Stable Diffusion does a lot already, for static pictures. I get good use out of Eleven for voice work, when I want something that isn’t my own narration.
I’m really looking forward to all of these new AI features in DaVinci Resolve 20. These are actual useful features that would improve my workflow. I already made good use of the “Create Subtitles From Audio” feature to streamline subtitling.
Good AI tools are out there. They are just invisibility doing the work for people that pay attention while all of the billionaires make noise about LLMs that do almost nothing.
I compare it to CGI. The very best CGI are the effects you don’t even notice. The worst CGI is when you try to employ it in every place that it’s not designed for.
And if you work on games and you haven’t seen your industry decimated in the past 16 months, I want to know what rock you have been living under and if there’s room for one more.
I love when regular folks act like they understand things better than industry insiders near the top of their respective field. It’s genuinely amusing.
Let me ask you a simple question: do YOU want to play a game with mediocre, lowest-common-denominator-generated AI audio (case-in-point, that AI audio generator sounds like dogshit and would never fly in a retail product)? Or do you want something crafted by a human with feelings (a thing an AI model does not have) and the ability to create unique design crafted specifically to create emotional resonance within you (and thing an AI has exactly zero intuition for) that is specifically tailored for the game in question, as any good piece of art demands?
Answers on a postcard, thanks. The market agrees with me as well; no AI-produced game is winning at the Game Awards any time even remotely soon, because nobody wants to play stuff like that. And you know what’s even funnier? We TRIED to use tools like this a few years ago when they began appearing on the market, and we very quickly ditched them because they sounded like ass, even when we built our own proprietary models and trained them on our own designed assets. Turns out you can’t tell a plagiarism machine to be original and good because it doesn’t know what either of those things mean. Hell, even sound design plugins that try to do exactly what you’re talking about have kinda failed in the market for the exact reasons I just mentioned. People aren’t buying Combobulator, they’re buying Serum 2 in droves.
And no, I have not seen my industry decimated by AI. Talk to any experienced AAA game dev on LinkedIn or any one of our public-facing Discord servers; it’s not really a thing. There still is and always will be a huge demand for art specifically created by humans and for humans for the exact reasons listed above. What has ACTUALLY decimated my industry is the overvaluation and inflation of everything in the economy, and now the low interest rates put in place to counter it, which is leading to layoffs once giant games don’t generate the insane profit targets suits have, which is likely what you are erroneously attributing to AI displacement.
I love how you didn’t read anything else I wrote regarding this and boiled it down to a quippy, holier-than-thou and wrong statement with no nuance. Typical internet brainrot.
I know it’s difficult for you to understand because you’re clearly kinda stupid, but the real world has this thing called “nuance” wherein two things that are seemingly contradictory at first glance can be true simultaneously.
Imagine a scenario: you are a major content artist at a studio. The studio has limited time to finish the project you’re working on, and limited money to do so. As such, you are told you need to create 200 textures extremely quickly that are due by the end of the week (not uncommon in today’s corporate crunch culture). Normally you’d throw your hands up and go “oh man, I’m fucked, I’m gonna get fired”. But thankfully you live in a world with stable diffusion models. You train said model on your own team’s previous work, then prompt it to generate a bunch of textures. You pick the best 200, and now you only have to clean them up. Bam, you have now saved 90% of your time working with a cutting-edge piece of productivity-improving software that is technically a plagiarism machine because you only had to clean up what it generated, and you didn’t infringe upon anybody else’s work that isn’t on the team you’re collaborating with (the art both you and the rest of your team make while doing so is legally owned by the company anyway). The company then keeps you on because you need to continually create fresh ideas to train the model on, because the model cannot create fresh, good ideas for injection into the model by itself, which is the reason they hired you in the first place. You keep your liveable-wage job and are now more efficient. You leave work at 5pm to go and hug your kids instead of being stuck at work crunching for 18 hours a day.
This is how AI helps artists, and it’s extremely common these days, even among independent artists. Your opinion is backwards; you’re arguing against tech that literally makes the lives of professional artists better. Please sit down and shut the fuck up, dumbass.
But it’ll never apply to what you do, because you’re special and that’s different.
Nuance nuance nuance! Plagiarism machine. Zero cognitive dissonance.
Generated content is great, it lets you go home early and fuck your wife! But let me ask you, novice: would YOU ever play a game with generated content?
This whole industry makes impossible broken demands, isn’t it just the tits? We’d never make games under-budget if not for this tech that I myself said was useless shite until just now. There’s no way increased productivity will also be crunched to demand 2000 textures in this eighty-hour week.
Obviously that scaling for selection doesn’t apply to MY job, because AI will never do what I do, unlike how I think it can handle everyone else’s work. Everyone insisting I’m not superior to all these NPCs I work with must not experience nuuuaaance.
What has ACTUALLY decimated my industry is the overvaluation and inflation of everything in the economy
The real answer, like every creative industry over the past 200+ years, is oversaturation.
Artists starve because of oversaturation. There is too much art and not enough buyers.
Musicians starve because of oversaturation. And music is now easier than ever to create. Supply is everywhere, and demand pales in comparison. I have hundreds of CC BY-SA 4.0 artists in a file that I can choose for use in my videos, because the supply is everywhere.
Video games are incredibly oversaturated. Throw a stick at Steam, and it’ll land on a thousand games. There’s plenty of random low-effort slop out there, but there’s also a lot of passionate indie creators trying to make their mark, and failing, because the marketing is not there.
Millions of people shouting in the wind, trying to make their voices heard, and somehow become more noticed than the rest of the noise. It’s a near-impossible task, and it’s about 98% luck. Yet the 2% of people who actually “make it” practice survivorship bias on a daily basis, preaching that hard work and good ideas will allow you to be just like them.
It’s all bullshit, of course. We don’t live in a meritocracy.
Do you remember the music from the last Marvel film you watched?
I don’t.
Quality isn’t directly correlated to success. Buy a modern pair of Nikes or… Go to McDonalds, play a modern mobile game.
I love when industry insiders think they’re so untouchable that a budget cut wouldn’t have them on the chopping block. You’re defensive because its your ass on the line, not because its true.
People gargle shit products and pay for them willingly all day long. So much so that it’s practically the norm. You’re just insulated from it, for now.
“Oh no, all my quality work won’t be in the next marvel movie or in mcdonalds’ next happy-meal promo campaign, darn. Guess I’ll have to make and sell something else.”
~ Literally every artist with a modicum of talent, ambition and a brain
This is such a flimsy argument that it’s barely worth responding to. People by-and-large are absolutely sick of Marvel slop and still seek quality art elsewhere; this is not a novel concept, nor will it be outmoded by the introduction of AI. The internet and entertainment industry at large is still actively exploding with monetized, unique, quality content because not everybody wants slop; most people are actively sick of it. Talented visual artists are still and will continue to be hired in the entertainment industry and will also continue to be able to independently release stuff online because they have their own individual perspective and the x-factor of “human creativity” that AI slop just cannot compete with. Interesting that you didn’t address that, but what’s also interesting is you’re touching upon the reason most people are mad; AI models tend to churn out mediocre work, and people feel threatened because they aren’t good enough at their craft to compete with it, so instead of becoming better they scream at anybody trying to advance the technology of their particular discipline for taking away extremely easy kinds of work that they barely had to do anything to get before (patreon commissions, etc.). Work a tad harder, try to express yourself more effectively and I promise you somebody will value your work above the forgettable music from “The Eternals”. People with talent tend to break through if they try hard enough, it’s not rocket science.
And I addressed the budget-cut thing earlier, so no I am not acting the way you described. Budget cuts are not an AI problem, they’re a capitalism problem, as I stated previously. Please read.
INB4 people scream “survivorship bias”. No, you’re just not good enough, and you’d rather scream and yell at sensible takes from every expert in their field or craft than accept that fact. Legitimately. I know you don’t like hearing that, but you need to accept it in order to improve. Get better at your craft. If you can’t make stuff with greater quality than AI slop, you’re not going to be capable of making things that resonate with people anyway. AI will never be able to do this, and this kind of quality creates sales. AI will be used, sure, but it will be leveraged to improve efficiency, not replace artists
At this point, it should be obvious that no one is downvoting you because they believe you’re wrong. Rather, its because you’re an inflated, insecure douchebag who’s so threatened by the opinions of two federated users on the ass end of the internet, that he feels the need to write an essay about it, not to us, no, to his own ego.
And for the record, I’m not one of the believers. On a long enough timeline, you’ll be playing birthday parties dressed as a cowboy. Ai is improving while people have a bell curve. It’s only a matter of time. Cheers. I hope you find happiness one day.
Imagine the ego it would take to write something as unbelievably cringe as this personal fantasy about an anonymous person you’re angry at just to make yourself feel better.
For the record, I’m autistic and I am highly compensated for my expertise as an interactive artist, so that’s why I’m discussing this topic with fervor.
It’s also really funny that anybody would ever give a shit about fake internet points, as if it were some transcendental measure of correctness or moral merit and not just an indication of how uninformed, emotionally-driven and circlejerk-y the general public is on social media.
What AI tools are you personally looking forward to or already using?
Stable Diffusion does a lot already, for static pictures. I get good use out of Eleven for voice work, when I want something that isn’t my own narration.
I’m really looking forward to all of these new AI features in DaVinci Resolve 20. These are actual useful features that would improve my workflow. I already made good use of the “Create Subtitles From Audio” feature to streamline subtitling.
Good AI tools are out there. They are just invisibility doing the work for people that pay attention while all of the billionaires make noise about LLMs that do almost nothing.
I compare it to CGI. The very best CGI are the effects you don’t even notice. The worst CGI is when you try to employ it in every place that it’s not designed for.
Not me personally, as AI can’t really replicate my work (I’m a senior sound designer on a big game), but a few colleagues of mine have already begun reaping the workflow improvements of AI at their studio.
Obviously AI is coming for sound designers too. You know that right? https://elevenlabs.io/sound-effects
And if you work on games and you haven’t seen your industry decimated in the past 16 months, I want to know what rock you have been living under and if there’s room for one more.
I love when regular folks act like they understand things better than industry insiders near the top of their respective field. It’s genuinely amusing.
Let me ask you a simple question: do YOU want to play a game with mediocre, lowest-common-denominator-generated AI audio (case-in-point, that AI audio generator sounds like dogshit and would never fly in a retail product)? Or do you want something crafted by a human with feelings (a thing an AI model does not have) and the ability to create unique design crafted specifically to create emotional resonance within you (and thing an AI has exactly zero intuition for) that is specifically tailored for the game in question, as any good piece of art demands?
Answers on a postcard, thanks. The market agrees with me as well; no AI-produced game is winning at the Game Awards any time even remotely soon, because nobody wants to play stuff like that. And you know what’s even funnier? We TRIED to use tools like this a few years ago when they began appearing on the market, and we very quickly ditched them because they sounded like ass, even when we built our own proprietary models and trained them on our own designed assets. Turns out you can’t tell a plagiarism machine to be original and good because it doesn’t know what either of those things mean. Hell, even sound design plugins that try to do exactly what you’re talking about have kinda failed in the market for the exact reasons I just mentioned. People aren’t buying Combobulator, they’re buying Serum 2 in droves.
And no, I have not seen my industry decimated by AI. Talk to any experienced AAA game dev on LinkedIn or any one of our public-facing Discord servers; it’s not really a thing. There still is and always will be a huge demand for art specifically created by humans and for humans for the exact reasons listed above. What has ACTUALLY decimated my industry is the overvaluation and inflation of everything in the economy, and now the low interest rates put in place to counter it, which is leading to layoffs once giant games don’t generate the insane profit targets suits have, which is likely what you are erroneously attributing to AI displacement.
When it’s other people’s work, well, people need a nuanced opinion about this nascent technological breakthrough.
When it’s your specific area of expertise, it’s “the plagiarism machine.”
You are Knoll’s law personified.
I love how you didn’t read anything else I wrote regarding this and boiled it down to a quippy, holier-than-thou and wrong statement with no nuance. Typical internet brainrot.
Oh my god you’re still trying to have it both ways.
I know it’s difficult for you to understand because you’re clearly kinda stupid, but the real world has this thing called “nuance” wherein two things that are seemingly contradictory at first glance can be true simultaneously.
Imagine a scenario: you are a major content artist at a studio. The studio has limited time to finish the project you’re working on, and limited money to do so. As such, you are told you need to create 200 textures extremely quickly that are due by the end of the week (not uncommon in today’s corporate crunch culture). Normally you’d throw your hands up and go “oh man, I’m fucked, I’m gonna get fired”. But thankfully you live in a world with stable diffusion models. You train said model on your own team’s previous work, then prompt it to generate a bunch of textures. You pick the best 200, and now you only have to clean them up. Bam, you have now saved 90% of your time working with a cutting-edge piece of productivity-improving software that is technically a plagiarism machine because you only had to clean up what it generated, and you didn’t infringe upon anybody else’s work that isn’t on the team you’re collaborating with (the art both you and the rest of your team make while doing so is legally owned by the company anyway). The company then keeps you on because you need to continually create fresh ideas to train the model on, because the model cannot create fresh, good ideas for injection into the model by itself, which is the reason they hired you in the first place. You keep your liveable-wage job and are now more efficient. You leave work at 5pm to go and hug your kids instead of being stuck at work crunching for 18 hours a day.
This is how AI helps artists, and it’s extremely common these days, even among independent artists. Your opinion is backwards; you’re arguing against tech that literally makes the lives of professional artists better. Please sit down and shut the fuck up, dumbass.
But it’ll never apply to what you do, because you’re special and that’s different.
Nuance nuance nuance! Plagiarism machine. Zero cognitive dissonance.
Generated content is great, it lets you go home early and fuck your wife! But let me ask you, novice: would YOU ever play a game with generated content?
This whole industry makes impossible broken demands, isn’t it just the tits? We’d never make games under-budget if not for this tech that I myself said was useless shite until just now. There’s no way increased productivity will also be crunched to demand 2000 textures in this eighty-hour week.
Obviously that scaling for selection doesn’t apply to MY job, because AI will never do what I do, unlike how I think it can handle everyone else’s work. Everyone insisting I’m not superior to all these NPCs I work with must not experience nuuuaaance.
The real answer, like every creative industry over the past 200+ years, is oversaturation.
Artists starve because of oversaturation. There is too much art and not enough buyers.
Musicians starve because of oversaturation. And music is now easier than ever to create. Supply is everywhere, and demand pales in comparison. I have hundreds of CC BY-SA 4.0 artists in a file that I can choose for use in my videos, because the supply is everywhere.
Video games are incredibly oversaturated. Throw a stick at Steam, and it’ll land on a thousand games. There’s plenty of random low-effort slop out there, but there’s also a lot of passionate indie creators trying to make their mark, and failing, because the marketing is not there.
Millions of people shouting in the wind, trying to make their voices heard, and somehow become more noticed than the rest of the noise. It’s a near-impossible task, and it’s about 98% luck. Yet the 2% of people who actually “make it” practice survivorship bias on a daily basis, preaching that hard work and good ideas will allow you to be just like them.
It’s all bullshit, of course. We don’t live in a meritocracy.
Do you remember the music from the last Marvel film you watched?
I don’t.
Quality isn’t directly correlated to success. Buy a modern pair of Nikes or… Go to McDonalds, play a modern mobile game.
I love when industry insiders think they’re so untouchable that a budget cut wouldn’t have them on the chopping block. You’re defensive because its your ass on the line, not because its true.
People gargle shit products and pay for them willingly all day long. So much so that it’s practically the norm. You’re just insulated from it, for now.
“Oh no, all my quality work won’t be in the next marvel movie or in mcdonalds’ next happy-meal promo campaign, darn. Guess I’ll have to make and sell something else.”
~ Literally every artist with a modicum of talent, ambition and a brain
What’s your favorite big-budget, AI-generated game/movie/show that you’ve given money to, again?
This is such a flimsy argument that it’s barely worth responding to. People by-and-large are absolutely sick of Marvel slop and still seek quality art elsewhere; this is not a novel concept, nor will it be outmoded by the introduction of AI. The internet and entertainment industry at large is still actively exploding with monetized, unique, quality content because not everybody wants slop; most people are actively sick of it. Talented visual artists are still and will continue to be hired in the entertainment industry and will also continue to be able to independently release stuff online because they have their own individual perspective and the x-factor of “human creativity” that AI slop just cannot compete with. Interesting that you didn’t address that, but what’s also interesting is you’re touching upon the reason most people are mad; AI models tend to churn out mediocre work, and people feel threatened because they aren’t good enough at their craft to compete with it, so instead of becoming better they scream at anybody trying to advance the technology of their particular discipline for taking away extremely easy kinds of work that they barely had to do anything to get before (patreon commissions, etc.). Work a tad harder, try to express yourself more effectively and I promise you somebody will value your work above the forgettable music from “The Eternals”. People with talent tend to break through if they try hard enough, it’s not rocket science.
And I addressed the budget-cut thing earlier, so no I am not acting the way you described. Budget cuts are not an AI problem, they’re a capitalism problem, as I stated previously. Please read.
INB4 people scream “survivorship bias”. No, you’re just not good enough, and you’d rather scream and yell at sensible takes from every expert in their field or craft than accept that fact. Legitimately. I know you don’t like hearing that, but you need to accept it in order to improve. Get better at your craft. If you can’t make stuff with greater quality than AI slop, you’re not going to be capable of making things that resonate with people anyway. AI will never be able to do this, and this kind of quality creates sales. AI will be used, sure, but it will be leveraged to improve efficiency, not replace artists
At this point, it should be obvious that no one is downvoting you because they believe you’re wrong. Rather, its because you’re an inflated, insecure douchebag who’s so threatened by the opinions of two federated users on the ass end of the internet, that he feels the need to write an essay about it, not to us, no, to his own ego.
And for the record, I’m not one of the believers. On a long enough timeline, you’ll be playing birthday parties dressed as a cowboy. Ai is improving while people have a bell curve. It’s only a matter of time. Cheers. I hope you find happiness one day.
Imagine the ego it would take to write something as unbelievably cringe as this personal fantasy about an anonymous person you’re angry at just to make yourself feel better.
For the record, I’m autistic and I am highly compensated for my expertise as an interactive artist, so that’s why I’m discussing this topic with fervor.
It’s also really funny that anybody would ever give a shit about fake internet points, as if it were some transcendental measure of correctness or moral merit and not just an indication of how uninformed, emotionally-driven and circlejerk-y the general public is on social media.