the origin of assets matter? It is the same thing I see with crypto. It is just code and data. People putting value on it doesn't change what it is. Yet now there are all these regulations because enough people assigned enough value so the code suddenly becomes regulated.
AI is just code and data. It doesn't make sense how offended people are by it. No one is being for to use AI. Sure, it is changing how our society functions, but this isn't the fault of AI, it is the fault of bad systems. We have bad economic systems, bad political systems, bad leaders across the board, and bad distribution of ownership. AI isn't causing these problems, it is just amplifying them.
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.
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.
There is a very entitled class of "artists" out there who are trust fund babies, where mummy and daddy pay for everything, their art career is for show and any money it generates is play money for them. In my personal experience frequently these are the ones that most commonly refer themselves as "artists" and are the loudest shouters on that side of the debate.
Many artists I know that struggled to afford paintbrushes or musical instruments or whatever while developing their craft seem less vocal, they are used to the idea that they are probably unlikely to ever be paid or reconised sufficiently for their work because it was like that for a long time before LLM's came along. Artists in 3D studios for example often work for way less pay than a lot of us would deem acceptable just for the ability to do what they love for a job.
The best artists I know that work professionally (eg. graphic designers etc) are pragmatically using generative AI in productive ways to streamline their workflow.
Not that there's no merit to the "theft" debate at all. I do feel like a lot of people claiming to have had their work "stolen" by big companies probably don't have a portfolio online big enough or noticable enough to have been included in the training data. But for those whose work (eg. prolific and talented indie creators on Sketchfab, Artstation, Soundcloud) they have a point and I feel for them.
First, the "by artists for coders" equivalent always existed! There's tons of free-for-commercial-use art packs and BGM tracks and sound effect packs out there, and more when you add cheaply priced stuff. Will you get hate for using those common assets in a commercial project? Only as much as you'll get for visibly running on RPG Maker!
Which leads into the second - those "no-code" solutions you refer to are a far cry from "just add art". They're really "slightly lower code", relying on heavy scripting to actually shape the faintest approximation of a personal vision out of it. They were never the "by coders for artists" gift you frame them as, any more than Godot or Unity was. They're essentially just a pack of libraries for well-trodden genre boilerplate, used by hobbyist game coders and artists alike.
Artists have always needed to learn to code in order to make their vision for a game into reality. They equally cannot "enjoy creating a game, with help from tools that do something they simply don't care about" unless you want them to - wait for it - AI vibe code the whole thing. Or do you think all the artists nominally against AI art are secretly vibe coding a new wave of games too? Do you even think a vibe-coded game will hew to your expectations for a good game? If not, why?
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.
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.
I think, on the whole, the distaste for AI is primarily about a threat to the value of the artist's work. Importantly, I think the idea that this was done by training on their collective work is a bit of a sting on top but it is not the primary reason for the objection. Especially importantly, I think copyright is 100% not a good way to try to mend this issue, because it will primarily enable the parasitic centralization that already plagues the art business, as well as allow for further moat-building by tho ones creating these models (Adobe having already demonstrated this). In my view, a world where the big tech companies have models that only they are legally allowed to train is the worst possible outcome from this tech. I think addressing this either needs to involve some kind of blanket compensation from the big companies (with the important proviso that even their entire valuation spread amongst all the artists in their training set is a relative pittance), or through a general push against AI generation entirely, but from the perspective of the importance of supporting the artists as opposed to leaning on copyright claims which the AI industry can happily navigate if they must.
With regards to quality, Sturgeon's law applies doubly here. The vast majority of AI generated stuff you see will be slop, because it's so easy to make. It is possible to make very good stuff with AI with more effort, but this requires at a minimum some taste and willingness to put thought into what you want to get out of it, and better also some artistic talent. To me the best is when someone engages with it as a tool to achieve a vision as opposed to a perfunctory 'I need to fill some space with something' stock-image type thing (something which humans had already been doing, but were a bit more limited on because of expense and it's hard for someone doing art to not care at least a little bit about making something good even if it's utterly soulless corporate clip-art).
I'll also say it's not universal amongst artists. I know of multiple who are OK with it, and starting to incorporate it into their work. But it's also a somewhat dicey position to take publicly in those circles at the moment, so they're not very visible on the whole. (I suspect this is often dependent on why they got into art: in general the ones who are OK with or actively like AI are the ones who got into art because they wanted to see more art of the kind that they make (insert 'oh boy, two cakes!' meme here). The ones who got into art because they enjoy the process of making the art generally don't like it, though they're not always utterly virulently against it, and the ones who got into art for the status it affords them absolutely hate it. Though of course these are somewhat oversimplified categories)
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.
Put yourself in the shoes of some kid somewhere in the world who does neither of those things, and just wants to play a video game. If the two options are 1. imperfect translation or 2. no clue what is going on, and no ability to enjoy the game; which do you choose?
The fun part about shitty localization in games for ESL speakers is that you don't have to use it.
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.
Turns out you can both fail, and yet succeed in 10 different ways at the same time.
And the context is that it was 2hrs a week for 9 years, not 9 years of full-time dev.
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!
Like fairtrade... this code was produced without exploiting enslaved human knowledge ;)
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.
it's anyways about gamers and of that only gamers that are reachable for not yet successful indie games
I am sure that it can be very helpful for graphical or musical art, but I don't think it is quite there yet.
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.
Unfortunately technology has done this for centuries now, and everyone may as well quit whining get used to it, because it's not going to change. The market can "stay irrational" longer than they can afford to complain.
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.
There's a term for that
"Built on the shoulders of giants"
The actual dialogues were of course awesome, and relevant.
I gave them feedback about the controls for moving the character, which were a bit awkward.
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.
As much as I dislike the taste of AI slop, it seems to me like AI has so thoroughly permeated the internet at this point that a truly AI-free game is impossible unless you are a programming genius and/or independently funded to a point where you can hire domain experts for everything, such that you could make the game fully offline without even going on the internet at all. I actually find it hard to believe that anyone could code a game above a minimal level of complexity without searching problems online and using at least a tiny bit of AI-generated/summarized info, even unintentionally.
If you blindly copy paste the results though, I'm sure there are some smart people in north korea writing automated generic exploits by hand for vibe coded web sites...
google.com has become useless in the last couple years, all other search sites are doing fine or improving.
Like the fact that it's impossible to search without AI now is sort of my point, since the AI-free badge is described as projects being completely free of AI assistance, which only seems possible if you go completely off the grid while developing.
And how would one distinguish blindly vs non-blindly copy-pasting? If you use a line of code written by Claude or ChatGPT, and it works, and you need this functionality, are you supposed to rewrite it in different syntax? That seems equivalent to having AI generate art for you and then copying it by hand with different colors or slight modifications, which is still using AI imo.
I want to declare my own work AI-free because it almost totally is, but I feel like I'd be dishonest because I've definitely asked LLMs for help before and incorporated their code. Even if it was just a few lines and insights and I made changes here and there. And at least some of the assets I've used must have had AI help too. Sorites paradox kinda
It probably feels different if you’re in the JavaScript ecosystem where the “AI” is trained on suboptimal and full of security hole tutorials from content mills.
My main gripe with indie games since forever has been that they're usually boring. They often fall into creative traps that ruin the whole thing. Gameplay is constant grind, minmax, pointless choices, funnels, and "inspired" by some tired old genre. Music and art can be good, but not in the last decade or so anymore. The final nail is if there are political undertones. It's as if every developer out there only listens to their own echo chambers on discord and reddit.
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.
Edit: not a full explanation, but https://www.mikechambers.com/blog/post/2025-09-24-generative... ; this is subtly different. It's a claim that the model will not create infringing output, but that's not the same as "this model was trained only on content which was licensed for the purpose of AI training".
(there's also a discussion of the idea that the output of a model may not be copyrightable at all, which will cause a whole second set of problems for commercial users)
Adobe Firefly models are trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe Stock content is covered under a separate license agreement, and Adobe compensates contributors for the use of that content.
We do not mine the web or video hosting sites for content. We only train on content where we have rights or permission to do so.
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 bet no one listens to the "AI" voices, they have the game muted and chat on Discord with non AI generated humans...
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.
If there are only a few sentences of dialogue, how can you know it's "accurate?" "Plausible" is the more appropriate word here. The AI is filling in the blanks left by a limited sample set.
I'd imagine that's why it "works well" - you don't have a complete reference point to compare to. Ex: in your mind, what does Dagoth Ur sound like when he says "awww what a cute puppy!" Now, what does the AI sound like? Is there any reason to say one interpretation is more correct than the other?
You can make it to Dagoth Ur in about 4 minutes :)
Now I'm cleaning up the whole map as a leisurely pace. Now and then not every week. I might be done by 2028-29.
If it’s fun and you used AI, that’s fine with me. The game served its purpose.
The line for me is copyright on images. If you use ai to generate images to copy a popular game art style, I think that’s over the line. Create your own art or pay the artist.
Code however, I see it as a tool. You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. So to me, AI for coding isn’t any different than hiring a programmer to do the work for you. No problem there.
That being said, I do game dev, and using AI to help figure out an algorithm or do the work of creating my inputs code, etc is a big time saver. However, at the moment, it really struggles with anything else because it has no vision and explaining to it how to put code together for a weird game mechanic or level generation reminds me of that game where you explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the 3rd grade, and you tell your teacher to put the peanut butter on the bread and she scoops it out with her hand…
> You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done.
It’s literally the same. There is no difference, either you acknowledge AI is potentially a useful tool to lower costs of development (especially important for indie devs) or it’s exploitative and puts both artists and programmers out of a job.
There’s plenty of things in the art workflow that can be automated same as code, pay an artist to do key frames/storyboarding and use the AI to animate between them? Is this exploitative?
EDIT: I’m reminded of this thread from 2019 about a successful game dev that admits their games look like shit due to cheaping out on art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20804998