Comment on Tim Sweeney says Epic Games Store is open to devs using generative AI
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months agoBig developers don’t have to just increase the scope of their games, they could just as easily make many small teams that can each work on their own smaller games. You appear to have a very narrow view of what generative AI can do for game development. You assume it isn’t good for creating the types of things that makes indie games appealing, rather you can only create cold corporate schlock with it. It can also help with simple visuals, personal music, and writing (this link is possibly NSFW). You can also create with it procedural content, landscapes, dungeons, quests, and characters in your style.
Generative AI can help indie developers save time and money, increase their scope and variety, and give them the time to experiment with new ideas and genres. They can also reach a wider audience, by helping with content in different languages and cultures. They could also help collaborate with other developers, artists, and players, by sharing and remixing content.
I think you’re missing the point of generative AI. You are ignoring the fact that generative AI isn’t a monolithic entity, but a diverse, evolving field of research and practice.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There was never anything stopping them from doing that without AI. They don’t do it because their executives and investors want the large Return on Investment that they can only get with big blockbusters. They don’t care to take over the indie scene because it’s often focused on titles that are niche and risky.
Even if you are correct about the capabilities of AI, and to be clear I do believe you are mostly correct, it’s an overstatement to talk of it as if it will replace all other disciplines. It’s almost like saying there is no more purpose for drawing now that we have photography, and nobody can thrive if not for photography. Even if AI is widely adopted there will still be plenty of space for works made without it.
Really, I’m not entirely opposed to AI but the mindset here is definitely one I cannot gel with, one that making more, larger, faster art is more worthwhile than making it yourself. Even if AI could make whole characters and settings in someone’s style, the people working on it often want to make it themselves. An AI can’t condense all your inspirations and personality and the meaning you would put into a work for you. AI does not even truly understand what it does, it’s only providing a statistics-based output. Even the best, most complex, most truly intelligent AI imaginable is not replacement for an artist, because it isn’t that artist.
Ultimately AI still seems to serve better to expansive games that need to be filled with a lot of content than small works of passion.
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
There’s a possibility the profit margins could just get that juicy. You could have a skeleton crew work on a game for a shorter amount of time and get it out there making money.
AI can’t create anything itself, it’s a tool to help artists create explore, expedite, and improve. An AI can’t condense all of your inspirations and personality and meaning in the same way a drawing tablet can’t. It’s all in how you use it. You can infuse it with your learned experiences at training, guidance, inference, and post-processing to make it more closely adhere to your statistics.
We’ve been talking about indie game devs this whole time, but we haven’t even touched on amateur games devs. For small scale, I think this is where we’ll see the biggest impact. People with fewer or no skills might get the helping hand they need to fill the gaps in their knowledge and get started.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This is pure speculation, and a very iffy one at that. Large game companies keep betting on larger and larger projects, distancing themselves from niche genres. It’s a huge leap to go from “maybe they will try to make smaller games with AI”, which is already speculation, to “indie devs won’t be able to survive if they don’t use AI too”.
The tablet can be a neutral medium, an AI is trying to condense the outwardly obvious stylistic choices of countless other artists, without an understanding of the underlying ideas that guided them, while you are trying to wrestle something somewhat close to your vision out of it. I suppose that’s like being a director, but it inherently means the result less personal. What decided the shapes and colors? What decided the wording and tone? Who can say.
I’d say today there are easy enough tools that getting started is fairly easy, but there’s some merit to that. Still… that bumps with the uncomfortable possibility that if AI is widely adopted, there will be less game developer and artist jobs available. Sure, more people could get their start, but could they actually get any further than that?
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Square Enix, one of the biggest game publishers in the world, has several divisions that make gacha games for mobile platforms. These games are very profitable, and almost every one of them is developed in house. These games don’t compete with or replace their AAA games, and they keep on making them, so it must be good enough. It’s almost a requirement for there to be a mobile game of the latest Square-Enix game.
Don’t underestimate what you can do with fine-tuning. There’s more to guidance than just text prompts.
That I can’t say, but I hate that this tool with boundless potential to revolutionize the way we communicate, inspire, create, and connect with each other out of the gate has people attacking it with saws trying to get it to fit into the curtain rod shaped box of capitalism. It’s a sorry state. Maybe more people will follow cottage creators with a vision they find appealing, like on OnlyFans and Patreon? We’re social creatures, we like having shared experiences in that way. Hell, maybe collaborative projects like SCP in the future.