[ben_w]

Yes, but also.

Right now GenAI content a bad thing, cringe, a sign of low-value or lack of attention to detail. I don't want to play even a free game if I think it was made by someone else prompting an AI, and that's despite liking the output when I do the same for myself.

If AI output is normalised and becomes simply "boring" or "mundane", those negatives must have also gone away.

After that (assuming there is an "after that", I don't want to bet either way), people would, as per your argument, need to un-boring them.

[ragequittah]

>I don't want to play even a free game if I think it was made by someone else prompting an AI

I have bad news for you if you think the video game industry isn't widely embracing generative AI. Companies try not to say it because of the current backlash involved but I truly believe Tim Sweeney isn't wrong[1]. I think in 5 years it will be a quaint idea to be AI-vegan and it'll be similar to how people resisted smartphones (I was one of them) until they became inevitable.

[1]https://www.techspot.com/news/110410-epic-tim-sweeney-ai-lab...

[ben_w]

I am aware of its use. The point is: I *am* aware, even if the creator doesn't say so.

5 years is an eternity with the current rate of change of AI. Its development is already turning into an international geopolitical issue, even though the implications for mere task-level economics have yet to settle.

Even if it wasn't, 2031 (ish) happens to be roughly when a lot of long-term exponential growth trends all happen to reach points that suggest the assumptions behind them have to break, like more than 100% of electricity being made by PV etc.; the only thing I am confident of about AI is that even its current trend line on METR were to continue it becomes physically unmeasurable sooner than that. This also means nobody will pay Tim Sweeney so much as a single Zimbabwe Dollar in royalties for games written in the Unreal Engine.

Half the game logic I played on Kongregate back in the heyday of Flash games is now one-to-few shot prompting on Claude even if you don't pay for it, and even if you don't pay for ChatGPT you can get assets at that scale pretty quickly. I know 'cause I've tried. It's just, like every blog post whose headings contain emoji, every time there's a 6-7 word paragraph a little too bombastic about how important something is, every time I read or hear "you're absolutely right" or "delve" or "nuance", and yes hear even when the lips those words pass through happen to be human…

…the way most people prompt these models, I can tell. Most people don't bother to ask it to speak like a posh victorian, or draw poster art like it's the 60s, and they don't check and reject when the shadow on the foreground of the moon base doesn't match the Earth in the sky. And because humans are lazy and greedy, so even if the visual models gets as good as the finest artists and the language models as good as Nobel laureates, we're going to learn the style of whatever the default output of those models is when prompted by lazy and greedy humans. And we'll hate it, because it's a cliché, and we avoid those like the plague.