this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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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.
~~Writing good music is really freakin' hard, but I do it on my own anyway because the whole point of making something creative is that a person is doing it. It's truly a shame to see people rally for software made by tech bros that takes work away from real artists who could use it.~~
editing to be less snarky: How would you feel if generative AI could make a game and an artist or musician had it make an entire game for their art/music because it saved them money?
If you're mirroring the example being discussed above, then wouldn't the alternative be that the game doesnt exist in the first place? The musician or artist cant afford to hire a game dev for x amount of time to make a game at all, thats why they used the tool. But using the tool allowed them to get closer to their vision anyway, even if it is imperfect.
I admit that it's not the best comparison because games often take more time to make than music or visual art. But I think the results are similar if you take a game with programmer art (which does have its charms!) or no art vs one that hired an artist for some amount of time, compared to a soundtrack or set of art with a game the artist put together vs hiring a dev to put together a demo in the same amount of time.
What this really comes down to for me is that most if not all of these models were created without the artists' permission and training the models takes an obscene amount of energy that contributes to global warming. These models devalue actual art even further and have made the internet a worse place by making it easier to make spam and disinformation. It's too late to fix spam and disinformation, but we can still value art. I think game devs would be singing a different tune if Steam was flooded with games made entirely with AI slop.
For your first part, i agree dev art has its charms. I don't necessarily think that charm is lost if AI is introduced with a light touch to help them out. For sure if they just prompt and use slop then yeah, thats way worse. Curious, what if a dev hires an artist, and that artist uses AI tools in some form or another? Assuming they provide what the dev wants for the project at good quality, is there still an issue here?
I do agree with some of the copyright issues and computation issues in your second part. I don't know what the solutions and future hold for this. I honestly just cede those points to the anti-ai crowd. It doesn't stop me from being a supporter of these tools overall, but im mostly just interested from the technology side itself. And i really only use local models to tinker with them as a hobbiest, not posting anything.
Also side note, steam is already flooded with asset flips, functionally no different, haha.