“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

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. This is why custom efficiency tools are made in the first place, to make highly competent people with rare skill sets 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 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.

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.

Looks like I made somebody upset for sharing the opinion I was calling out.

yep

“Aw man, some person used an AI filter to quickly make a cute picture of themselves as a couple! Guess they should ride the sewer slide. Anybody who uses any AI whatsoever should krill themselves, otherwise there will be exactly zero human beings that still prefer art made with human hands, expertise and creativity!” ~ Dipshits all over social media

FFS, they’re not taking your job, they used an AI on their own photo to do a cute thing that they’re not going to sell. If you’re a good artist, you WILL find work. I make art for a living myself (and am paid quite well for it), and on occasion I use AI tools to make my workflow more efficient while still doing most of the difficult bits (such as, idk, CREATIVITY) myself. This all-or-nothing approach the internet has to AI in art is unbelievably annoying and pretentious, and reeks of that classic armchair critic stench. God, people sure do like to post extremely dumb shit to make themselves feel better, even up to and including stuff that essentially amounts to saying “kys” in response to someone using a glorified Snapchat filter.

Good. Let the stupids hit the darwinian great filter of “figure out how to make an account with more than 2 brain cells” and never make it here. Will hopefully mitigate yet another eternal September.

The devil came to JOHNNY, not the other way around. The moral of the story is not that it is possible to beat the devil out of ego or for glory, but that even the devil could not defeat a man completely dedicated to his pure, uncorrupted love for a craft. It’s not a story about Johnny’s hubris winning out, it’s a story about the respect one should have for genuine passion when it is lovingly applied to creativity. It is a story about the indomitable human spirit.

But okay, America bad or whatever, sure.