Vapourware Lay offs? Can be worse - in an unexpected twist & turn of events AI is taking "jobs" in "gaming" industry

[Baron Dupek]

Original Article
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-is-already-taking-jobs-in-the-video-game-industry/
no-paywall
https://archive.is/pEW2S

A WIRED investigation finds that major players like Activision Blizzard, which recently laid off scores of workers, are using generative AI for game development.
sA big publisher and developer acting that way?
shocking, I know

“I felt that we were throwing away our humanity,” he says.

Then the jobs started disappearing.

VIDEO GAMES—AND THE people who make them—are in trouble. An estimated 10,500 people in the industry were laid off in 2023 alone. This year, layoffs in the nearly $200 billion sector have only gotten worse, with studios axing what is believed to be 11,000 more, and counting. Microsoft, home of the Xbox and parent company to several studios, including Activision Blizzard, shuttered Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games in May. All the while, generative AI systems built by OpenAI and its competitors have been seeping into nearly every industry, dismantling whole careers along the way.
But gaming might be the biggest industry AI stands poised to conquer. Its economic might has long since eclipsed Hollywood's, while its workforce remains mostly nonunion. A recent survey from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference found that 49 percent of the survey’s more than 3,000 respondents said their workplace used AI, and four out of five said they had ethical concerns about its use.
“It’s here. It’s definitely here, right now,” says Violet, a game developer, technical artist, and a veteran of the industry who has worked on AAA games for over a decade. “I think everyone’s seen it get used, and it’s a matter of how and to what degree. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's box is opened.”

Now, previously unreported emails obtained by WIRED, in addition to interviews with artists, developers, designers, and workers across the gaming world—from AAA studios with thousands of employees to indies with just a handful—paint a picture of an already precarious industry getting further squeezed by the rise of AI.
Job automation rarely happens evenly or cleanly. Historically, much of its impact is felt through deskilling, as more tasks are handed over to a machine or program, or attrition, as employees who are laid off, quit, or retire, don’t get replaced or hired back. Generative AI, by all indications, is no different.
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Managers at video game companies aren’t necessarily using AI to eliminate entire departments, but many are using it to cut corners, ramp up productivity, and compensate for attrition after layoffs. In other words, bosses are already using AI to replace and degrade jobs. The process just doesn’t always look like what you might imagine. It’s complex, based on opaque executive decisions, and the endgame is murky. It’s less Skynet and more of a mass effect—and it’s happening right now.

“THERE'S A TON of anxiety for artists across the board with AI,” says Molly Warner, an environment artist who was working on an Overwatch game at Activision’s corporate sibling, Blizzard Entertainment, at the time the CTO’s emails went out. “Pretty much everyone I know is vehemently against the use of AI-generated images.”
That anxiety rose as Vance’s drip of AI-boosting emails continued. In May 2023, Bobby Kotick, then the CEO of Activision Blizzard, fielded a question about how generative AI would impact the gaming industry at a company-wide meeting.
“I’ve known Sam Altman and the folks who are working at OpenAI for a long time,” he said, according to a recording obtained by Kotaku. “I don’t know how much people realize that a lot of modern day AI, including ChatGPT, started with the idea of beating a game, whether it was Warcraft or Dota or Starcraft or Go or Chess.” Kotick went on: “One of the things that I’ve experienced over the last year is that same feeling that I had when I saw that first Macintosh, about how meaningful the impact of AI would be on society, both positive and negative.”
By July, the company’s initial restraint had slackened. In another internal memo, Vance announced that Activision had secured access to GPT-3.5 and approved the use of certain generative AI tools in creating concept art and marketing materials. The company would also deploy AI in other public-facing use cases, like to compose user surveys.
Though many of the game workers and artists were queasy about this proliferation, and some were even afraid for their livelihoods, few spoke out. “I think we all didn’t talk about it much for fear of losing our jobs,” Noah says. He claims Activision assured its artists that generative AI would be used only for internal concepts, not final game assets—and importantly, that AI would not be used to replace them.

Yet by the end of the year, Activision made an AI-generated cosmetic available for purchase on the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 store. In late January, Microsoft laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees—among the teams hit hard were 2D artists.

“What a fucked up day,” a onetime environment artist at Blizzard, Lucas Annunziata, posted on X. “Half the environment art team cut from [Overwatch 2], folks I helped hire and train.”
At Activision, it was the same. “A lot of 2D artists were laid off,” Noah says. The department was slashed. “Remaining concept artists,” he claims, “were then forced to use AI to aid in their work.” Employees, according to Noah, have been made to sign up for AI trainings, and its use is being promoted throughout the org.

“FROM AN AI perspective, different parts of the industry are getting eaten up by others,” says Violet, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retribution. “Why get a bunch of expensive concept artists or designs when you can get an art director to give some bad directions to an AI and get stuff that’s good enough, really fast—and get a few artists to clean it up?”
Hence the emerging consensus is that concept artists, graphic designers, asset artists, and illustrators have been most impacted by AI so far—attested to by personal accounts of game employees, laid-off workers themselves, and the reams of posts on Reddit, X, and beyond.

Generative AI can most capably produce 2D images that managers in cost-squeezed studios might consider “good enough,” a term AI-watching creative workers now use as shorthand for the kind of AI output that’s not a threat to replacing great art, but is a threat to their livelihoods. Some clients care more about cost than quality, after all. Tasks like 3D animation and programming are, for now at least, much harder to automate in full.
Games have, to varying degrees, used automation for years. They rely heavily on “AI” programs that control enemies, environments, and nonplayer characters. That’s not what people are talking about when they discuss AI now. In 2024, they’re typically talking about generative AI produced by large language models (LLMs), and the related systems that have been unleashed by the latest boom.
A recent report from the consulting firm CVL Economics, commissioned by entertainment industry trade groups, found the gaming industry already relegated tasks to generative AI more than its peers in TV, film, or music. According to its survey of 300 CEOs, executives, and managers, nearly 90 percent of video game companies had already implemented generative AI programs.
Gaming, CVL found, “relies heavily, more so than the other entertainment industries, on GenAI to carry out tasks like generating storyboards, character designs, renders, and animations. In fact, by some estimates GenAI may contribute to more than half of the game development process in the next five to 10 years.”
This might be news to some games workers, who are often unable to see the whole picture of what’s going on at a major games company like Activision Blizzard, which consists of a winding supply chain of studios, developers, third-party contributors, and quality assurance (QA) testers. One studio might be a subsidiary of a larger one, tasked with developing or codeveloping a single game for its parent organization. “It’s pretty fractured in AAA, so you don’t see who’s doing what,” Violet says. “You’ll probably never see which part is using AI in what, but you know it’s there.” (Activision Blizzard did not provide comment when contacted about this story.)
This murkiness about when and where AI might be used in any given game also seems to have made copyright infringement concerns easier to dismiss. “It’s the Wild West,” Violet says. “I’ve been in meetings at different companies, and at some level they’re like, ‘We should make sure this is legal,’” before deciding to move ahead with adopting AI anyway.

US law insists that any work seeking copyright must have a human author—a fact that gives, say, Hollywood studios pause. But it's still an open question whether using unlicensed intellectual property to train AI systems violates copyright. Even in cases in which an AI program generates work based on human prompts, courts have ruled against copyright protection. For things like concept art, character descriptions, or code that doesn't wind up in the game, it's harder to determine what is out of line. The thinking becomes, Violet says, “How do you prove that’s copyright infringement?”
Uncertainty about copyright, concerns over the security of LLM systems, and worker fears of displacement have divided the industry.
“There are basically two camps,” says Karla Ortiz, an artist who often works in the industry, “companies that are like ‘Oh, hell no,’ and companies who see this as ‘Ooh I can cut labor costs.’” (Ortiz is also a plaintiff in a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney.)
As Ortiz notes, some studios have all but banned generative AI use. According to multiple sources, Blizzard, unlike its sibling studio Activision, doesn't allow devs to use publicly available AI generators, even as it develops its own AI tools. Other companies embrace them. “I’ve seen a lot of optimism from executives on integrating AI,” says Dan Beglov, a narrative designer for Sensorium and Team Gramps. “And I think it’s pretty obvious there’s a negative sentiment among game workers.”

Last May, Electronic Arts (EA) CEO Andrew Willson said on a quarterly earnings call that, “the fear of displacement of the workforce is something we read a lot about and we talk a lot about." He noted that in every revolution—agricultural, industrial—there “has been displacement of the workforce in the near term, and then meaningful increases in workforce opportunities over the longer term. Our hope is that AI represents the same opportunity." In February 2024, EA cut 5 percent of its workforce.
Riot Games, the company behind the wildly successful League of Legends series, held an internal town hall in 2023 with the creative department about AI. “It was pretty uncomfortable,” says Rachael Cross, a concept artist who worked at the company at the time, “but I remember leadership saying they didn’t intend to replace anyone with it because they knew the value of their artists, and how much the art at Riot was what carried its brand integrity.”
In January of this year, Pony Ma, CEO of Riot’s parent company, Tencent, said in his annual company speech that Tencent’s focus should be on integrating a proprietary Hunyuan AI model into ‘different business scenarios as a way to boost efficiency,’ as Reuters put it.
The week before Ma made those comments, Riot Games laid off 530 employees, including Cross. Cross doesn’t think their job was replaced outright with AI, “but considering the amount of people who worked on big tentpole events (including myself) who got laid off, it’s funny.”

NOT ALL, OR even most, of the video game industry’s lost jobs were replaced directly by AI systems rolled out by management. Many studios went on hiring sprees during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and overextended in the process. Others consolidated—Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in a record-breaking $69 billion gaming industry deal last October—and commenced layoffs in the aftermath. (Kotick stepped down following Microsoft’s acquisition; Natalya Tatarchuk replaced Vance as CTO soon thereafter.) Others have followed the lead of many major tech companies and begun relying more on outsourcing and contract work.
Within hours of the time Cross was laid off from Riot, where they worked on character skins for League of Legends, they say, they were approached by a company that outsourced artwork for game studios. The company asked them if they were available to create skins—for a version of League of Legends. They would get a flat rate, per skin completed.
“I do think AI is a problem,” Cross says, “but it’s emblematic of a much larger issue.” Art is undervalued in games, they say, and as with so many other jobs, it’s a race to the bottom to drive down wages by any means necessary—often by outsourcing work to other countries.

“We started outsourcing lots of 3D art assets, almost all of the art,” Noah, the Activision worker, claims, “because in-house art couldn't keep up” after the layoffs. Some of those third-party concept artists are using AI-generated art too, he says.

And those companies in other countries, primarily China, are getting squeezed by AI too. Last year, Leo Li, a Hangzhou-based gaming industry recruiter, told Rest of World the number of illustrator jobs in his country had fallen by 70 percent, due in part to the widespread availability of generative AI tools.

In Japan, the startup Crypko AI hocks AI-generated characters. “Character illustrations that typically cost upward of ¥100,000 each to outsource can be obtained from Crypko for a flat monthly fee of ¥4,980 and a commercial license of ¥980 per image,” per Bloomberg. That’s $692 for one human-made illustration, versus $34 per month for access to an endless stream of the AI-generated variety. A human artist still needs to touch up the output—but they can be paid a lot less than the cost of retaining a staff illustrator, or for a full custom design.

Meanwhile, the leverage that AI tools give management, the justification for cuts, can be as impactful as the tech itself. Warner says many of her friends and industry colleagues’ jobs were transitioned into AI image-training jobs or AI image clean-up jobs over the last year or so—“and then they were laid off.” Now, she says, “it's also unfortunately become fairly common to see job postings” for concept art jobs that require applicants to use generative AI.
In one viral example, Treyarch, a Southern California-based studio that produces some elements of Activision’s Call of Duty games, posted a job listing for a “2D Artist Animator.” The first thing listed under the “To succeed you should have …” section was “exceptional skills and expertise in digital sketching, drawing, and painting, as well as advanced expertise in working with generative AI tools such as Stable Diffusion, Vizcom, Dall-E, or equivalent.” The artist community did not respond kindly.

IF THERE’S ONE thing a number of games workers say they’re glad AI is generating, it’s more interest in unions. “AI is definitely a catalyst for workers to organize,” says Beglov, who appeared on a panel on the topic at this year’s GDC. “If AI is going to be used, it has to be used with workers’ consent and workers having a voice.” Fifty-seven percent of developers surveyed by GDC organizers this year said they were in support of unionizing.
Chrissy Fellmeth, an organizer with International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), and Beglov’s copanelist, points to the efforts Hollywood guild writers made to secure protections from AI use in their contract with the major TV and movie studios. Right now, there’s little to no worker consent between game developers and their managers about when and how AI could be used; a contract like the Writers Guild of America’s could change that. “The use of AI is up to the writers and not the studios,” Fellmeth says. “I think that’s a great baseline goal for game workers to have.”

There’s another factor that management might soon need to consider with the generative AI tools they’ve deployed: They simply might not turn out to be all that good, or reliable. Tales of companies overextending in their embrace of AI have gone viral on social media, and, as Lauren Lehmann, an animation director at Terrible Posture Games, notes, AI may be able to generate pictures of guns and robots, but not one that transforms into the other. Even humans struggle with that. “The stories I’ve heard is they tried to bring some AI prompters, and as soon as they said, ‘Yeah that’s a good start,’ it pretty much broke down,” Lehmann says.
Still, the fear is that demand for quantity cost-cutting will trump quality, at least in the short term. "I think over the next year or two it’s going to be painful for a lot of people,” Ortiz says, particularly the entry-level workers who rely on commissioned work to gain experience and make ends meet. “I see massive displacement coming from companies who think that ‘good enough’ is good enough.”
And yet some video game companies are going even further, pursuing a business that doesn’t just dabble in AI but is almost fully automated. Take the self-described AI game maker Braindump, which aims “to give you an entire AI game studio, complete with coders, artists, and so on, to help you create your dream game.” It promises to let users build entire top-down games and interactive worlds “by simply typing prompts.”
Meanwhile, studios like Activision Blizzard and Riot are developing their own in-house systems, to varying degrees of success.

“Riot was experimenting with trying to make a custom internal-use-only generative AI, but it never got a lot of traction internally,” Cross says. Others with knowledge of the program told WIRED it was being pursued in partnership with Vizcom, a startup whose tagline is “Bring your design ideas to life,” and was indeed off to a rocky start, viewed with derision by artists at the company.

When WIRED reached out to Riot about this story, its head of tech research, Wesley Kerr, said the company has "teams exploring AI tools that could improve the player experience in ways that align with our values. We know AI is a complex issue, and will be transparent with players about our intentions." Vizcom didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Reportedly, Blizzard is building its own AI system too, which at one time was named Blizzard Diffusion—though details are scarce, beyond a patent the company filed for a “machine-learning based 2D structured image generation” system. “Blizzard's ‘internal AI’ that they trained is still super secretive. Only those who have access to it work with it, and no one else knows how it works,” Warner claims.
The risk here, Ortiz believes, is that a sufficiently advanced internal model could reduce the need for future work and incentivize short-term hires over permanent staffing. Ortiz herself spent the last year and a half looking for full-time work. Many in the industry “want me to do work for hire, train their own model, and never have to work with me again,” Ortiz says.
Not a single artist, illustrator, or designer WIRED spoke with wanted to use AI. It was foisted onto them by their bosses. Some of these workers took significant risks to speak out, often in trembling voices, afraid that doing so would cost them their jobs.

Ultimately, those whose work is at stake—the developers, artists, designers, and programmers actually making the games—may determine how much AI disrupts their industry. How much of the gaming world gets automated away may depend on how much workers push back or demand control over the use of AI systems.
“AI isn’t bad in and of itself,” says Violet, the veteran AAA games developer. “It’s bad when the end goal is to maximize profits. AI can be extremely helpful to solve complex problems in the world, or do things no one wants to do—things that are not taking away somebody’s job.”

 

[tritosine2k]

The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's box is opened.”

stopped reading cuz expect nothing else than tautology.

Megatexture paper in 2010 or so mentioned hallucination already. Good stuff.

 

[Tyranicon]

Ultimately, those whose work is at stake—the developers, artists, designers, and programmers actually making the games—may determine how much AI disrupts their industry. How much of the gaming world gets automated away may depend on how much workers push back or demand control over the use of AI systems.

Ah yes, the horse is protesting the existence of the horseless carriage. This has historically proven effective and big corpo will totally, seriously care.

Lol they've integrated generative AI into photoslop like three weeks after the technology was barely ready.

I've already accepted that my field (writing) is cooked for 80% of us.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Automation is great, except when it takes away my job.

 

[deuxhero]

Ultimately, those whose work is at stake—the developers, artists, designers, and programmers actually making the games—may determine how much AI disrupts their industry. How much of the gaming world gets automated away may depend on how much workers push back or demand control over the use of AI systems.

I've already accepted that my field (writing) is cooked for 80% of us.

AI "writing" doesn't work. It's a glorified word prediction that doesn't understand cause and effect. It will make rubbish bin of Amazon filled with more garbage, but I doubt actual writers will be impacted.

 

[Tyranicon]

AI "writing" doesn't work. It's a glorified word prediction that doesn't understand cause and effect. It will make rubbish bin of Amazon filled with more garbage, but I doubt actual writers will be impacted.

You're thinking about a very high level of writing.

Low level copy writing (small snippets of text you'll see on products/ads, whatever) is already dead. Soon technical writing will probably be next.

Fiction writing will be the last to go. Generative AI can't get there, not really, but it'll provide enough support that corpos won't need too many human writers.

Think about modern media. It's all garbage. I honestly can't tell if the latest Disney slop is produced by a human or a generative model.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

I think "doesn't understand cause and effect. It will make rubbish" is a pretty good description of a lot of modern writers.

 

[I eat frozen vegetables]

Automation is great, except when it takes away my job.

This sums up any form of AI-sperging I have seen recently.

I think "doesn't understand cause and effect. It will make rubbish" is a pretty good description of a lot of modern writers.

I just have to point at Chuck Wendig and Joss Whedon for why modern writing is absolute dogwater.

 

[thesecret1]

AI "writing" doesn't work. It's a glorified word prediction that doesn't understand cause and effect. It will make rubbish bin of Amazon filled with more garbage, but I doubt actual writers will be impacted.

You're thinking about a very high level of writing.

Low level copy writing (small snippets of text you'll see on products/ads, whatever) is already dead. Soon technical writing will probably be next.

Fiction writing will be the last to go. Generative AI can't get there, not really, but it'll provide enough support that corpos won't need too many human writers.

Think about modern media. It's all garbage. I honestly can't tell if the latest Disney slop is produced by a human or a generative model.

Yeah, but low level writing (copywriting especially) is soul-crushing tedium, and good riddance to it. Humanity isn't losing anything there, really, instead freeing up labor for more meaningful tasks. What people tend to not realize is that by driving down the costs via AI, what is being lowered is also the cost of entry into the industry – I'm sure we'll get many new indie developers thanks to them no longer needing to fork over copious amounts of cash for artwork, for example.

 

[ind33d]

If AI is automatic artistic work but not physical labor, you might be enslaved

 

[Tyranicon]

Yeah, but low level writing (copywriting especially) is soul-crushing tedium, and good riddance to it. Humanity isn't losing anything there, really, instead freeing up labor for more meaningful tasks. What people tend to not realize is that by driving down the costs via AI, what is being lowered is also the cost of entry into the industry – I'm sure we'll get many new indie developers thanks to them no longer needing to fork over copious amounts of cash for artwork, for example.

I mean, most work is soul-crushing tedium. I didn't like copywriting either, but it paid well.

It is personally a big hope of mine that more artistic-minded solodevs enter the industry, but honestly, I'd doubt it. More than likely we'll get a tidal wave of shit and maybe a handful of hidden gems, at best.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Writing bland dialog that's necessary to pad out the open world game genre would save a fortune and free up dev time else where. If you need 20 different NPCs to say "Fuck you asshole" as you bump into them in GTA that's 20 people you need to find, record and then edit. If AI voices can do the same thing you can have "fuck you assholes" and all you would need to do is check each time to make sure it's recorded what you asked. You wouldn't even need to write every line of dialog you could let the AI do it.

Is it great for voice actors? No. Is it a massive time saver with no downside? Yes. No one cares if random NPC is AI generated or not. If anything it's a bonus because it can scale to insane levels. Imagine a game the size of cyberpunk but they used AI to generate unique 'fuck you assholes' and back stories for every character. It wouldn't all be good but the depth would be insane. Watchdogs is a proof of concept for AI generated story telling in gaming and it could easily make one of the best CRPGs ever.

The main content should still be handled by humans at every level. But the background stuff even for indie devs is off the charts.

 

[abija]

Or they could just not voice all the random crap. Humans "should" be able to read a lot faster than that anyway.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Yes, I really want to read a GTA game. When I'm speeding down the highway with cops chasing me I want little speech bubbles.

 

[thesecret1]

It is personally a big hope of mine that more artistic-minded solodevs enter the industry, but honestly, I'd doubt it. More than likely we'll get a tidal wave of shit and maybe a handful of hidden gems, at best.

That's always the case. But the bigger the wave of shit, the more gems hidden within.

 

[Melcar]

This was totally unforeseeable.

 

[Iucounu]

Or they could just not voice all the random crap. Humans "should" be able to read a lot faster than that anyway.

That will hopefully be the next step. When only AAA projects could afford full voice acting it was considered prestigious, but once every indie dev can do the same the public will soon tire of it. Even written dialogs will be reduced in the future, now that any indie developer's AI can spew unlimited quantities of text. So if we're lucky AI will cause a return to "less is more" in games (after the inital glut of mediocre content).

 

[Damned Registrations]

The AI writing thing has already been done ages ago and people loved the absolute shit out of it. It's in dwarf fortress with everyone's little history blurbs and descriptions of wall engravings and artifacts and such. Given the choice between nothing at all and silly generated nonsense that occasionally spits out something hilarious or awesome, obviously people prefer the latter. Better AI just means it's applicable in more places and will produce better quality.

Humanity isn't losing anything there, really, instead freeing up labor for more meaningful tasks.

This is the general refrain with technological progress, but seems to have stopped at some point. Now it's just freeing up cash for people at the top and expanding the underclass that will never afford a home or start a family. The endgame seems to be one guy with an empire of robots maintained by a single serf while billions look on in envy, fighting each other for the chance to be that serf.

Using game writing as an example; which seems more likely- replacing tedious minor dialogue with AI enables writing twice as many deep, engaging sidequests, or the company slashes the wages for their remaining writers by 20% and makes 2 well qualified people have an ass kissing contest to see who gets the job?

 

[thesecret1]

The AI writing thing has already been done ages ago and people loved the absolute shit out of it. It's in dwarf fortress with everyone's little history blurbs and descriptions of wall engravings and artifacts and such. Given the choice between nothing at all and silly generated nonsense that occasionally spits out something hilarious or awesome, obviously people prefer the latter. Better AI just means it's applicable in more places and will produce better quality.

Humanity isn't losing anything there, really, instead freeing up labor for more meaningful tasks.

This is the general refrain with technological progress, but seems to have stopped at some point. Now it's just freeing up cash for people at the top and expanding the underclass that will never afford a home or start a family. The endgame seems to be one guy with an empire of robots maintained by a single serf while billions look on in envy, fighting each other for the chance to be that serf.

Using game writing as an example; which seems more likely- replacing tedious minor dialogue with AI enables writing twice as many deep, engaging sidequests, or the company slashes the wages for their remaining writers by 20% and makes 2 well qualified people have an ass kissing contest to see who gets the job?

The choice isn't between nothing at all and an AI generated text though. It's like with procedural map generation - some games can use it, others won't since it just doesn't fit the overall design.

Your example with one guy and an empire of robots is missing the fact that nothing prevents those billions from either employing each other, or, if the robots are much cheaper, from each having a little robot empire.

 

[Azdul]

AI "writing" doesn't work. It's a glorified word prediction that doesn't understand cause and effect. It will make rubbish bin of Amazon filled with more garbage, but I doubt actual writers will be impacted.

You're thinking about a very high level of writing.

Low level copy writing (small snippets of text you'll see on products/ads, whatever) is already dead. Soon technical writing will probably be next.

Fiction writing will be the last to go. Generative AI can't get there, not really, but it'll provide enough support that corpos won't need too many human writers.

Think about modern media. It's all garbage. I honestly can't tell if the latest Disney slop is produced by a human or a generative model.

Free LLM are intentionally limited in amount of context you can provide (5000 words?):

• When hiring Chris Avellone, you've made 'silent' artistic choice that the tone and themes of the writing should match his previous work.
• When hiring someone to write for D&D or WH40K, there is silent requirement that the text should match the tone and the lore of existing works in the setting.

General, freely available LLM is a blank slate that only knows how 'average human' would fulfill certain assignment. It was trained on every terrible piece of text humans had ever written and does not make subjective aesthetic judgements unless directly and precisely told to how to fit your taste. Great works are only miniscule part of total human output and the training base.

Saying that, LLM is not exactly competing with William Shakespeare but with a creative writer you can hire within your budget. Chances that this human that will write story and dialogues for your video game is also capable of writing great English prose, are close to zero.

 

[Hace El Oso]

Humanity isn't losing anything there, really, instead freeing up labor for more meaningful tasks.

There isn’t enough need for respectable labor to go around as it is. A huge proportion of people are already superfluous, this is just going to bring that ugly reality sharply into focus.

What people tend to not realize is that by driving down the costs via AI, what is being lowered is also the cost of entry into the industry – I'm sure we'll get many new indie developers thanks to them no longer needing to fork over copious amounts of cash for artwork, for example.

The ‘good stuff’ will be gated somehow, expensive to license or coming with extensive strings attached. Nothing has gotten better in that regard with any other ‘democratizing tools’, why would this be different?

 

[d1r]

So, basically, nothing will change?

Pajeet performance optimization will be replaced by AI performance optimization (no difference).
Woke/CandyCrush graphic artists will be replaced by AI image generation (no difference).
Woke/DEI/Emil Pagliarulo writers will be replaced by AI story writing (slightly better?)
08/15 orchestral music slop will be replaced by AI music generation (probably better?)

98% of todays games will stay soulless shit, regardless of whether AI or real people create them.

 

[Pika-Cthulhu]

The best part is being able to call those that complain Luddites

 

[catfood]

Now they can generate infinite pozz 24/7.

 

[Azdul]

Humanity isn't losing anything there, really, instead freeing up labor for more meaningful tasks.

There isn’t enough need for respectable labor to go around as it is. A huge proportion of people are already superfluous, this is just going to bring that ugly reality sharply into focus.

We could probably afford to hire all people that currently unemployed - it's just that AI won't steal, get drunk or high on the job or experiment with available equipment when left unsupervised.