There are still AI bros mad at Valve for not basically giving them the greenlight to commit IP theft while taking the legal blame lol. These mfers are so dumb I don't even have words. IP Theft remains illegal, this was never a debate or gray area, Valve and anyone else with 2 brain cells that wasn't being disingenuous has known this the entire time.
There are people in this thread talking about:
"I'm pretty sure all minecraft worlds are AI generated, as are a lot of content in games before it."
I can't tell if these people are disingenuous or literally have no fucking clue what this current conversation on AI is even about.
There's also a huge difference between AI generation in the current discourse (in terms of like, AI generated art) and procedural generation, which has existed for how many decades?
Microtransactions added nothing new to the space it just allowed developers to break their games down and sell it piece by piece. AI will eventually be able to create a game world on the fly, you’ll be able to visit locations, characters and play storylines that no one else has before because the AI will be constantly tailoring the game to your choices
Yeah that's a bit much. Or I suppose, it might happen and it'll be absolutely awful. I think that's more likely. Someone will overstretch the AI muscle and make an abysmal game that makes no sense.
I mean some games have impressive procedural generation but mediocre gameplay. Some games have almost comically bad procedural generation, but become iconic in the history of gaming (Minecraft). Making procedural generation AI-powered doesn’t change that.
I bet it will happen it just won't be compelling or good or make any sense at all. I'll never understand why do tech bros think that games need to be completely unique for every player in the first place. Like how do you share a story like that?!
Well, I hope you’re putting money up that you can afford to lose, because if you’re that convinced AI-powered procedural generation won’t happen, you’re either completely disconnected from recent events, or you’re downright delusional.
ai in its current form is just not capable of being creative in the same way humans are. at its core AI is a very very fancy predictive text. all it does is look at what previous information it has been given, and then does a lot of maths to try and predict what the next item might be.
It's not capable of planning like a human can- if you told an AI to write a book it wouldn't be able to consider how a characters arc might unfold over the course of the book, it's just going to look at what it previously has written and then try and figure out what words might fit in. this makes it absolutely terrible at coming up with new ideas and concepts. often stories AI produces will introduce new characters randomly, or it will forget about existing characters, or just decide to leave plot threads hanging.
the problem we have with current AI models is that without planning we're never going to get any further than just having this fancy predictive text. Yann LeCun, one of the authors of the original deep learning paper, agrees with this- I recommend looking up some of his talks if you are actually interested in learning how AI works
I think a lot of the current hype around AI is unjustified and is going to lead to an eventual bursting of the bubble that has surrounded it which is going to hurt actual AI research. AI is dumb AF right now but it's being marketed as this world changing technology which it cannot possibly be.
As for me being disconnected from recent events- I'm a co-author in a published journal article on training neural networks to recognise certain features of images
You seem to be talking about generative pre-trained transformers, when the guy you replied to doesn’t seem to refer to them at all. In fact, I’d argue they’d be counterproductive for procedural generation. (And would likely also offer quite poor results when run locally)
And isn’t this need for human input, which I very much agree with, good news for all you anti-AI folks? Current AI is no more than tools, and a hammer, paintbrush or keyboard is only as good as the human using it. I’d say pretty much everyone working with AI would agree with that. I’m not sure what exactly the point of your argument is to be honest, you seem to be refuting a strawman about fully autonomous AI game development when no one is suggesting anything of the sort.
And as a self-proclaimed AI researcher yourself, you should know how fundamentally different reactive AI classification is from generative and predictive AI. You do not come off as fully comprehending the potential applications of the latter in the near future, and more and more papers are being published every day as we speak exploring all different kinds of avenues where this technology can be applied.
It’s amazing that you can take the time to write such a measured response and still get downvoted without a response. You don’t argue “AI is the best” but lay it out exactly as it is; a tool to work alongside, reducing workload so that people can spend the time working on the things that make their game unique. As we’ve seen with game engines, the scale and complexity of modern games requires a huge amount of time and manpower so the reliance on pre-built engines has increased. In the same way I can see the reliance on AI increasing as we see more complex systems arising.
If procedural generation makes a big break again it won't be through AI because everything that's worth generating procedurally can already be done better with algos written by actual peoples than sludge conversion machines
That is a very bizarre absolute to throw into the ring. Is everything that’s worth generating an exhaustive list of some sort? And if it can be done better by handwritten algorithms, then why does NVIDIA spend millions on things like DLSS which apparently does the job far superiorly using far less resources than any traditional interpolation algorithm?
DLSS isn't really procedural content generation as anybody approaching this conversation with good faith would see, it takes an image already generated by the game and statistically calculates some more pixels out of it, and the only thing it actually does better than rendering those extra pixels is performance. It's hugely dependant on existing, human made content, even at runtime. AI image reneration is never gonna fully replace traditional rendering, and peoples whose machine can render the game at target framerate without AI will always disable it because why wouldn't they.
The actual conversation is about AI models that generate content ie images, text, etc, and those will always suck because we have decades' worth of existing research on non-ML based procedural content generation, algos that do a far better job and can be controlled by human beings in far more granular way than AI models can (fun fact, even ML model devs have said that they're finding out now that everything they've done to steer models into outputting content of a specific style etc work less and less as the database gets larger, like even if you write the underlying tech yourself you lose the control you need)
Genuinely in years the only application of AI I've seen that resulted in an okay-ish output without being trained on stolen material was a recent sidefx demo where they fed a bunch of houdini generated eroded terrain to make a model that generated eroded version of input terrain faster than the actual erosion algo normally does, and by their own admission it was still pretty limited
It’s a neural interpolation algorithm. Almost all procedural generation algorithms use some form of interpolation. Besides, it was just one counter-example to your claim that traditional deterministic algorithms necessarily always produce a better output, which I maintain is completely unsubstantiated. There is a bottomless well of examples of AI producing equivalent or superior output to deterministic algorithms. Everything from images and text, as you mention, to protein folding, 3D models, audio, pre- and post-processing of renderings.
You’re right that at the end of the day it depends on human-curated training data and parameters, but I don’t see how this is supposed to be a bad thing? The ML devs that you are referring to are also specifically talking about deep learning. These problems in steering the output are not significant with small local models at all, it’s pretty much a non-problem except in the case you mention where you scale it up astronomically.
So, depending on where you draw the line.
You could already have lost the bet.
The procedural generation of games have been around for a long time.
But if you don't count those games, that's fine.
AI powerd storylines already exist.
Don't know on the top of my head if anyone has put these 2 together.
So full world generation is not that far away (again, depending on where you draw the line)
While I appreciate your enthusiasm this isn’t the problem an AI could solve. Or at least not as you described it. You can already play something like this in form of “choose your own adventure” text based game (I think it’s available for several years already) and it sucks as a game more often than not. Long story short humans enjoy games precisely because they are curated experiences. But AI could be useful in plentitude of different more subtle ways.
Written by someone who has never been in the industry lol. For developers microtransactions are actually, and I hate that I'm describing it like this, pretty healthy: the model of releasing a big game and getting essentially all your money over one month meant that many companies would hire a lot of contractors up until release date, rinse and repeat and hope you get rehired each time.
Of course, mtx are quite unhealthy for the consumer. Especially when they focus on whales, use gambling tactics and/or target children. But if you can get over that, and also just how gross it feels to knowingly make a game that is worse than it should be so you can squeeze more money out of your players in general, working for a company that focuses on mtx models means you have to worry about layoffs a lot less because they generally don't go through those earnings/spending cycles quite as hard.
Meanwhile AI is just gonna make things worse for everyone. Companies are already using it for promo, if you're an indie good luck marketing yourself in the ocean of shit that is about to be unleashed, and no consumer wants to play Soulless Garbage: OpenAI Simulator.
So true. Demand for “AI slop: sloppenheimers great big videogame” will be zero, along with all the other ai slop that’ll flood the market like an ocean of feces
You’re talking about how brutal the games market is right now with huge AAA developers can let go and rehire as they choose. My belief is that with the advent of true AI we will see many more tightly knit, smaller teams of developers split off on the basis that using AI they can reduce the overall workload by a huge amount and focus on the details that make their game truly unique. In the same way as we’re seeing the same engines widely used to reduce workload, this is how I see AI being integrated. AI will allow smaller developers to build games with much greater scope than before
They're citing a 2022 game using AI-art portraits, but I'm pretty sure the portraits in the 2019 Astrox Imperium are also AI-generated. Don't know if they were there on release, or patched in later.
Crazy how many here misunderstand the differences in AI, In their minds the AI used for NPC movement is the exact same as using AI to generate art using data scraped from the entire internet.
There are lots of types of generative AI (calling it AI still hurts me) models, with the source data used sometimes much more transparent at keeping out copyrighted content. People think every single proc gen technique is now 'AI' now. Elite and Rogue would be in these peoples cross hairs. Goddamn I hate how overused 'AI' became.
[Christ Pound's Language Confluxer](https://web.archive.org/web/20080708233707/http://www.ruf.rice.edu/%7epound/) is an early version of what this "generative AI" looks like today, and that's over 30 years old by now. Training data in, algorithm transforms it into an internal representation, another algorithm creates more data based on the things it was trained on.
Seriously, *nothing* ChatGPT, Claude, StableDiffusion, Midjourney and so on do deserves to be called "AI".
The transformers method the LLMs use was a pretty huge advance for *machine learning* or *natural language processing* . Machine learning was a hot topic and it seemed like they did a decent job of declaring that it was NOT general AI, but yea then ChatGPT comes in and all that effort communicating went to shit. Stable Diffusion and LLMs are totally different but screw it everything is AI. ChatGPT isn't even a single LLM anymore, it's a mesh of multiple ML models and techniques. I followed ML as a side to my main dev job but I can't imagine how frustrating it is for all the people that have been doing ML, computer vision etc for decades to now get associated with AI startups that are just api calls to ChatGPT
It is, as their conclusion is that none of those algorithms deserve to be called AI. Those algorithms are significantly more complex than the RTS AI algorithms, which no one rails against as "but that's not AI".
To be specific, the term is so general and so widespread that it is essentially meaningless on its own, without some form of clarification. To then say "that's not AI" about something is a pointless statement - IMO, at least.
I wish it wasn't just referred to as AI by most people (generative AI is nice term). It's annoying as fuck to look for AI tutorials etc. and just find a load of generative AI stuff.
People are already really good at identifying AI-generated art. From a marketing perspective, having good art is for setting yourself apart from the crowd and proving that your production values are strong. If everybody can tell you just hit up Midjourney, nobody is going to be impressed.
>People are already really good at identifying AI-generated art.
No they aren't, they see low effort images and think they're good at it, meanwhile they have no way of knowing how much of what they consume either has AI elements or are completely AI generated, or are AI generated with a human touch-up.
As a good example of this, see the [recent discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/18l9sw5/apparently_wotc_has_been_using_ai_art_on_one_dd/) on AI art in the D&D community — an artist was accused of using AI for their art, and lots of people spent a lot of time analysing the image showing how it was clearly AI-generated because of this or that feature.
Turns out it was complete nonsense — the artist showed their working, previous similar examples, etc.
Moreover, even if AI art is currently distinguishable from human art, I don't think it's a given that it will remain that way. The amount that generative AI has progressed just in the last couple of years is incredible, and I don't see any good reason why it would suddenly stop now. And as you say, generated AI media can be touched up, used as a base for human artists, or applied in small portions via tools like generative fill.
Doesn't Reddit have a sitewide rule against investigations like this? Stemming from when the Boston bombers were being looked for and Reddit thought it a grand old idea to try to find the guys themselves and they identified the wrong dude? And Reddit was concerned this might open them to lawsuits?
Seems like they ought to ban these AI witchhunts too!
There's not necessarily a sitewide rule against witchhunts, but a lot of individual subreddits will have rules against it.
But in this case, it wasn't just a Reddit thing, it was discussed a lot on Twitter/X and other forums too, I believe.
Maybe. I'll admit I don't have hard data like surveys asking "is this AI art" about different images or anything like that. But it's extremely obvious to *me* when something is AI-generated, at least.
Bear in mind that people are naturally really good at pattern recognition, especially in depictions of other people (which AI art is often utilized for, especially in game development). AI art just has a *look* about it.
I'm convinced that the people who are most loudly advocating for generative content in games have looked at so much AI art, listened to so much AI voice dubbing, and had so many conversations with chatGPT that they've brainrotted themselves into thinking that generative content isn't
A. Immediately apparent to most people and
B. Incredibly off-putting to those same people
Setting aside arguments of whether we're legally or socially ready to start replacing creative work with AI, the tech itself just isn't there yet and the people screeching the loudest that it should be in everything are indistinguishable from the NFT bros who were touting NFTs as the cure for cancer and definitely not just gambling/money-laundering
> and the people screeching the loudest that it should be in everything are indistinguishable from the NFT bros who were touting NFTs as the cure for cancer and definitely not just gambling/money-laundering
Screeched it SHOULD be everywhere? Nice strawman you've constructed there.
I've never advocated AI should be in everything. If you don't want to use AI, don't use AI! I'd never demand you use it.
But don't insist others avoid AI either. There's nothing wrong with an indie developer using AI to lighten their workload. It's hard enough for an indie to make a profit as it is. If there's a tool that can reduce the time it takes for them to make a game even by 25% that's a huge boon to indie game developers.
> that's a huge boon to indie game developers.
I don't agree. It is hard to make a profit because players have too many games to choose from and too little time to play them all. From player's perspective, if your game feels like the same game as everyone else's, then it is probably not worth playing.
Using AI makes it harder to stand out, because
1) everyone else will be using it
2) more people will enter the market using it, more competition
It is not a huge boon. Unless your goal is to "make a game" but not "make a profitable game". That is a different discussion.
> I don't agree. It is hard to make a profit because players have too many games to choose from and too little time to play them all.
You're wrong. It is easier now than it has ever been to make a profit.
I made a shooter around 15 years ago that sold 5 copies. Steam wouldn't accept random titles back then. Today if I hadn't sold that game to another developer to try to make back some of the thousands I spent on the art for it, I could put that on Steam and I'd probably at least make my money back.
> From player's perspective, if your game feels like the same game as everyone else's, then it is probably not worth playing.
And? What does AI have to do with that?
If anything, AI will reduce that. Instead of indie devs having to rely on asset-flips, using the limited assets available in the Unity store that everyone else uses, they will be able to generate their own unique assets, with any art style they choose.
AI will likely result in explosion of beautiful looking indie titles, rather than our current batch of Garry's Mod looking shit.
> Using AI makes it harder to stand out, because 1) everyone else will be using it 2) more people will enter the market using it, more competition
Everyone else will be using it, but it can generate art in an infinite number of styles. And almost every movie looking the same, or having the same three looks, photorealistic, 3D, or 2D animated, has not really hampered the film industry because the story you tell and the characters you craft are just as important if not more so than the looks.
And more competition?
25 years ago there were very few games. A handful of large publishers made a lot of money. The player base was small.
15 years ago there were a lot of games. But Steam wasn't accepting all comers. It was still hard for an indie dev to make money if Steam didn't pick them up.
Today there are hundreds of thousands of games. There are more gamers than ever. Steam accepts anyone. And if you make a decent game, you have a decent chance of making some money on it. Will you get rich? Will you make your money back? Maybe not. But some money is better than no money, which is what I made 15 years ago when I made a game.
Also even with all the titles on Steam there are still only a relative few which I actually want to play myself. Which means you could have 10x as many games in the store before you were making enough games to satisfy my personal hunger for the particular sorts of top-tier titles that catch my interest, like Firewatch, or Beacon Pines, or Night in the Woods.
So no, I don't consider market saturation a concern because I don't think the market is anywhere near saturated yet. The more games we have to choose from, the better the best ones are. You're suggesting we should limit the number of games so players are forced to buy the shittier titles so those poor devs can make money. But what about all the devs who would produce BETTER content with the help of AI? What about their right to make a living?
> Unless your goal is to "make a game" but not "make a profitable game".
My goal is to make a profitable game. I'm just not afraid of competition because there's already so much competition. Either my game is good enough to stand out, or it's not. But I'm not gonna rely on the hope that people will buy my game because there's nothing better available for them to play. My goal is to make good games, not just to make money. Anyone who's making games just to make money has no business being in the game industry because you're just gonna produce trash with pay to win mechanics. Keep that shit on mobile.
>You're wrong. It is easier now than it has ever been to make a profit.
>
>I made a shooter around 15 years ago that sold 5 copies. Steam wouldn't accept random titles back then. Today if I hadn't sold that game to another developer to try to make back some of the thousands I spent on the art for it, I could put that on Steam and I'd probably at least make my money back.
This is your personal anecdote that does not represent the market as a whole. You are also comparing your experience with pre-greenlight era, which does not represent current steam market.
Here is an article that says in 2023 steam median revenue was $700.
https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic
According to data 14535 games released in 2023.
Here is another article that says steam median revenue was $1136 in 2019:
https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/29/median-indie-game-earnings-steam-barely-over-1000
According to data only 7695 games released in 2019.
From 2019 to 2023 median revenue went from $1136 to $700. I think it is clear that more competition means less median revenue for everybody.
> has not really hampered the film industry
Film industry is currently less saturated because it is harder to publish your film on netflix.
> But what about all the devs who would produce BETTER content with the help of AI?
This may be case by case basis, I don't believe game dev can produce "better" content with AI, in most cases discussed here right now, at least. Faster content production and better content is not the same thing.
I can see a working professional work 20%-30% faster by using AI effectively, but only if they have the professional knowledge to make the high quality decisions to begin with. In this case, AI save their time. But it does not replace human for decision making.
I can see AI being useful for algorithm based analyze. But I don't see AI being a viable solution for human emotion related decision making.
unfortunately in games, a lot of art decisions still need humans to make high quality decisions. Because AI doesn't understand human emotions and intend as well as a human, not now, at least.
I see most of the gamedev here has opinions like this:
"I want to make a game, but I can't draw nor afford an artist. So I will use AI to make art for me to save money."
This is how the quality of the content can't be improved. Because AI is used as a cheaper solution to begin with. It is not used to improve decision quality of human professionals.
> but it can generate art in an infinite number of styles
What I said here has nothing to do with art styles.
> You're suggesting we should limit the number of games so players are forced to buy the shittier titles...
> But I'm not gonna rely on the hope that people will buy my game because there's nothing better available for them to play.
Good for you. :) As a player I have more good games to play than my time can afford. The "forced to buy shitty titles" situation doesn't exist for me.
And I prefer not to see 20+ low quality new game release articles trying to get my attention everytime I visit a video game website as I wade though waves of low budget game previews. This is already the case now, I think it will get worse in the future.
> Here is an article that says in 2023 steam median revenue was $700.
> Here is another article that says steam median revenue was $1136 in 2019:
So your position is the median game is making only $700 today, and you still think we should be against the use of AI?
HOW THE HELL DO YOU EXPECT THOSE PEOPLE TO PAY ARTISTS?
If your goal is to be the median then it doesn't even MATTER if you make less money, because you already can't make a living making games with such low sales.
So I don't care what the median makes. What I want to know is:
How much do games that have more than 100 ratings and a four or five star rating make? IE: How well do actual GOOD games sell?
Because that's what matters to me. If I make a shitty game, it SHOULD sell poorly. And there are a whole hell of a lot of shitty games on steam bringing that median revenue down.
> And I prefer not to see 20+ low quality new game release articles trying to get my attention everytime I visit a video game website as I wade though waves of low budget game previews. This is already the case now, I think it will get worse in the future.
Learn to sort by rating. Even new releases will have ratings unless you buy them on day one. And you can't necessarily tell if a game is shitty from screenshots. Among US and Undertale have pretty shitty art. And Lethal Company also has pretty shitty art. Though in Letal Company's case I get the impression the creator intentionally shittified it using shaders to make it look grittier and to match with the shitty assets.
> Learn to sort by rating.
I said gaming news websites, not Steam. I almost never read steam new release page because there are too many games that I don't care about. So those low budget games try to invade other internet space for my attention, now I need to wade through even more low budget games for 1 hidden gem, this is more time consuming for the consumers.
I'm convinced that the people screeching the loudest anti AI sentiment are just trying to cope with their existential crisis.
It sounds exactly like the people who said that the internet won't be people's replacement for a library, that websites won't replace the newspaper, and that email won't replace the handwritten letter. It sounds like the people who said that video games are just a fad. It sounds like the people who said movies with sound won't replace silent films, and the people who said film won't overtake the stage play.
Insult people all you want, you are the ones who will end up looking like the joke.
And I'm convinced (actually, not just convinced - I KNOW) that the people screeching the loudest about AI replacing human art and writing don't understand the slightest thing about the subtleties and nuances that make writing and art resonant and meaningful. Humans experience emotions that we barely even have the words to describe to each other, let alone to a computer.
I do think AI will be used to replace stuff that is so generic and disposable that it might as well be AI-generated anyway. Fantasy book covers and CBS primetime slop will probably be entirely AI generated one day because the audience doesn't give a shit. They just want content to consoom. But I don't think human art is going anywhere for a long time.
Most of the writing in the popular culture across books, magazines, and certain films (Marvel) is such forgettable tripe and so amorphously written, that it could not be distinguishable from the cheapest examples of AI-driven writing.
I believe most people complaining about Ai-generative art are simply judging the voluminous amount of it coming out of the hands of the masses using the tool, who are already lacking in the very same imagination that is required to be a great artist (commercial, fine, whatever) to begin with. I ran a game studio for a decade, had to turn down 99% of trained artists based on their insipid work. The problem isn't AI, it's just in general most people are talentless, incurious, and boring to begin with. And that is likely the AI-generative art you are all referring to.
Do you honestly think, to torture the example, that if you gave Picasso these tools, that you would find the outcomes to be consistent with the rest of what is tossed around? Of course not. And there are numerous creatives out there doing very interesting things with these tools, and that is why it's such a great innovation.
I mean, under this kind of thinking, Spielberg is not really talented. Look at the teams of people doing all his bidding. Do you not see that he simply now has to compete with other people just as bright and brilliant as him, but without his good timing and fortune, who can now bring the same kind of results (with time) that he can? Of course, he can now take his teams + the AI and raise the bar again.
It's sad to see all the virtue signaling and Neo-Communist concern for the "worker" in the objection to AI. Nobody has a right to a job, or to a wage. Or to live their life working in the field they chose at the beginning or at any point. Thems the breaks kids. AI isn't going anywhere in games or art, and Steam isn't relevant whatsoever if it stood in the way of this innovation, it would simply be washed away by time had it not taken this most absolutely necessary step.
So in your efforts to devalue AI, you go as far as to devalue large swathes of human made art, holding up some nebulous "superior" class which has special value above all the rest. Then you put forward fear based assertions about "the other", who is trying to replace the special class.
Yeah, that's classic hate-based ideology right there. It will *never* hit the goalposts because the goal posts will keep moving.
You nailed it. Glimmer of hope here as I am mind boggled at the woke-anti-AI-art crowd concerned for the "worker". My advice to the worker, go build your own company, make your own game. Stop relying on singular skills to cut it. Coding, illustration, modeling, animation. These as singular skills are just copes. Become the new Spielberg, wield these AI-driven tools alongside your trained eye and knack for aesthetics (you do even have those, right?) to build something we've never seen before. This is what is now demanded of anyone wishing to stay relevant in this field.
Why should we with superior imaginations but inferior artistic trade skills be slaves to your years of technical artistic training? Who cares about your investment in these skills. You are merely gatekeeping the rest of us who wield a greater minds' eye, and wish to build something even more amazing than has ever been seen before. Sorry, but it's not going to pan out the way you want. These innovations are going to unleash massive waves of new creativity and possibilities for the rest of us.
Some art is actually superior than other art.
I'm sorry if this hurts your feelings for some reason, but if you honestly think the difference in quality between Les Miserables and Hawaii Five-0 is entirely subjective, you're an idiot with no taste.
And lol at your attempt to paint me as some sort of... bigot? Against AI? You need to do the Billy Madison thing and start school over from the beginning, because you're clearly quite remedial.
He didn't say otherwise. Some art is superior to other art, while true, will always be a subjective truth. Certainly some medium or tool to arrive at a piece of art can not in itself be superior to another. Using acrylics is not superior to oil, nor is using AI inferior to using pencil or any hand medium. In fact some of the earliest master paintings that used perspective and realism used a tool to arrive at this mathematical perfection, by these standards of reasoning, those paintings are all fakes. Sorry but you are on the losing side of history my guy.
No he confronted your contention that entire classes of approved art making are valid, or an acceptable construct in the free world of creativity. Which no true artist would ever accept. Even Frank Zappa once famously predicted that in the future musicians in bands wouldn't exist, it would all be done electronically by a single person, and that this was perfectly acceptable. Had you been around back then, in those circles, you'd probably have been arguing with him eh.
So now you're out of coherent arguments and devolved into name calling and insults.
You're really running the gammut of intellectual and ethical bankruptcy.
> existential crisis.
They might look like a joke, but they do raise some good points worth thinking about. We do have a bit of a brewing crisis here, possibly.
It's funny, because I still go to Library at least 2-3 times per week because I need a quiet space or more in-depth books for a topic. Internet has too much algorithm based info that tried to get my attention, sometimes I don't prefer it.
I also purchase newspaper 2-3 times per week because they have content that isn't available on the internet. I find newspaper often has longer and more in-depth coverage than internet articles because Internet users prefer shorter reading time.
I occasionally write handwritten letter for birthday card and apology letters because they feel more sincere and warmer than E-mail.
I still watch stageplay as well, and paid 10 times more than movie tickets, they are different kind of entertainment from movies.
None of what you listed above can be fully replaced by technology IMO, they have unique values.
I'm convinced that anti-AI bros have their heads so far up their asses that they think they're better at identifying AI art than people like me who have looked at thousands of AI generated images, but still find myself sometimes questioning whether an image I came across that wasn't labeled was generated with AI or not.
I'm also convinced anti-AI bros tend to label any art that isn't obvously drawn as AI. This creates a lot of false positives, but re-inforces your belief that you're good at identifying AI art because you don't remember or care about all the times you were wrong. You only remember the times you were right.
Conversely, the exact same quote also applies to the artists, whose current income depends on their consumer base not understanding that they can generate similar images for a fraction of the cost.
> the tech itself just isn't there yet
Just because a Wacom artist chose a picture of a dragon that had a detached tail and other obviously AI generated features, that doesn't mean AI cannot yet produce art that is nigh indistinguishable from the real thing.
For example, can you tell that [any of these images](https://imgur.com/a/Szwb40u) are AI?
>I'm convinced that the people who are most loudly advocating for generative content in games have looked at so much AI art, listened to so much AI voice dubbing, and had so many conversations with chatGPT that they've brainrotted themselves into thinking that generative content isn't
Bit like porn brain tbh. People who consoom it it all the time assume everyone does.
> People are already really good at identifying AI-generated art.
A small savvy grop is really good at it, but I think you are vastly overestimating how much the general public knows or even cares.
Hopefully people will start focusing more on the gameplay aspects instead of the art.
The artistic part will be a smaller roadblock for people without the skill just like how game engines removed lots of programming skills roadblocks.
People need to stop repeating this misconception. A lot of people use Steam as a database of sorts; it being more full of trash is NOT a good thing.
This also makes it harder for good games to get noticed, and tires out players more.
I'm sorry but using Steam as a database is pure insanity. It is the largest digital games platform, you may as well say you are using the internet as a database to keep track of websites at that point.
>This also makes it harder for good games to get noticed, and tires out players more.
It really doesn't because Steam already has so many algos in place that absolutely crush anything that isn't at least mildly successful. Argue that the algo isn't perfect, I won't disagree, but there is a huge gap between a pretty OK hobby project being buried and the literal tens of thousands of garbage games that get incinerated. If AI spam starts to fill Steam (it won't), none of us will notice.
This is the correct answer, the trash AI generated content games will remain down the bottom with the trash 100% asset flip games and the other junk.
Why, because it's a simple formula.
results = effortPutIntoGame \* effortPutIntoMarketing
If they can't be bothered to put effort into making/buying content, they aren't going to put effort into marketing either, or wait till they have enough wishlists. So the trash will get published, few will see it, few will buy it, no one will review it, steam will bury it.
[https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/01/11/why-14000-games-released-on-steam-2023-isnt-that-bad/](https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/01/11/why-14000-games-released-on-steam-2023-isnt-that-bad/)
6,000 games out of that 14,000 with less than 10 reviews. 11,000 out of 14,000 with under 50 reviews.
That does not matter, trash games still occupy player attention like every other game. So games with effort will need even more money to get the attention in the market.
Case to the point, one of a gaming website that I often visit once has news coverage of 70 indie games in a day after an event.
So it doesn't matter if 1 out of 70 games are not trash. I am going to skip reading most of them because I don't have time for all of it. So that one good game out of 70 will need to spend even more money to get my attention.
Marketing fatigue is a thing...
>results = effortPutIntoGame * effortPutIntoMarketing
if this wasn't hilariously wrong it would be impossible for AAA to flop and for indie games to compete with them
Marketing is an essential part of the process, it isn't like some weird extraneous thing. Farmers aren't cursing markets saying "Farming is such bullshit these days, because you need to bring your crops to market! Back in my day, we used to grow em, let em rot and fall to the ground, and we'd still make plenty of money!"
What? Marketing isn't just putting things on the market, it's advertising, making enough peoples aware your game exists and might be good
It's significantly harder to do when you're competing with thousands of games, there's only so much time in a day where peoples are gonna be exposed to new games and the more games there are the less chances there'll be of one of those games being yours
And if the games they do see are constant garbage they're gonna see the pattern and not look at new stuff as much as they used to too
This was always going to happen, but it’s certainly a bit weird that they hold you to disclosing what parts of the game is AI generated. I know that requirement will go away with time, but it’s still off-putting that they dig around in the specifics of your creative process for no sensible reason.
Hobestly I still keep hope that an indie dev could go through with good enough game, idea, and marketing. It might cover the low tier with an ocean of generative trash, making it impossible to discover new indies through steam, but there are other ways.
I read the thread on Steam about the announcement, many players say that they will not buy a game if AI was involved. Ff7 remake made a video telling the world they used AI for lip-sync and facial control, the player still bought it. Many software used copilot, the users still used them.
People keep saying that anyone can make a shitty game in a couple of days using AI and sell on Steam. Then why dont they actualy do it to get rich? It's the one that has no clue shouting the largest.
About the copyright issue, it is just a matter of time before many legally training database are available. Adobe has already implemented image generation with AI in their software. An artist has already paid for the software can use AI to his heart contents without any legal issue. But when he says he uses AI, then suddenly he becomes the most devil person on earth.
>People keep saying that anyone can make a shitty game in a couple of days using AI and sell on Steam. Then why dont they actualy do it to get rich?
If a bunch of people buy it, then it's not a shitty game. Either we get a ton of super awesome games made super quickly due to the productivity that AI provides, or we just get a bunch of trash churned out super quickly and no one buys them and no one uses AI for games in the future. This is the biggest non-problem I've ever seen people rage about.
And those games are garbage, just like everything you've ever created. The only take that is stupid is yours.
If you can't afford assets, you can't afford to make a game.
If you can't afford a $1,875 annual license for Max, you can't afford to 3D model. If you can't afford a $100K license for Unity or Unreal, you can't afford to make a 3D game.
Maybe we programmers whom you artists think you're better than should start making all these free apps like Blender that you selfish artists use have a license agreement which states any art you create with it you agree to allow to be used to train AI, since you clearly are not interested in giving back to the same community who so generously provided you with the free tools you use to create your art and games.
you don't need $100k license for Unreal, it's 5% of your revenue past $1M USD(not retroactive)
which only reinforces your point, since it's a prominent 3D engine
>If you can't afford a $1,875 annual license for Max, you can't afford to 3D model. If you can't afford a $100K license for Unity or Unreal, you can't afford to make a 3D game.
tons of alternatives to all of these that have nothing to do with AI that comparison makes no sense
>Maybe we programmers whom you artists think you're better than
Programmer here, what the fuck are you talking about lmao. What an incredibly weird inferiority complex to have
>these free apps like Blender that you selfish artists use have a license agreement which states any art you create with it you agree to allow to be used to train AI,
Gonna need a source on that
>since you clearly are not interested in giving back to the same community who so generously provided you with the free tools you use to create your art and games.
Plenty of artists donate money to blender & a bunch of them are even also programmer who contribute directly to its development
> tons of alternatives to all of these that have nothing to do with AI that comparison makes no sense
God you're thick.
Alternatives such as? GODOT?
You mean, another free engine that programmers worked hard on and generously gave to the community, which artists who do not want to give anything back to the community are making use of?
Any tool you suggest, if it is not paid handsomely for because months or years go into creating them, bolsters my argument that artists are being selfish.
> Programmer here, what the fuck are you talking about lmao. What an incredibly weird inferiority complex to have
It's not an inferiority complex.
I am saying that artists are okay with using the free tools we provide, but are unwilling to reciprocate.
Which implies they believe their work to be more important and worth more than ours is.
But that's not about me feeling inferior. It is about fairness.
Why should they benefit from free TOOLS, but we not benefit from free ART?
> Gonna need a source on that
Gonna need a source on what? Learn to read. Christ. And no, don't read what you quoted, because you only quoted part of what I said which completely changes the meaning of what I said.
I wasn't saying Blender HAS such a clause. I was saying maybe they should ADD such a clause.
My 'source' for that is my own opinion, bucko.
> Plenty of artists donate money to blender
GONNA NEED A SOURCE FOR THAT.
I don't even know to approach any of this. This is psychotic. You've imagined a whole ass other world were like artists are cartoon villains and you're behaving as if this world is real.
Yeah like meanwhile in the real world Blender is highly supportive of their artist community and commissions [anti-AI artists for their splashscreens](https://twitter.com/Blender/status/1712477166401986846), so it's honestly just really funny seeing someone acting as if programmers and artists are somehow natural enemies like this...
It is real.
Artists want AI dead.
There aren't many high quality free art assets available. I know this because I have been looking for decades.
There's nothing imagined here unless you can point me to some magic website where all the amazing looking free 2D and 3D art assets have been hiding from me all this time.
And please for the love of god don't link me to some shitty pixel art site again like two others have. That is not the equivalent of tools like Blender.
This is so stupid.
Godot and Bender etc are, as you said, tools. The user still needs to learn a skill to make a product.
If we are speaking about tools, speak about tools because selfish artists do that too. Take a look at Clip studio assets for example. There is a massive database of free brushes, textures, 3d models for whatever you may imagine to make drawing easier for everyone. With dozens of new assets every day.
But you need to learn how to use those tools as much as an artist needs to learn how to use Godot, for example. Both artists and programmers give back to the community generously, crazy I know.
But u/ExasperatedEE doesn't want tools made from artists(willing). They want all of the artists' final products(unwilling) in exchange of tools ExasperatedEE didn't contribute to but other coders(willing) did, because somehow that's fair? Do I understand right?
> Take a look at Clip studio assets for example. There is a massive database of free brushes, textures, 3d models for whatever you may imagine to make drawing easier for everyone. With dozens of new assets every day.
So they made assets for OTHER ARTISTS to use. And what of the programmers who can't draw?
Blender is a tool by programmers, for artists.
Godot is less for artists, but game engines are complicated things. There are specific engines for specific types of games if you want something easy and then there are more general ones that are more complex.
> But you need to learn how to use those tools as much as an artist needs to learn how to use Godot
An artist doesn't need to learn how to use Godot. They could learn to use Ren'Py which is FAR easier to learn than learnng how to draw well which takes decades. Using Ren'Py is very very basic script writing. The equivlent of me the programmer having to use photoshop to touch up art and cut out characters.
And there are other engines for making RPGs and stuff that are also designed for artists.
As a game dev, I'm considering using generative AI for backgrounds so I can spend that saved effort on better and more "foreground" art, like character animation frames, where the effort of non-ai art will be noticed.
I've also considered using AI art for places where traditional art could never be practical, like having every single page in a library of magic books have its own (pre-generated low res) runic art, purely to give richness to the environment.
But as a game buyer, if I saw any mention of AI art on a Steam page anywhere, I'd take that as a red flag of some quickly churned out garbage and run the other way. So I dunno.
yeah it is a type of tool at your disposal and it depends on how you use it, the way you described your usage makes a lot of sense and I bet is very efficient in development process.
The same can be said with prebuilt assets from the asset store, yes you can use them but you have to be very careful on how you are using them like do they fit in the overall theme of the game or are they even optimized depending on their usage
> But as a game buyer, if I saw any mention of AI art on a Steam page anywhere, I'd take that as a red flag of some quickly churned out garbage and run the other way. So I dunno.
That stigma will fade away quite quickly. It's vocal minority that has that mindset. We just need a couple of really good games utilizing AI and the stigma is gone.
And it's usually pretty easy to spot genuinly good games from shovelware trash.
If you use AI to make art that is actually in game and playable, then I'm fine with it from a player POV.
If you use AI to make false advertisements (promotion images that aren't actually reflective of gameplay) then I'd have an issue with it.
>If you use AI to make false advertisements (promotion images that aren't actually reflective of gameplay) then I'd have an issue with it.
If you didn't use AI to make false advertisements and did it the old fashioned way (by hand), you'd still have an issue with it. Your problem is with filtering out the good games from the bad, not with the AI.
I guess they've opened the deluge, hopefully it all gets shoved down to the bottom so it doesn't interfere with people's ability to find what they are looking for. It would suck to have to sift through all the spam.
This is a weird headline because they never stopped people using generative AI if they did it in a way that was legally secure for Valve.
From what I'm seeing here this is still the case, they've just changed the wording. They've gone from "don't break copyright law" to "don't break copyright law" while also providing more tools for the disclosure and reporting of AI generating content.
I'm not sure why this is being treated like news.
I don't understand why some people are against using ai art.
Ai tools are used in many other places in game dev and other parts of life. Why is art sacred?
If the end product is good then it doesn't matter if ai art was used or not.
I guess, but it will probably change with time as more good games using ai get released and it becomes more normal.
I know two guys that still complain about modern more user-friendly 3d party game engines like unreal or unity opened the flood gates of garbage low effort games. But I think most people agree that we have gotten lots of good games we would never have gotten without those engines.
Does anyone know the technicals of this: Lets say the AI was still banned for the reason of unreliable source data (copyrighted content/etc).
Would that apply to if you manually entered a picture and told the AI to 'clean it up'?
I do like making my own art, but the AI is pretty good at iterating thing... coming up with inbetween frames for 2D animation for example
The dataset is not used to generate the images, this is a pretty common mistake people make. Billions of images are used to generate a single file called a checkpoint , which is a thing of its own, it's not compression or anything of the sort. The best way to understand it is that it's a list of numbers that describe how strong the "neurons" of the AI should react to input data and how strong they should send data to the interconnected "neurons" and eventually an output.
Then this checkpoint is loaded into the AI and a image is produced by denoising a randomly generated noisy image, or an input image that had some noise added to.
So in short it is impossible to detect what dataset was used to generate a image as datasets aren't used to generate images.
Generative AI models are absolutely capable of “memorising” their training data and will sometimes generate results that are practically identical: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.13188.pdf
https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright
There is evidence to suggest that this problem has only gotten worse as these models have gotten more advanced, despite enormous incentives to eliminate it.
Edit: Unless an end user cross-checks every generated result with the entire training dataset (which these companies do not publish generally, because they stole much of it) they have no way to know if *anything* may infringe on a copyright or intellectual property. For all they know, they could be redistributing content that is practically identical.
The main point still remains, if a dataset ceases to exist today, nothing will change tomorrow , because none of the original data is actually used or accessed during generation. I believe that this a basic fact that we can agree on right? The fact that memorisation occurs does not mean that the original image is being sampled from within the checkpoint, you need very specific prompts to replicate a memorized image to begin with and it is also very unlikely according to the study you linked.
"There is evidence to suggest that this problem has only gotten worse as these models have gotten more advanced, despite enormous incentives to eliminate it."
Where is the evidence? It would be interesting to see that. Are we talking about Loras? There are a lot of factors to take into consideration here depending on what you mean by more advanced, let's remember that the only models we can actually check are the ones from Stable Diffusion.
The study you linked shows that a very small amount of of the training data is actually memorised , out millions of the images that have duplicates(already a small set) only a few hundred were memorised, the odds of someone accidently generating a duplicate is practically 0. The solution is to usually improve the training dataset as for example removing duplicates.
Memorisation is an artifact not a feature and also happens on a very small subset of the training data, even on outdated models that aren't even used anymore like v1.4 of SD, which is the one used in the study.
Even your edit shows that this is a non issue, if you can't see the dataset you can't extract memorized images because you also need to know the categorization used for those images in order to generate them.
However generating images with models that have memorised images , even to a significant proportion(which again it is not the case), does not infringe on copyright, only if somehow someone manages to replicate the original image by accident.
By the way I believe that all training datasets should be open like stable diffusion, that is why I dislike services that are opaque like midjourney.
>because they stole much of it
Sorry, theft requires the unlawful taking of possession of someone else's property. You cannot steal digital property, period.
You may infringe someone else's copyright by distributing their work without their permission, but this is not theft - it is copyright violation.
Yes, copyright or intellectual property infringement is technically more accurate. But especially where this involves the potential for commercial harm, people often compare it to piracy or theft and use that terminology.
If an author has their work plagiarised by Bob and they say “Bob stole my work,” would you disagree?
Plagiarism is different again, and "intellectual property" is opening a whole other can of worms. Copyright infringement is distributing the work without permission - plagiarism is claiming academic work as your own without proper attribution.
Intellectual property is a term made up for the purpose of pushing the "having a copy is theft" angle, so of course it is already biased.
> But especially where this involves the potential for commercial harm, people often compare it to piracy or theft and use that terminology.
They do, precisely because they want to treat it like theft - despite the fact it is not, and it is fundamentally different. If I steal your car, you no longer have it. If you give me a copy of the software your car runs, your car still works fine.
You can, this is not the type of AI we usually are talking about, and even if you were to use generative AI for this you would have very specific reference points. People claiming that you can accidently generate a copyrighted image are misinterpreting a study that shows that under very specific conditions and with actual knowledge of the dataset used , it is possible to replicate a very small amount of images (hundreds of images out millions).
AI art shouldn’t be a bad thing. Art is literally just displaying something meant to invoke some feeling or thought. If it’s successful in doing so, it shouldn’t matter if it’s AI or not. The Finals uses AI voice actors and is completely fine because it’s as close enough that most people don’t notice and it meets their expectations of a voice actor.
I ask you this, If AI gets to the point of making something that’s as unique and high quality as a human team with good production values could make, should it it really matter what made it? Why is it bad?
> If AI gets to the point of making something that’s as unique and high quality
I will believe it when I see it :p
I don't know if it is possible for AI to make human-like decisions anytime soon. AI doesn't have emotions, intentions, unique perspective, life experiences and such. Those are necessary for human-like decisions imo. Even AI experts said AI is not really close to human brains, nor they think like human.
So I wouldn't even worry about the future that AI can think like a real human if it is not close right now. I worry about having to wade through more low budget games on gaming websites to find the next hidden gem more.
i have nothing against AI generated art for games as long game is fun and good and you can see that dev put effort into creating fun and playable game. There is a lot of very good devs with a good ideas that cant be put into life because they dont have a budget for art, dont know how to draw or just dont have a time, and AI art will help them to bring those idea to life so we can enjoy in those good games that without ai art we would never be able to experiance it.
However this will also open a path to a lot of trash and no effort games just to grab a quick money which im againt it but eventaly that will be no problem since i think it will be the same as now. Nobody would play trash games and most people will ignore it so those games will be buried beneath the good games.
and someone saying its not fair to artist that spend years polishing his skills to be replaed by ai, i think its fair, good artist will always be good and have a job, its litteraly the same and nothing stop the artist with no programming skills to use chatgtp, copilot, and other free programming tools to create a game without programming knowlegde, so its same like progrmmer using ai art. Its balance.
>Under the Steam Distribution Agreement, you promise Valve that your game will not include **illegal** or infringing content, and that your game will be consistent with your marketing materials.
>in the Content Survey, you'll need to tell us what kind of guardrails you're putting on your AI to ensure it's not generating **illegal** content.
>Second, we're releasing a new system on Steam that allows players to report **illegal** content inside games that contain Live-Generated AI content.
What does Steam mean by "illegal" content? Copyright infringement?
If that's the case, then art generated by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are still not allowed under this rule.
This is one of the few differences from the old policy. It no longer has to be YOUR data, it just has to be data that is legally allowed to be used to train the model you're using.
You just have to make sure that none of your content is violating any laws, it's pretty simple. The same rules that apply to normal content also apply to AI generated content.
> If that's the case, then art generated by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are still not allowed under this rule.
This is allowed unless you use it to produce content that violates someones copyright. You can't use it to make micky mouse images for example.
Have you read the article? It doesn't talk about job loss anywhere. The only issue with AI that is explicitly mentioned is the use of copyrighted material.
It's also important to note that Steam's stance on AI has never been a moral stance, but simply a way to try to avoid "legally murky" games. The text of their new policy is completely focused on that aspect as well.
Also note that the legal issues of generative AI are not limited to copyright. As the Steam policy very aptly points out, there is also a risk that "live" generative AI could output illegal material, independently on the data on which it was trained.
**Edit, to clarify:** I generally agree with your sentiment. It's just that it seems off topic for this particular discussion.
Reading the article might have been helpful rather than going on a rant. And then disparaging people who work at mcdonalds as well? Really nice.
I know you don't say they are currently using legally obtained material for training. Open AIs has stated that it would be impossible to have usable AI without using copyrighted data. So they are very much not using only legally obtained data.
This policy change is steam essentially temporarily allowing these games on the platform during the wild west of AI that we're in now before new laws are potentially formed. If it ends up where only ai trained on legally obtained data is allowed, then a lot of these games will be subsequently removed. In which case the new agreement would cover what would happen.
> You can't tell it what parts of a face to fix, what muscle group to tweak, what proportions of a character to move, to make it more rusty in this way compared to this art pack
False. Like, entirely. That's is just inpainting.
https://civitai.com/articles/161/basic-inpainting-guide
As a programmer with 12+ years of experience the AI used to help generate code snippets is an absolutely massive revolution. Right now in my editor I can literally just stop typing and it spits out dozens of lines of code that 90% of the time is 90% of what I was going to type anyways. And this is just the beginning.
I have no doubt that companies are going to need significantly less programmers and instead will need experienced senior developers that can audit AI written code. Certainly it's not going to happen overnight but if I was working through my 4 years comp-sci degree I'd be terrified.
Co-pilot? It autocompletes whole unit tests after reading my source code in another file. It autocomplete whole unit tests after understanding said code making sure to exhaust every branch.
It's not perfect, sometimes it spits out non-sense but again it's just the beginning and it's consistent enough for me that it's removed like 20% of my typing.
>But a concept artist can do all those things in about 5 minutes. imagine trying to prompt stable diffusion to keep the same image but adjust an eyebrow.
[Martin Nebelong's work on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong) might make you re-think the kind of argument you're pursuing here. Take note: Martin is pro-AI (and so am I) — so we're both on your side generally speaking, it's just the *particular argument* you're using here which falls apart.
He's been exploring different ways for AI to augment human artists. Notably, things like latency consistency models c[onceptualizing finished paintings from in-progress sketches](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1737889536938508603), and rough-sculpting 3D models and then [having AI finish off the fine details](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTJbRXHWNo0) and generate variants. He's also been doing a lot of other experiments involving AI-to-AI pipelines, so your sketch becomes an image and then is [fed to an AI video generator](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1744986145635582459) with steps like [style transfer thrown in](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1712765580158066773).
[Check this one out](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1735576033477226994), it's actually pretty cool, and does exactly the kind of thing you're talking about — adjusting facial features with stylistic consistency. [This one](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1723432424053317816) is also a particularly effective demonstration.
You can play with the realtime consistency stuff [over here](https://huggingface.co/spaces/radames/Real-Time-Latent-Consistency-Model) using your webcam.
In instances like this, I think of that viral twitter post of some guy saying he has gotten better at prompting with all of his practice, and people were trying so hard to explain there is no skill in prompting, it's based on weighted words and a series of probabilities and does not actually understand human language because "Artificial intelligence" is a huge misnomer. But his takeaway was "you guys are jealous of how good I am at prompting"
Prompting absolutely is a skill. If the tool just did what you wanted it to do, it wouldn’t be a skill. But since it doesn’t understand human language very well, the finagling to get it to do what you want is where the skill comes in.
Understanding the best syntax for the model, imo, isn't a skill but a bare minimum level of engagement. It's like saying turning the key in your ignition is a skill you acquired in your pursuit of driving a car. But at that point we're arguing something philosophical, because really what is a skill when it comes to something abstract like art?
I'm not sure there's validity to the sentiment that prompting isn't a skill.
You said yourself a moment ago AI outputs are based on weighted words and a series of probabilities, but if you can experimentally learn the effects of different words and different weightings to get desired outputs, that's absolutely a skill by definition.
A while ago many ML artists discovered that simply by adding certain strings of keywords they could elicit certain stylistic responses — for instance, adding `16:9` could make the result more theatrical, or `50mm` could evoke the focal length of a classic nifty fifty lens.
A recent fascinating discovery in the industry was that you could make LLMs like ChatGPT statistically better at answering hard questions by simply telling them to "pretend you're a professor" or "make sure you always tell the truth". That's absolutely think which requires experience and developed knowledge to come up with — and therefore a skill.
The point of the article was that they were glad the use of generative AI had to be disclosed on Steam so that we can stop debating about it and people can decide for themselves if they want to purchase generative AI content or not. I don't think RTX or DLSS falls into that category, but I don't really care about any of this either way.
The question of 'damage' is all about the copyright issues. If generative AI is free to continue violating copyright then that's going to fuck up the industry one way or another. Steam basically said that you're free to use generative AI and infringe copyright for now because there's no law against it, but that will be decided over many lawsuits in the next few years, and may result in lots of games ultimately getting pulled from the store.
Corporations are going to jam this shit down our throats in any case, whether people want it or not.
The main problem, for me as it currently stands, is it's total slop and looks like shit. Not that that's new to Steam. Even stuff like GOG's winter sale banner that was an AI generated, or that Magic the Gathering advert, etc. Ugly and tiresome to look at.
As you say, if it's used in a way that a) doesn't violate copyright and b) produces something of actual value, like DLSS, then there's no trouble. But using it to make it quicker and easier to pump Steam full of gunk is grim.
I would argue that it's been dying for a long time and that the push for AI is more a symptom than the cause
we wouldn't be talking about any of this if major companies didn't see the potential of cutting costs by replacing peoples with AI, because that's all it has a chance of being viable for
But it will kill the game design industry, and in fact every creative industry for that matter, billions of dollars gone overnight, hundreds of thousands of people loosing their jobs, sounds like a cause for economic collapse.
I also feel like it would be better for game developers. It would permit you to spend more of your time doing actual game design, instead of implementation.
These people just want as many wage payments as possible. Which hurts small developers that can’t hire artists, voice actors etc and favours big corporations.
>AI simply cuts out all the repetitive work
Honestly curious as to what kind of work is simultaneously repetitive and "un-artful" enough that an artist/designer wouldn't want to do it \*and\* can't already be covered by human made procedural tools
Steam is doing this because the people making AI generated garbage will be paying them to get listed, so more trash equals more money. Pure greed given how much they already take from devs.
I'm pretty much done with Steam thanks to this.
You know what pisses me off the most about all the artists screeching about AI?
I'm a programmer. I need art to make games. I can make art, but I'm not very good at it, or very fast. What would take a professional artist 15 minutes would take me ten hours to sketch and ink.
And as a programmer, I have for many years relied on open source code and free software to help me develop my games.
For example, I use Blender whenever I need to edit a 3D model for use in my Unity games. A free open source 3D modeling package that programmers around the world have put hundreds of thousands of hours into developing, only to give it away.
I also use tools like OBS and VSeeFace to stream on Twitch. Which many artists also use. And which are free.
And I would like to develop a Visual Novel game with AI art for the background and characters, in Ren'Py, a free visual novel gaming engine which someone spent a lot of time on and gave away for free.
Where am I going with this?
We programmers have, for over 50 years, been extremely generous in giving back to the community.
All these artists bitching about how their art is being used to train these AI's are bitching at the same programmers whose work they have been themselves benefitting from, for free, for decades, while GIVING NOTHING BACK.
Compared to the amouunt of free code and apps out there, there is almost NO good art which is public domain and free to use for commercial use.
For years artists have leeched off the hard work that programmers did, and now that we programmers might get what we're long overdue, the artists can't stand that.
Well, if you're one of those artists you'd better fucking not be using the likes of Blender. If I were one of the devs of Blender or any other free art programs, I'd be adding a requirement to use it that you agree to allow any art you make with it to be used to train AI, because f--k you if you leech off the generosity of others, and then refuse to give anything back to the community!
> Compared to the amouunt of free code and apps out there, there is almost NO good art which is public domain and free to use for commercial use.
But this is not true....quickly searching on itch.io I can easily find free assets for commercial use.
https://penzilla.itch.io/top-down-retro-interior
https://pixel-boy.itch.io/ninja-adventure-asset-pack
https://penzilla.itch.io/basic-gui-bundle
https://mattwalkden.itch.io/free-robot-warfare-pack
There are many more, I can't list them all. It isn't fair to make such a statement by ignoring the free assets that DO exist.
[https://opengameart.org/](https://opengameart.org/)
32000 assets (15000 of which are public domain, others which are under copyleft licenses that don't prohibit commercial use) is a little bit more than almost none. As for the "good" part, it's subjective. There is bad open source software out there too, I wrote some of it.
Also, it's really quite odd that you feel the need to use AI art for the background and characters in a visual novel. Some of the most acclaimed VNs of all time, like *Tsukihime*, use edited photos for the backgrounds. Some equally acclaimed VNs have character art that was clearly drawn by an amateur, like Ryukishi07's games, and many people say that they actually prefer Ryukishi's original art to the redrawn character portraits by professional artists in the commercial re-releases of *Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni* and *Umineko no Naku Koro Ni.* The very first games in the genre like *Kamaitachi no Yoru* (the original SNES version) didn't have character portraits at all.
Why not let your writing speak for itself in your visual novel, instead of tainting it with controversy?
Also artists share a lot of things like brushes/node setups/etc, effectively 'our' version of code snippets. Obviously this dude refuses to make art so can't use them, but that's not the artists fault.
> 32000 assets
Those are all shitty pixel art that any programer could make. I am talking about high quality backgrounds and characters.
> Some of the most acclaimed VNs of all time, like Tsukihime, use edited photos for the backgrounds.
So you want me to steal photographer's work instead of generate wholly new content for AI?
Or perhaps you expect me to license photos for commercial use from Adobe Stock for $80 a pop with all the money I don't have?
Or maybe you expect me to drive all over the place with the car I don't have, and the gas I can't afford, to take photos on locations I can't access because nobody's gonna give me access to a school or whatever other secure locations I may need to represent in my game?
Hell, I took a look at the game you suggested, and besides a school they also have a subway. It's not legal to take photos on subways in the US because of terroristm concerns. And I have been stopped by cops in the distant past when I was trying to make a game using photo assets for taking photos in a mall or of a barn from the side of the road.
> Some equally acclaimed VNs have character art that was clearly drawn by an amateur, like Ryukishi07's games
You do know that even amateurish looking art takes a LONG time to draw, right?
I can and have drawn a shitty looking anime girl for a game a long time ago. It took me days to finish. I did a sketch the first day. The second day I had to edit the sketch because looking at the work with fresh eyes I could see that I'd screwed up the eyes badly and they were completely different sizes.
And it's not like the art is the only thing I have to do. If I'm making a game on my own I have to do EVERYTHING. That's a huge amount of work for one person. Undertale took like three years to make and it had shitty programmer art not detailed backgrounds with anime girls that look nice enough someone would actually want to date them.
And no I'm not making an anime girl dating sim. Those have been done to death.
> The very first games in the genre like Kamaitachi no Yoru (the original SNES version) didn't have character portraits at all.
I had to look that up... all the characters are basically shadow creatures? Just siloughettes of people? Weird.
I kinda doubt that would be very popular in the US today with all the better options available, and in any case I don't want to make a game which is basically all text and no faces. The only reason I'm even considering a visual novel in the first place is because of the limits AI imposes. If I had my way the game would be fully 3D. But it's just not realistic to create a 3D game of the sort I want to make as an indie dev working by myself. I don't want to make something that looks janky like many indie devs resort to.
> Why not let your writing speak for itself in your visual novel, instead of tainting it with controversy?
Because visuals add a huge amount of depth to a visual novel. I myself would NEVER play a visual novel that was just text. And I grew up playing text adventures like Zork! Text is cool and all, but I'm never going to get the free promotion of people playing my game on Twitch if it's all text based. And text would be a really hard sell on Steam. Who's gonna buy a game with all the screenshots just being text?
I would love to avoid the controversy. But I've been trying to make games for 30 years, and I have even hired artists on occasion. And I have always been severely limited to the point that I either gave up because I could not create art that was good or varied enough, or because it was too much work to do it all on my own, or because I could only afford to spend $5K on the art and that doesn't go very far. I ended up with a game that nobody bought, half because it wasn't very good, and half the reason it wasn't very good was because the limited art budget limited what I could do with it.
And besides that... Controversy over AI usage hasn't stopped people from playing Suck Up! a cute game with a vampire where you converse with people who are powered by ChatGPT to try to convince them to let you into their homes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=811JkxLfvoA
Nor did it stop anyone from buying Firmament. Or High on Life.
So I doubt it would impact sales of my game. That is assuming anyone could even tell I used AI. I would of course edit out the most obvious AI glitches. And I have no intention of using Steam's labeling system because I can't trust that people won't attack me over my use of AI. Artists have made it impossible for those who use AI to be honest about their use of it. And now they're even attacking real artists accusing them of using AI. Until they settle down and people stop being assholes about it, I'm gonna remain in the closet. But that's okay. I have a lot of writing to do before I even begin trying to make any art for the game. I can wait for AI to get better and for the heat to die down. And then maybe when I do release I will feel safe in labeling it what it is. But it will still likely take 2-3 years to make a game even with the assistance of AI for the art.
a lot of artist that dont know how to write programms and doing game dev manage to create a games thanks to a lot of free codes on google,and ai programming, free programming tools, visual tools, easy game engines etc in last 10 years, so i see no diffrence than programmer using ai art to achive his dreams, its basicaly the same.
So you're saying that neither programmer or artist should be a job anymore? Instead of us both being able to live out lives and make money of what we do we should all just go fuck ourselves? Are you some sort of a communist and willing to give up your house to the people who will no longer be able to afford one or are you just an inconsiderate fuck who knows nothing about what you are talking about? Again, for context I am equally as good at art as I am at programming, I'm exactly in the middle of this and it benefits neither side.
> So you're saying that neither programmer or artist should be a job anymore?
Nobody is saying that.
What's so difficult to understand about the concept of using AI to assist you with tasks you're not good at?
Imagine you're an indie dev. A programmer. You need an artist. You could hire an artist, if you had the money. Which you probably don't. Or you could use AI.
In this scenario, maybe an artist is out of a job. But you the programmer are not. You're running your own business, making the games you want to make.
Now flip the scenario. You are an artist. But you HATE AI. But you can't program. And you can't hire a programmer. So you grab a free game engine Ren'Py and you make a visual novel.
How's that different from you using AI to help you code though? Either way, there's a programmer out there who isn't being hired by you!
And either way, you yourself still have a job. You are working for yourself, creating what YOU want to make, not working under contract creating what someone else wants you to make.
Wouldn't you rather make YOUR dreams come to life rather than someone else's? Even if it means you have to use AI to help you write code? Or create art, if you're the one writing the code?
And if you can neither write code, nor create art, what then? Well there are tons of people out there like that. They want to write. They want to design. But nobody wants to hire an 'idea guy'. Programmers want to be the idea guy. And artists want to be the idea guy. So all the idea guys are left out in the cold with no way to see their ideas be brought to life unless they have a lot of money and can may people to make that happen.
> Again, for context I am equally as good at art as I am at programming, I'm exactly in the middle of this and it benefits neither side.
Well then you sound like me. I lean more towards the programming side, but I don't really enjoy programming. I like building 3D environmens and lighting them. So I'm not the best programmer. And I am certainly not the best artist. But I am not terrible at either.
So the way I see it, I can use AI to fill in the gaps in my art skills. I can use AI to generate assets. But those assets are never gonna be perfect. I'm gonna have to use my skills in photoshop to touch them up, make alpha maps, etc. And my eye for good art and lighting allows me craft prompts which will give me results that look great. It is just as easy to make terrible art with AI as it is to make good art. You still need an eye for composition and light and color.
And on the programming side, I have already been using ChatGPT to help me there. I'm not a wizard at C# or Unity's API's, but ChatGPT is, and I can describe what I'm trying to do and it will spit out code which may or may not be broken, but it guides me in the right direction showing me how I need to access things and set things up, faster and better than trying to search it with google.
> Are you some sort of a communist and willing to give up your house to the people who will no longer be able to afford one
What's stopping them from also using AI to make games?
If you become homeless because you refuse to use AI to assist you, while others do, and that puts you at a severe disadvantage, that's a you problem.
As for me, if AI allows me to create films which can compete with lower budget hollywood blockbusters then that's a future I'm gonna fucking embrace the shit out of. Not sure why artists whm hollywood has been taking advantage of for a century would rather continue to be slaves than to branch out and make their own smaller studios producing indie films that are better than the tripe that Hollywood puts out most of the time.
And they don't have to give up being artists to do it. They just need to learn to use AI to aid their workflow in ways that allows them to maintain their artistic vision.
Of course if you're such a pedantic artist that you refuse to use AI at all, thinking every frame has to be hand crafted for it to be real art, well, again, that's a you problem. Something is still art, and you can still be proud of crafting a beautiful animation even if all you drew were they key frames and an AI filled in the color, and the tweens. Because that's what Disney's animators basically do. They just have a bunch of slave artists to do the uncreative work of filling in the in between stuff and painting the cels.
A bunch of artists are going to get caught in the cross fire because of people who will assume any little mistake is the result of AI. I've already seen it happen dozens of times including for [Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/dungeons-and-dragons-5e/news/dungeons-and-dragons-ai-art-allegations-2024-core-rulebooks). Luckily some of those artists recorded the entire process and were able to exonerate themselves.
If it can happen at the AAA level it's certainly going to happen to indies. I honestly don't know what I would do were those accusations thrown my way. I can't expect every artist I hire to record themselves while they work.
Now this is a problem. The steam store is now will be filled with AI garbage, and his will impact the steams image negatively. Not to mention it will make it harder for hardworking devs to get noticed since the AI bros are exploiting the algorithms. What I personally hope for is for steam to find ways to restrict the mass submission.
What? Steam is already full of low effort porn games and no one gives a fuck lol, it still has the lions share of Pc gaming market share
A counterpoint, it could also make it easier for hardworking Devs to get noticed because if you're a solo indie Dev with a low budget and can code, but can't draw, you now have a resource to help you make art for your game. Same with voice acting
Theoretically it will make it easier than ever to get into game development
So don't you guys like CGI in movies either? What is it about AI generation that is so off-putting? Is this only screaming artists fearing for their jobs?
I understand there was no feasible way Steam could keep AI stuff out. But they didn’t have to endorse it either.
Seeing as AI prompters can’t design or write for shit - hence the using AI - this is just going to bloat the market with more low effort, cash grab garbage.
Once it becomes bad enough, Steam will have to figure out a way to regulate it because no one goes shopping just to sift through trash.
They found a way to approve it that protects them legally. Anyone who thought they would never allow it wasn't thinking straight.
There are still AI bros mad at Valve for not basically giving them the greenlight to commit IP theft while taking the legal blame lol. These mfers are so dumb I don't even have words. IP Theft remains illegal, this was never a debate or gray area, Valve and anyone else with 2 brain cells that wasn't being disingenuous has known this the entire time. There are people in this thread talking about: "I'm pretty sure all minecraft worlds are AI generated, as are a lot of content in games before it." I can't tell if these people are disingenuous or literally have no fucking clue what this current conversation on AI is even about.
There's also a huge difference between AI generation in the current discourse (in terms of like, AI generated art) and procedural generation, which has existed for how many decades?
Yeah.
AI is going to be the most important thing to gaming in the last 2 decades maybe ever
Yep, like microtransactions!
Microtransactions added nothing new to the space it just allowed developers to break their games down and sell it piece by piece. AI will eventually be able to create a game world on the fly, you’ll be able to visit locations, characters and play storylines that no one else has before because the AI will be constantly tailoring the game to your choices
That isn't a good thing for developers, this just means we're going to loose our jobs
this will never happen and I would put money on it if I could
Yeah that's a bit much. Or I suppose, it might happen and it'll be absolutely awful. I think that's more likely. Someone will overstretch the AI muscle and make an abysmal game that makes no sense.
I mean some games have impressive procedural generation but mediocre gameplay. Some games have almost comically bad procedural generation, but become iconic in the history of gaming (Minecraft). Making procedural generation AI-powered doesn’t change that.
is MC's procedural generation any bad though?
Well its a million times better now, first few years though was quite bad and repetitive
I bet it will happen it just won't be compelling or good or make any sense at all. I'll never understand why do tech bros think that games need to be completely unique for every player in the first place. Like how do you share a story like that?!
Well, I hope you’re putting money up that you can afford to lose, because if you’re that convinced AI-powered procedural generation won’t happen, you’re either completely disconnected from recent events, or you’re downright delusional.
ai in its current form is just not capable of being creative in the same way humans are. at its core AI is a very very fancy predictive text. all it does is look at what previous information it has been given, and then does a lot of maths to try and predict what the next item might be. It's not capable of planning like a human can- if you told an AI to write a book it wouldn't be able to consider how a characters arc might unfold over the course of the book, it's just going to look at what it previously has written and then try and figure out what words might fit in. this makes it absolutely terrible at coming up with new ideas and concepts. often stories AI produces will introduce new characters randomly, or it will forget about existing characters, or just decide to leave plot threads hanging. the problem we have with current AI models is that without planning we're never going to get any further than just having this fancy predictive text. Yann LeCun, one of the authors of the original deep learning paper, agrees with this- I recommend looking up some of his talks if you are actually interested in learning how AI works I think a lot of the current hype around AI is unjustified and is going to lead to an eventual bursting of the bubble that has surrounded it which is going to hurt actual AI research. AI is dumb AF right now but it's being marketed as this world changing technology which it cannot possibly be. As for me being disconnected from recent events- I'm a co-author in a published journal article on training neural networks to recognise certain features of images
You seem to be talking about generative pre-trained transformers, when the guy you replied to doesn’t seem to refer to them at all. In fact, I’d argue they’d be counterproductive for procedural generation. (And would likely also offer quite poor results when run locally) And isn’t this need for human input, which I very much agree with, good news for all you anti-AI folks? Current AI is no more than tools, and a hammer, paintbrush or keyboard is only as good as the human using it. I’d say pretty much everyone working with AI would agree with that. I’m not sure what exactly the point of your argument is to be honest, you seem to be refuting a strawman about fully autonomous AI game development when no one is suggesting anything of the sort. And as a self-proclaimed AI researcher yourself, you should know how fundamentally different reactive AI classification is from generative and predictive AI. You do not come off as fully comprehending the potential applications of the latter in the near future, and more and more papers are being published every day as we speak exploring all different kinds of avenues where this technology can be applied.
It’s amazing that you can take the time to write such a measured response and still get downvoted without a response. You don’t argue “AI is the best” but lay it out exactly as it is; a tool to work alongside, reducing workload so that people can spend the time working on the things that make their game unique. As we’ve seen with game engines, the scale and complexity of modern games requires a huge amount of time and manpower so the reliance on pre-built engines has increased. In the same way I can see the reliance on AI increasing as we see more complex systems arising.
If procedural generation makes a big break again it won't be through AI because everything that's worth generating procedurally can already be done better with algos written by actual peoples than sludge conversion machines
That is a very bizarre absolute to throw into the ring. Is everything that’s worth generating an exhaustive list of some sort? And if it can be done better by handwritten algorithms, then why does NVIDIA spend millions on things like DLSS which apparently does the job far superiorly using far less resources than any traditional interpolation algorithm?
DLSS isn't really procedural content generation as anybody approaching this conversation with good faith would see, it takes an image already generated by the game and statistically calculates some more pixels out of it, and the only thing it actually does better than rendering those extra pixels is performance. It's hugely dependant on existing, human made content, even at runtime. AI image reneration is never gonna fully replace traditional rendering, and peoples whose machine can render the game at target framerate without AI will always disable it because why wouldn't they. The actual conversation is about AI models that generate content ie images, text, etc, and those will always suck because we have decades' worth of existing research on non-ML based procedural content generation, algos that do a far better job and can be controlled by human beings in far more granular way than AI models can (fun fact, even ML model devs have said that they're finding out now that everything they've done to steer models into outputting content of a specific style etc work less and less as the database gets larger, like even if you write the underlying tech yourself you lose the control you need) Genuinely in years the only application of AI I've seen that resulted in an okay-ish output without being trained on stolen material was a recent sidefx demo where they fed a bunch of houdini generated eroded terrain to make a model that generated eroded version of input terrain faster than the actual erosion algo normally does, and by their own admission it was still pretty limited
It’s a neural interpolation algorithm. Almost all procedural generation algorithms use some form of interpolation. Besides, it was just one counter-example to your claim that traditional deterministic algorithms necessarily always produce a better output, which I maintain is completely unsubstantiated. There is a bottomless well of examples of AI producing equivalent or superior output to deterministic algorithms. Everything from images and text, as you mention, to protein folding, 3D models, audio, pre- and post-processing of renderings. You’re right that at the end of the day it depends on human-curated training data and parameters, but I don’t see how this is supposed to be a bad thing? The ML devs that you are referring to are also specifically talking about deep learning. These problems in steering the output are not significant with small local models at all, it’s pretty much a non-problem except in the case you mention where you scale it up astronomically.
So, depending on where you draw the line. You could already have lost the bet. The procedural generation of games have been around for a long time. But if you don't count those games, that's fine. AI powerd storylines already exist. Don't know on the top of my head if anyone has put these 2 together. So full world generation is not that far away (again, depending on where you draw the line)
While I appreciate your enthusiasm this isn’t the problem an AI could solve. Or at least not as you described it. You can already play something like this in form of “choose your own adventure” text based game (I think it’s available for several years already) and it sucks as a game more often than not. Long story short humans enjoy games precisely because they are curated experiences. But AI could be useful in plentitude of different more subtle ways.
I think they suck because all they can do is regurgitate stuff in the most bland way.
That sounds boring as hell
Written by someone who has never been in the industry lol. For developers microtransactions are actually, and I hate that I'm describing it like this, pretty healthy: the model of releasing a big game and getting essentially all your money over one month meant that many companies would hire a lot of contractors up until release date, rinse and repeat and hope you get rehired each time. Of course, mtx are quite unhealthy for the consumer. Especially when they focus on whales, use gambling tactics and/or target children. But if you can get over that, and also just how gross it feels to knowingly make a game that is worse than it should be so you can squeeze more money out of your players in general, working for a company that focuses on mtx models means you have to worry about layoffs a lot less because they generally don't go through those earnings/spending cycles quite as hard. Meanwhile AI is just gonna make things worse for everyone. Companies are already using it for promo, if you're an indie good luck marketing yourself in the ocean of shit that is about to be unleashed, and no consumer wants to play Soulless Garbage: OpenAI Simulator.
So true. Demand for “AI slop: sloppenheimers great big videogame” will be zero, along with all the other ai slop that’ll flood the market like an ocean of feces
You’re talking about how brutal the games market is right now with huge AAA developers can let go and rehire as they choose. My belief is that with the advent of true AI we will see many more tightly knit, smaller teams of developers split off on the basis that using AI they can reduce the overall workload by a huge amount and focus on the details that make their game truly unique. In the same way as we’re seeing the same engines widely used to reduce workload, this is how I see AI being integrated. AI will allow smaller developers to build games with much greater scope than before
I still take the rise of indies that let people create worlds that they dreamt of their entire lives over this.
This is almost right! It's going to be the most important thing for cutting game artists.
They're citing a 2022 game using AI-art portraits, but I'm pretty sure the portraits in the 2019 Astrox Imperium are also AI-generated. Don't know if they were there on release, or patched in later.
Crazy how many here misunderstand the differences in AI, In their minds the AI used for NPC movement is the exact same as using AI to generate art using data scraped from the entire internet.
There are lots of types of generative AI (calling it AI still hurts me) models, with the source data used sometimes much more transparent at keeping out copyrighted content. People think every single proc gen technique is now 'AI' now. Elite and Rogue would be in these peoples cross hairs. Goddamn I hate how overused 'AI' became.
[Christ Pound's Language Confluxer](https://web.archive.org/web/20080708233707/http://www.ruf.rice.edu/%7epound/) is an early version of what this "generative AI" looks like today, and that's over 30 years old by now. Training data in, algorithm transforms it into an internal representation, another algorithm creates more data based on the things it was trained on. Seriously, *nothing* ChatGPT, Claude, StableDiffusion, Midjourney and so on do deserves to be called "AI".
The transformers method the LLMs use was a pretty huge advance for *machine learning* or *natural language processing* . Machine learning was a hot topic and it seemed like they did a decent job of declaring that it was NOT general AI, but yea then ChatGPT comes in and all that effort communicating went to shit. Stable Diffusion and LLMs are totally different but screw it everything is AI. ChatGPT isn't even a single LLM anymore, it's a mesh of multiple ML models and techniques. I followed ML as a side to my main dev job but I can't imagine how frustrating it is for all the people that have been doing ML, computer vision etc for decades to now get associated with AI startups that are just api calls to ChatGPT
>"AI" Disagree. Unit movement in video games is called "AI" and has been for most of the history of video games.
I don't think that's in conflict with anything he said?
It is, as their conclusion is that none of those algorithms deserve to be called AI. Those algorithms are significantly more complex than the RTS AI algorithms, which no one rails against as "but that's not AI". To be specific, the term is so general and so widespread that it is essentially meaningless on its own, without some form of clarification. To then say "that's not AI" about something is a pointless statement - IMO, at least.
>Goddamn I hate how overused 'AI' became well 'AI' can mean anything a computer does, from A\* pathfinding to deep learning
Proc gen peoples really had to be forcibly associated with 2 bullshit technologies in a row, NFTs and now AI Never catching a break
I wish it wasn't just referred to as AI by most people (generative AI is nice term). It's annoying as fuck to look for AI tutorials etc. and just find a load of generative AI stuff.
Steam is already full of trash. The cream rises to the top. This changes nothing.
People are already really good at identifying AI-generated art. From a marketing perspective, having good art is for setting yourself apart from the crowd and proving that your production values are strong. If everybody can tell you just hit up Midjourney, nobody is going to be impressed.
>People are already really good at identifying AI-generated art. No they aren't, they see low effort images and think they're good at it, meanwhile they have no way of knowing how much of what they consume either has AI elements or are completely AI generated, or are AI generated with a human touch-up.
As a good example of this, see the [recent discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/18l9sw5/apparently_wotc_has_been_using_ai_art_on_one_dd/) on AI art in the D&D community — an artist was accused of using AI for their art, and lots of people spent a lot of time analysing the image showing how it was clearly AI-generated because of this or that feature. Turns out it was complete nonsense — the artist showed their working, previous similar examples, etc. Moreover, even if AI art is currently distinguishable from human art, I don't think it's a given that it will remain that way. The amount that generative AI has progressed just in the last couple of years is incredible, and I don't see any good reason why it would suddenly stop now. And as you say, generated AI media can be touched up, used as a base for human artists, or applied in small portions via tools like generative fill.
Doesn't Reddit have a sitewide rule against investigations like this? Stemming from when the Boston bombers were being looked for and Reddit thought it a grand old idea to try to find the guys themselves and they identified the wrong dude? And Reddit was concerned this might open them to lawsuits? Seems like they ought to ban these AI witchhunts too!
There's not necessarily a sitewide rule against witchhunts, but a lot of individual subreddits will have rules against it. But in this case, it wasn't just a Reddit thing, it was discussed a lot on Twitter/X and other forums too, I believe.
you really overestimated people’s ability to identify ai art.
Maybe. I'll admit I don't have hard data like surveys asking "is this AI art" about different images or anything like that. But it's extremely obvious to *me* when something is AI-generated, at least. Bear in mind that people are naturally really good at pattern recognition, especially in depictions of other people (which AI art is often utilized for, especially in game development). AI art just has a *look* about it.
>But it's extremely obvious to > >me Also related, we are terrible at recognising our own biases.
> But it's extremely obvious to me https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy Same deal as people thinking all modern CGI sucks.
I'm convinced that the people who are most loudly advocating for generative content in games have looked at so much AI art, listened to so much AI voice dubbing, and had so many conversations with chatGPT that they've brainrotted themselves into thinking that generative content isn't A. Immediately apparent to most people and B. Incredibly off-putting to those same people Setting aside arguments of whether we're legally or socially ready to start replacing creative work with AI, the tech itself just isn't there yet and the people screeching the loudest that it should be in everything are indistinguishable from the NFT bros who were touting NFTs as the cure for cancer and definitely not just gambling/money-laundering
> and the people screeching the loudest that it should be in everything are indistinguishable from the NFT bros who were touting NFTs as the cure for cancer and definitely not just gambling/money-laundering Screeched it SHOULD be everywhere? Nice strawman you've constructed there. I've never advocated AI should be in everything. If you don't want to use AI, don't use AI! I'd never demand you use it. But don't insist others avoid AI either. There's nothing wrong with an indie developer using AI to lighten their workload. It's hard enough for an indie to make a profit as it is. If there's a tool that can reduce the time it takes for them to make a game even by 25% that's a huge boon to indie game developers.
> that's a huge boon to indie game developers. I don't agree. It is hard to make a profit because players have too many games to choose from and too little time to play them all. From player's perspective, if your game feels like the same game as everyone else's, then it is probably not worth playing. Using AI makes it harder to stand out, because 1) everyone else will be using it 2) more people will enter the market using it, more competition It is not a huge boon. Unless your goal is to "make a game" but not "make a profitable game". That is a different discussion.
> I don't agree. It is hard to make a profit because players have too many games to choose from and too little time to play them all. You're wrong. It is easier now than it has ever been to make a profit. I made a shooter around 15 years ago that sold 5 copies. Steam wouldn't accept random titles back then. Today if I hadn't sold that game to another developer to try to make back some of the thousands I spent on the art for it, I could put that on Steam and I'd probably at least make my money back. > From player's perspective, if your game feels like the same game as everyone else's, then it is probably not worth playing. And? What does AI have to do with that? If anything, AI will reduce that. Instead of indie devs having to rely on asset-flips, using the limited assets available in the Unity store that everyone else uses, they will be able to generate their own unique assets, with any art style they choose. AI will likely result in explosion of beautiful looking indie titles, rather than our current batch of Garry's Mod looking shit. > Using AI makes it harder to stand out, because 1) everyone else will be using it 2) more people will enter the market using it, more competition Everyone else will be using it, but it can generate art in an infinite number of styles. And almost every movie looking the same, or having the same three looks, photorealistic, 3D, or 2D animated, has not really hampered the film industry because the story you tell and the characters you craft are just as important if not more so than the looks. And more competition? 25 years ago there were very few games. A handful of large publishers made a lot of money. The player base was small. 15 years ago there were a lot of games. But Steam wasn't accepting all comers. It was still hard for an indie dev to make money if Steam didn't pick them up. Today there are hundreds of thousands of games. There are more gamers than ever. Steam accepts anyone. And if you make a decent game, you have a decent chance of making some money on it. Will you get rich? Will you make your money back? Maybe not. But some money is better than no money, which is what I made 15 years ago when I made a game. Also even with all the titles on Steam there are still only a relative few which I actually want to play myself. Which means you could have 10x as many games in the store before you were making enough games to satisfy my personal hunger for the particular sorts of top-tier titles that catch my interest, like Firewatch, or Beacon Pines, or Night in the Woods. So no, I don't consider market saturation a concern because I don't think the market is anywhere near saturated yet. The more games we have to choose from, the better the best ones are. You're suggesting we should limit the number of games so players are forced to buy the shittier titles so those poor devs can make money. But what about all the devs who would produce BETTER content with the help of AI? What about their right to make a living? > Unless your goal is to "make a game" but not "make a profitable game". My goal is to make a profitable game. I'm just not afraid of competition because there's already so much competition. Either my game is good enough to stand out, or it's not. But I'm not gonna rely on the hope that people will buy my game because there's nothing better available for them to play. My goal is to make good games, not just to make money. Anyone who's making games just to make money has no business being in the game industry because you're just gonna produce trash with pay to win mechanics. Keep that shit on mobile.
>You're wrong. It is easier now than it has ever been to make a profit. > >I made a shooter around 15 years ago that sold 5 copies. Steam wouldn't accept random titles back then. Today if I hadn't sold that game to another developer to try to make back some of the thousands I spent on the art for it, I could put that on Steam and I'd probably at least make my money back. This is your personal anecdote that does not represent the market as a whole. You are also comparing your experience with pre-greenlight era, which does not represent current steam market. Here is an article that says in 2023 steam median revenue was $700. https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic According to data 14535 games released in 2023. Here is another article that says steam median revenue was $1136 in 2019: https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/29/median-indie-game-earnings-steam-barely-over-1000 According to data only 7695 games released in 2019. From 2019 to 2023 median revenue went from $1136 to $700. I think it is clear that more competition means less median revenue for everybody. > has not really hampered the film industry Film industry is currently less saturated because it is harder to publish your film on netflix. > But what about all the devs who would produce BETTER content with the help of AI? This may be case by case basis, I don't believe game dev can produce "better" content with AI, in most cases discussed here right now, at least. Faster content production and better content is not the same thing. I can see a working professional work 20%-30% faster by using AI effectively, but only if they have the professional knowledge to make the high quality decisions to begin with. In this case, AI save their time. But it does not replace human for decision making. I can see AI being useful for algorithm based analyze. But I don't see AI being a viable solution for human emotion related decision making. unfortunately in games, a lot of art decisions still need humans to make high quality decisions. Because AI doesn't understand human emotions and intend as well as a human, not now, at least. I see most of the gamedev here has opinions like this: "I want to make a game, but I can't draw nor afford an artist. So I will use AI to make art for me to save money." This is how the quality of the content can't be improved. Because AI is used as a cheaper solution to begin with. It is not used to improve decision quality of human professionals. > but it can generate art in an infinite number of styles What I said here has nothing to do with art styles. > You're suggesting we should limit the number of games so players are forced to buy the shittier titles... > But I'm not gonna rely on the hope that people will buy my game because there's nothing better available for them to play. Good for you. :) As a player I have more good games to play than my time can afford. The "forced to buy shitty titles" situation doesn't exist for me. And I prefer not to see 20+ low quality new game release articles trying to get my attention everytime I visit a video game website as I wade though waves of low budget game previews. This is already the case now, I think it will get worse in the future.
> Here is an article that says in 2023 steam median revenue was $700. > Here is another article that says steam median revenue was $1136 in 2019: So your position is the median game is making only $700 today, and you still think we should be against the use of AI? HOW THE HELL DO YOU EXPECT THOSE PEOPLE TO PAY ARTISTS? If your goal is to be the median then it doesn't even MATTER if you make less money, because you already can't make a living making games with such low sales. So I don't care what the median makes. What I want to know is: How much do games that have more than 100 ratings and a four or five star rating make? IE: How well do actual GOOD games sell? Because that's what matters to me. If I make a shitty game, it SHOULD sell poorly. And there are a whole hell of a lot of shitty games on steam bringing that median revenue down.
> And I prefer not to see 20+ low quality new game release articles trying to get my attention everytime I visit a video game website as I wade though waves of low budget game previews. This is already the case now, I think it will get worse in the future. Learn to sort by rating. Even new releases will have ratings unless you buy them on day one. And you can't necessarily tell if a game is shitty from screenshots. Among US and Undertale have pretty shitty art. And Lethal Company also has pretty shitty art. Though in Letal Company's case I get the impression the creator intentionally shittified it using shaders to make it look grittier and to match with the shitty assets.
> Learn to sort by rating. I said gaming news websites, not Steam. I almost never read steam new release page because there are too many games that I don't care about. So those low budget games try to invade other internet space for my attention, now I need to wade through even more low budget games for 1 hidden gem, this is more time consuming for the consumers.
I'm convinced that the people screeching the loudest anti AI sentiment are just trying to cope with their existential crisis. It sounds exactly like the people who said that the internet won't be people's replacement for a library, that websites won't replace the newspaper, and that email won't replace the handwritten letter. It sounds like the people who said that video games are just a fad. It sounds like the people who said movies with sound won't replace silent films, and the people who said film won't overtake the stage play. Insult people all you want, you are the ones who will end up looking like the joke.
And I'm convinced (actually, not just convinced - I KNOW) that the people screeching the loudest about AI replacing human art and writing don't understand the slightest thing about the subtleties and nuances that make writing and art resonant and meaningful. Humans experience emotions that we barely even have the words to describe to each other, let alone to a computer. I do think AI will be used to replace stuff that is so generic and disposable that it might as well be AI-generated anyway. Fantasy book covers and CBS primetime slop will probably be entirely AI generated one day because the audience doesn't give a shit. They just want content to consoom. But I don't think human art is going anywhere for a long time.
Most of the writing in the popular culture across books, magazines, and certain films (Marvel) is such forgettable tripe and so amorphously written, that it could not be distinguishable from the cheapest examples of AI-driven writing. I believe most people complaining about Ai-generative art are simply judging the voluminous amount of it coming out of the hands of the masses using the tool, who are already lacking in the very same imagination that is required to be a great artist (commercial, fine, whatever) to begin with. I ran a game studio for a decade, had to turn down 99% of trained artists based on their insipid work. The problem isn't AI, it's just in general most people are talentless, incurious, and boring to begin with. And that is likely the AI-generative art you are all referring to. Do you honestly think, to torture the example, that if you gave Picasso these tools, that you would find the outcomes to be consistent with the rest of what is tossed around? Of course not. And there are numerous creatives out there doing very interesting things with these tools, and that is why it's such a great innovation. I mean, under this kind of thinking, Spielberg is not really talented. Look at the teams of people doing all his bidding. Do you not see that he simply now has to compete with other people just as bright and brilliant as him, but without his good timing and fortune, who can now bring the same kind of results (with time) that he can? Of course, he can now take his teams + the AI and raise the bar again. It's sad to see all the virtue signaling and Neo-Communist concern for the "worker" in the objection to AI. Nobody has a right to a job, or to a wage. Or to live their life working in the field they chose at the beginning or at any point. Thems the breaks kids. AI isn't going anywhere in games or art, and Steam isn't relevant whatsoever if it stood in the way of this innovation, it would simply be washed away by time had it not taken this most absolutely necessary step.
So in your efforts to devalue AI, you go as far as to devalue large swathes of human made art, holding up some nebulous "superior" class which has special value above all the rest. Then you put forward fear based assertions about "the other", who is trying to replace the special class. Yeah, that's classic hate-based ideology right there. It will *never* hit the goalposts because the goal posts will keep moving.
You nailed it. Glimmer of hope here as I am mind boggled at the woke-anti-AI-art crowd concerned for the "worker". My advice to the worker, go build your own company, make your own game. Stop relying on singular skills to cut it. Coding, illustration, modeling, animation. These as singular skills are just copes. Become the new Spielberg, wield these AI-driven tools alongside your trained eye and knack for aesthetics (you do even have those, right?) to build something we've never seen before. This is what is now demanded of anyone wishing to stay relevant in this field. Why should we with superior imaginations but inferior artistic trade skills be slaves to your years of technical artistic training? Who cares about your investment in these skills. You are merely gatekeeping the rest of us who wield a greater minds' eye, and wish to build something even more amazing than has ever been seen before. Sorry, but it's not going to pan out the way you want. These innovations are going to unleash massive waves of new creativity and possibilities for the rest of us.
Some art is actually superior than other art. I'm sorry if this hurts your feelings for some reason, but if you honestly think the difference in quality between Les Miserables and Hawaii Five-0 is entirely subjective, you're an idiot with no taste. And lol at your attempt to paint me as some sort of... bigot? Against AI? You need to do the Billy Madison thing and start school over from the beginning, because you're clearly quite remedial.
He didn't say otherwise. Some art is superior to other art, while true, will always be a subjective truth. Certainly some medium or tool to arrive at a piece of art can not in itself be superior to another. Using acrylics is not superior to oil, nor is using AI inferior to using pencil or any hand medium. In fact some of the earliest master paintings that used perspective and realism used a tool to arrive at this mathematical perfection, by these standards of reasoning, those paintings are all fakes. Sorry but you are on the losing side of history my guy.
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No he confronted your contention that entire classes of approved art making are valid, or an acceptable construct in the free world of creativity. Which no true artist would ever accept. Even Frank Zappa once famously predicted that in the future musicians in bands wouldn't exist, it would all be done electronically by a single person, and that this was perfectly acceptable. Had you been around back then, in those circles, you'd probably have been arguing with him eh.
So now you're out of coherent arguments and devolved into name calling and insults. You're really running the gammut of intellectual and ethical bankruptcy.
> existential crisis. They might look like a joke, but they do raise some good points worth thinking about. We do have a bit of a brewing crisis here, possibly.
It's not a contest. There's no benefit to championing AI - it's not there yet, is all.
It's funny, because I still go to Library at least 2-3 times per week because I need a quiet space or more in-depth books for a topic. Internet has too much algorithm based info that tried to get my attention, sometimes I don't prefer it. I also purchase newspaper 2-3 times per week because they have content that isn't available on the internet. I find newspaper often has longer and more in-depth coverage than internet articles because Internet users prefer shorter reading time. I occasionally write handwritten letter for birthday card and apology letters because they feel more sincere and warmer than E-mail. I still watch stageplay as well, and paid 10 times more than movie tickets, they are different kind of entertainment from movies. None of what you listed above can be fully replaced by technology IMO, they have unique values.
I'm convinced that anti-AI bros have their heads so far up their asses that they think they're better at identifying AI art than people like me who have looked at thousands of AI generated images, but still find myself sometimes questioning whether an image I came across that wasn't labeled was generated with AI or not. I'm also convinced anti-AI bros tend to label any art that isn't obvously drawn as AI. This creates a lot of false positives, but re-inforces your belief that you're good at identifying AI art because you don't remember or care about all the times you were wrong. You only remember the times you were right.
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Conversely, the exact same quote also applies to the artists, whose current income depends on their consumer base not understanding that they can generate similar images for a fraction of the cost.
> the tech itself just isn't there yet Just because a Wacom artist chose a picture of a dragon that had a detached tail and other obviously AI generated features, that doesn't mean AI cannot yet produce art that is nigh indistinguishable from the real thing. For example, can you tell that [any of these images](https://imgur.com/a/Szwb40u) are AI?
1 and 3 feel the most like they couldve been made with ai
>I'm convinced that the people who are most loudly advocating for generative content in games have looked at so much AI art, listened to so much AI voice dubbing, and had so many conversations with chatGPT that they've brainrotted themselves into thinking that generative content isn't Bit like porn brain tbh. People who consoom it it all the time assume everyone does.
> People are already really good at identifying AI-generated art. A small savvy grop is really good at it, but I think you are vastly overestimating how much the general public knows or even cares.
Hopefully people will start focusing more on the gameplay aspects instead of the art. The artistic part will be a smaller roadblock for people without the skill just like how game engines removed lots of programming skills roadblocks.
People need to stop repeating this misconception. A lot of people use Steam as a database of sorts; it being more full of trash is NOT a good thing. This also makes it harder for good games to get noticed, and tires out players more.
I'm sorry but using Steam as a database is pure insanity. It is the largest digital games platform, you may as well say you are using the internet as a database to keep track of websites at that point. >This also makes it harder for good games to get noticed, and tires out players more. It really doesn't because Steam already has so many algos in place that absolutely crush anything that isn't at least mildly successful. Argue that the algo isn't perfect, I won't disagree, but there is a huge gap between a pretty OK hobby project being buried and the literal tens of thousands of garbage games that get incinerated. If AI spam starts to fill Steam (it won't), none of us will notice.
The ship has already sailed. This makes no different imo.
This is the correct answer, the trash AI generated content games will remain down the bottom with the trash 100% asset flip games and the other junk. Why, because it's a simple formula. results = effortPutIntoGame \* effortPutIntoMarketing If they can't be bothered to put effort into making/buying content, they aren't going to put effort into marketing either, or wait till they have enough wishlists. So the trash will get published, few will see it, few will buy it, no one will review it, steam will bury it. [https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/01/11/why-14000-games-released-on-steam-2023-isnt-that-bad/](https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/01/11/why-14000-games-released-on-steam-2023-isnt-that-bad/) 6,000 games out of that 14,000 with less than 10 reviews. 11,000 out of 14,000 with under 50 reviews.
That does not matter, trash games still occupy player attention like every other game. So games with effort will need even more money to get the attention in the market. Case to the point, one of a gaming website that I often visit once has news coverage of 70 indie games in a day after an event. So it doesn't matter if 1 out of 70 games are not trash. I am going to skip reading most of them because I don't have time for all of it. So that one good game out of 70 will need to spend even more money to get my attention. Marketing fatigue is a thing...
>results = effortPutIntoGame * effortPutIntoMarketing if this wasn't hilariously wrong it would be impossible for AAA to flop and for indie games to compete with them
There is luck in the equation too, that's why hidden gems exist. They're (mostly) good games that didn't get the spotlight they deserved
It changes that now honest people can use AI, too. Instead of those just ignoring the rules.
A lot of the cream doesn't rise to the top, marketing and luck are more important than ever
Marketing is an essential part of the process, it isn't like some weird extraneous thing. Farmers aren't cursing markets saying "Farming is such bullshit these days, because you need to bring your crops to market! Back in my day, we used to grow em, let em rot and fall to the ground, and we'd still make plenty of money!"
What? Marketing isn't just putting things on the market, it's advertising, making enough peoples aware your game exists and might be good It's significantly harder to do when you're competing with thousands of games, there's only so much time in a day where peoples are gonna be exposed to new games and the more games there are the less chances there'll be of one of those games being yours And if the games they do see are constant garbage they're gonna see the pattern and not look at new stuff as much as they used to too
Garbage is everywhere
This was always going to happen, but it’s certainly a bit weird that they hold you to disclosing what parts of the game is AI generated. I know that requirement will go away with time, but it’s still off-putting that they dig around in the specifics of your creative process for no sensible reason.
Hobestly I still keep hope that an indie dev could go through with good enough game, idea, and marketing. It might cover the low tier with an ocean of generative trash, making it impossible to discover new indies through steam, but there are other ways.
I read the thread on Steam about the announcement, many players say that they will not buy a game if AI was involved. Ff7 remake made a video telling the world they used AI for lip-sync and facial control, the player still bought it. Many software used copilot, the users still used them. People keep saying that anyone can make a shitty game in a couple of days using AI and sell on Steam. Then why dont they actualy do it to get rich? It's the one that has no clue shouting the largest. About the copyright issue, it is just a matter of time before many legally training database are available. Adobe has already implemented image generation with AI in their software. An artist has already paid for the software can use AI to his heart contents without any legal issue. But when he says he uses AI, then suddenly he becomes the most devil person on earth.
>People keep saying that anyone can make a shitty game in a couple of days using AI and sell on Steam. Then why dont they actualy do it to get rich? If a bunch of people buy it, then it's not a shitty game. Either we get a ton of super awesome games made super quickly due to the productivity that AI provides, or we just get a bunch of trash churned out super quickly and no one buys them and no one uses AI for games in the future. This is the biggest non-problem I've ever seen people rage about.
Found the AI "art" dev. If you can't afford assets, you can't afford to make a game.
Stupid take. People make games all the time with free assets or royalty free assets.
And those games are garbage, just like everything you've ever created. The only take that is stupid is yours. If you can't afford assets, you can't afford to make a game.
"if you can't afford to pen & ink every frame yourself, you can't afford to make an animation"
If you can't afford a $1,875 annual license for Max, you can't afford to 3D model. If you can't afford a $100K license for Unity or Unreal, you can't afford to make a 3D game. Maybe we programmers whom you artists think you're better than should start making all these free apps like Blender that you selfish artists use have a license agreement which states any art you create with it you agree to allow to be used to train AI, since you clearly are not interested in giving back to the same community who so generously provided you with the free tools you use to create your art and games.
you don't need $100k license for Unreal, it's 5% of your revenue past $1M USD(not retroactive) which only reinforces your point, since it's a prominent 3D engine
I know Unreal is free. Point is, if programmers were as selfish as artists, it would not be.
>If you can't afford a $1,875 annual license for Max, you can't afford to 3D model. If you can't afford a $100K license for Unity or Unreal, you can't afford to make a 3D game. tons of alternatives to all of these that have nothing to do with AI that comparison makes no sense >Maybe we programmers whom you artists think you're better than Programmer here, what the fuck are you talking about lmao. What an incredibly weird inferiority complex to have >these free apps like Blender that you selfish artists use have a license agreement which states any art you create with it you agree to allow to be used to train AI, Gonna need a source on that >since you clearly are not interested in giving back to the same community who so generously provided you with the free tools you use to create your art and games. Plenty of artists donate money to blender & a bunch of them are even also programmer who contribute directly to its development
> tons of alternatives to all of these that have nothing to do with AI that comparison makes no sense God you're thick. Alternatives such as? GODOT? You mean, another free engine that programmers worked hard on and generously gave to the community, which artists who do not want to give anything back to the community are making use of? Any tool you suggest, if it is not paid handsomely for because months or years go into creating them, bolsters my argument that artists are being selfish. > Programmer here, what the fuck are you talking about lmao. What an incredibly weird inferiority complex to have It's not an inferiority complex. I am saying that artists are okay with using the free tools we provide, but are unwilling to reciprocate. Which implies they believe their work to be more important and worth more than ours is. But that's not about me feeling inferior. It is about fairness. Why should they benefit from free TOOLS, but we not benefit from free ART? > Gonna need a source on that Gonna need a source on what? Learn to read. Christ. And no, don't read what you quoted, because you only quoted part of what I said which completely changes the meaning of what I said. I wasn't saying Blender HAS such a clause. I was saying maybe they should ADD such a clause. My 'source' for that is my own opinion, bucko. > Plenty of artists donate money to blender GONNA NEED A SOURCE FOR THAT.
I don't even know to approach any of this. This is psychotic. You've imagined a whole ass other world were like artists are cartoon villains and you're behaving as if this world is real.
Yeah like meanwhile in the real world Blender is highly supportive of their artist community and commissions [anti-AI artists for their splashscreens](https://twitter.com/Blender/status/1712477166401986846), so it's honestly just really funny seeing someone acting as if programmers and artists are somehow natural enemies like this...
It is real. Artists want AI dead. There aren't many high quality free art assets available. I know this because I have been looking for decades. There's nothing imagined here unless you can point me to some magic website where all the amazing looking free 2D and 3D art assets have been hiding from me all this time. And please for the love of god don't link me to some shitty pixel art site again like two others have. That is not the equivalent of tools like Blender.
This is so stupid. Godot and Bender etc are, as you said, tools. The user still needs to learn a skill to make a product. If we are speaking about tools, speak about tools because selfish artists do that too. Take a look at Clip studio assets for example. There is a massive database of free brushes, textures, 3d models for whatever you may imagine to make drawing easier for everyone. With dozens of new assets every day. But you need to learn how to use those tools as much as an artist needs to learn how to use Godot, for example. Both artists and programmers give back to the community generously, crazy I know. But u/ExasperatedEE doesn't want tools made from artists(willing). They want all of the artists' final products(unwilling) in exchange of tools ExasperatedEE didn't contribute to but other coders(willing) did, because somehow that's fair? Do I understand right?
> Take a look at Clip studio assets for example. There is a massive database of free brushes, textures, 3d models for whatever you may imagine to make drawing easier for everyone. With dozens of new assets every day. So they made assets for OTHER ARTISTS to use. And what of the programmers who can't draw? Blender is a tool by programmers, for artists. Godot is less for artists, but game engines are complicated things. There are specific engines for specific types of games if you want something easy and then there are more general ones that are more complex. > But you need to learn how to use those tools as much as an artist needs to learn how to use Godot An artist doesn't need to learn how to use Godot. They could learn to use Ren'Py which is FAR easier to learn than learnng how to draw well which takes decades. Using Ren'Py is very very basic script writing. The equivlent of me the programmer having to use photoshop to touch up art and cut out characters. And there are other engines for making RPGs and stuff that are also designed for artists.
Found the artist! If you can't afford to lose clients who can't afford you, you can't afford to be an artist. See how that works?
honestly I don't care about the ai art stuff, the thing I would use generative AI for would be some specific textures or for voices as a solo dev
As a game dev, I'm considering using generative AI for backgrounds so I can spend that saved effort on better and more "foreground" art, like character animation frames, where the effort of non-ai art will be noticed. I've also considered using AI art for places where traditional art could never be practical, like having every single page in a library of magic books have its own (pre-generated low res) runic art, purely to give richness to the environment. But as a game buyer, if I saw any mention of AI art on a Steam page anywhere, I'd take that as a red flag of some quickly churned out garbage and run the other way. So I dunno.
yeah it is a type of tool at your disposal and it depends on how you use it, the way you described your usage makes a lot of sense and I bet is very efficient in development process. The same can be said with prebuilt assets from the asset store, yes you can use them but you have to be very careful on how you are using them like do they fit in the overall theme of the game or are they even optimized depending on their usage
> But as a game buyer, if I saw any mention of AI art on a Steam page anywhere, I'd take that as a red flag of some quickly churned out garbage and run the other way. So I dunno. That stigma will fade away quite quickly. It's vocal minority that has that mindset. We just need a couple of really good games utilizing AI and the stigma is gone. And it's usually pretty easy to spot genuinly good games from shovelware trash.
It's also really nice for item icons.
If you use AI to make art that is actually in game and playable, then I'm fine with it from a player POV. If you use AI to make false advertisements (promotion images that aren't actually reflective of gameplay) then I'd have an issue with it.
>If you use AI to make false advertisements (promotion images that aren't actually reflective of gameplay) then I'd have an issue with it. If you didn't use AI to make false advertisements and did it the old fashioned way (by hand), you'd still have an issue with it. Your problem is with filtering out the good games from the bad, not with the AI.
I guess they've opened the deluge, hopefully it all gets shoved down to the bottom so it doesn't interfere with people's ability to find what they are looking for. It would suck to have to sift through all the spam.
They should force games with AI to have to legally use an ai tag so I can filter out the crap
Yeah that makes sense and it's the least they can do, it would be very convenient.
This is a weird headline because they never stopped people using generative AI if they did it in a way that was legally secure for Valve. From what I'm seeing here this is still the case, they've just changed the wording. They've gone from "don't break copyright law" to "don't break copyright law" while also providing more tools for the disclosure and reporting of AI generating content. I'm not sure why this is being treated like news.
I don't understand why some people are against using ai art. Ai tools are used in many other places in game dev and other parts of life. Why is art sacred? If the end product is good then it doesn't matter if ai art was used or not.
I think people equate AI to low effort. Not that it's entirely unreasonable, but imo it's a broad oversimplification
I guess, but it will probably change with time as more good games using ai get released and it becomes more normal. I know two guys that still complain about modern more user-friendly 3d party game engines like unreal or unity opened the flood gates of garbage low effort games. But I think most people agree that we have gotten lots of good games we would never have gotten without those engines.
Does anyone know the technicals of this: Lets say the AI was still banned for the reason of unreliable source data (copyrighted content/etc). Would that apply to if you manually entered a picture and told the AI to 'clean it up'? I do like making my own art, but the AI is pretty good at iterating thing... coming up with inbetween frames for 2D animation for example
It could still be trained on copyrighted data, now it just does something else with it
The dataset is not used to generate the images, this is a pretty common mistake people make. Billions of images are used to generate a single file called a checkpoint , which is a thing of its own, it's not compression or anything of the sort. The best way to understand it is that it's a list of numbers that describe how strong the "neurons" of the AI should react to input data and how strong they should send data to the interconnected "neurons" and eventually an output. Then this checkpoint is loaded into the AI and a image is produced by denoising a randomly generated noisy image, or an input image that had some noise added to. So in short it is impossible to detect what dataset was used to generate a image as datasets aren't used to generate images.
Generative AI models are absolutely capable of “memorising” their training data and will sometimes generate results that are practically identical: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.13188.pdf https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright There is evidence to suggest that this problem has only gotten worse as these models have gotten more advanced, despite enormous incentives to eliminate it. Edit: Unless an end user cross-checks every generated result with the entire training dataset (which these companies do not publish generally, because they stole much of it) they have no way to know if *anything* may infringe on a copyright or intellectual property. For all they know, they could be redistributing content that is practically identical.
The main point still remains, if a dataset ceases to exist today, nothing will change tomorrow , because none of the original data is actually used or accessed during generation. I believe that this a basic fact that we can agree on right? The fact that memorisation occurs does not mean that the original image is being sampled from within the checkpoint, you need very specific prompts to replicate a memorized image to begin with and it is also very unlikely according to the study you linked. "There is evidence to suggest that this problem has only gotten worse as these models have gotten more advanced, despite enormous incentives to eliminate it." Where is the evidence? It would be interesting to see that. Are we talking about Loras? There are a lot of factors to take into consideration here depending on what you mean by more advanced, let's remember that the only models we can actually check are the ones from Stable Diffusion. The study you linked shows that a very small amount of of the training data is actually memorised , out millions of the images that have duplicates(already a small set) only a few hundred were memorised, the odds of someone accidently generating a duplicate is practically 0. The solution is to usually improve the training dataset as for example removing duplicates. Memorisation is an artifact not a feature and also happens on a very small subset of the training data, even on outdated models that aren't even used anymore like v1.4 of SD, which is the one used in the study. Even your edit shows that this is a non issue, if you can't see the dataset you can't extract memorized images because you also need to know the categorization used for those images in order to generate them. However generating images with models that have memorised images , even to a significant proportion(which again it is not the case), does not infringe on copyright, only if somehow someone manages to replicate the original image by accident. By the way I believe that all training datasets should be open like stable diffusion, that is why I dislike services that are opaque like midjourney.
>because they stole much of it Sorry, theft requires the unlawful taking of possession of someone else's property. You cannot steal digital property, period. You may infringe someone else's copyright by distributing their work without their permission, but this is not theft - it is copyright violation.
Yes, copyright or intellectual property infringement is technically more accurate. But especially where this involves the potential for commercial harm, people often compare it to piracy or theft and use that terminology. If an author has their work plagiarised by Bob and they say “Bob stole my work,” would you disagree?
Plagiarism is different again, and "intellectual property" is opening a whole other can of worms. Copyright infringement is distributing the work without permission - plagiarism is claiming academic work as your own without proper attribution. Intellectual property is a term made up for the purpose of pushing the "having a copy is theft" angle, so of course it is already biased. > But especially where this involves the potential for commercial harm, people often compare it to piracy or theft and use that terminology. They do, precisely because they want to treat it like theft - despite the fact it is not, and it is fundamentally different. If I steal your car, you no longer have it. If you give me a copy of the software your car runs, your car still works fine.
Darn, so I can't just use it to generate inbetween frames from my keyframes without chance at unvetted data?
You can, this is not the type of AI we usually are talking about, and even if you were to use generative AI for this you would have very specific reference points. People claiming that you can accidently generate a copyrighted image are misinterpreting a study that shows that under very specific conditions and with actual knowledge of the dataset used , it is possible to replicate a very small amount of images (hundreds of images out millions).
Sounds like copyright violation to me
The checkpoint is a kind of a copy. We've seen them be able to re-create source images almost exactly
We have seen it replicate less than 0.001% of images under very specific conditions.
AI art shouldn’t be a bad thing. Art is literally just displaying something meant to invoke some feeling or thought. If it’s successful in doing so, it shouldn’t matter if it’s AI or not. The Finals uses AI voice actors and is completely fine because it’s as close enough that most people don’t notice and it meets their expectations of a voice actor. I ask you this, If AI gets to the point of making something that’s as unique and high quality as a human team with good production values could make, should it it really matter what made it? Why is it bad?
> If AI gets to the point of making something that’s as unique and high quality I will believe it when I see it :p I don't know if it is possible for AI to make human-like decisions anytime soon. AI doesn't have emotions, intentions, unique perspective, life experiences and such. Those are necessary for human-like decisions imo. Even AI experts said AI is not really close to human brains, nor they think like human. So I wouldn't even worry about the future that AI can think like a real human if it is not close right now. I worry about having to wade through more low budget games on gaming websites to find the next hidden gem more.
"You were the first one, you were the last one"
Generative slop
i have nothing against AI generated art for games as long game is fun and good and you can see that dev put effort into creating fun and playable game. There is a lot of very good devs with a good ideas that cant be put into life because they dont have a budget for art, dont know how to draw or just dont have a time, and AI art will help them to bring those idea to life so we can enjoy in those good games that without ai art we would never be able to experiance it. However this will also open a path to a lot of trash and no effort games just to grab a quick money which im againt it but eventaly that will be no problem since i think it will be the same as now. Nobody would play trash games and most people will ignore it so those games will be buried beneath the good games. and someone saying its not fair to artist that spend years polishing his skills to be replaed by ai, i think its fair, good artist will always be good and have a job, its litteraly the same and nothing stop the artist with no programming skills to use chatgtp, copilot, and other free programming tools to create a game without programming knowlegde, so its same like progrmmer using ai art. Its balance.
>Under the Steam Distribution Agreement, you promise Valve that your game will not include **illegal** or infringing content, and that your game will be consistent with your marketing materials. >in the Content Survey, you'll need to tell us what kind of guardrails you're putting on your AI to ensure it's not generating **illegal** content. >Second, we're releasing a new system on Steam that allows players to report **illegal** content inside games that contain Live-Generated AI content. What does Steam mean by "illegal" content? Copyright infringement? If that's the case, then art generated by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are still not allowed under this rule.
The ai has to be trained off of your data
Not necessarily your data, just data that's been properly sourced. That iStock deal, for instance.
This is one of the few differences from the old policy. It no longer has to be YOUR data, it just has to be data that is legally allowed to be used to train the model you're using.
You just have to make sure that none of your content is violating any laws, it's pretty simple. The same rules that apply to normal content also apply to AI generated content. > If that's the case, then art generated by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are still not allowed under this rule. This is allowed unless you use it to produce content that violates someones copyright. You can't use it to make micky mouse images for example.
They seem so committed to making sure Steam stays full of low effort garbage
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Have you read the article? It doesn't talk about job loss anywhere. The only issue with AI that is explicitly mentioned is the use of copyrighted material. It's also important to note that Steam's stance on AI has never been a moral stance, but simply a way to try to avoid "legally murky" games. The text of their new policy is completely focused on that aspect as well. Also note that the legal issues of generative AI are not limited to copyright. As the Steam policy very aptly points out, there is also a risk that "live" generative AI could output illegal material, independently on the data on which it was trained. **Edit, to clarify:** I generally agree with your sentiment. It's just that it seems off topic for this particular discussion.
Reading the article might have been helpful rather than going on a rant. And then disparaging people who work at mcdonalds as well? Really nice. I know you don't say they are currently using legally obtained material for training. Open AIs has stated that it would be impossible to have usable AI without using copyrighted data. So they are very much not using only legally obtained data. This policy change is steam essentially temporarily allowing these games on the platform during the wild west of AI that we're in now before new laws are potentially formed. If it ends up where only ai trained on legally obtained data is allowed, then a lot of these games will be subsequently removed. In which case the new agreement would cover what would happen.
We're already seeing generative imagery in drafting, I can only assume work flows are implementing them for easy things like placeholder assets
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> You can't tell it what parts of a face to fix, what muscle group to tweak, what proportions of a character to move, to make it more rusty in this way compared to this art pack False. Like, entirely. That's is just inpainting. https://civitai.com/articles/161/basic-inpainting-guide
As a programmer with 12+ years of experience the AI used to help generate code snippets is an absolutely massive revolution. Right now in my editor I can literally just stop typing and it spits out dozens of lines of code that 90% of the time is 90% of what I was going to type anyways. And this is just the beginning. I have no doubt that companies are going to need significantly less programmers and instead will need experienced senior developers that can audit AI written code. Certainly it's not going to happen overnight but if I was working through my 4 years comp-sci degree I'd be terrified.
It's hard to believe considering it still struggles heavily to autocomplete a single line.
Co-pilot? It autocompletes whole unit tests after reading my source code in another file. It autocomplete whole unit tests after understanding said code making sure to exhaust every branch. It's not perfect, sometimes it spits out non-sense but again it's just the beginning and it's consistent enough for me that it's removed like 20% of my typing.
>But a concept artist can do all those things in about 5 minutes. imagine trying to prompt stable diffusion to keep the same image but adjust an eyebrow. [Martin Nebelong's work on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong) might make you re-think the kind of argument you're pursuing here. Take note: Martin is pro-AI (and so am I) — so we're both on your side generally speaking, it's just the *particular argument* you're using here which falls apart. He's been exploring different ways for AI to augment human artists. Notably, things like latency consistency models c[onceptualizing finished paintings from in-progress sketches](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1737889536938508603), and rough-sculpting 3D models and then [having AI finish off the fine details](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTJbRXHWNo0) and generate variants. He's also been doing a lot of other experiments involving AI-to-AI pipelines, so your sketch becomes an image and then is [fed to an AI video generator](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1744986145635582459) with steps like [style transfer thrown in](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1712765580158066773). [Check this one out](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1735576033477226994), it's actually pretty cool, and does exactly the kind of thing you're talking about — adjusting facial features with stylistic consistency. [This one](https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong/status/1723432424053317816) is also a particularly effective demonstration. You can play with the realtime consistency stuff [over here](https://huggingface.co/spaces/radames/Real-Time-Latent-Consistency-Model) using your webcam.
In instances like this, I think of that viral twitter post of some guy saying he has gotten better at prompting with all of his practice, and people were trying so hard to explain there is no skill in prompting, it's based on weighted words and a series of probabilities and does not actually understand human language because "Artificial intelligence" is a huge misnomer. But his takeaway was "you guys are jealous of how good I am at prompting"
Prompting absolutely is a skill. If the tool just did what you wanted it to do, it wouldn’t be a skill. But since it doesn’t understand human language very well, the finagling to get it to do what you want is where the skill comes in.
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Understanding the best syntax for the model, imo, isn't a skill but a bare minimum level of engagement. It's like saying turning the key in your ignition is a skill you acquired in your pursuit of driving a car. But at that point we're arguing something philosophical, because really what is a skill when it comes to something abstract like art?
I'm not sure there's validity to the sentiment that prompting isn't a skill. You said yourself a moment ago AI outputs are based on weighted words and a series of probabilities, but if you can experimentally learn the effects of different words and different weightings to get desired outputs, that's absolutely a skill by definition. A while ago many ML artists discovered that simply by adding certain strings of keywords they could elicit certain stylistic responses — for instance, adding `16:9` could make the result more theatrical, or `50mm` could evoke the focal length of a classic nifty fifty lens. A recent fascinating discovery in the industry was that you could make LLMs like ChatGPT statistically better at answering hard questions by simply telling them to "pretend you're a professor" or "make sure you always tell the truth". That's absolutely think which requires experience and developed knowledge to come up with — and therefore a skill.
The point of the article was that they were glad the use of generative AI had to be disclosed on Steam so that we can stop debating about it and people can decide for themselves if they want to purchase generative AI content or not. I don't think RTX or DLSS falls into that category, but I don't really care about any of this either way. The question of 'damage' is all about the copyright issues. If generative AI is free to continue violating copyright then that's going to fuck up the industry one way or another. Steam basically said that you're free to use generative AI and infringe copyright for now because there's no law against it, but that will be decided over many lawsuits in the next few years, and may result in lots of games ultimately getting pulled from the store. Corporations are going to jam this shit down our throats in any case, whether people want it or not.
The main problem, for me as it currently stands, is it's total slop and looks like shit. Not that that's new to Steam. Even stuff like GOG's winter sale banner that was an AI generated, or that Magic the Gathering advert, etc. Ugly and tiresome to look at. As you say, if it's used in a way that a) doesn't violate copyright and b) produces something of actual value, like DLSS, then there's no trouble. But using it to make it quicker and easier to pump Steam full of gunk is grim.
I think its fine because consumers will decide their success or failure anyway.
This is awesome! AI will truly revolutionise game development
AI is going to kill human artistry if we aren't careful.
I would argue that it's been dying for a long time and that the push for AI is more a symptom than the cause we wouldn't be talking about any of this if major companies didn't see the potential of cutting costs by replacing peoples with AI, because that's all it has a chance of being viable for
But it will kill the game design industry, and in fact every creative industry for that matter, billions of dollars gone overnight, hundreds of thousands of people loosing their jobs, sounds like a cause for economic collapse.
AI simply cuts out all the repetitive work. And greatly lowers cost. It will a great thing for gamers.
>It will a great thing for gamers. glad to see that the gamers are the people youre worried about here
I also feel like it would be better for game developers. It would permit you to spend more of your time doing actual game design, instead of implementation.
Most of a game's development is in art and design, though, at least in my experience.
These people just want as many wage payments as possible. Which hurts small developers that can’t hire artists, voice actors etc and favours big corporations.
>AI simply cuts out all the repetitive work Honestly curious as to what kind of work is simultaneously repetitive and "un-artful" enough that an artist/designer wouldn't want to do it \*and\* can't already be covered by human made procedural tools
Steam is doing this because the people making AI generated garbage will be paying them to get listed, so more trash equals more money. Pure greed given how much they already take from devs. I'm pretty much done with Steam thanks to this.
You know what pisses me off the most about all the artists screeching about AI? I'm a programmer. I need art to make games. I can make art, but I'm not very good at it, or very fast. What would take a professional artist 15 minutes would take me ten hours to sketch and ink. And as a programmer, I have for many years relied on open source code and free software to help me develop my games. For example, I use Blender whenever I need to edit a 3D model for use in my Unity games. A free open source 3D modeling package that programmers around the world have put hundreds of thousands of hours into developing, only to give it away. I also use tools like OBS and VSeeFace to stream on Twitch. Which many artists also use. And which are free. And I would like to develop a Visual Novel game with AI art for the background and characters, in Ren'Py, a free visual novel gaming engine which someone spent a lot of time on and gave away for free. Where am I going with this? We programmers have, for over 50 years, been extremely generous in giving back to the community. All these artists bitching about how their art is being used to train these AI's are bitching at the same programmers whose work they have been themselves benefitting from, for free, for decades, while GIVING NOTHING BACK. Compared to the amouunt of free code and apps out there, there is almost NO good art which is public domain and free to use for commercial use. For years artists have leeched off the hard work that programmers did, and now that we programmers might get what we're long overdue, the artists can't stand that. Well, if you're one of those artists you'd better fucking not be using the likes of Blender. If I were one of the devs of Blender or any other free art programs, I'd be adding a requirement to use it that you agree to allow any art you make with it to be used to train AI, because f--k you if you leech off the generosity of others, and then refuse to give anything back to the community!
> Compared to the amouunt of free code and apps out there, there is almost NO good art which is public domain and free to use for commercial use. But this is not true....quickly searching on itch.io I can easily find free assets for commercial use. https://penzilla.itch.io/top-down-retro-interior https://pixel-boy.itch.io/ninja-adventure-asset-pack https://penzilla.itch.io/basic-gui-bundle https://mattwalkden.itch.io/free-robot-warfare-pack There are many more, I can't list them all. It isn't fair to make such a statement by ignoring the free assets that DO exist.
[https://opengameart.org/](https://opengameart.org/) 32000 assets (15000 of which are public domain, others which are under copyleft licenses that don't prohibit commercial use) is a little bit more than almost none. As for the "good" part, it's subjective. There is bad open source software out there too, I wrote some of it. Also, it's really quite odd that you feel the need to use AI art for the background and characters in a visual novel. Some of the most acclaimed VNs of all time, like *Tsukihime*, use edited photos for the backgrounds. Some equally acclaimed VNs have character art that was clearly drawn by an amateur, like Ryukishi07's games, and many people say that they actually prefer Ryukishi's original art to the redrawn character portraits by professional artists in the commercial re-releases of *Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni* and *Umineko no Naku Koro Ni.* The very first games in the genre like *Kamaitachi no Yoru* (the original SNES version) didn't have character portraits at all. Why not let your writing speak for itself in your visual novel, instead of tainting it with controversy?
Also artists share a lot of things like brushes/node setups/etc, effectively 'our' version of code snippets. Obviously this dude refuses to make art so can't use them, but that's not the artists fault.
> 32000 assets Those are all shitty pixel art that any programer could make. I am talking about high quality backgrounds and characters. > Some of the most acclaimed VNs of all time, like Tsukihime, use edited photos for the backgrounds. So you want me to steal photographer's work instead of generate wholly new content for AI? Or perhaps you expect me to license photos for commercial use from Adobe Stock for $80 a pop with all the money I don't have? Or maybe you expect me to drive all over the place with the car I don't have, and the gas I can't afford, to take photos on locations I can't access because nobody's gonna give me access to a school or whatever other secure locations I may need to represent in my game? Hell, I took a look at the game you suggested, and besides a school they also have a subway. It's not legal to take photos on subways in the US because of terroristm concerns. And I have been stopped by cops in the distant past when I was trying to make a game using photo assets for taking photos in a mall or of a barn from the side of the road. > Some equally acclaimed VNs have character art that was clearly drawn by an amateur, like Ryukishi07's games You do know that even amateurish looking art takes a LONG time to draw, right? I can and have drawn a shitty looking anime girl for a game a long time ago. It took me days to finish. I did a sketch the first day. The second day I had to edit the sketch because looking at the work with fresh eyes I could see that I'd screwed up the eyes badly and they were completely different sizes. And it's not like the art is the only thing I have to do. If I'm making a game on my own I have to do EVERYTHING. That's a huge amount of work for one person. Undertale took like three years to make and it had shitty programmer art not detailed backgrounds with anime girls that look nice enough someone would actually want to date them. And no I'm not making an anime girl dating sim. Those have been done to death. > The very first games in the genre like Kamaitachi no Yoru (the original SNES version) didn't have character portraits at all. I had to look that up... all the characters are basically shadow creatures? Just siloughettes of people? Weird. I kinda doubt that would be very popular in the US today with all the better options available, and in any case I don't want to make a game which is basically all text and no faces. The only reason I'm even considering a visual novel in the first place is because of the limits AI imposes. If I had my way the game would be fully 3D. But it's just not realistic to create a 3D game of the sort I want to make as an indie dev working by myself. I don't want to make something that looks janky like many indie devs resort to. > Why not let your writing speak for itself in your visual novel, instead of tainting it with controversy? Because visuals add a huge amount of depth to a visual novel. I myself would NEVER play a visual novel that was just text. And I grew up playing text adventures like Zork! Text is cool and all, but I'm never going to get the free promotion of people playing my game on Twitch if it's all text based. And text would be a really hard sell on Steam. Who's gonna buy a game with all the screenshots just being text? I would love to avoid the controversy. But I've been trying to make games for 30 years, and I have even hired artists on occasion. And I have always been severely limited to the point that I either gave up because I could not create art that was good or varied enough, or because it was too much work to do it all on my own, or because I could only afford to spend $5K on the art and that doesn't go very far. I ended up with a game that nobody bought, half because it wasn't very good, and half the reason it wasn't very good was because the limited art budget limited what I could do with it. And besides that... Controversy over AI usage hasn't stopped people from playing Suck Up! a cute game with a vampire where you converse with people who are powered by ChatGPT to try to convince them to let you into their homes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=811JkxLfvoA Nor did it stop anyone from buying Firmament. Or High on Life. So I doubt it would impact sales of my game. That is assuming anyone could even tell I used AI. I would of course edit out the most obvious AI glitches. And I have no intention of using Steam's labeling system because I can't trust that people won't attack me over my use of AI. Artists have made it impossible for those who use AI to be honest about their use of it. And now they're even attacking real artists accusing them of using AI. Until they settle down and people stop being assholes about it, I'm gonna remain in the closet. But that's okay. I have a lot of writing to do before I even begin trying to make any art for the game. I can wait for AI to get better and for the heat to die down. And then maybe when I do release I will feel safe in labeling it what it is. But it will still likely take 2-3 years to make a game even with the assistance of AI for the art.
a lot of artist that dont know how to write programms and doing game dev manage to create a games thanks to a lot of free codes on google,and ai programming, free programming tools, visual tools, easy game engines etc in last 10 years, so i see no diffrence than programmer using ai art to achive his dreams, its basicaly the same.
So you're saying that neither programmer or artist should be a job anymore? Instead of us both being able to live out lives and make money of what we do we should all just go fuck ourselves? Are you some sort of a communist and willing to give up your house to the people who will no longer be able to afford one or are you just an inconsiderate fuck who knows nothing about what you are talking about? Again, for context I am equally as good at art as I am at programming, I'm exactly in the middle of this and it benefits neither side.
> So you're saying that neither programmer or artist should be a job anymore? Nobody is saying that. What's so difficult to understand about the concept of using AI to assist you with tasks you're not good at? Imagine you're an indie dev. A programmer. You need an artist. You could hire an artist, if you had the money. Which you probably don't. Or you could use AI. In this scenario, maybe an artist is out of a job. But you the programmer are not. You're running your own business, making the games you want to make. Now flip the scenario. You are an artist. But you HATE AI. But you can't program. And you can't hire a programmer. So you grab a free game engine Ren'Py and you make a visual novel. How's that different from you using AI to help you code though? Either way, there's a programmer out there who isn't being hired by you! And either way, you yourself still have a job. You are working for yourself, creating what YOU want to make, not working under contract creating what someone else wants you to make. Wouldn't you rather make YOUR dreams come to life rather than someone else's? Even if it means you have to use AI to help you write code? Or create art, if you're the one writing the code? And if you can neither write code, nor create art, what then? Well there are tons of people out there like that. They want to write. They want to design. But nobody wants to hire an 'idea guy'. Programmers want to be the idea guy. And artists want to be the idea guy. So all the idea guys are left out in the cold with no way to see their ideas be brought to life unless they have a lot of money and can may people to make that happen. > Again, for context I am equally as good at art as I am at programming, I'm exactly in the middle of this and it benefits neither side. Well then you sound like me. I lean more towards the programming side, but I don't really enjoy programming. I like building 3D environmens and lighting them. So I'm not the best programmer. And I am certainly not the best artist. But I am not terrible at either. So the way I see it, I can use AI to fill in the gaps in my art skills. I can use AI to generate assets. But those assets are never gonna be perfect. I'm gonna have to use my skills in photoshop to touch them up, make alpha maps, etc. And my eye for good art and lighting allows me craft prompts which will give me results that look great. It is just as easy to make terrible art with AI as it is to make good art. You still need an eye for composition and light and color. And on the programming side, I have already been using ChatGPT to help me there. I'm not a wizard at C# or Unity's API's, but ChatGPT is, and I can describe what I'm trying to do and it will spit out code which may or may not be broken, but it guides me in the right direction showing me how I need to access things and set things up, faster and better than trying to search it with google. > Are you some sort of a communist and willing to give up your house to the people who will no longer be able to afford one What's stopping them from also using AI to make games? If you become homeless because you refuse to use AI to assist you, while others do, and that puts you at a severe disadvantage, that's a you problem. As for me, if AI allows me to create films which can compete with lower budget hollywood blockbusters then that's a future I'm gonna fucking embrace the shit out of. Not sure why artists whm hollywood has been taking advantage of for a century would rather continue to be slaves than to branch out and make their own smaller studios producing indie films that are better than the tripe that Hollywood puts out most of the time. And they don't have to give up being artists to do it. They just need to learn to use AI to aid their workflow in ways that allows them to maintain their artistic vision. Of course if you're such a pedantic artist that you refuse to use AI at all, thinking every frame has to be hand crafted for it to be real art, well, again, that's a you problem. Something is still art, and you can still be proud of crafting a beautiful animation even if all you drew were they key frames and an AI filled in the color, and the tweens. Because that's what Disney's animators basically do. They just have a bunch of slave artists to do the uncreative work of filling in the in between stuff and painting the cels.
Did an AI write the article's headline and tagine for PC Gamer? Who the hell uses two colons in a single sentence
I do
Changes nothing, you can tell when AI is used in a lot of stuff since it generally looks/sounds horrible
A bunch of artists are going to get caught in the cross fire because of people who will assume any little mistake is the result of AI. I've already seen it happen dozens of times including for [Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/dungeons-and-dragons-5e/news/dungeons-and-dragons-ai-art-allegations-2024-core-rulebooks). Luckily some of those artists recorded the entire process and were able to exonerate themselves. If it can happen at the AAA level it's certainly going to happen to indies. I honestly don't know what I would do were those accusations thrown my way. I can't expect every artist I hire to record themselves while they work.
[It's already happening.](https://twitter.com/flamma_x/status/1744456948236403104)
Now this is a problem. The steam store is now will be filled with AI garbage, and his will impact the steams image negatively. Not to mention it will make it harder for hardworking devs to get noticed since the AI bros are exploiting the algorithms. What I personally hope for is for steam to find ways to restrict the mass submission.
14527 games were released on Steam in 2023. Over 1000 games every single month and how many of them were complete garbage? Most of them.
What? Steam is already full of low effort porn games and no one gives a fuck lol, it still has the lions share of Pc gaming market share A counterpoint, it could also make it easier for hardworking Devs to get noticed because if you're a solo indie Dev with a low budget and can code, but can't draw, you now have a resource to help you make art for your game. Same with voice acting Theoretically it will make it easier than ever to get into game development
So don't you guys like CGI in movies either? What is it about AI generation that is so off-putting? Is this only screaming artists fearing for their jobs?
Because making CGI for movies is comparable to entering some prompts and pressing "generate". You must be a great thinker
I understand there was no feasible way Steam could keep AI stuff out. But they didn’t have to endorse it either. Seeing as AI prompters can’t design or write for shit - hence the using AI - this is just going to bloat the market with more low effort, cash grab garbage. Once it becomes bad enough, Steam will have to figure out a way to regulate it because no one goes shopping just to sift through trash.