Games

If you can't tell it's AI, then it's a problem entirely made up in your own head.

Surprising amount of comments that are OK with this and completely missing the point that Steam requires disclosure of AI asset usage. The devs neglected to tag it as such and people are rightly getting refunds for it.

I saw some early demos and hoped that AI could bring about a revolution in on-the-fly procedural generated content for gaming to do things that would be literally impossible by other methods. But no, instead it has been used to replace artists to produce poor-quality pre-generated static content and I couldn't be more disappointed.

Gaming is the one place generative AI makes the most sense, imo.

Personally, I want to see the Holodeck from Star Trek. That entire concept is generative AI.

oh ffs, The Alters used it for placeholder assets for which no one would have hired a professional. It’s a rough machine translation instead of Lorem Ipsum.

I don't care about AI in video games, seems silly to give a shit.

I DO care if they are using AI to analyse or harvest my data. Otherwise.... its a freaking video game. Whatever. Is it a good game?

And I say this because I know people who really have interesting ideas, but they cant afford artists, musicians, and some even need a little help creating meshs and rigging. I would hope they are honest about it, but if they use AI as a tool to bring their vision together that seems fine. If they do translations it definitely would be worth saying "AI generated" as it never is as good as a native speaker. But it is something that is better than nothing.

And I will add: If you are concerned about the "executive class" and workers, you shouldnt be buying from the big studios anyways.

Edit: I guess the down otes indicate that you don't give a shit about artists, you just have a knee jerk reaction to technology. Probably because you do not even understand it.

Complete overreaction, but I agree that commercial games should not be using GenAI art. If you're making money out of selling your game, then don't use something which abused to commons to do so. If you're making a FOSS game, I don't see a problem with it.

I don't really care? Is that allowed? 🤷‍

I'm old enough to remember when computers started to be used for art, and how traditional artists were complaining about how soulless the end product would be, and how unskilled people could 'fake' being good artists because the computer does most of the work for them. I mean the undo function of a computer on its own is putting incredible creative power into the hands of even the most useless digital artist, power that da Vinci himself would have creamed his little loincloth over. And the copy & paste function - and all of the other everyday functions all PC users depend on - cut down the production time by orders of magnitude compared to traditional painting/drawing. This isn't even getting into the incredible transformation tools on offer in Photoshop (or even MS Paint 1.0).

Remember matte painters who painted incredible photorealistic chunks of the screen in films? Do Photoshop users of today feel any qualms about having extincted the fuck outta those people? Would they have even entertained the woes of those artists if they were around at the time? Would they have been calling for government intervention to prevent non-traditional matte painters from taking those jobs?

What about sculptors and stop-motion pros? Movies have been riddled with worse-looking CGI replacements for those things for half a century. Any shits given about those artists who spent their lives perfecting their craft only to be supplanted overnight by a cunt with a Pentium who produces objectively worse results?

AI is just the latest sabot-magnet disruption, and it won't be the last, despite the apocalyptic language around it. Either find a way to live with it and exploit it, or lay down in the Artists of Christmas Past mass grave and pull the clay in over yourselves. Or, you know, go ahead and try to uninvent it or whatever it is you're proposing 👍 And if you really wanna go hardcore, uninstall all of your digital art tools, get yourself an easel and see what you can do in the "real world" with your "real talents" without recourse to time-saving, labour-deleting, instantaneous bespoke-brush-manifesting technology.

So I'm in two minds about this. I am a software engineer by trade and have an idea for a game I'd like to try making.

The problem is that I don't even really know how to make games, not do I have any artistic abilities myself. I can't afford to pay a load of artists for work for a game that might never be finished and might never make money.

So I'm stuck in this hard decision of do I try and make my game, invest a lot of money and potentially lose it all, or do I try and find a publisher who can front the money but lose creative control of my game? Or do I use AI to give me a head start in building something that I can use to garner interest in, in the hope that enough people like it that I can fund the development?

Essentially, AI offers me a way to create something that I would not otherwise be able to create and that's really hard to accept.

Well that author is not playing any games any time soon. Or he probably will after this artificial rage topic is gone. GenAI is here to stay and it makes stuff way easier and way faster.

video games in their current market might be one of the only areas that I'm tentatively okay with ai work.

Stasis Bone Totem had some hideous applications of it but the studio was using it to fill out supplemental art for puzzles and items that could've eaten up their budget. it kind of gives smaller studios a way to punch up when their vision is exceeding their budget for things like piles of gore on the ground or bundles of wire.

that said I only make that particular defense under late stage capitalism which is proving to be poisonous to art. not to mention that for every Bone Totem there's 108 employees that Ubisoft is going to lay off because they think ChatGPT can do their job

It sucks that players are having to scour every asset and line of dialogue

Im sorry. But this is pathetic if it's true. And I mean that on part of the players.

Huh, it's almost like this new tool is fine for placeholder art, and placeholders can be good enough to ship.

Did you know The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" was supposed to have a brass section? That driving riff with the fuzzbox guitar was a placeholder. They released it as-is, the song hit #1, and distortion became mainstream. At what point do we stop lamenting all the horn players who were robbed?

Yeah and I am also real scared about this “green screen” technology in movies, as if they fake stuff you know.

Getting really tired of this moral performance people put on to look cool to their peers.