I love how none of these are cogent counterarguments.

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.

Prove it.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

AAA dev here.

Carmack is correct. I expect to be dogpiled by uninformed disagreements, though, because on social media all AI = Bad and no nuance is allowed. If that’s your knee-jerk reaction, please refrain for a moment and calmly re-think through your position.

EDIT: lol called it

I can’t think of a single AAA game using UE5 that requires that level of performance due to its size and complexity and doesn’t use audio middleware, which by default compresses audio when generating soundbanks. I have no idea where this myth of “everyone uses uncompressed audio” came from, but it’s annoying and wrong most of the time, as most social media misinformation is. Maybe people think there’s real-time compression of audio at runtime in shipped games? Idk, because that’s just not how anything works; audio files are usually pre-compressed into a nearly lossless audio format before the game binaries are even compiled into a .exe for distribution, and there are usually unique compression settings per-area-of-your-game to further compress less-critical audio into the smallest filesize possible.

Source: literally generating Vorbis/WEM Opus files (for Playstation) in Wwise as I type this.

Nothing annoys me more as a AAA dev than weird, annoying armchair critic nerd-ass dweebs thinking we’re “lazy”. Okay, you try this shit, then. I have the UE5 editor open right now, and I’m busy squashing bugs and optimizing our game. I’ve been doing it for 18 hours a day for months, sometimes 7 days a week. This stuff is way harder than you think, even with the proper amount of time, money, staffing and expertise.

I don’t care; they can downvote away. People on social media are stupid, which is demonstrated by the fact that if you read the rest of my replies, you’d see that I agree with Miyazaki, but also that everyone is interpreting what he was saying incorrectly by ignoring half of what he said, which is ACTUALLY disrespectful to the man. The important context in what he said was that an AI would not be able to replicate the expression of pain his friend felt via animation like a human who understands pain and emotions could, and THAT is why he found it offensive to life. There is a giant difference between that and using AI in your workflow to improve your efficiency so that you can focus more on the important creative bits, which is what Miyazaki was clearly referring to as being what he cared about.

So yeah, dumbasses online not being able to read context or critically think from their social media complaint armchairs don’t have any sway on my opinion when I have a decade of real-world experience being an artist for a living on them.

no u

super funny that everyone calling me a bot weirdly said the exact same kinds if things because they thought I was “self-censoring”. Who’s the bot here?

Dude, did you even read the article I linked? You train your AI models on databases of your OWN ART. That’s literally the only way it works properly. Otherwise it would just be a mishmash of different styles that don’t fit whatever it is you’re trying to do.

Even the point you’re trying to make doesn’t make sense, and it’s being addressed in the exact same article:

“Smith agrees with all artists who don’t want their work to be used for training different AI tools. At the same time, he thinks that we should be prepared that lawyers will argue that the process of AI training is similar to how real artists learn from other people’s work.”

He then compared the AI to the bombs activated by Ozymandias at the end of Watchmen. This has already happened, and artists now should realize how to deal with the outcome.

of a tool it can be in ideation and pre-production, as well as inspiration and other things. It also already has your data. Moving your images to another site isn’t going to stop the scrape. Nothing will until laws are passed and enforced. ArtStation knows this.

— Ryan James Smith (@OverdrawXYZ) December 18, 2022

That’s why Smith thinks that artists should learn how to use AI as soon as possible. “It is a tool just like anything else, and when time = money, knowing how to effectively use powerful tools will make you a showstopper in this industry,” he noted. “And having the added bonus of being able to actually art direct these things will make you more powerful, not obsolete.”

All art is derivative. Pandora’s box is open. Either learn to leverage it in creative ways or get left behind. That’s the unfortunate reality.

My dude has no idea how gamedev works at the AAA level. It’s not that simple, smartass. You can be fully staffed, with outsourcers and even have contract workers and still have to crunch; there are a limited number of people who know how to build certain proprietary systems on this earth, and having limits on your budget and having to pivot major parts of your game late in development are both extremely common things. This is why custom efficiency tools are made in the first place, to make highly competent people with rare skill sets and with limited time more efficient. The solution isn’t “hurr durr just throw more people and money at the problem”. Having a larger number of developers without the proper skillsets (because those are the only other people on the job market you can feasibly hire to staff up) can actually make a project take MORE time, not less, believe it or not. This is why coder interview processes have, like, 4 or 5 phases at some companies. You’re handing somebody the keys to the kingdom (for a fairly large paycheck, no less) and they might accidentally burn down the castle with you in it if they’re not the right fit for whatever it is you’re working on.

So yeah, AI art is not all bad. Please sit down.

Gonna guess you don’t make art for a living.

Please do a little bit of reading before you go saying stupid things.

He hated people taking humanity out of art, which is what is actually disrespectful here. AI being used as an efficiency tool to remove the more tedious, time-consuming and less creativity-intensive aspects of making art is not the same thing as letting AI write/animate an entire movie for you, which I do agree is an affront to the concept of human art.

Idk, why did your dad yell “gawk gawk gawk” last night when he was gargling my balls?

I understand what you’re saying, that the job market is a lot of luck and can be unfair. But it does sound like they need to keep trying. Every determined, talented person I’ve seen enter my industry (gamedev, an industry at the bleeding edge of ai art as a technology) has done so after hundreds of rejected applications and eventually broken in. Is it fair? Not at all. Will you eventually have your value recognized if you keep at it long enough and keep honing your craft? Absolutely. The difficult part lies in not burning out and quitting during the agonizingly grueling process of breaking in, which I can sympathize with, as I’ve gone through it myself. I have seen many people end up down that route, but the thing everybody on that route shared was that they didn’t care enough about doing art to just keep on trying despite whatever circumstances they had thrown at them, which is just an unfortunate reality. And yes, for what it’s worth, AI is absolutely making that process more frustrating.

His reply doesn’t disagree with anything I said. Using AI to enhance your creativity and do work more efficiently is not the same as letting the AI do the actually creative/artistic bits for you, which seems to be the thing he’s upset at in that clip.