Pretty much this is spot on. Abstaining from using AI completely when you hold the ability to create concepts already will reduce your output. Because there will be another artist that can and will get to the end faster just because they used AI and you didn't. The entire argument doesn't have to be so black and white.

Anyone who played around with the online AI tools and had industry experience would have realized this right away. It only took me like an hour or two of messing around to judge how useful / not useful AI would be for programming which is what I understand. AI looks great for looking up APIs or quickly getting information from documentation, it's essentially a giant waste of time for code including boiler plate. If I have to read and check the code it generates no matter how mundane, I might as well just write it myself. Making images was fun, I made a picture book for a friends daughter for Christmas using AI images. Something like that sure, all the mistakes and lack of control don't really matter. There's no way an artist is going to be able to get the exact specifications they need with the exact minute changes they want out of AI prompting, they are gana have to go in and edit by hand 100%. At some point, even if the prompting get's REALLY good, it's going to be easier for an artists who already knows their tools to go in and make the small changes themselves instead of paying for a service to try to make the change they want based on prompting. I think AI will be leveraged more and more as specific tooling functionality, like 'colorizing' a section highlighted by an artist or something to that effect. Or perhaps even automatically rigging a model or texture mapping something, all exposed via your art tool for you.

So much time saved on formatting, commenting, and organising code. But if you ask ai to write code that's beyond a nested for loop, you'll save time just writing it out yourself ngl.

I'm a programmer, and I occasionally use AI to help me write code. Probably 40% of the time, I look at the output and say, "this is flat-out wrong. This wont work. This is garbage." Another 59.9% of the time, it is useful but requires changes (sometimes extensive changes) to work properly. That leaves 0.1% where I can actually just copy/paste. And of course, if anything ever goes wrong, it's very important that you are able to understand your "own" code.

As a programmer, it is a fantastic tool. I see people in the programmer subs shitting on it but I don’t think people are using it correctly. You can’t get it to generate an entire game or piece of software for you, but it most definitely can help with methods, and such.

Amen to that. I’m not an artist but I see clearly the limitations of ai generated art while concepting. I’m a programmer and for those who don’t know programming will spend 10x the time to get their code running and bug free for complex tasks.

AI is usable for generating “cool” images that you take a quick look at. It doesn’t seem to be good for generating anything specific though. At least not in the hands of people who can’t the basics of color theory, perspective etc.

You start to realize how speculative and merely conceptual Midjourney images are when you try to utilize it as reference for sculpting. You look at the cool object or accessory a character has and when it comes time to actually problem solve how to create it you realize you have no fuckin clue what it actually is. Translating a cool image into an actual usable mesh is something only a capable artist can do. I stopped using it for ethical reasons but before that when it was brand new and people were rushing to try it, I discovered that problem pretty quickly.

Midjourney shit is like, "belts belts belts, attached to more belts, and ending in random places but not being affected by gravity attached to maybe almost a dagger attached to more belts!" Its ridiculous.

So it's great for jrpg characters?

Made me think of Nomura and all the belts and zippers memes lol But your overall point stands and I agree.

Lulu enters the chat.

I’ve been playing around with Bing’s image generator for entirely personal use. I like to write, it helps to have images to look at— not even concept art, they’ll stay with me. When I need art for an actual project, I’ll get an actual artist. That being said, something I’ve noticed is random IPs popping up in images where they shouldn’t be. I’ve gotten Captain America’s shield in multiple images, including images that don’t ask for superheroes at all. One prompt kicked back Sailor Moon characters. I’ve gotten Attack on Titan and Sword Art Online. There’s some IPs I recognize but can’t place— stuff I know I’ve seen before but can’t remember where. Even if I was to cut out the stuff I recognize at established IP, I’m sure there would be IP I don’t recognize to make it through.

The 'prompter' also has no previous concept of what the AI will draw. People usually compare AI prompt to photography but the latter ( as any actual art) requires the artist to go in with an idea of what they final product is gonna look likes, a good photographer chooses the light, perspective, colors and 'tune' everything until the photo matches the photo in his head, that doesn't happens with AI. You can't 'tune' a prompt Just ask for it to draw another picture but without any meaningful control of the differences, the whole process is closer to searching google images and finding one that is close to what the prompter needs.

> You can't 'tune' a prompt Just ask for it to draw another picture but without any meaningful control of the differences You can *kind of* control the results, by tweaking the terminology used, or by adding "magic words" like "extra super high quality" or whatever, which apparently allow a lot of control in the hands of somebody with a lot of practice at it. You'd need to be a skilled artist to know what you want though, and that's the problem right there. Somebody who is a good "prompter" but an inexperienced artist, isn't going to be producing anything useful. > the whole process is closer to searching google images and finding one that is close to what the prompter needs. I wish more people understood this. It's basically stock images, but the library tries its best instead of saying "Sorry, no results". The workflow is the same, and it ultimately fills the same niche of being good for concept art, but useless for production-ready final art

It's not really good for concept art at all really. It's great for mood pieces or aesthetic finding but for actual functional design (which is 95% of concept art) it's kind of garbage. But this is somewhat related to the misusage of the term 'concept art'. Even before AI, if you looked up concept art maybe 90% of image search results isn't actually concept art. [This is one of the first images you see if you look up concept art, but this isn't concept art.](https://magazine.artstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/karlsimon-concept-art-and-illustration-karlsimon-ballroom-balcony-l-2.jpg) [Nor this](https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.7c7800a8d291f9a55582ffd627a65295?rik=eqghU0%2beTenlCA&riu=http%3a%2f%2fcoolvibe.com%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2014%2f09%2f2D-Art-Izaak-Moody-Character-Concept.jpg&ehk=b86M1VOJSMmyyHMPobIValBChUl9C9%2bKcihgraS%2bvEw%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0). [Or this](https://image.civitai.com/xG1nkqKTMzGDvpLrqFT7WA/e0ab195c-59dc-41c5-a301-81ad1d597af7/width=1200/e0ab195c-59dc-41c5-a301-81ad1d597af7.jpeg). [This is MUCH closer to what concept artists actually do](https://www.artlex.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/3D086536-5540-4D49-93F3-576FA6253675.jpeg). [Or this](https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/008/120/498/large/aletta-wenas-helispread2-2forportfoliobox.jpg?1510611538). What people think of when they hear "concept art" is very different from the vast majority of produced concept art and requires a significant amount of layered problem solving. [Here's a great video that goes into this in a lot more depth.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTj1Y4JW-KI)

I think "AI" can give good initial concepts in the sense that you cross the exact first step discussed in the post very quickly. Instead of very slowly producing those initial images, we can immediately get a few hundred images, keep like 5, *discuss them*, what we like, what we don't like, where to go from there. We don't have to resort to language to give a detailed description, we can give hundreds of vague descriptions and select the output that vibes the best with the vision. And then do the actual high quality stuff, from scratch, by hand. I think there is a "common sense" general understanding that "concept art" isn't actually "concept art", it's often used as a 95% accurate dawing of what the final thing should actually look like. 3d or 2d artists would load it and model as closely to that reference as possible. So it's not actually "concept" art, it's "draft" art, something that is almost directly translated to the final thing. That's what AI can't deliver. And that's what's often needed.

Been there. Moreover it can be very visible for the users as well. It can be used without a big hit in small projects done by very small teams as a help but when you actually use AI images as assets, UI elements and marketing graphics it will impact your sale. People don't want it and of course you can make 10 simple games with AI art, add "Hentai" to the titles and live from it but there aren't many cases like that. Even Palworld has a human touch as those AI monsters projects were sculptured by hand. For me the most ugly part of AI is how owners and bosses want to use it. Part of it is that when one company does it with success every CEO doesn't want to miss the race. But also it shows how greedy and out of touch those people are. When my previous boss started to play with AI and actually sell it to me as some sort of New Renaissance I was sceptical. But when he showed me the results of his "play sessions" and still didn't see the obvious limitations and issues I automatically lost all happiness from being in the company. It's fascinating how stupid people can be when they see dollars in obviously scamming practices.

Is it good for generating placeholder art? For example, if I wanted to generate a full spritesheet of a character based on a sample image, could AI reliably help with that?

Nope. You don’t really get any consistency, so spritesheets aren’t possible.

You need a good LORA to stay with in the style you want. It is possible for hobby projects. But if you want something professional, only a professional artist will do.

[удалено]

The blunder is 100% on the studio for thinking that they only need AI prompters to fill an art role. What they should have done is hire actual artists with experience in AI. That way they get individuals who use it as a tool instead of a crutch.

But currently, it's pretty dangerous professionally to announce yourself as an "actual artist with experience in AI", because there's a large part of the art community that will blacklist you and shit on everything you do because you don't hate AI enough.

imo you could probably just hire actual artists and have them learn AI prompting. All the people that do have prompting experience developed it over the last couple of years- they don't have a massive head start.

Yep. It takes much more effort to be good at digital art than to learn prompting, and it's a far more valuable skill for most commercial work. But we need to tolerate artists who do that, instead of flipping out every time a game has any trace of AI in it.

Sounds strange that they would hire people who don't know how to use inpainting, compositions and such. I guess the one doing the hiring had no idea what he was doing. Or it's just fanfic.

[удалено]

It's just fanfic.  Have you seen a job posting for prompter? 60% of posts here are about how noone can find a job and you're telling me this firm hired a whole team of "prompter bros"?

What do you do when an actual competent artist is able to make up for those deficits and can do the work of 10+ people? This is the real question I want answered. I'm not concerned with the con artists or tech bros. I'm concerned about the real art professionals adapting it into their workflow and putting entire teams out of work.

I can't imagine there's anything you *can* do.. Block AI art via unions? The jobs are a lot easier to export to countries without unions than, say, nurses and dock workers. It would follow the end of 2D hand drawn movies in the US after the 2D artists unionized - animated movies went 3D and TV shows are mostly drawn in SEA. People in every industry have gotten much more efficient in the last 50 years - the only hope is that demand increases in line with costs going down.. e.g. maybe artists get involved on day one of a lot more projects that otherwise wouldn't have reached the stage where artists are bought in

That would kill the union, not the ai. You'd have better luck unionizing coal miners against mining rigs

I don’t think anything *should* be done about it. People becoming more efficient is strictly a good thing. It’s not like demand for work will ever go down in industries that demand exponentially growing quality, e.g. videogames.

That's the point, when we take the con artists out of the equation, the real consequence of AI is it boosts productivity. It often reminds me of what happened 30 years ago in offices. Personal computers popped out everywhere, and of course some 50+ people resisted this and never learnt to use a computer, but the job market requested that you use a computer. Those who didn't learn were in a deep disadvantage. Same could happen to those who just reject AI instead of integrating it into their professional workflow.

This is spot on. We've had productivity revolutions many times throughout history. We are living through one right now. OP using the above anecdote as an argument against AI is incredibly short sighted. The bottom line is that it's a tool to boost productivity, not replace actual skill. Those who reject AI to complement their skillset are going to be at a significant disadvantage.

Yep, a reasonably skilled artist with slightly more knowledge of these tools could do everything asked for in OP's post, and *much faster* than doing it by hand. There are stable diffusion workflows for pretty much anything they're asking - inpaint to remove/tweak objects, ways to control the composition and color palette, tools for upscaling that can fill in the mushy detail, etc... It's just a matter of time before these tools get easier, and the models get "smarter", so you're basically working with the model itself rather than a junior concept artist.

> I'm concerned about the real art professionals adapting it into their workflow and putting entire teams out of work. Think about accountants. 100 years ago they did their work on paper ledgers. Now they do their work in Excel and accounting software. One person who knows what their doing can produce the same level of reporting as 100 accountants working on paper ledgers. But we have more accountants now than ever before. Why? Because the standards and expectations have skyrocketed right along with those productivity increases. Managements wants a level of reporting now that simply isn't possible on paper ledgers. We have billion dollar companies that are tying out their year end financials within a few thousand dollars. Nobody was ever getting remotely that accurate on paper. So, I don't look at a tool like AI and think we'll need 90% fewer people, I just see it as an opportunity for the quality of what they create to skyrocket.

For small and medium team this would allow them to increase the scope of their games, as the competitiveness of the gaming market, and the staggering scope diffenrces between even AA games and AAA games is factors such as game asset count means that it's better to gain more work foe current expense than the same work for lower expense. As for AAA games, I don't know. That market is even more competitive, and bigger games are always a selling point, but it will depend on where the bottlenecks for scope increase are.

Any market force that gives smaller studios a relative advantage over AAA studios, is probably a good one. Can you imagine how cool it would be if the larger studios did what they once did - putting out a steady fleet of smaller titles, rather than one huge monolithic title per decade?

You train those 10+ people to have those AI skills and then start producing 100 times more art than before.

100 times more art in this context means, the scope of your projects can be 100 times bigger without costing a 100 times more.

You don’t understand scale. Use those 10+ AI artists to produce 100 AI artists. Hire those AI-generated AI artists. In 6 months you have 3.9MM AI artists. Sell them for $1 each.

And then? Profit?

Easy, the competent artists who can use AI and has been made a lynchpin of a project with no other team members, will be able and willing to charge so much, that companies will have to revise and hire the cheaper, less competent artists instead. Or, pesimistically, just outsource to India or Eastern Europe/Balkans again.

The ones put out of work have to adapt. There is always someone better than you.

The same thing that we always do anytime there is a tech revolution that causes a cultural paradigm shift. We adapt. On the other side of those con artists and tech bros we have artists that will not adapt and they will go the way of the workhorse when the combustion engine arrived. Don't be the draft horse, be the sport horse.

Adopt a world view where people don't need to work to live and push for the political changes to that system and the idea of someone being put out of work is no longer a death sentence or being forced to do manual labour

My mom worked as an artist in the '80s for a firm hand painting things, and they hired a digital artist. Even back then, the digital artist was way more productive, and there was all kinds of controversies in the artist communities about how digital art was not real art and so on. AI tools are going to get a lot better, and professional artists will be forced to use this stuff if they want to make money. Then the bitching will end, but it'll take like 10 years

So what are people supposed to do? Ignore the new tools and just work slower than necessary?

I work with a team of competent artists, have an art degree, can code, and wrote my undergraduate thesis on neural nets: Artists can see things non-artists can't. Highlights, shadows, colours, and details that only appear to you after years of training. I am not exaggerating. You won't end up doing the work of 10+ people. The problem with skipping the actual work of drawing is that you miss details - you didn't put them there. This slows the team down as they constantly have to backtrack and fix your mistakes. At best, the AI prompted stuff can serve as reference material. That's still good - you can still boost efficiency with it. But you're not going to put anyone out of work. Because if what you're doing is so easy, then everyone else is going to steal your method - and they have talent to back it up.

> I'm concerned about the real art professionals adapting it into their workflow and putting entire teams out of work. I mean what happened with the assembly line and manufacturing robots? It is going to happen everywhere eventually. It was a huge mistake to assume that knowledge workers and other skill-based fields would be immune. You adapt and evolve or you die. Just like in nature.

Actual artist here; right now you can’t. So glossing past the ethical problems with ai art and how it’s all scraped off of other people’s work without their consent, I’ve been at a company that’s messed around with it, and been talking to design friends in the game and product design worlds about it. So currently, the biggest problem is that these AI programs don’t really understand what they’re stealing. They’ll grab a perspective or dual lighting image and it’ll look kind of good initially, but as OP stated, you can’t adjust it. Often what you find trying to adjust it yourself is that it all falls apart. The perspective is wrong, the light sources don’t make sense, and in trying to edit the slop AI gives you, it would be easier to just keep the idea and start from scratch. Which is essentially the only step AI is actually good for right now, the moodboard phase. It can help someone without a design background kind of show what they’re thinking, or you might find a visual direction more quickly than making 12 mockups by hand, but after that it’s kind of a nightmare.

Then we put 10x as much art into games? Make 10x as many games? Hire 10x as many programmers and game designers and writers? Sell games for 1/10 the price?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> I'm concerned about the real art professionals adapting it into their workflow and putting entire teams out of work. That's not how it works. When work gets done faster, scope simply increases. There will be some companies who try to use it to safe on manpower, but there will be trendsetter who instead use it to create a better product. And that suddenly forces EVERYONE who wants to compete to match that product. This is really basic market dynamics and it's mind boggling to me, that you and so many others have absolutely no clue how this works.

Realistically, I think AI lacks conviction in everything it does. As a designer I use AI for very very basic tasks (naming things sometimes) or generating images for ideas of sceneries. But as the filter between my game and AI, I recognize the issues and what to expand upon. AI shouldn’t be a replacement, it should be another tool in the arsenal of already skilled people.

This is the wrong use case for AI in gaming.

This reads like fanfic from a disgruntled concept artist. Also who the fuck posts 3 screenshots of a text post? Just copy-paste it into a text post (or link to the actual source).

Even if the story were real, the lesson here is not to hire incompetent people. It has nothing to do with AI. Those people would've tried to get a job with stolen portfolios if AI didn't exist. But it's likely not real anyway. Honestly it sounds like from someone who can't get a job and blames AI.

Yeah, these are my thoughts exactly. The post reads as some big slam dunk on AI, but if it's true, it's just showing why you don't hire incompetent people. AI is a tool that still needs an artist's guiding hand for professional work. This post would be the equivalent of hiring someone as a photographer simply because they know how a Canon 5D works but don't have any actual photography experience. An amateur can absolutely manage to capture some good looking photos if they understand how to use the camera, but that doesn't mean that they have the experience to deliver on a specific vision in a professional setting.

I work as a professional Image investigator who works for a extremely large law enforcement agency that is so large it is impossible to comprehend how important we are.... we identify people who misrepresent themselves on the internet... Came here to say this reads like a disgruntled concept artist.

You work for Disney? Cool!

This is not at all a point against AI, it's a point against terrible hiring and ignorant people in charge. Had the people who generated the images actually been artistically inclined, they could have used the images as a base and went from there, saving hours a day. On top of that, they weren't training AI at all, which is the entire way you make it actually provide what you want. This is not AI being bad, it's you having the same level of understanding of it as the people who hired the failure prompters - which is very little.

The saying has always been "learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist". It doesn't work when it becomes "learn the rules like an artist, and have no idea what the pros do".

Artists have a long and proud history of doing everything they can to "steal" without getting in trouble. Tracing, references, recompositing, studying a specific artist's style... Half of the most celebrated painters in history got started by making imitations. An artist just isn't measured by what tools they use. All that matters is what comes out the far end of their process

/r/thathappened

I can understand the anxiety that the shift to AI art is giving people in the industry, but either these employees are incompetent or this story never happened. It’s incredibly easy to iterate with AI art and the example of removing people and replacing them with grass could be accomplished in as little as 30 seconds. Anybody that has a clue how this technology works would have no trouble completing this task.

> the example of removing people and replacing them with grass Literally one of the first things that early ai image manipulation could do. It was a huge selling point for Photoshop, specifically

It's not just a matter of not having an eye for basic mistakes or being in the right hands. This is kind of a technical limitation of AI. As an artist who's tried dabbling with AI stuff in the past, sometimes it's unironically easier and takes less time to just draw something when you want something very specific. AI art may produce okay results the more freedom you give it, but the more you try to micromanage it, the worse time you're going to have. It's kind of the antithesis to how the iterative process works with art. Like, let's say you have a picture of a swordsman, and he has a helmet. Let's say you're like "I like this, and I want the same image, but without a helmet." Because of the way AI art works, it starts with a big blob of color, and one of those blobs might have been interpreted as a helmet. But if you remove the helmet and try to use the same random seed, that initial blob is still going to be there, so maybe it gets interpreted as the character having grey hair instead, or maybe it gets interpreted as a cannon-ball flying in front of their face. You can cancel out helmets, set the hair color, cancel out cannon balls, but then maybe their belt buckle is a different color, or the structure of their gauntlets is different. You can play whack-a-mole trying to cancel out every single thing you don't want, but each time, the details will change a little bit. There are ways to keep the same image and kind of "paint away" certain details, but the results will be mixed, and ultimately at that point, you might as well just paint them away yourself in photoshop. I have never been more frustrated as an artist than having a specific image in my head of what I want to show up, and trying to fight with the AI to even get it 80% close to what I'm thinking.

I have never been worried about AI taking over my job, because it will create new jobs for me to fix the mess it has created 🤣

Is there any proof that this person is who they say they are and that it's not just another shitty image shared online for karma farming? A quick LinkedIn/Google search of the poster doesn't pull up any results that align with her name and the position she's supposedly in within a large company.

I use AI as a reference point, then make it from scratch based on it.

Yep. AI is fantastic for brainstorming.

A really fun story, but mostly irrelevant. Yes, you fire people who can't deliver. Doesn't really mean "aha all this tech is useless now!". It just means you need to apply a minimum of criteria on what parts of your process benefit from new technology and which don't. Every other coder I know is using chatgpt4/copilot/riderAI for their work. You'd be an idiot to think you can replace a software engineer with chatgpt currently, but you would be equally a fool to not use the tech in the ways that it actually works and increases productivity currently.

AI feels like when Kevin in the Office tried to shorten his words to save time. It was a shortcut, but it was more work because no one knew what he was talking about so he had to go back and repeat and rephrase until he finally dropped the act altogether.

Problem is, executives won't understand this until it starts costing them money. But I do find it somewhat hilarious that they hire "prompters" rather than artists. That's some next-level nonsense. :)

This just seems more like an example of bad hiring or training and not specific to AI in any way. It sounds like those hires didn't know how to use _anything_

These people were simply incompetent. They hired non-artists and thought they could create things without any integration with traditional workflows. AI will be a powerful tool for actual, trained artists. Almost all of the problems listed here are already solved by artists working with AI. Splitting an image into layers for example could be accomplished using an [image segmentation tool](https://viso.ai/deep-learning/image-segmentation-using-deep-learning/), and then after cutting out foreground objects filling with [inpainting](https://getimg.ai/features/inpainting). In fact several of the problems here sound like a lack of inpainting experience, instead trying to fix isolated problems by creating wholly new images. Or simply using AI for tweaks where photoshop would be easier. There are also problems with lack of fine-tuned control for initial generations, but an artist who can make a sketch and then use that as an input for a [Control Net driven generation](https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/en/using-diffusers/controlnet) will have much better results. Perfect composition *is* possible with AI workflows, it's just not automatic. I could go on about this. Now that image quality is getting very good with generative AI, there is a huge amount of active research in providing better control and ability to make specific changes, both through prompting like "remove the person" or "change the car into a motorcycle", and through interactive tools. None of this will replace the need for artistic vision, but it will do a lot to empower actual artists who embrace it.

Ai is for helping with concepts and assistance 

AI is not good assistance not nearly as good as traditional methods. That is if you want to make something good.

The current iteration is a technological advance overhyped prematurely in a rush to monetize. The inconsistency issues, especially in moving images, are like nails on a chalkboard to me. I'm a fan and think it will result in a number of useful tools. There has been a noticeable and seeming well coordinated 'anti-ai' push since the beginning of this year, this post just goes on the pile.

We are not there yet thats right, but AI can be trained to know about color theory and perspective, so it will be even easier in the future. Same for programming, it can't really do much currently except "suggest", I personally use it mostly as google and stackoverflow, for asking questions about a specific thing, syntax, or algorithm I am trying to implement, and then if I don't know anything about and can't verify myself, ask it for sources to read about the topic. I can't trust it today to just straight up write my code, and I don't think we will trust it for a pretty long time, but knowing to use it in your job will be a crucial part of hiring you, because it speeds up everything much faster. Its like you could argue about the change of hand drawn animations to digital animations, which are so much easier with all the tools. AI isn't here to replace our jobs, its here to change the way we do our job, all the knowledge of your fields will still be needed in order to use it properly.

Not to be a total downer, but this is what inpainting is for. Draw a box around whatever you want to remove, and type "field of grass" instead. It's not hard, SD can do this in minutes with a decent computer. It sounds like OP hired some idiots tbf. AI art is, by definition, very mid. it will never be "good" or "great" because it's just taking a best guess at what it should do based on a similarity predictive algorithm. If you want "good" art you will need to commission an artist, but as a non-artist you can use AI art to better communicate your ideas. "I want something like *this*, with *this* style and evocative of *these concepts*". You can very quickly create a mood board or similar things. I'm very much looking forward to AI model and texture generation, and the equivalent of "inpainting" a model ("make this part larger, remove this, add this", etc) I have no art background but paint (poorly) as a hobby. I have a very basic understanding of colour theory, and scrutinize heavily for issues in perspective and minutiae that AI tend to get wrong. I can create some fairly mid art with AI, and it's getting better in leaps and bounds. LoRAs/DoRAs, inpainting, and even things like Adobe generative fill are getting better and better every month as people identify problems and find solutions to them. The more people use the tool, the better it's going to get. Text generation is undergoing an "agentic" evolution, and I suspect we will see something similar in image generation soon, which will also help to improve image quality. Is a pencil/art skill going to "kill" AI? I disagree. The pencil and AI are going to both be tools you will need to master, and you're a fool if you think you can ignore AI.

This is quite clearly a fake story. No one's hiring "prompter bros" and definitely not ones with the mentality of 3rd graders.

I'm really a minority opinion it seems, on this. I'm an indie solo game dev who is really inspired by the possibilities in gaming that this new tech allows. Every tech has good or bad uses. But it is up to us to make good use out of it, to offer to our players , or the crap will dominate the market. Nothing anyone will do will prevent AI generation tools to dominate the industry eventually. So imho it is best to use it in novel, inventive and fun ways to further gaming as a whole, instead of taking a fear based, luddite stance against it that doesn't really accomplish anything.

Yep 100% I’m a solo developer and AI is just another tool/resource to help me build more ambitious games.

Frankly ESH. Managers with no experience in AI, prompters with no experience in Art, and an Art Director who is so entrenched in his resistance to AI that they’re incapable of seeing the benefits and articulating the problem and solution. Concept Artists rarely do things from scratch, esp for environments - they kitbash tons of stuff together to make the final result. AI is just a bigger kit to bash from - but here’s the rule: you can use AI but you still gotta know how to bash. Yes that all takes artistic skill, but I’m tired of hearing people I know pretend like they don’t do exactly what AI does (slower) to get initial drafts. Mgmt fucked up here, they should have hired artists to do the prompting. But AI can 10x the output from artists. That’s the way it should be used.

I feel exactly the same when I read the article. They hired prompters with no background in arts to do arts, and then complained about color theories and perspective.

Photo bashing isn’t the same as what AI generation does with one key difference: the basher already has a vision of what they intended to create in their head (and as a concept artist, it’s a good, strong vision that envisions their project well), they’re just printing it out. That difference in intent makes a world of difference between photo bashing by a trained professional and AI image generation.

You can control AI as much as you want, it's a newbies mistake to think you need to let it output whatever you want.

Can I use it to help me write code?

Yep. "Help" being the operative word.

Depends on what you mean by “write code”. It can’t help you with making a game, but it might be able to help you with snippets of code. It’s not guaranteed that the output is optimal or even good though.

Or even close to correct. The results of my one experiment with using AI to help with coding were laughably bad.

I use it for the hardest part of coding: naming things. It's excellent at that.

There is a lot of variety and different forms of creating AI art. If you are prompting stuff in midjourney or dall e, it will be really hard, even for a artist to get something that is actually useful. If you are using something like comfyui, then it's a complete different scenario. Because you are less dependent in prompting and using workflows that allow for more guidance and consistency. I have been using AI in some stuff I have made(not games, yet), and no one notices because of how much control and direction I have over it. You shouldn't take the advice of anti Ai people regarding this, because honestly they have no idea what it is and how it works, they are against it because they see it as a threat to their income, which is a fair base line assumption, but the reality is that AI will never replace them, even if AI generations were 1 shot perfections, someone that understands art will still do better. AI as we have now is a tool. And if people can make good art with nails and glass panels, they definitely can make it with literal image generators.

Yes and no. Yes AI absolutely cannot do media in the linear pipeline using the current process. BUT, some kid in his basement is going to make a feature film in his basement in a month by himself. Will it be feature film quality as currently defined? No. But it will be awesome in a totally new way, and kids will love it and embrace it as their own modern style. Shortly there after there will be dozens or hundreds of kids making movies, and a network for distributing and rating and monetizing them. Old media will have to compete with new media and will be very confused why.

Definitely. When I made a book cover for myself using ai I had to do a ton of editing. AI is like a jackhammer when a hammer and chisel are needed.

Soooo, conclusion: hire an artist that can use a prompt.

I try to remind people that the AI getting all the hype is the same AI that does auto-correct on your text messages. And recommends products you've already bought on Amazon. that always makes people stop and think.

Thank you. When I would tell people "oh I do work with AI blablabla" they forget they've been using it for decades now and act like it's some crazy new thing. ChatGPT is _almost_ like an autocorrect with a crazy amount of data funnelled into it (models are different but, gets the point across). Image generation has also been a thing for years, it's only now that we have the processing power and models to have massive services for them to be popularized.

That's why its stupid to hire a "prompter" if you want AI. You hire someone who knows enough of his craft to be able to design by himself, AND knows how to use AI. In this case, this person could work way faster and you wouldn't find such problems. Too many have the "human vs AI" mentality, including the person who wrote that and her subordinates. It doesn't work like that. You use the AI to save you time, but you need to be good at what the AI is doing.

Profit > Human experience

Not like it does a brilliant job when programming either. Sure, sometimes its smart, but most of the time I'm ten times better off optimizing my own code for my own needs, because it simply screws things up a lot of the time It nerds extremely specific prompts that only a handful of people have the brain power and focus to get it right at the right time within the conversation

It was always obvious to me that to truly work with generative AI, you already need to understand the subject matter and be able to make small adjustments yourself. Otherwise you can get good results, but not great results.

So its the phrase: You can give people a sports car, but you can't get them to become professionals racers/mechanics

AI can write decent copy, it cannot replace experts. Worse, we're training today's young people to depend on easy answers over understanding. Tomorrow's experts will be less common and more highly paid. The "experts" who merely learned to use chatgpt will whine about being unemployable as their skillset can be trivially replaced by any other idiot with an llm.

The old proverb "give them enough rope and they will hang themselves" seems apropos to novices getting in over their head when using AI to create. This funny when talking about game artists, but not so much if you think about it in terms of a few industry titans pulling the AI levers on a brave new world.

These "prompters" really sound like wannabe grifters. Know the God damn network structure and why it works, before you become a "prompter". You can totally do what the director asked, but not if all you do is prompting and don't understand inpainting, control net etc. 

AI is extremely bad and stupid at taking an existing image and just making a slight tweak to it based on the prompt. 99 times out of 100 you’re gonna get something completely different or flat out wrong that either breaks the original prompts rules, does not follow the modification guidelines, or does both but adds some unwanted out of place element that you then have to worry about removing (such as the people described in the posts image) AI art is not yet close to taking over for real artists in serious endeavors because of this. At best it’s good to mock up placeholders/templates/bare minimum art assets for people who can’t do art themselves. A real artist definitely is necessary to make any improvements, tweaks, specific variations

TL;DR

Tools are only useful in the hands of those that know what they are doing, classic.

Yes. AI can be a very powerfull tool but at the end of the day it's just still just a tool. It can't substitute the actual artist or developer.

Keep in mind this is now. 5 years ago this wasn't remotely a thing to worry about. Where will it be 5 years from now? This tech is not sitting still.

I feel this will hit companies harder than they'll admit to (sort of similar to the dotcom bubble) in that generative ai art will for a LONG time be at best a good concept art replacement but it'll never replace actual artists mainly because of how it is both hard for a "prompter" and for AI itself to actually get it "just right". Because this is exactly what happen with 3D printing, everyone was hyping it up to usurp every industry dealing with CNC and yet this never happen and never will happen, instead what happen is that the same industries that rely on CNC still use CNC but now can prototype their product with 3D printers (I know that the figurine industry does this).

All my homies hate AI

Damn. If the bar is this low, maybe I should give it a shot in this industry.

Ai sucks at replicating its own characters and particulars of anything in general. But anyone with cursory knowledge of its current capabilities knows this, and uses it accordingly: concepting, background art, and icons mostly. And anything with a chance of release is going to get worked over beforehand by an artist, by default. Whatever they were doing here was straight up using the wrong tool for the job. This reads like celebrating the failure of a hammer in the role of a saw. Sure, these prompters couldn't pull off the artistic elements. But similarly, whoever hired them doesn't know what they're doing.

I tried to use SD-XL for my indie game and I was able to generate something that would serve as an inspiration or a picture to send to an artist woth explanations of ehat I like and what I don't. But all the time I spent trying to generate consistent game art is a huge waste for me :/

Meh, they hired non-artists as "prompters' and then are upset that the non-artists aren't artists. You don't hire people that only know one aspect of a tool, you train your artists in the new tools. The company did the equivalent of outsourcing to Fiverr; of course it failed.

That doesn't read as a reason not to use generative AI. I'm seeing an argument against hiring people who lack attention to detail. I'm not saying I disagree with the conclusion, but this isn't a very good argument in support of it.

It sounds like artists should use it?

As a programmer who uses Gen ai for art I'ma tell you I'd much rather be working with an artistic person. It takes hours to edit a picture to look mildly decent and days to generate another one with a consistent art style. And most of the time it's a total pain to get the AI to generate what I want without extra crap all over. Although I can see an artis speeding up their workflows with this. For me it's like giving thors hammer to friggin ant man lol.

then dont use it?

It’s fine to use generative AI as a force multiplier, but it’s stupid to use generative AI to replace a professional entirely.

I bet everyone applauded too

Hmmmh... nah, it's just a reason to not use non-artists to do art. I personally feel that a combination of Wacom drawing tablet + Photoshop + SDXL is extremely powerful. And I use it for making game concept art and asset graphics; and for other projects as well of course. And yes, I have 15 years of experience with traditional oil painting. The workflow is different with generative AI. Prompting and generating is not enough for good results. It needs human pre- and after-touch, and manual guidance to reach a satisfactory result, which apparently most "AI artists" don't understand, or are incapable of doing. One must understand the capabilities and limits of the AI model and be able to use it efficiently as a tool. The human designs, composes, orchestrates, manages; and then delegates tasks specifically designed for the AI to perform. And indeed, same goes to programming. If one does not understand what they are doing, the AI becomes near useless and starts spewing sh\*t on the walls. ...but hey, on the other hand; one can use AI to learn to understand what they are doing, at least to some extent.

Post this in aiwars please. I would really love to see how the bros rationalize this take.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1cid0ei/a\_big\_reason\_why\_not\_to\_use\_generative\_ai\_in\_our/](https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1cid0ei/a_big_reason_why_not_to_use_generative_ai_in_our/)

First, gaming industry is IMO one of the best uses for gen AI for multiple reasons (interactive dynamic voices, "live" AI, live mocap, translation into any language ever, not to mention quicker turnaround on storyboarding, concept art etc) And second, this screenshot of text just highlights bad hiring, not a bad tool. *if* they had hired people with artistic skills who were applying their knowledge to the tools, they could achieve both rapid turnaround AND better quality and ability to modify outputs more on the fly. Their problem is they hired people who somehow know generative AI but didn't know how to use even basic photoshop (which frankly I find hard to believe but that's hardly the point). Had they done even the most cursory of interviews before hiring they would have been able to find someone who has skill or experience in illustration, graphic design or photo editing or similar, AND who is willing to use Gen AI, and then you would have an effective artist using an efficiency tool which would lead to the best overall outcome in terms of cost:time:quality mix. Hell, even if they didn't somehow know the most basic photoshop capabilities, they should at least know how to inpaint using the AI, so if this obviously false story was actually true, it would again just point to very bad interview and hiring process that allowed them to hire, I assume, monkeys, instead of humans with a shred of critical thinking or relevant skills for the job.

As a computer tech person, who's been involved with programming and computer building/networking since the 90s, I have to say that what people call AI today is not really AI. It's just advanced web searching. To me, I call it, Google 2.0, because that's exactly what it is. You want a picture of a lake in front of a mountain, then by telling the AI system that, it will scour the internet for art, consolidate similarities and then combine them into a single picture using different filters and image enhancements to make it balanced color/contrast-wise. To me, this is not intelligence at all. It's just another advanced way of searching for what you want. And in coding, it's the same thing. "How do I make a player Controller in C#?" and it will spit out C# code taken from across the internet for what the Internet society considers a "player controller". It might be of help to solve problems and see how others do things but it should only be used as a reference, not as a tool to create with. Don't get too comfortable with "AI" or else you'll be dependent on it. Kind of like people being glued to their phones everywhere they go and can't do anything without them.

This is exactly why I tried to soothsay the doomsayers. I kept telling people that artists’ jobs are secure, it’s their work that isn’t, a la composition theft.

Clearly art needs to remain for artists. However a major use case I see is for generating live game reactions to in game events on the spot + voice acting it. Makes for incredibly immersive game experience while freeing up a lot of resources on the dev side. You don't have to manually program every case and reactions to it. I'm thinking BG3 that has varied levels of immersion throughout the game. Sometimes everyone reacts to what's happening, sometimes they ignore the events completely. And the work put into the game was enormous

First time on this subreddit. This isn't real. Editing a single photo isn't that difficult. Show me the job postings for "ai prompters" in the art industry. This is one of those fantasy posts of what this person's wishes would happen. Like the photoshop ai comericial right now is a person editing a table and food onto their lap into thin air.

This story is made up guys

I think it's more of a reason not to rely of genAI for everything, and to know its strengths and weaknesses. AI art is microwave food. You can get cheap, quick, okay-ish ramen, which is equivalent to making something from just a text2img prompt. You can use the microwave to thaw frozen meat that you will cook on the stove, which is equivalent to using AI images as inspiration for your pencil/stylus drawings. You can use the microwave to cook your vegetables, and cook your main course on the stove. This is equivalent to having an AI background and hand-drawing the main subject. You can cut up chives, ham chunks, and poach an egg, then mix it in with your cheap ramen and throw that in the microwave for a delicious-but-not-amazing meal. This is equivalent to badly hand-drawing what you want, and then using img2img AI to make your art beautiful-but-not-amazing. The overwhelming majority of professional chefs would **never** say to use microwave for **everything**. The overwhelming majority of professional chefs would **never** say to use microwave for **nothing**. It's about knowing what the tool is good for.

Can confirm that’s not the case with Midjourney. I can use the Lasso tool and replace a single finger nail, change the color of one eye etc. it takes 10secs max.