this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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I'm a one man Indie making a game. It's a management/strategy game and I want to add some depth to some of the pawns you control in the game by having a portrait for each and actual voices saying things and there are quite a lot of possible such pawns so that means quite lot of portraits and voices saying lines.
If I use generative AI I can do it at the cost of my time and some electricity for my PC, if I don't it would cost $$$ so wouldn't be able to have those elements because that's not just one or two portraits and voices.
Apparently if I use AI for it that makes me and my micro-company a big bad corporation.
Same here. Everyone complaining about AI in game development have no idea how hard indie devs have it. We desperately want to make a quality product and work our asses off doing so. We're working full time jobs for 'The Man' to fund it out of pocket, so every cent saved by using AI Gen is value being added elsewhere. Building games is really freakin' hard folks. The dream is to have a studio of artist making content, but that's literally impossible given my pay grade. It's truly a shame to see the gaming community rally against tooling that helps us indie devs make our dream a reality.
The problem with using gen AI is you're taking the effort of other hard workers for free. You thanklessly get the energy and time artists spent honing their craft because it was stolen by Gen AI. It pits hard worker vs hard worker all while the man profits.
One can make the exact same argument by saying Open Source and it would be just as incorrect.
Ultimately, the actual time and effort of the artist is not being used when a Gen AI trained on his or her work generates an output, just like when an Open Source library is used in a program the time and effort of the programmers who made that library is not being used.
(As for the rest, that grand statement that users of Gen AI are "taking the energy the artist spent honing their craft" is just laughably exaggerated and detached from objective reality)
The problem with Gen AI as it's being used now and the main difference to Open Source, is that with Open Source the programmer is in control of how works derived from their own freely distributed code are used, by means of which license they release their Open Source code under (so, for example, some licenses do not allow that code to be part of a commercially used or sold program, no matter how small a part that is, whilst others do), whilst the will of individual artists when it comes to their works being or not part of the training of Gen AI, and what kind of limits and uses are acceptable with the derived-via-Gen AI works based on their own art, is not taken into account much less respected.
It makes absolute sense that, like for programmers, some artists decide that none of their work or works works derived from it if free to distribute (so, no Gen AI), others decide that works can be derived from their own works but only for non-commercial use (i.e. can be used to train Gen AI as long as the output of that Gen AI is not used for commercial purposes) and yet others are ok with totally free use of automated derivations of their works.
That it isn't so, is not a problem of Gen AI as a technology (though if the training inputs are hundreds of thousands of works, the equivalent of Free With Attribution licenses might be hard to pull off) but a problem of how Intellectual Property Law is either lacking or being misused.
Your basing your entire argument on the assumptions that every generative models is trained on copyright works and also that training AI on copyrighted works is not Fair Use.
The first assumption is just false and the second assumption is not built on any established legal grounds in Western countries and is completely false in other countries with different legal systems.
Perfectly reasonable, but at the same time a little naive. Let's shift the focus on your future customers. What you say is true: artists are expensive and having proper art for your work can be costly. I mean, it's not entirely true cause young artists are not that expensive but you want very good art for your game and I can understand that.
Now, you may use gen AI to get all your art and voices. Are you sure your customers wanted that? Are you sure they wanna see all those "something's off" portraits and that will be the deciding factor for your game? If your game is good and fun even crappy art will sell it (look at touhou). Isn't it better to work on the actual game with placeholder art and look for a young artist when you have the finished product instead of wasting your time fiddling with settings and prompts on a genAI?
I mean, you do you. I'm not against AI as a tool, but don't assume people will like your game more if you plaster it with AI art. It's like coloring your sketch with stickers. The stickers may be good quality, but it will still look like a messy puzzle...
I think most customers want a fun game that doesn't cost $120.
If your game is good and fun even crappy art will sell it (look at touhou).