silent hill protagonist

He hated people taking humanity out of art, which is what is actually disrespectful here. AI being used as an efficiency tool to remove the more tedious, time-consuming and less creativity-intensive aspects of making art is not the same thing as letting AI write/animate an entire movie for you, which I do agree is an affront to the concept of human art.

Good. Let the stupids hit the darwinian great filter of "figure out how to make an account with more than 2 brain cells" and never make it here. Will hopefully mitigate yet another eternal September.

AAA dev here.

Carmack is correct. I expect to be dogpiled by uninformed disagreements, though, because on social media all AI = Bad and no nuance is allowed. If that's your knee-jerk reaction, please refrain for a moment and calmly re-think through your position.

EDIT: lol called it

Not me personally, as AI can't really replicate my work (I'm a senior sound designer on a big game), but a few colleagues of mine have already begun reaping the workflow improvements of AI at their studio.

Uh...yes...obviously it's learning...I'm referring to the stance of the luddites on social media who like throwing babies out with bathwater due to their anti-AI cargo-cult approach. I'm talking directly to them, because they're everywhere in these threads, not to people with their heads screwed on properly, because that would just be preaching to the choir.

"Aw man, some person used an AI filter to quickly make a cute picture of themselves as a couple! Guess they should ride the sewer slide. Anybody who uses any AI whatsoever should krill themselves, otherwise there will be exactly zero human beings that still prefer art made with human hands, expertise and creativity!" ~ Dipshits all over social media

FFS, they're not taking your job, they used an AI on their own photo to do a cute thing that they're not going to sell. If you're a good artist, you WILL find work. I make art for a living myself (and am paid quite well for it), and on occasion I use AI tools to make my workflow more efficient while still doing most of the difficult bits (such as, idk, CREATIVITY) myself. This all-or-nothing approach the internet has to AI in art is unbelievably annoying and pretentious, and reeks of that classic armchair critic stench. God, people sure do like to post extremely dumb shit to make themselves feel better, even up to and including stuff that essentially amounts to saying "kys" in response to someone using a glorified Snapchat filter.

My dude has no idea how gamedev works at the AAA level. It's not that simple, smartass. You can be fully staffed, with outsourcers and even have contract workers and still have to crunch; there are a limited number of people who know how to build certain proprietary systems on this earth, and having limits on your budget and having to pivot major parts of your game late in development are both extremely common things. This is why custom efficiency tools are made in the first place, to make highly competent people with rare skill sets and with limited time more efficient. The solution isn't "hurr durr just throw more people and money at the problem". Having a larger number of developers without the proper skillsets (because those are the only other people on the job market you can feasibly hire to staff up) can actually make a project take MORE time, not less, believe it or not. This is why coder interview processes have, like, 4 or 5 phases at some companies. You're handing somebody the keys to the kingdom (for a fairly large paycheck, no less) and they might accidentally burn down the castle with you in it if they're not the right fit for whatever it is you're working on.

So yeah, AI art is not all bad. Please sit down.

The devil came to JOHNNY, not the other way around. The moral of the story is not that it is possible to beat the devil out of ego or for glory, but that even the devil could not defeat a man completely dedicated to his pure, uncorrupted love for a craft. It's not a story about Johnny's hubris winning out, it's a story about the respect one should have for genuine passion when it is lovingly applied to creativity. It is a story about the indomitable human spirit.

But okay, America bad or whatever, sure.

Okay, dude. Mute this video (no cheating by listening to it first; you have to act like a REAL designer here), then use that AI 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 an AI that makes their expertise irrelevant and will totally steal their job.

Oh, what's that? It sounds awful and doesn't represent the character at all? Hmm...

Nah, good art breaks through with enough perserverance, time, improvement in your work and a little bit of luck (which you need less of the more of the first three you have). People just underestimate what "good art" is defined as. The bar is now just where it always should have been, which is JUST above somebody copying your work without any underlying understanding as to why it works or the cultural gestalt involved. Not a very high bar to clear, tbh, but I could understand why some entry-level folks feel frustrated. If that's you, keep your head down, push through and improve, you'll get there.

I can't think of a single AAA game using UE5 that requires that level of performance due to its size and complexity and doesn't use audio middleware, which by default compresses audio when generating soundbanks. I have no idea where this myth of "everyone uses uncompressed audio" came from, but it's annoying and wrong most of the time, as most social media misinformation is. Maybe people think there's real-time compression of audio at runtime in shipped games? Idk, because that's just not how anything works; audio files are usually pre-compressed into a nearly lossless audio format before the game binaries are even compiled into a .exe for distribution, and there are usually unique compression settings per-area-of-your-game to further compress less-critical audio into the smallest filesize possible.

Source: literally generating Vorbis/WEM Opus files (for Playstation) in Wwise as I type this.

This is fair if you're just copy-pasting answers, but what if you use the AI to teach yourself concepts and learn things? There are plenty of ways to avoid hallucinations, data-poisoning and obtain scientifically accurate information from LLMs. Should that be off the table as well?

I don't care; they can downvote away. People on social media are stupid, which is demonstrated by the fact that if you read the rest of my replies, you'd see that I agree with Miyazaki, but also that everyone is interpreting what he was saying incorrectly by ignoring half of what he said, which is ACTUALLY disrespectful to the man. The important context in what he said was that an AI would not be able to replicate the expression of pain his friend felt via animation like a human who understands pain and emotions could, and THAT is why he found it offensive to life. There is a giant difference between that and using AI in your workflow to improve your efficiency so that you can focus more on the important creative bits, which is what Miyazaki was clearly referring to as being what he cared about.

So yeah, dumbasses online not being able to read context or critically think from their social media complaint armchairs don't have any sway on my opinion when I have a decade of real-world experience being an artist for a living on them.

Nothing annoys me more as a AAA dev than weird, annoying armchair critic nerd-ass dweebs thinking we're "lazy". Okay, you try this shit, then. I have the UE5 editor open right now, and I'm busy squashing bugs and optimizing our game. I've been doing it for 18 hours a day for months, sometimes 7 days a week. This stuff is way harder than you think, even with the proper amount of time, money, staffing and expertise.

Prove it.

Imagine the ego it would take to write something as unbelievably cringe as this personal fantasy about an anonymous person you're angry at just to make yourself feel better.

For the record, I'm autistic and I am highly compensated for my expertise as an interactive artist, so that's why I'm discussing this topic with fervor.

It's also really funny that anybody would ever give a shit about fake internet points, as if it were some transcendental measure of correctness or moral merit and not just an indication of how uninformed, emotionally-driven and circlejerk-y the general public is on social media.

no u

super funny that everyone calling me a bot weirdly said the exact same kinds of things because they thought I was "self-censoring". Who's the bot here?

yep

Dude, did you even read the article I linked? You train your AI models on databases of your OWN ART. That's literally the only way it works properly. Otherwise it would just be a mishmash of different styles that don't fit whatever it is you're trying to do.

Even the point you're trying to make doesn't make sense, and it's being addressed in the exact same article:

"Smith agrees with all artists who don’t want their work to be used for training different AI tools. At the same time, he thinks that we should be prepared that lawyers will argue that the process of AI training is similar to how real artists learn from other people’s work."

He then compared the AI to the bombs activated by Ozymandias at the end of Watchmen. This has already happened, and artists now should realize how to deal with the outcome.

of a tool it can be in ideation and pre-production, as well as inspiration and other things. It also already has your data. Moving your images to another site isn’t going to stop the scrape. Nothing will until laws are passed and enforced. ArtStation knows this.

— Ryan James Smith (@OverdrawXYZ) December 18, 2022

That’s why Smith thinks that artists should learn how to use AI as soon as possible. “It is a tool just like anything else, and when time = money, knowing how to effectively use powerful tools will make you a showstopper in this industry,” he noted. “And having the added bonus of being able to actually art direct these things will make you more powerful, not obsolete.”

All art is derivative. Pandora's box is open. Either learn to leverage it in creative ways or get left behind. That's the unfortunate reality.