At the quality of the current output, I think players still easily differentiate between AI generated art and hand-created art. Maybe in future versions this will be less noticeable.

As a game dev, I think at this stage AI can be a helpful utility, but it does not replace a designer's touch for professionally looking games.

The AI stuff is a style though. I'm seeing it happening now in the art world, where the quirks of the model become part of the appeal of the work. Won't be long until a game with good enough mechanics comes along and blows up I think.

For me the model "quirks", eg. all the mistakes they make, are a huge turnoff.

For better or worse, I agree with your sentiment, but that will probably change. Consider how many kinds of foods and clothing are mass produced; we often consider something made by hand to be precious, and even a higher value, but we have become accustomed to the tradeoffs for cheaper solutions. It may not be our generation, but it's conceivable future generations will be less inclined to differentiate as we do (if only based on the exposure to what this kind of art generation offers at an early age).

I'm not convinced this is true. The economics of cultural production are far more winner take all than the economics of food and clothing production. Higher quality work gets more of the limited attention in that economy. AI work is doomed to fail because of this dynamic.

Everything gets re-appropriated by art, from mpeg frame skips to messy bedrooms.

Many of the quirks of our technology, like audio distortion for example, quickly become key components of certain styles. I remember as a child growing up in a funny valley after the acceptance of analogue distortion but before the widespread adaption of digital distortion.

Right now I'm thinking of someone like James Gerde, where the frame-to-frame shifts of AI imagination are part of the aesthetic. I think it's only a matter of time before this effect is matched up with something that makes emotional sense, and then it will blow up.

Using it that way requires intention. Developing that intention is hard to do if all you ever do is pull the one armed bandit hoping for AI to produce what you want.

Of course, any tool still requires a skilled artist to make good use of it.

If these levels were used in a game I was playing, they would not certainly not stand out to me as AI generated. It's possible if I was specifically asked to try to figure out if they were AI then I would succeed, but even that I'm not sure of.

Would that even be legal for a commercial game?

Personal use, a mod, or a free experiment is one thing, but a shipping game is a different can of worms.

The game was called “Braid”

The sad thing though is that $100k on art wasn’t wasted. It allowed an artist to make art and a living. I’m down the with tech and I’ve even written a typing game that generates Minecraft stories with a LLM and imagines them with stable diffusion for my daughter to learn typing with. But - my mom is an artist and she spent her career starving between sales and commissions. The fact the models have ingested their work and careers and can now replace them is sad.

On the other hand, I’ve never been an artist myself. So I’ve never been able to make my game ideas come true until now. The world is much more open to me in a creative side that my mechanical skills prevented.

Artists will continue to make art because it’s a compulsion. But I wish we had a world that was less oriented towards rewarding meaningless toil and would at least allow our born artists, writers, and creators the chance to do their obsessions to our benefit. Especially as we move post scarcity, I hope we can build a WPA like entity - perhaps, in a crazy twist, funded by AI?

We're never moving post scarcity. There is no scenario where that outcome is going to occur. Logistics alone guarantee that won't happen. Existence by its very nature is bound up in scarcity. There will always be various critical elements that provide a scarcity restriction on humanity and the rest (the less scarce) will always collide against that scarcity bottleneck.

The artists can now create on the tech side too, courtesy of inbound GPT-like LLMs. This isn't a one way street. The techies can craft art, the artists can craft tech.

It's opening up enormous pathways whether you're a programmer or artist. The artist has to be willing to expand and take on more responsibilities, just as the techie does if they want to craft quality AI art for a game.

With all the various game engines available now, we're not far away from being able to relatively easily have an LLM build nearly all the software side for you via prompting. From there you can bring whatever your strength is to customizing, implementing the game. Maybe you're good at ensuring high quality gameplay, maybe you're an artist that has an elite eye for how things should look, maybe you're a programmer and your game will be better optimized (and so on).

> We're never moving post scarcity.

We already are with digital goods, society just hasn't caught up yet. I can make essentially infinite many copies of, say, Braid, and give every person in the world with an Internet connection a copy of it for a couple thousand dollars by using Cloudflare unlimited bandwidth R2 and bittorrent. A couple thousand dollars is basically a rounding error in the scheme of things. As I am not Jonathan Blow, distributing Braid would be a violation of copyright law, but copyright law is just a social contract that we entered into to incentivize the creation of work. If Jonathan Blow were compensated for every copy of Braid out there, I'm sure he would be quite happy to be (even more) rich.

So even in a post-digital-scarcity world, artists and programmers need to get paid, and so we have various DRM schemes, the first of which is the copyright system in the first place, but that works about as well as trying to make water not wet. Movies are leaked onto torrent sites like Rarbg (RIP) and people make copies all day long. libgen mirrors are still around despite the best efforts of the copyright regime. But let's be honest with ourselves, digital goods themselves are already post scarcity, we just haven't figured out how to incentivize the creation of works in our half-post-scarcity world and have no idea on how to move forwards.

Alternate solutions are out there, but we have no experience as a society in upending large social contracts (like copyright). You can easily imagine a system where what's popular gets tracked, and money flow to the creators of the media that people are actually watching and consuming. It would be a more draconian system than the DRM we have right now, but on the other hand, if it promotes the arts, then maybe it's worth it.

Post scarcity doesn’t mean “I dream of a palace and it appears.” It means basic necessities of life are available to all without everyone laboring. I think we are actually there, but have induced a scarcity economy with extreme imbalances and fake incentives to toil for toils sake.

The artist will make art without reward. They always have. But few can do it for a living. Fewer will in this next phase.

> Post scarcity doesn’t mean “I dream of a palace and it appears.” It means basic necessities of life are available to all without everyone laboring. I think we are actually there, but have induced a scarcity economy with extreme imbalances and fake incentives to toil for toils sake.

To be clear, that is according to the definition you've made up. The commonly understood definition includes many or most of peoples' desires. Travel, housing, vacations, iphones, advanced health care, entertainment, higher education, etc.

> I think we are actually there, but have induced a scarcity economy with extreme imbalances and fake incentives to toil for toils sake.

Even in western countries, millions of people are struggling with basic costs of housing, energy, and even food. I mean people who actually work many hours every day and earn money are struggling with these things. We seem to be a long way off it even for your "basic necessities" definition.

Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

To your point, they do. However I’d assert that’s mostly due to income inequality and false scarcity to induce labor for labors sake.

Not for all goods and services, no. It's not just the basic necessities for life though.

And I'd assert it's not mostly due to income inequality.

It feels like a lot of people on the pro-AI side of this debate think making art is some kind of magical activity that is totally inaccessible to them. The reality is the barrier to entry is a pen and paper and 10 minutes a day. There are a ton of resources online to learn about how to produce art without surrendering all your creativity to the AI slot machine, that don't involve stealing 400 million images.

I could glibly say the same about programming but it’s just not true. Anyone can learn to write a script to do some simple task, but they are not a programmer. The ability to go from a vision to a high quality output that accurately represents your vision requires years of work for most people, in any field.

And yet, so ready are we to discard those millennia of earned experience in favor of statistically generated sludge. Instead of glibly saying the same about programming, we glibly dismiss the role of the artist in making art. In another comment on this thread, someone talks about how Jon Blow could have saved $100,000 on art for Braid if he had used an ai system like this, perhaps not understanding that the art of Braid is a critical component of what makes it Braid.

If Karma is real, games made with uninteresting AI art will fail as we generate a sea of low-effort sludge.

History has shown that with every new tool people are going to make some crap, but also some wonderful things.

I would note, as a 30 year student of Buddhism, this isn’t at all what karma is.

Yeah, that won’t happen. As with anything; by far and large most people don’t care. As long as it’s fun, people will play. That statically generated sludge looks often better than what most humans come up with and sure, some (very few) humans are still better, but not for very long. That said, the speed and price of using AI are so much better and if you have 0 talent, like me, you can iterate for days for pennies. There is no going back.

I’ve always practiced art, after all my mother is an artist. I simply don’t have the mechanical aptitude. I enjoy creating my art, but my art is entirely mine and has no aesthetic value to anyone else. In making a game, you need an ability to create a consistent style that speaks to a topic. I can’t do that despite all practice. I think I’m not alone.

You are not alone.

I tried to learn; took years of courses. I cannot. I have no feel for it. AI, for me, is a lifesaver for game art and web design. In a pepsi test, I found no one (of our clients, which is all who matter for this for me, and that is for web design, not art) who can see the difference between human or ai, so that’s that then.

> The sad thing though is that $100k on art wasn’t wasted. It allowed an artist to make art and a living.

I'm sure in many AI proponents' minds, this is the exact definition of "wasted": a human does something that machines can do.

(I'm still on the fence over this topic)

> But - my mom is an artist and she spent her career starving between sales and commissions.

Why should we care about your mum, and not the guy who creates buggy whips?? Or the guy who runs the ferry that crosses the river who will be out of their job because of the new bridge?

Where do you draw the line at caring?

You're getting downvoted but your point is valid. Why is art sacred?

> Artists will continue to make art because it’s a compulsion. But I wish we had a world that was less oriented towards rewarding meaningless toil and would at least allow our born artists, writers, and creators the chance to do their obsessions to our benefit.

Everybody is an artist, and everybody can create and share art for themselves and the people around them. That is art at is best, in my opinion. Commercialization and mass production and display and distribution of "art" is what degrades it for me.

> Especially as we move post scarcity, I hope we can build a WPA like entity - perhaps, in a crazy twist, funded by AI?

Post-scarcity will never happen because even the people with mansions in many countries, billion-dollar yachts, and fleets of private airplanes do not have enough. And 10 billion people can't even live like them. Why would the people who own most of the capital suddenly collectively decide they would like to share the production with the rest of the world?

But if it did happen, we should not pay artists for art. We should give everybody enough so that if anybody wanted to paint a picture or hammer some metal into a horseshoe or knit a sweater or write some assembly code, they could do so.

Yeah- imagine paying people for their work.