is AI going to ruin video games?

[Edelgard von Hræsvelg]

—Damn Vault City's prez be drippin frfr

Lately we're seeing an explosion in AI/Deep-learning algorithms creating 'art' and people are going crazy about it without thinking twice. On 4chan, I read hopeful wannabe devs thinking AI will solve indie video game making, freed from the plight of having to contract others to help in areas where the main developer lacks knowledge about. Finally the shut-in autist programmer dreams about making his game all alone... but it's really his? How do we measure authorship when you start relying on AI to help you design worlds? Most importantly, what happens to soul, does it matter anymore? Should we simply accept a sense of inferiority against machines and call it a day?

I find all those implications troubling, to surrender human creativity is to admit defeat as a species. Not only this makes us closer to the world of Wall-E, where everybody is a fat consumerist blob maintained by systems (some might say America already is like that), it also raises questions about what humanity wants to achieve with the concept of art. Among all those developers already salivating with games with automated art, level design and system progression... are there still a few dreamers left who still want to express what they really carry inside? Will consumers eventually shun the authentic products in favor of AI-made works that cater to the tastes of the common denominator? Even if you simply use AI as an inspiration for specific parts... how much of the end product can you still call yours? Are the fears raised by this thread dramatic and unwarranted? Will AI actually save gaming?

 

[S.torch]

People are going crazy about it

Only halfwits and morons believe in the whole "IA" scam.

 

[what am i doing]

Huge budget savings for textures, art in general, voice acting. This is only a positive thing. Opposition to it is coming from megacorps who don't like the fact that "programmer art" will soon look much better, and low-grade artists who are mad that their mediocre art no longer has a market (good artists have nothing to worry about).

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

Lately we're seeing an explosion in AI/Deep-learning algorithms creating 'art' and people are going crazy about it without thinking twice. On 4chan, I read hopeful wannabe devs thinking AI will solve indie video game making, freed from the plight of having to contract others to help in areas where the main developer lacks knowledge about. Finally the shut-in autist programmer dreams about making his game all alone... but it's really his? How do we measure authorship when you start relying on AI to help you design worlds? Most importantly, what happens to soul, does it matter anymore? Should we simply accept a sense of inferiority against machines and call it a day?

Alright, I'll bite. How do we measure authorship currently for large works? Generally current movies and games have multiple artists working on large chunks, if we liked something within that chunk how do we know who authored it? Maybe it was Kevin's idea, Sophia's model, John's texturing and Phil's animations. Now who do you associate the ownership to, is it Kevin since he is the progenitor of the idea? But what if the idea only works because it's a small chunk within the movie or game, and the one who decided what the collective should look like was the creative director? Do we give credit to him? But what if the creative director only had this idea because of the story board? Since the story board worked off the script we should give credit to the writer correct! It's already convoluted, we usually give credit to the people making the decision. The art director gets the largest credit and the entity called the art team gets the collective.

Now why would this change if it was the programmer who is approving art an AI generates? You are confusing individual art pieces to the individual piece of art a game developer wants to make. For an artist that one painting is his art, for a game developer the whole game which is a combination of everything, a culmination of everything to form the game is his art. Since you are worried about credit, have you ever thought about the programmers? How often do programmers get credit for the creation and implementation of impeccable mechanics?

Next you ask for the soul, but what is the soul? Generally I consider attention and effort to create something that is filled to the brim with details that enrich the game experience to be the soul. But then you hear people tell you how some cookie cutter clone game is made with passion and soul. You are bringing a personal and arbitrary metric to judge something, and since the criteria is vague it'll never matter.

I find all those implications troubling, to surrender human creativity is to admit defeat as a species. Not only this makes us closer to the world of Wall-E, where everybody is a fat consumerist blob maintained by systems (some might say America already is like that), it also raises questions about what humanity wants to achieve with the concept of art. Among all those developers already salivating with games with automated art, level design and system progression... are there still a few dreamers left who still want to express what they really carry inside? Will consumers eventually shun the authentic products in favor of AI-made works that cater to the tastes of the common denominator? Even if you simply use AI as an inspiration for specific parts... how much of the end product can you still call yours? Are the fears raised by this thread dramatic and unwarranted? Will AI actually save gaming?

AI is a tool to express what we carry inside. AI will allow the dudes who have ideas that are unmarketable or isn't trending to get created, depends on you if you think that's a good thing or not.

 

[ADL]

Anything that makes 'artists' seethe is a good thing and anything that lowers the barrier of entry for making video games is even better.

 

[JarlFrank]

Games with lackluster procedural generation have already proven that no amount of AI algorithms can replace human creativity, because hand-made levels >>>>>> proc gen, EVERY SINGLE TIME, no exceptions.

Same with art, same with story. A human has to make it for it to have any value.

 

[fork]

Games with lackluster procedural generation have already proven that no amount of AI algorithms can replace human creativity, because hand-made levels >>>>>> proc gen, EVERY SINGLE TIME, no exceptions.

Same with art, same with story. A human has to make it for it to have any value.

Yes, but the point is it won't be made anymore. People accept modern art, architecture and design in general, they consume capeshit from Hollywood etc. This is just another step down the seemingly endless ladder of decline.

 

[Derringer]

Huge budget savings for textures, art in general, voice acting. This is only a positive thing. Opposition to it is coming from megacorps who don't like the fact that "programmer art" will soon look much better, and low-grade artists who are mad that their mediocre art no longer has a market (good artists have nothing to worry about).

The big thing here is that programmer art now has a chance to look like character designer or promotional art/concept art (like the stuff made for Mass Effect versus what people actually got) so any jump production-wise for budget that doesn't involve jewish stock holders has a chance to help to make video games look less shitty. That's the biggest thing I could think of about it helping.

 

[what am i doing]

Games with lackluster procedural generation have already proven that no amount of AI algorithms can replace human creativity, because hand-made levels >>>>>> proc gen, EVERY SINGLE TIME, no exceptions.

Same with art, same with story. A human has to make it for it to have any value.

And similar to hand-made vs procgen, carefully prompted and guided AI art is superior to just grabbing the first thing the model spits out. But the AI takes care of the step between what you have in mind, vs the resulting image, without you having to devote years of time to learning how to draw / paint.

I don't transform matrices by hand either, OpenGL Mathematics does it for me. Actually, I don't even know how to do matrix math, I just know the appropriate functions to call. This is no different.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

No, they were already ruined by video game developers.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

because hand-made levels >>>>>> proc gen, EVERY SINGLE TIME, no exceptions.

Yeah, Ubisoft games are vastly superior to nethack.

 

[JarlFrank]

because hand-made levels >>>>>> proc gen, EVERY SINGLE TIME, no exceptions.

Yeah, Ubisoft games are vastly superior to nethack.

Ubisoft worker drone brains are closer to robots than humans.

 

[Wunderbar]

anything that lowers the barrier of entry for making video games is even better.

more shit games, hurray

 

[ADL]

more shit games, hurray

There's more good games coming out every year than ever. You gotta dig through the shit to find the gems but they're out there.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

more shit games, hurray

There's more good games coming out every year than ever. You gotta dig through the shit to find the gems but they're out there.

number of good games per year has at best remained constant for decades
it's completely uncorrelated to the total number of games released

 

[KateMicucci]

Instead of hundreds of shitty pixel art games there will be hundreds of shitty AI art games.

 

[catfood]

Games with lackluster procedural generation have already proven that no amount of AI algorithms can replace human creativity, because hand-made levels >>>>>> proc gen, EVERY SINGLE TIME, no exceptions.

Same with art, same with story. A human has to make it for it to have any value.

Nobody makes hand-made levels anymore. Gaymers have been conditioned to cons00me randomly generated shit without giving it a second thought. The decline is real.

 

[Derringer]

anything that lowers the barrier of entry for making video games is even better.

more shit games, hurray

The games that are shit are already shit, there's just a chance they can look less shit now depending on if effort is put into setting up ai pattern prompt scripts.

 

[†††]

Good news, video games are already dead and AI won't revive them. Every time I've played procedurally generated shit, it feels very shallow. It will be the same story for art, pretty at first look but really shallow upon closer inspection. It should improve western gaming aesthetics since they're already bottom of the barrel nonetheless.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

People are going crazy about it

Only halfwits and morons believe in the whole "IA" scam.

Not so much a scam as they're just around 100-200 years too early. These goofs waiting around for real AI would be like late medieval peasants kicking their busted wagon wheels, dreaming of the time when the internal combustion engine will come along and solve their labor problems. Keep dreamin', kid. Ya' got a ways to go.

And for us that's a good thing. I don't think ppl are quite prepared for the utter decline of humanity once true AI machines take over and literally do everything for us. Our grasp and purpose for living will slip away before Skynet can even unleash the nukes.

 

[Strig]

Anything that makes 'artists' seethe is a good thing and anything that lowers the barrier of entry for making video games is even better.

There's a serious flaw in your reasoning. Browse through any AI image generator related discord, subreddit or any other AItard dwelling and you'll see that these people already think themselves artists just because a script spat out something palatable after the hundredth prompt they plonked in the box. I dislike artists, they're often obnoxious but at least many of them acquired a few skills necessary for the job. Now you'll have the same sense of self-importance without ANY merit to back it up.

Huge budget savings for textures, art in general, voice acting. This is only a positive thing. Opposition to it is coming from megacorps who don't like the fact that "programmer art" will soon look much better, and low-grade artists who are mad that their mediocre art no longer has a market (good artists have nothing to worry about).

Where do you think good artists come from? Apart from a very select group of naturally gifted savants most people are bad, then mediocre and then they become good. If there's no need for mediocre artists the whole ecosystem will collapse and there will be almost no good artists in the future. And I personally find that there is value in mediocrity, not everything has to be a work of high art, sometimes you just need to follow the guidelines and make a thing that's proper and adequate. What's worse, people will argue (again) about the superiority of conceptual art like a random object with a wall of incoherent ramblings printed next to it. The technology is amazing but as human creativity goes this is just sacrificing long-term health for short-term gains.

 

[S.torch]

Opposition to it is coming from megacorps

Is the other way around. These inferior versions of a parrot that people call "IAs" do exactly the same type of "output" that corporations want: cheap, bland and inoffensive that can be produced in masse. There's the fact that megacorps already had their own IAs for handling many if not most of the work.

This whole crap is a scam, sloppy engineered by the mainstream in its more than ever decadent state. Another type of low-quality soma and nothing more.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Opposition to it is coming from megacorps

Is the other way around. These inferior versions of a parrot that people call "IAs" do exactly the same type of "output" that corporations want: cheap, bland and inoffensive that can be produced in masse. There's the fact that megacorps already had their own IAs for handling many if not most of the work.

This whole crap is a scam, sloppy engineered by the mainstream in its more than ever decadent state. Another type of low-quality soma and nothing more.

"muh HOOOOMAN factor!!!!!!!"

 

[S.torch]

Yes.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

most of the people making the shit cheap art that will be replaced aren't even human(chinks in sweatshops)