this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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AAA dev here.
Carmack is correct. I expect to be dogpiled by uninformed disagreements, though, because on social media all AI = Bad and no nuance is allowed. If that's your knee-jerk reaction, please refrain for a moment and calmly re-think through your position.
EDIT: lol called it
What AI tools are you personally looking forward to or already using?
Not me personally, as AI can't really replicate my work (I'm a senior sound designer on a big game), but a few colleagues of mine have already begun reaping the workflow improvements of AI at their studio.
Obviously AI is coming for sound designers too. You know that right? https://elevenlabs.io/sound-effects
And if you work on games and you haven’t seen your industry decimated in the past 16 months, I want to know what rock you have been living under and if there’s room for one more.
Okay, dude. Mute this video (no cheating by listening to it first; you have to act like a REAL designer here), then use that AI to generate for me some sound design that works for the visuals at the timestamp. Should be simple to do better than the sound designers over at Riot for an expert like yourself with access to an AI that makes their expertise irrelevant and will totally steal their job.
Oh, what's that? It sounds awful and doesn't represent the character at all? Hmm...
I love when regular folks act like they understand things better than industry insiders near the top of their respective field. It's genuinely amusing.
Let me ask you a simple question: do YOU want to play a game with mediocre, lowest-common-denominator-generated AI audio (case-in-point, that AI audio generator sounds like dogshit and would never fly in a retail product)? Or do you want something crafted by a human with feelings (a thing an AI model does not have) and the ability to create unique design crafted specifically to create emotional resonance within you (and thing an AI has exactly zero intuition for) that is specifically tailored for the game in question, as any good piece of art demands?
Answers on a postcard, thanks. The market agrees with me as well; no AI-produced game is winning at the Game Awards any time even remotely soon, because nobody wants to play stuff like that. And you know what's even funnier? We TRIED to use tools like this a few years ago when they began appearing on the market, and we very quickly ditched them because they sounded like ass, even when we built our own proprietary models and trained them on our own designed assets. Turns out you can't tell a plagiarism machine to be original and good because it doesn't know what either of those things mean. Hell, even sound design plugins that try to do exactly what you're talking about have kinda failed in the market for the exact reasons I just mentioned. People aren't buying Combobulator, they're buying Serum 2 in droves.
And no, I have not seen my industry decimated by AI. Talk to any experienced AAA game dev on LinkedIn or any one of our public-facing Discord servers; it's not really a thing. There still is and always will be a huge demand for art specifically created by humans and for humans for the exact reasons listed above. What has ACTUALLY decimated my industry is the overvaluation and inflation of everything in the economy, and now the low interest rates put in place to counter it, which is leading to layoffs once giant games don't generate the insane profit targets suits have, which is likely what you are erroneously attributing to AI displacement.
Do you remember the music from the last Marvel film you watched?
I don't.
Quality isn't directly correlated to success. Buy a modern pair of Nikes or... Go to McDonalds, play a modern mobile game.
I love when industry insiders think they're so untouchable that a budget cut wouldn't have them on the chopping block. You're defensive because its your ass on the line, not because its true.
People gargle shit products and pay for them willingly all day long. So much so that it's practically the norm. You're just insulated from it, for now.
That's a different kind of problem.
"Oh no, all my quality work won't be in the next marvel movie or in mcdonalds' next happy-meal promo campaign, darn. Guess I'll have to make and sell something else."
~ Literally every artist with a modicum of talent, ambition and a brain
What's your favorite big-budget, AI-generated game/movie/show that you've given money to, again?
This is such a flimsy argument that it's barely worth responding to. People by-and-large are absolutely sick of Marvel slop and still seek quality art elsewhere; this is not a novel concept, nor will it be outmoded by the introduction of AI. The internet and entertainment industry at large is still actively exploding with monetized, unique, quality content because not everybody wants slop; most people are actively sick of it. Talented visual artists are still and will continue to be hired in the entertainment industry and will also continue to be able to independently release stuff online because they have their own individual perspective and the x-factor of "human creativity" that AI slop just cannot compete with. Interesting that you didn't address that, but what's also interesting is you're touching upon the reason most people are mad; AI models tend to churn out mediocre work, and people feel threatened because they aren't good enough at their craft to compete with it, so instead of becoming better they scream at anybody trying to advance the technology of their particular discipline for taking away extremely easy kinds of work that they barely had to do anything to get before (patreon commissions, etc.). Work a tad harder, try to express yourself more effectively and I promise you somebody will value your work above the forgettable music from "The Eternals". People with talent tend to break through if they try hard enough, it's not rocket science.
And I addressed the budget-cut thing earlier, so no I am not acting the way you described. Budget cuts are not an AI problem, they're a capitalism problem, as I stated previously. Please read.
INB4 people scream "survivorship bias". No, you're just not good enough, and you'd rather scream and yell at sensible takes from every expert in their field or craft than accept that fact. Legitimately. I know you don't like hearing that, but you need to accept it in order to improve. Get better at your craft. If you can't make stuff with greater quality than AI slop, you're not going to be capable of making things that resonate with people anyway. AI will never be able to do this, and this kind of quality creates sales. AI will be used, sure, but it will be leveraged to improve efficiency, not replace artists
At this point, it should be obvious that no one is downvoting you because they believe you're wrong. Rather, its because you're an inflated, insecure douchebag who's so threatened by the opinions of two federated users on the ass end of the internet, that he feels the need to write an essay about it, not to us, no, to his own ego.
And for the record, I'm not one of the believers. On a long enough timeline, you'll be playing birthday parties dressed as a cowboy. Ai is improving while people have a bell curve. It's only a matter of time. Cheers. I hope you find happiness one day.
Imagine the ego it would take to write something as unbelievably cringe as this personal fantasy about an anonymous person you're angry at just to make yourself feel better.
For the record, I'm autistic and I am highly compensated for my expertise as an interactive artist, so that's why I'm discussing this topic with fervor.
It's also really funny that anybody would ever give a shit about fake internet points, as if it were some transcendental measure of correctness or moral merit and not just an indication of how uninformed, emotionally-driven and circlejerk-y the general public is on social media.
The real answer, like every creative industry over the past 200+ years, is oversaturation.
Artists starve because of oversaturation. There is too much art and not enough buyers.
Musicians starve because of oversaturation. And music is now easier than ever to create. Supply is everywhere, and demand pales in comparison. I have hundreds of CC BY-SA 4.0 artists in a file that I can choose for use in my videos, because the supply is everywhere.
Video games are incredibly oversaturated. Throw a stick at Steam, and it'll land on a thousand games. There's plenty of random low-effort slop out there, but there's also a lot of passionate indie creators trying to make their mark, and failing, because the marketing is not there.
Millions of people shouting in the wind, trying to make their voices heard, and somehow become more noticed than the rest of the noise. It's a near-impossible task, and it's about 98% luck. Yet the 2% of people who actually "make it" practice survivorship bias on a daily basis, preaching that hard work and good ideas will allow you to be just like them.
It's all bullshit, of course. We don't live in a meritocracy.
Nah, good art breaks through with enough perserverance, time, improvement in your work and a little bit of luck (which you need less of the more of the first three you have). People just underestimate what "good art" is defined as. The bar is now just where it always should have been, which is JUST above somebody copying your work without any underlying understanding as to why it works or the cultural gestalt involved. Not a very high bar to clear, tbh, but I could understand why some entry-level folks feel frustrated. If that's you, keep your head down, push through and improve, you'll get there.
When it's other people's work, well, people need a nuanced opinion about this nascent technological breakthrough.
When it's your specific area of expertise, it's "the plagiarism machine."
You are Knoll's law personified.
And yeah yeah yeah, it does a mediocre job of whatever you do. That's the opposite of safety. Disruptive change only cares about whether it can do the job. Already the answer seems to be a soft yes.
Right now is the worst the tech will ever be, again.
I love how you didn't read anything else I wrote regarding this and boiled it down to a quippy, holier-than-thou and wrong statement with no nuance. Typical internet brainrot.
Oh my god you're still trying to have it both ways.
But it'll never apply to what you do, because you're special and that's different.
Nuance nuance nuance! Plagiarism machine. Zero cognitive dissonance.
Generated content is great, it lets you go home early and fuck your wife! But let me ask you, novice: would YOU ever play a game with generated content?
This whole industry makes impossible broken demands, isn't it just the tits? We'd never make games under-budget if not for this tech that I myself said was useless shite until just now. There's no way increased productivity will also be crunched to demand 2000 textures in this eighty-hour week.
Obviously that scaling for selection doesn't apply to MY job, because AI will never do what I do, unlike how I think it can handle everyone else's work. Everyone insisting I'm not superior to all these NPCs I work with must not experience nuuuaaance.
Okay, dude, time to put your money where your gigantic mouth is. Mute this video (no cheating by listening to it first; you have to act like a REAL designer here, and real gameplay is silent when it gets given to us), then use one of the many freely-available, generative audio AI models that are all easily Googlable to generate for me some sound design that works for the visuals at the timestamp. Should be simple to do better than the sound designers over at Riot for an expert like yourself with access to free AI that makes their expertise and human, artistic perspective irrelevant and will totally steal their job. I mean, you clearly know more than me, so you should easily be able to do something that is requested in the first stages of any entry-level sound designer job interview.
Oh, what’s that? It sounds awful and doesn’t represent the character, let alone what's happening on-screen at all? Hmm…nah, I must still be wrong somehow. I've got "cognitive dissonance" and "survivorship bias", after all. I definitely don't understand the strengths, efficiency-increasing potential and limitations of the technology we're discussing better than a guy who thinks that because you can generate more textures with a trained diffusion model that that means more can and will be used on nonexistent parts of a game (because you have to apply textures to, you know, THINGS THAT EXIST IN THE GAME). And if you are able to put more things in a game, you definitely should, because the suits/customers will DEFINITELY demand it. It's not like QA testers or the market research department will straight-up tell you in no uncertain terms that paying customers are gonna hate a bloated game or anything. That's definitely how that works; no designer ever has to cut content in order to focus an experience and make the game feel good to have a fighting chance against its competition in the market; that never happens. Ask any dev or artist; there has definitely and for sure never been a single ounce of cut content in any development cycle ever since generative AI tools came on the scene and began getting incorporated into the commercial development of art, let alone games. This is because games for sure are not works greater than the sum of their parts, and extra ancillary features added solely because "suit want big game, use AI, give moar now" never ruins the balance of everything else in the game, leading to losses in sales that are easily predictable by market research requested by said suit. You're clearly the expert here, not me. Please continue to school me with your 400 IQ takes, Stephen Hawking.
God damn, gamers are sooooooooooooo fucking dumb and recalcitrant. Seriously, y'all will rudely and ignorantly argue to the death with actual developers for DAYS rather than admit you don't have one an iota of an idea as to what you're fucking talking about, with egg on your face the whole way. Ugh.
Your explicit argument is that "better" isn't the standard, when it comes to cranking out textures or whatever. But suddenly when it's your thing - there's no possible way that passable results could work. Disruptive change won't affect your profession, because good-enough audio never happens in video games, a medium obsessed with escalating... audio quality? No, right, graphics. The thing you figure AI will be awesome for, when someone needs two hundred variations, to-day. And when that demand becomes reasonable there's no fucking way the studio will demand two thousand.
'You're being a hypocrite, judged on your own statements, in this thread alone.'
'YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME AT EVERYTHING?!?!?!'
Jesus.
I consider myself pretty positive about the potential for generative AI, especially in game development, and it's still embarrassing watching you aggressively fail to handle polite criticism. You lurched in with 'I bet people will downvote my lukewarm take!' and then got big mad when that happened. Like it was a surprise.
This latest comment is an open wound of grievances which I, personally, didn't say a god damned word about. You're just showing your whole ass over... cut content? For some reason? Who asked. And you're trying to turn measured pushback regarding your sweeping claims into some chest-beating dominance-game, where one of us has to go away humiliated and quintessentially stupid forever, instead of just saying - oh, guess that was a slight overreach, whoopsie daisy.
My condolences to anyone who works under you. However good you are at your job, the way you handle disagreement is demonstrably miserable. Please get better at it.
I pretty explicitly explained why this is the dumbest take ever in the previous post, and then tried to get you to do what you're claiming in actual practice so perhaps midway through you'd realize how stupid you're being. Read, please.
It's also pretty funny how aggressively you're defending artists and their right to "not have their jobs taken by AI" based on a misunderstanding as to how this all works, only to turn around and post this in a thread, essentially stating that artists should continually create content for games years after they've hit their sales peak for no additional cost to you at the expense of their labor essentially be exploited for free because you don't wanna cough up $15 for the thing they put months/years of their life into or whatever. Like, dude, YOU'RE the one arguing to not pay the people you're supposedly defending. This is the thing that's ACTUALLY going to cost people their jobs. Turns out creative human labor is still incredibly relevant these days and costs money, and you don't seem to understand the business models of game studios, either.
I was looking for an intelligent discussion with you. My mistake.
Nah, dude, those are the most basic responses/questions you'd get out of literally any qualified person with any knowledge on this subject if you brought it up as a suggestion at an actual studio. People have to think out and justify their approaches to things at jobs, this isn't rocket science. It's genuinely incredible that you can't follow a point from A to B to C to D and understand how they might all be related and affect one another. You're just digging the hole further with your obvious ignorance and inability to think critically; my advice is to please learn when to stop speaking and begin listening.
Writing fan-fiction about some random you're mad at online to make yourself feel better about being demonstrably stupid? Who's showing their ass here, again?