[simondotau]

[Meme of astronaut with a gun]

Always has been.

There's nothing new here. Capital and technology have repeatedly been used to replace skilled creative labour with something cheaper, faster, more scalable, or merely "good enough". Offshore animators replacing domestic teams, mass-produced clothing replacing dressmakers and home sewing, MIDI replacing session musicians, digital typesetting replacing sign-writing, and so on. Yes AI will be weaponised against (mostly pseudo-) creative workers, just as capitalism and automation has gutted and decimated hundreds of other (equally or greater) creative industries before it.

The game industry is an extreme example. Large productions now employ veritable armies of people, many doing highly procedural, tightly constrained work absent of any original creative decisions. It's sad for the worker if their jobs are at risk, but it's silly to argue that creativity is being lost.

Quite apart from AI, the AAA game industry has long been in a bubble of over-investment and unsustainable head-counts. That bubble was going to burst one way or another. AI just happens to be the catalyst. But the underlying dynamic of replacing expensive skilled labour with cheaper systems (and accepting a decline in quality when the savings are large enough) is nothing new.