[VonGuard]

The author is coming from the games industry. As an arts based industry, AI is EXTREMELY divisive. The author really will lose friends over even so much as touching AI in certain ways, because the artists that built the games industry were already badly abused, and now, they're being squeezed out entirely. For business developers, AI is somewhat less existentially terrifying, as it can be seen to be really empowering to an experienced user.

In the games industry, AI usage immediately eliminates a human job. Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds, and output them in the right format? Hollywood is going through the same thing: the companies that are building AI for Hollywood have to do so in the bushes, hiding. You don't see them advertising or flashing cash. That's because no one involved in using their wares wants anyone to know they're using them, lest they alienate the highly-talented people they still need to fill the gap between concept AI and full theatrical release AI.

In the software world, we are worried about AI. In the creative industries, they are absolutely pants on fire, screaming at the sky, burning down the village terrified of AI.

[drdaeman]

> Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds

Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try. And not always a non-specialist can see the issue.

Same thing why we still need human software engineers, even though a machine can generate code. Someone with actual understanding of the problem needs to make a management decision. Just like engineers see code slop (design or implementation) that laypeople vibe-coding don't recognize, artists see the visual slop where layman eye glances over.

Honestly, IMHO, this whole panic is artists' own creation. Instead of educating others on how to spot the issues (and thus reaffirming that expertise still matters - nothing had changed, and probably nothing ever will), a notable fraction went all-in on neo-luddite ideas, as if they don't know the history of their own craft and adjacent creative industries (I guess many really don't, or at least it doesn't click). Evaluate new tools, make use of them when they provide value, skip them where they fall short, and most importantly reaffirm that fancier brushes don't replace the artist in a human society - this is an already well-tested and proven strategy. Ring the existential bells when we'll get to the question of machine cognition rather than just intelligence.

Same for the engineering. Don't shy away from new tools, use them where they're a good fit, don't waste time when they are't (but periodically check out if something changes), explain everyone why you still matter - just to push back on unfortunate misconceptions.

The fact that a lot of companies' upper management went delusional and decided they want to replace humans witch machines (as if don't need responsibility anymore) doesn't help. But - hey - already plenty of stories how it bites them back, so while this period sucks, it's not exactly fucked, just in a state of (a pretty much expected) confusion.

Dishing out pixels or lines of code got somewhat cheaper. Expertise cost remains the same, though.

[coldtea]

>Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try.

Not if nobody cares for the end product that finely.

And even if it was true, one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.

[drdaeman]

> Not if nobody cares for the end product that finely.

Yes. But a non-negligible number of people do care. If nobody would've cared, we wouldn't have this drama.

> one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.

Yes. In other words, new tools had increased people's performance for mechanical work - individual units of that can be arguably done faster than before. So hypothetically one person can do a work of five. Note of that erases those people and their skills. The real underlying issue is that demand for it doesn't catch up because world's coincidentally fucked (through a series of unrelated issues, such as a quite few global conflicts) and economies aren't exactly thriving outside of a few niches du jour.

I strongly suspect that if we would've had a flourishing economies around the world, the demand would ramp up and artists (and engineers, and writers, and everyone else whose performance could've been positively affected by new tools) would be in greater position than ever before.

[coldtea]

>So hypothetically one person can do a work of five. Note of that erases those people and their skills.

It just doesn't magically take them out of the universe or turns them into unskilled persons.

But it does magically erases those people with those skills as needed employees.

>The real underlying issue is that demand for it doesn't catch up because world's coincidentally fucked (through a series of unrelated issues, such as a quite few global conflicts) and economies aren't exactly thriving outside of a few niches du jour.

Why would that demand have to "catch up"? Just because we can do something faster or automate parts of it doesn't guarantee demand will go up, even in a good economy. No shortage of jobs that vanished forever in a similar even, despite the economy going otherwise up. Even more so now, where it's fucked up anyway, of course.

[drdaeman]

> Just because we can do something faster or automate parts of it doesn't guarantee demand will go up

It's not guaranteed, but why wouldn't it? It's digital entertainment and art, and the market is not saturated, there's still tons of ideas unexplored. If more people would have spare money they can spend on digital purchases instead of making ends meet - I'm pretty sure there'd be more people seeking ways to earn that money. Especially if production just got cheaper.

Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but every time production got cheaper for something that isn't obsolete (and art and stories are never obsolete), the markets became more and more flooded.

[coldtea]

>It's not guaranteed, but why wouldn't it? It's digital entertainment and art, and the market is not saturated, there's still tons of ideas unexplored.

Because there's only so much "digital entertainment and art" people practically care for, and already people were saturated and bored with all the crap out there pre-AI too.

[cognitiveinline]

You are indeed wrong, there's no infinite demand for everything

[AlexandrB]

Everyone in the games industry is badly abused. Mostly because so many want to go into it. And yet game publishers continue to struggle with profitability because budgets have ballooned. I honestly think there's just not enough room in the market for the number of game studios we have today, at least not unless management improves and gets costs under control.

[gafferongames]

The beatings will continue until management improves and gets costs under control.

[FireBeyond]

For one small idea, we probably don't really need Ron Perlman, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Spacey, Kit Harrington, Gary Oldman, Kiefer Sutherland, Willem Dafoe, Peter Dinklage, Samuel L. Jackon and Ray Liotta doing voice acting.

[bpavuk]

but Maelle didn't wouldn't be Maelle without Jennifer English

[deterministic]

A friend of mine is an artist working in the games industry. So far nobody has been fired. They all simply started using AI to be more productive.

They care more about doing their job well than some artistic ideal that only works in practice if you don't have to care about things like food and shelter.

[nekusar]

What gets me is that LLM writing has an inhuman voice. Of course we know the tells. Not only this, but that. You're exactly right! —

The woman and man AI voice endemic to YouTube and ilk is also tremendously off putting. M5Stack has a bunch of these videos, and it devalues what they're doing.

And then... Transformer "art". It is some of the worst drek I've seen. I smell it a mile away. It's easily seen by slop english-like characters. Or too glowy humans. Or overall fake feel. For pixel art, I can perhaps see it. But for anything it just feels... Gross.

I'm completely sure management LOVES it cause its cheap and devalues humans.

[nunez]

> And then... Transformer "art". It is some of the worst drek I've seen. I smell it a mile away.

Hating that every third or fourth ad now is AI-generated. So much worse than what entry-level graphic designers can put out while putting them out of work.

[drdaeman]

> I'm completely sure management LOVES it cause its cheap and devalues humans.

And the tragic bit is that instead of educating them about the pitfalls so everyone's on the same page, a lot of brave hotheads are literally calling for a class war

[tavavex]

> educating them about the pitfalls so everyone's on the same page

What? They know what they're doing, they have access to the same information we do. There's just too much money in it for them to care about irrelevant things like product quality or the continued employment of anyone but themselves. Their prosperity and usefulness in their position is fully reliant on them not being on the same page. Their incentives are completely different from ours.

[drdaeman]

> They know what they're doing, they have access to the same information we do.

Who? I'm not talking about a few well-known sociopaths that run few well-known transnational corporations and have means to pump and squeeze biggest markets for profit (though I doubt they really know what they're doing). I'm talking about your casual folks in management roles in tons of companies of all sizes out there. Our peers. Just like us, on average, they, put frankly, don't know shit.

There is no "here's how we cook now, when new tools are invented" vetted guidebook anywhere. Can't be - no one had a head start long enough to prove anything. Almost everyone out there are more or less blind kittens from the same litter, applying some heuristics to poke around to see what works and what doesn't, learning what's not to do as it bites us in the ass.

Always been like that - humans learn from their failures. Most - we do during our training and experimentation days (which directly translated into our professional knowledge of things to be avoided), but this time we got caught with our pants down, when many say we gotta try to find something ourselves, or lose out to those who tried and found something of value, and there's something to it.

One can argue the writing was on the wall for years, but ask around and be surprised how many people actually had time and mental capacity to do the predictions, and if they had - how accurate those predictions were. In my bubble, most people are still trying to make sense of things past the very basics. Slightly past "all things AI now", onto "okay, for real, how do we learn to use this where it's a benefit, and don't use this where it's a liability" stage.

Even if you potentially have access to the information (others' experiences and discoveries), you gotta dig it up from all the surrounding noise. Figure out how to validate it. Actually validate it. That's a ton of unplanned effort.

[moralestapia]

Arts or no arts companies hire you to do X, not to make friends.

If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as.

You can make friends on your free time.

[solid_fuel]

> Arts or no arts companies hire you to do X, not to make friends. If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as.

> You can make friends on your free time.

Most well-adjusted people work to live, they don't live to work. Life comes first, the demands of the job come a distant second.

[moralestapia]

Great!

All the more reason, then, for them to be okay with not being hired.

[LastTrain]

Oh my gosh I’ve worked with so many of you!

[GTP]

Go tell HR that you don't give a shit about your coworkers ;)

[AlexandrB]

Why would this bother HR? They don't give a shit about the coworkers either.

[moralestapia]

Spend some time learning about the concept of the excluded middle[1]. It is something that will be useful on your life going forward, it might even save you a lot of trouble.

I am writing a post about that for my blog but it's still not there so ... check back later? Lol.

Anyway, in this particular scenario, a co-worker not being my friend does not mean we are enemies.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle