Games

AI should be a tool, not a replacer.

The fact that this is possible is amazing to me. The fact that the whole trailer consists of nothing from the game but dreamt up fabrications of a random number generator with lots of training is not.

Games are an intentional art where a lot of creativity and work is put into a unique interactive medium. The AI trailer is far from that.

Good AI art should be completely invisible, like when romcom movies with no visible CGI are actually changing the entire sky in certain scenes. People were able to spot the flaws here instantly.

Or if you're a 1 man studio living in their parent's basement, go nuts with it. This is a gigantic company that could afford to hire humans.

Intent is critical for my enjoyment of art. What makes art wonderful is that it lets you connect with another human being, get a glimpse into their mind, see their perspective, feel their feelings.

Gen AI as it exists today has no intent, so I have no interest in it.

What's rad about a character holding a gun with three hands? It's insulting to professional artists and the player base alike.

GenAI videos can be fun to use as inspiration, but you don't collect a reel of shitty animations and call it a trailer. I don't even play ARK and I feel bad for the players. They got served a shit sandwich.

They're cool, but using them to sell a product is bullshit

Generative AI "art" is incredibly useful for small creators to prototype works. Whether that is storyboarding/previs or making a presentation to show investors. It allows those small creators to make something "understandable" while keeping budgets down during the early days/years of a project.

Once that work is ready to be shown to the public? All work must have an actual creator. Whether that is an asset pack you purchased because it is "close enough" or an artist that you contracted/hired.

But also? Studio Wildcard (the company behind Ark) is very established and have been making games for over a decade at this point. They should have artists on staff who are already familiar with the style and design bibles of the Ark universe.

It's because you didn't spend a significant portion of your life learning how to create things from, for lack of a better term, your soul, and then had a machine suddenly rip it all away from you. There are good things and bad things about gen-AI.

It's a complicated issue. In an extremely financialised economy like in western societies, a non insignificant portion of labour was detoured from productive useful work into entertainment and services. This labour is becoming more and more replaceable by NNs which threatens the jobs of bloggers, influencers, artists and the like. Personally, I think the negative sentiment is a mix of these people having privileged access to spread their message and the incompetence of governments legislating so that all these economic sectors don't eschew workers resulting in massive unemployment and a further degradation of standards of living for a big slice of society.

Taking all that into consideration, I can't help but feel a slight schadenfreude due to these sectors of society having hijacked the blue collar class struggle and shifting the left towards movements that are predominantly defending bourgeois causes and leaving the working class behind. I happily see more and more artists talking of unionisation and labour movements. Perhaps we can go back to mainstreaming relevant left wing talking points like minimum wages, labour unions, workers rights, et al. Group issues, rather than bourgeois issues that focus mostly on individuals.