Companies are slow to move on things, but I think "video game concept artist" is done. An art director can now sit down in front of Midjourny and pump out years and years of a concept artists work in just an afternoon.
When electric sound amplification came along, it put most professional musicians out of business. Instead of an orchestra all you need is a band of 3 or 4.
Making music expanded though. In the sense that more people played, there was more variety, and indeed more professional musicians today than 100 years ago. (the bar for entry is also lower, and most are permantly broke - take that as you will.)
Some orchestras still exist. But they're pretty rare.
So yes, alot of job descriptions and job titles will change. Making indie games just got a lot easier. But where you see loss, many others see opportunity.
AI is opposite of human creation. Its definition of anti-creation. Its a spell that locks visual culture to year 2025. And it can only do this by illeagly stealing all the human work.
You don’t think we can make it come up with variations, and use people’s feedback on what’s interesting to figure out what new avenues are promising? It’s not that hard to do this sort of exploration, it’s not limited to just mimicking what it’s seen. If anything, I think we’ll see an increase in the pace of evolution of art as it becomes economical for normal people to get personalized art.
> Its a spell that locks visual culture to year 2025.
What a fantastic way of putting it.
I'm constantly reminded of _the Matrix_, with Agent Smith telling Neo that 1999 (the apparent year inside the Matrix) was the peak of human civilization.
It’s nice that the barrier became lower but people still need jobs to afford food and rent. I doubt that UBI will come anytime soon so less jobs that pay enough is a serious issue.
Agreed. It feels like a lot of the people burning hard on AI seem to think that when the jobs are gone some benevolent benefactors (who exactly?) will decide to institute UBI for all because....why exactly?
It seems much more likely to me that all that will happen is there will be a lot more poor people...
it's not like "all jobs" will be taken by Robots and AI. That will be of little consolation though to modern-day buggy-whip-makers.
Jobs are a way of "adding value" to society. But over the last 120 years we've figured out how to add a Lot of value with minimal people. 95% of people used to grow food. Now it's like 2%.
People moved to factories, where today robots and automation rule. People moved to hi-tech, and leveraged that tech. Now AI is moving into that space.
In truth, we now create way, way, more value than we need. We need to figure out how to distribute the value created. Somehow I doubt that the US will be the leader here; things like UBI are too far against the "American Way".
When we see UBI emerge, in whatever form that takes (basically basic human needs met) it'll likely come from places that value community over individuality. Places that rate their success by their poor, not their rich. Places that celebrate achievements which don't require the exploitation of others.
I was just pointing out one job that I could see in my industry. I for one welcome the wealth of interesting new indies games with great looking graphics we'll soon see.
People will be able to take more risks and do more interesting projects. It will be awesome.
You are wrong, I have worked for many years as an artists and level builder in video games. Bioshock is the most famous game, and Void Bastards the most recent.
Could you instead use AI to reduce drudgery in your work, or to iterate faster between ideas until you settle on a final peace? What if you have something in mind that is hard to prompt for, or the tool just refuses to generate what you had in mind? I would try to lean into it as a tool to speed up some of the tedium, instead of fear it, if possible
I'm not in the camp that fears it, I think it will be an awesome tool and I can't wait to use it in my next game. I've been playing with Midjourny a lot already, but have been watching Stable Diffusion and the control net stuff closely as well.
I could see drawing a couple of characters and getting an AI to extend the style to more. Especially if you can give it feedback. But the idea that you could get years of concepts in an afternoon is silly. That's like saying I can generate hundreds of business plans using ChatGPT.
