this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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?