Ideally, yeah, AI should be used to automate boring grunt work and enable more people to engage in something creative. Maybe those jobs in the future can transform into something like managing AI’s output and fixing unique edge cases, where human input is still required.
taiyang@lemmy.world 1 year ago
People are a bit optimistic about how it could be used, it’s still a bit dumb. In all likelihood it’s likely to be used in asset creation since that’s one of the pricier aspects of game design, automating and replacing the more grunt work stuff. Not design so much as textures, object modeling, etc., which are already easy to do via AI (and easy to train, avoiding lawsuits by keeping things in house). That’ll displace “artists” although texture creation is a bit of a slog anyway.
Should people be worried about writers? Maybe, but I’m not-- at least not yet. AI can create filler, but it’s story writing is abysmal. You’ll still need a creative behind the curtain to build the world, subvert tropes, and so on. AI can assist but if it’s better than you on writing, you really shouldn’t be a writer.
To use an example from when ChatGPT became mainstream, a certain scifi serial magazine had to close submissions because they were bombarded with cheap and fast short story submissions. According to the editors, these stories were some of the worst they’ve ever seen. I forget the name of the magazine, but I thought it was pretty funny since I was playing with the tool and couldn’t agree more.
None the less, it’s probably for the best. I hate making assets, and my wife used to do translation and that’s really boring and under paid. A lot of game design is incredibly boring and laying off people making those things is probably in their best interest, those jobs suck. Main downside is the business class of the industry will pocket the profits instead of reinvesting in their products or reducing prices.
rockerface@lemm.ee 1 year ago
taiyang@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes exactly! And ideally in the short term we can minimize the damages that charges like that make. I’ve seen places where factory jobs left, and it’s not great without some intervention.
I’d love basic income but… not optimistic, but we can always dream.
rockerface@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Even if the dream isn’t going to be realized fully, it’s still useful to have a direction to move in
echo64@lemmy.world 1 year ago
People need to pay rent. The fuck is this.
taiyang@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The fuck is what, the jobs in question won’t even pay rent. Translation, for instance, is contract work and pays less than minimum wage if you do it well and it’s not a job of passion. If that’s what’s keeping you afloat, your problem isn’t with the gaming industry, it’s with society itself.
Quitting that work was also the best decision my wife ever made, so fuck off with bleeding heart nonsense. Those jobs aren’t jobs society should have.
AnonTwo@kbin.social 1 year ago
Even if you remove the jobs, it doesn't create jobs. If you remove those jobs the people who were taking them are still there.
Where do they go when the jobs are gone? Is this just meant to force those people to change careers?
taiyang@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well putting it another way, labor market always stabilizes, and it’s only the last few decades labor didn’t raise with demand (at least in the U.S.). But inevitably people find work or create work, the speed of which could be days or it can be decades depending on a ton of factors that won’t fit in a one off explanation on Lemmy (especially given how much people don’t like hearing what I have to say, regardless of my own training in policy lol).
But to explain at least a little nuance, people in jobs with low entry requirements often do change industry and people with training or education sometimes do. Tech companies gave us a great example recently with massive layoffs. Reports are still out but it seems like many of them just found more work or made start ups. It was kind of interesting that some left tech, but it’s a high paying job and even outside of layoffs, there’s a concept that if you want a raise, you change jobs because there’s always someone looking for programmers.
My wife actually ended up in localization, which is slightly different from translation but has room to go up (which she did). Same industry. Not going to dox her, of course, but she managed to get work within a week and has a weirdly high success rate even if the industry still grossly underpays everyone (gaming is a passion field). Bilingual skill is not easy to train, so she was valuable-- she just didn’t know it when she was just doing contact based translation work.
Ugh, and there’s another long winded explanation I meant to avoid, haha. Look, I don’t worry too much about it if you’re American (or Western European). If you guys want to get upset about something, it can and will harm the jobs that were outsourced decades ago. Translation for instance is big in Eastern Europe (e.g. Romania) and automation easily removes those jobs.