FoxMcChief
Gold Member
Eh. I’ll worry about it in 10 years. Until then, hopefully the AI can help us get stuff out the doors sooner, and costs the devs less to make, meaning they can work on more projects.
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[Wired] AI Is Already Taking Jobs in the Video Game Industry
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mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Who says the difference has to be high quality art vs. bad\low quality art? Know "HOW" to use A.I. will be up to project managers and producers. But it doesn't have to be a zero sum game here.
Chuck Berry
Gold Member
Keep reading the OT as "Weird Al is already taking over jobs in the video game industry"
Insane mindset
Dr_Ifto
Member
Machine learning (AI) has been taking developer jobs for years.
I had to read it twice to understand what was said
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ArthriticZombie
Member
Misread this as Weird Al was taking jobs. I was like F him.
hyperbertha
Member
Current ai has a low quality ceiling. It's not a case of skill.
FoxMcChief
Gold Member
I don’t think it’s as big of a deal as a few here. At the end of the day, it’s just video games. I love them, but I can live without them and find a different one. I’ve actually been flirting with the idea of models and more reading.
What in the actual fuck are you talking about
FoxMcChief
Gold Member
That’s it’s not a big deal and this is just a hobby.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Maybe. If AI stinks then employees have nothing to worry about.
But regardless, not everything in life requires the most time consuming expensive quality even if it's proven hand made media is the best.
If that was the case, everyone would buy one of a kind art for their walls which cost $100s and took someone two months to make, instead of framed Ikea prints for $15 (like me). Oreos are the best selling cookies in the world. Not good cookies compared to store made cookies from the bakery section. But when a bag of Oreos costs $3 they can be good enough. There's options.
AI is going to help churn out stuff fast. For some people, what is made from it is good enough. Others will be purists and go old school.
Right now, it can be argued digital art is AI made already. Digital artists use all the fancy photoshop and whatever programs they use pushing buttons and adjusting sliders to make things slick. That's computer driven adjustments.
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Oh ok. You seem a little bit too emotionally invested for this to be *just a* hobby but that's just me.
It's also a hobby of mine. But one for which I'm appreciative towards the very people who make it possible. A little human decency and precautious foresight goes a long way
SaucyJack
Member
The harsh reality is that this is true of all automation, always, for all time.
It takes time to adjust, some people lose out in the meantime. The question is what we do about it, as society. What safety net we provide, how we help people retrain, etc.
Not at all. But people doing mundane, repeatable tasks are definitely first in the firing line
ResurrectedContrarian
Suffers with mild autism
I came here to post essentially the same thing.
One of -- if not the biggest -- problems with gaming today is the scale issue, where high-end games require vast amounts of cash & people to produce, which means that only the most cynical and braindead corporations are behind them in nearly all cases. And then you have all the worthless people who arrive when it becomes a corporate industry like that, from HR types wringing their hands about diversity to politicized demands for representation to absolutely lowest-common-denominator pandering to whatever trend floats by.
With AI, a small team can do as much as a massive team. And it doesn't mean giving up creative control; you can create your own unique artistic vision, but allow AI to fill in the gaps. Mature AI technologies (look at all the tooling for Stable Diffusion, starting with ComfyUI and all its infinite plugins) allow for total control, and let you do things like supply your own original art and characters and environments, but let AI do the gruntwork of iterating them into all the variations and additional assets needed to go from concept to full game. Or use it to build and assemble systems faster than most large teams of rote programmers, if you have just 1 or 2 very bright minds who are using AI as a tool to speed through boilerplate.
I've seen this myself. The best engineers I know are 10x more productive this year than in prior years, due to using services like Claude (excellent AI for coding; totally obliterates GPT4) to act as virtual junior coders, so that you can work on the hard parts but just write your spec needs to Claude and have it pump out thousands of lines of code, or even debug its own code until it's correct. This lets you build large systems and focus on the architecture rather than the grunt work that used to be done by low-level coders.
I look back at the "learn to code" movement for children's toys (shelves full of products that supposedly teach coding or similar skills) and laugh. Low level coding is worthless. Only being an architect of software who can assemble all the conceptual pieces matters anymore. I'd rather use AI than hire any junior to waste my time.
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SaucyJack
Member
I look forward to Red Bread Redemption and Call of Doody: Modern Poo-fare
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
In general when technology over time takes over life or a process, it shows that the masses want it. Ok, some people directly involved wit the old way might lose their job if they cant adapt, but thats what unemployment insurance is for, and people need to adjust instead of being inflexible expecting a guaranteed job for life. If someone loses their job and somehow with the million other jobs out there combined with their working brain and two hands, cant figure out how to get another job they got issues.
It's not like tech over time has lead to giant unemployment rates. In fact, they are super low (close to historical lows). If the aura that tech and efficiencies kill jobs over time, then all the PCs, assembly lines, and whatever tech that has invented the past 100 years should by now have lead to unemployment of 50%. In the US, it's 4%.
I'm sure 1000s of years ago, general labourers and animal trainers lost jobs hauling jugs of water step by step from lakes lost when aqueducts got invented. Some clever engineers knowing about building stone ducts, gravity and angles designed it. But that's human life and progress. Things change all the time.
Sometime around the 1980s(?) is when PCs really got wind at companies. Before that it was endless floors of paper pushers with calculators doing stuff on graph paper. I'm sure a lot of people who couldnt use a PC got phased out and consolidated to fewer employees. I dont get the gist unemployment ramped up like crazy. The office people probably just got a different job.
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Solarstrike
Gold Member
Wasn't there suppose to a law to prevent this sort of thing? I mean, I don't want to talk political but this is really fucking sad. There are certain things in the world which need and will always need a human element. Entertainment industry to include music, gaming, and movies should be very concerned. The food and medical industry as well as trade and commerce as well should all be very concerned. A.I cannot and will not ever be able to do as good as a human being in some areas of work/activities, etc. Companies need to be held accountable when they switch to A.I if a human being is trained for and can do the task. Example, customer service. It's absolutely infuriating when trying to get assistance for a product, medical question or help, technical support, and it's a robot you're talking to. It really sucks. The human element must be protected and those industries mentioned, protected.
A point I also wish to add regarding the human element. Mistakes, idea(s), thinking, inspiration, failure. These are some of the things which A.I is NOT trained for or will never be able to "understand" or replicate. What makes humans what they are is them not being perfect. We struggle to achieve, we get inspired, our emotions build and rebuild through them. We dream, laugh and wonder. We remember and correct things to prevent or protect. A.I operates as a totality in correctness. It eventually will not make mistakes or wonder what could have been or have an idea(s) if something was to be this way or that. A.I "sees" the path is was programmed to take. But while it may point out the bumps along the way, it doesn't stumble or fall and become stronger because of it. Only a human can do that and that's what separate's humans from anything is the known universe. When A.I is given the ability to run more and more systems it will make a world where total perfection is the only way and will make corrections to remove anything (or anyone) who doesn't agree or contribute to it. End rant. /Carry on
A point I also wish to add regarding the human element. Mistakes, idea(s), thinking, inspiration, failure. These are some of the things which A.I is NOT trained for or will never be able to "understand" or replicate. What makes humans what they are is them not being perfect. We struggle to achieve, we get inspired, our emotions build and rebuild through them. We dream, laugh and wonder. We remember and correct things to prevent or protect. A.I operates as a totality in correctness. It eventually will not make mistakes or wonder what could have been or have an idea(s) if something was to be this way or that. A.I "sees" the path is was programmed to take. But while it may point out the bumps along the way, it doesn't stumble or fall and become stronger because of it. Only a human can do that and that's what separate's humans from anything is the known universe. When A.I is given the ability to run more and more systems it will make a world where total perfection is the only way and will make corrections to remove anything (or anyone) who doesn't agree or contribute to it. End rant. /Carry on
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
I think holistically, if AI is as great as it claims to be that it's no different than PCs or tech making things easier. Will there be mistakes? Yes. Will it replace some jobs? Yes. Will it create new jobs? Yes. etc...
I dont think people want AI to take over like Skynet where your entire life is controlled by Nvidia servers, so anyone freaking out like that should calm down. Just because there is a PC option doesn't mean a lot of people will even bother. Some people think just because there is a PC or AI option, everyone will go to that. Not true.
I dont care if someone makes the greatest AI robot ass wiper. No thanks. I'll wipe my my butt. I wash my car in my driveway for half an hour even though a car wash is down the street can do it in minutes.
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Fess
Member
Yeah I agree it’s definitely sad, and while joking about AI posting I think it’s an important topic regarding how AI will affect our knowledge of things. There is already a decline in knowledge of certain things, old people can know things that young people have no clue about.
Felessan
Member
It's common misconception that progress eliminate work. Its not - it eliminate outdated jobs, but in the same time it create a new ones. Horse drivers might lost their jobs forever, but car driver job appeared on the market.
AI may eliminate some of artists jobs, but at the same time it creates a lot of data scientist and data analysts jobs as AI needs people who create and improve them and people who will "talk" to them to get desired results.
Making AI do something for you in production environment with stable result of expected level of quality is actually quite some work, and people who do the setup - they all new jobs created by the rise of AI
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Agreed.
But there will always be one key pushback factor.
What does the company, gov or society do for that guy who lost a job and has issues getting another one after he got laid off. Or what does everyone do to help a guy out who lost his job even though he wants to stay in that job/industry forever. He has skills to do something else, but wants to stay there for 30 years till he retires.
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FoxMcChief
Gold Member
By not caring, I’m too emotional? Not sure how that tracks.Oh ok. You seem a little bit too emotionally invested for this to be *just a* hobby but that's just me.
It's also a hobby of mine. But one for which I'm appreciative towards the very people who make it possible. A little human decency and precautious foresight goes a long way
And I did say I too love games, but it’s still just a hobby/distraction/escape. If the medium blew up tomorrow, I’d just fill that void with something else and move on. Like maybe building models, or reading.
FoxMcChief
Gold Member
Exactly. The industry is going to evolve. Possibly for the better.
Wildebeest
Member
Bit of harsh take here, but if you are part of a "AAA games industry content pipeline" then you are not an artist, you are an industry line worker. If your job can be automated to save money, then it will be.
NickFire
Member
Looking at the brighter side, this should make games faster and cheaper to produce. Consumers will likely benefit from the faster production. But I'm not kidding myself that we will benefit from the cheaper production. I already fell for that shit when I assumed going digital would make games cheaper.
Icymanipulator
Member
And none of these savings will trickle down to consumers. They will be able to create games and assets for much less, yet charge the same or more.
The rich get richer and use the tools of production to benefit themselves.
The rich get richer and use the tools of production to benefit themselves.
Fess
Member
Nothing will be done. Those who want to stay at a big company needs to go back to school and then hope they can compete with young people after years of reeducation. Won’t be easy. Old school jobs like being an engine programmer, concept artist, 3D modeller, musician, won’t exist.
Some might stay to oversee AI output, for awhile.
Winner:
”I can’t code, can’t draw, I’m tone deaf… but I still want to make my own game!”
The indie scene will explode!
Unity is already a big help for those who can’t do engine coding. I use it myself. AI will take the indie scene forward like nothing else.
Felessan
Member
They might do something like reeducation or they might not. And for guys who wants to stay in industry - there is a way, not all people replaced by automatization, top 2-5-10% remains in the industry, you just need to be better than 90-95-98% who got replaced.
For example art director will be there even if 100% of artists will be replaced by AI - someone still should decide about conceptual direction of art in the game, style used etc.
Treat progress as natural disaster - you can adapt to it, but you can't stop it. Once cat out of the box - it's irreversible. "Others" (company, gov or society) might help you with damages or might not, ultimately it's up to you, it's your problem first and foremost, that you got hit by disaster.
Games of Today
Member
I feel like the A.I. vs Artists argument is horseshit.
If anything this will artists time and help them refine their skills.
The A.I. can make several versions of rough drafts before the artists begin creating the final product.
Hopefully it'll speed up dev time.
If anything this will artists time and help them refine their skills.
The A.I. can make several versions of rough drafts before the artists begin creating the final product.
Hopefully it'll speed up dev time.
Varteras
Member
Yep! If anything, AI will most likely be what ultimately saves the industry when you look at how bloated and tedious development has been and continues to get worse. Colin Moriarty said he believes there are too many people making too many games. I agree with that, to an extent, in that I would agree that there are too many people in the industry who shouldn't have a job. But also, that there is too much talent being hoovered into increasingly massive teams. Concentrated into particular corners of the industry instead of being able to spread out. Allowing for the creation of many smaller teams where the talent can really shine, without the constraints these often "developed by committee" games suffer from.
I do not agree with him that there are too many games. In fact, I would argue that there aren't enough. There isn't enough constant competition and certain franchises have been allowed to dominate by default because too few companies want to risk being in certain genres. We clearly see how risk averse these companies have become. How reliant they are on regurgitating the same franchises or concepts. We're talking about an industry where now a single failure can be the death of a company. And by failure, it's that they didn't sell several million copies or, in the case of live service, that they don't maintain hundreds of thousands of users. That's insane, but we've been conditioned to think that's normal. It shouldn't be.
Kataploom
Gold Member
Those are probably the companies that would put 827683621 tasks into a single person and overwork them to dead to avoid paying more people, or the same mf that hired us to mount them a Wordpress corporate site to "avoid paying a programmer" but got 78967821 plugins and themes just to hire a programmer since it was always a fantasy to "self-manage" it in the end, or those that will try and pay designers "$5 because it's just a logo, I can download hundreds of those on the interwebs"... Or directly demand free trials to freelancers in order to "get a chance to get the project"... There's always people like that, and in my experience, those tend to be in the lowest end of quality and earnings. I'm sure people will get heavily fatigated of obvious AI generated stuff because that's happening even today already.
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Kataploom
Gold Member
BTW, apart from dangerous jobs, anyone see any benefit of creating "robots" to replace humans? Like... What would be the actual benefits if those "robots" are already there since forever? It's the people, they have the brains and criteria to do a good job, it's like if I want to make a game but as I don't like how Unity handles gravity, instead of making my own gravity script I'll just write a whole new engine, see the nonsense here?
The gaming industry was really healthy the last few years what's going on now?
Is this just the people at the top cutting the fat so they will have more for themselves or is it fear of a shift in the industry?
TommyCronin6969
Member
Since we're strawmanning let's say AI can cure cancer would you feel bad for all the scientists and companies who'll have to fire all their employees who create cancer treatments etc and would you stop the AI from curing cancer just so them people can keep their jobs?
sendit
Member
It's already in-progress: https://www.cancer.gov/research/infrastructure/artificial-intelligence
Hypothetically, 80 year old Principal will be the first to say: "I want the warmth of a human's touch telling me there is nothing else we can do versus a robot giving me the cure to cancer"
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Mercador
Member
I think it's both actually. You could be surprised how high execs got incredible expectations on AI... It might help a bit but I don't think it will be the job killer that some startups are trying to push currently, we're still on the top of the hype circle, or it's already starting to wind down.
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Comandr
Member
Gee I sure hope AI doesn't come and overwhelm us with shitty shovelware games no one cares about...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/778440/Ruzar__The_Dark_Stones/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2824610/8_Days_of_School/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2603480/Temple_Crawler/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3059490/Mission_Andromeda/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3048540/Micro_Tanks/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2332850/DefenseCraft/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3082960/ICE/
Oh yeah; all of these out within a day. And it's only a fraction of them. There are dozens of shitty games no one cares about released on various platforms EVERY DAY. This is nothing new. It's actually shockingly difficult to find high quality upcoming releases on Steam. There's no like.. "Major Publisher" checkbox. While you can add a negative search for "Indie;" an overwhelming number of these games still show up, because they aren't self-tagged with the indie label.
This isn't to say that all indie games are bad. An enormous number of my most played games are indie games. But when you have a platform that vomits out hundreds, thousands of these games a month, finding the diamonds in the rough gets real challenging.
So let's not start crying now that the advent of AI is going to start a sudden tidal wave of bad games. We are already fuckin' underwater. I would argue that access to advanced tools like ChatGPT for writing assistance, Dall-E for art help, and even Suno for music creation could go and incredibly long way to helping some of the developers who clearly lack talent in given areas create a much more polished product.
AI isn't the boogie man. It's just a tool.
Indies can use the tools to help flesh out the areas they are lacking in. Big studios can use the tools to help streamline the development process because games taking 10+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars to produce is not sustainable. With studios closing virtually every day, it feels like the whole industry is on the verge of collapse. The big boys play it safe because they literally cannot afford to take risks. It's safe, or extinction.
I will take anything that allows studios to be creative and experimental again.
There's a ton of practical applications for humanoid worker robots to replace humans. A lot of it is cost, and work safety. Some of it is convenience. If I could pay $20,000 for a robot that did my dishes, laundry, dusting, lawn care and maintenance? Fuck yeah.
Now apply that toward industry. Housekeeping staff at places like hotels and cruise ships are notoriously overworked. The expected turn around time for a room to be cleaned and prepped for a new guest after check out is under 10 minutes, and can be as low as SIX in some places. Six minutes to change bedding, clean everything, all new towels and toiletries, tidy up, etc. And this is assuming there aren't any messes to take care of that will push that number even lower for the next job. Why does this happen? It's a staffing issue. Someone in the chain decides that X amount of housekeepers are all that's necessary because hiring more is too expensive. This breeds a scenario where speed is more important than quality. Get it good enough, and if they complain, we'll fix it then.
Now you're going to tell me that for the price of one human worker, who needs breaks and insurance and has to have days off (ugh so selfish) - I can buy TWO housekeeping robots that are just as efficient, don't need breaks, don't need insurance, don't complain, don't start drama, don't take days off, don't no call-no show and won't quit when the going gets tough, and now I have to train a new person all over again? AND we are getting publicity because we have this interesting new gimmick that is bringing in customers?
It's not a hard fuckin' decision from a corporate standpoint. Sucks for whoever is getting replaced. It's just a sign of the times. People have been dreaming about worker robots for over 60 years.
And now they're almost here. Maybe consider a job in robotics maintenance?
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Man, and to think it's only going to get worse
Appreciate the write-up!how about we reduce the risk of life threatening illnesses alltogether by not replacing every mundane task by AI so the average
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mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
It's a Multi-BILLION industry! It is a VERY BIG DEAL! It's not a hobby to 100s of thousands of people making games.
FoxMcChief
Gold Member
Well, that numbers bound to be less with the use of AI now though. Jokes aside, I’m talking only as the customer. I don’t care about how the product is made so much. If I did, then I’d go down a rabbit hole of how kids are actually making all our electronics, etc. So my line in the sand is only caring about my end. And if shit goes sideways in this industry, I’ll fill my time with something else.
TommyCronin6969
Member
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