Yeah it seems very clear that the cheapest artstyle of the future will be whatever AI can output with minimal human editing or involvement. And some studios will go that route.
Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon, and definitely not by the indie crowd.
I've also been thinking about this for animation. I foresee cheap limited animation (sliding layers, only mouth moving, etc) being replaced by incoherent un-/barely edited AI output instead.
All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.
> Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon
It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing. Same in professional film and TV productions. It doesn’t look AI generated because they don’t just run Stable Diffusion and call it a day, but the reductions in labor costs are still immense even with the post-processing that’s currently still required to match AAA quality.
The games market has a massive oversupply. It's not enough to just "make a game", you have to make a good one. That is to say, better than all the other things your audience could be playing. Cheaping out is literally not an option. You can cheap out in one area to spend more effort in another area, but you can't just say "this is cheaper therefore it will be the default" because the default isn't good enough. Most games fail
I don't agree that the cheaper option is less good. I can admit that ai often (but not always) writes code with more attention to detail than I do, and much faster. Diffusion by itself does not produce human tier graphics (usually), but in combination with llms and heuristics it can do some things better than humans. When wielded by a graphic artist who could do it by hand with mixed media much less digitally, the amount of top tier art that can be produced is increased. Less expensive art doesn't have to mean worse art, it can mean equally good art, just note of it, art everywhere.
> All of them will. It can save nearly 100% of costs for art production. Nobody can afford not to use it, unless they aren’t developing the game to make a profit.
This is not correct. Your profit doesn't have to be relative to what another company makes. It would only be affected if games passed the savings on to the customers. You make more profit if you do use it potentially but it doesn't mean you don't make profit if you choose to go the traditional route.
> All of them will. [...] It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing.
Doesn't your lot ever get tired of the intellectually lazy, rubbish absolutisms you peddle? Same goes for the projections; just because you slop it, doesn't mean everyone will.
Oh, that's really elegant! I've got a whitespace sensitive language of my own, and I think I'll change it to use that rule! Thanks!
(Until now, I went with the standard approach: Remember the leading whitespace of the previous line. Then compare with the new line's leading whitespace: If they are the same, then no change in indentation. If the old one is a prefix of the new one, it's an indent. If the new one is a prefix of the old one, it's a dedent. If neither, it's an error)
That seems like a decent way to handle the mixed-spaces-and-tabs scenario, even between lines: one line starts with `<tab><tab>`, the next line `<tab><tab><sp><sp><sp><sp>`, that's an indent. (Probably someone who likes 4-space indents and 8-space tab characters). Follow that up with `<sp>*12` and that looks like the same indent to someone who uses 4-space tabs, but not the same indent to someone who uses 8-space tabs.
So your proposed prefix-matching rule would correctly flag that scenario, forcing people stop and figure it out.
EDIT to add this P.S.: Actually, my "spaces may follow a tab but tabs may not follow a space" rule, while elegant, is incomplete. Your prefix-matching rule is actually necessary in order to deal with the "two tabs on one line, twelve spaces on the next line" situation. That would be legal under the "spaces may follow a tab but tabs may not follow a space" rule, but it's ambiguous whether that's an indent or a dedent. If tabs mean eight spaces then it's going from 16 to 12, a dedent; if tabs mean four spaces then it's going from 8 to 12, an indent.
One could imagine an even smaller subset interpreter. It's an interpreter for a subset of Python, consisting only of the programs that print "Hello World". Since it doesn't do any error checking, for all other programs the output is undefined. Implementing it is very simple: Just ignore the input file, and print "Hello World". As a bonus, it's an interpreter for the subset of "Hello World" programs in all other programming languages too!
(It should be noted that these are all joke esolangs. There are actual languages on the wiki that are very interesting though - I would definitely recommend you take them out!)
In my experience, people justifying their own piracy usually think about it in terms of refusing to give money to unethical/monopolistic publishers. The fact that it results in money not going to the author is sort of abstracted away, by the fact that the publisher is in between. (Some also walk the walk and donate to the artists and authors directly in some way, but many don't.)
The AI arguments I've seen are instead usually justifying it like this: "We're democratizing those skills. You shouldn't have to learn art/writing/coding or pay someone else in order make what you imagine. Therefore, training AI on pirated stuff is worth it for the greater good." So the fact that it will result in artists not getting paid is unavoidable and much harder to ignore in that line of thinking.
"Advocating open national borders means you must let random strangers live in your house" a truly reasonable and not at all disingenuous argument. On par with "advocating socialism means you must let random strangers use your toothbrush".
Misrepresenting the argument is not a good look. The argument is that everyone believes in borders. And that borders aren't racist. The only question is where we personally accept them being drawn. But NOBODY believes they're inherently all bad. Not even the people who pretend to do so, and are all too happy to throw around accusations of fascism and racism, to appeal to base emotion rather than logical and practical arguments.
But the person you are responding to didn't say "any and all borders are racist, including borders in your own home". You are the one misrepresenting their argument.
I don't know if you're being intentionally obtuse, or you genuinely believe what you're saying. I was the one saying that a border is a border, and you had better have a good explanation as to why the national border is fundamentally different from your home. If it's okay to protect your home, why is it WRONG to protect your country? See? I was putting the OP to the test: why is one just fine, but the other reprehensible? Instead, the OP responded with accusations of racism.
There is a lot of space in my country that is not actively used as living space. On the other hand, 100% of the space in my home is actively used as living space.
Comparing a country and a home is a poor comparison.
Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to.
Personally, I suspect good writers will adapt in due time, not because they don't want to sound like AI, but because they don't want to sound cliche. Even the ones stubbornly holding on to their em-dashes.
The ones hit hardest will be the mediocre writers, who have always relied on cliches. Their writing will become indistinguishable from reading chatbot output.
> Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to.
The Zaphod Beeblebrox style of communication.
So far I haven't been accused of using AI for my comments, even though I use (and always used) a lot of the tropes. It's probably because my rhetorical skills overall suck.
> I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)
Hmm I don't think that would be enough. I'd expect that would only make the modifications themselves copyrightable, but not the whole modified work including the AI parts.
Compare for example the case where the US copyright office ruled that, when assembling AI-generated images and human-written text into a comic book, only the human-made elements themselves (text, arrangement) get copyright protection, but not the images.
E.g. if you generate an AI photo and color grade it, i expect only the color grading would be protected (if that is even significant enough to be protectable), not the rest. And someone else could re-color-grade the same image without infringing your copyright.
I would like to know too, but the author's Github account seems to have been deleted, and the crates.io releases have been completely deleted too (not just yanked) so it seems impossible to view the file :/
Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon, and definitely not by the indie crowd.
I've also been thinking about this for animation. I foresee cheap limited animation (sliding layers, only mouth moving, etc) being replaced by incoherent un-/barely edited AI output instead.
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