On the other hand, I’ve never been an artist myself. So I’ve never been able to make my game ideas come true until now. The world is much more open to me in a creative side that my mechanical skills prevented.
Artists will continue to make art because it’s a compulsion. But I wish we had a world that was less oriented towards rewarding meaningless toil and would at least allow our born artists, writers, and creators the chance to do their obsessions to our benefit. Especially as we move post scarcity, I hope we can build a WPA like entity - perhaps, in a crazy twist, funded by AI?
The artists can now create on the tech side too, courtesy of inbound GPT-like LLMs. This isn't a one way street. The techies can craft art, the artists can craft tech.
It's opening up enormous pathways whether you're a programmer or artist. The artist has to be willing to expand and take on more responsibilities, just as the techie does if they want to craft quality AI art for a game.
With all the various game engines available now, we're not far away from being able to relatively easily have an LLM build nearly all the software side for you via prompting. From there you can bring whatever your strength is to customizing, implementing the game. Maybe you're good at ensuring high quality gameplay, maybe you're an artist that has an elite eye for how things should look, maybe you're a programmer and your game will be better optimized (and so on).
We already are with digital goods, society just hasn't caught up yet. I can make essentially infinite many copies of, say, Braid, and give every person in the world with an Internet connection a copy of it for a couple thousand dollars by using Cloudflare unlimited bandwidth R2 and bittorrent. A couple thousand dollars is basically a rounding error in the scheme of things. As I am not Jonathan Blow, distributing Braid would be a violation of copyright law, but copyright law is just a social contract that we entered into to incentivize the creation of work. If Jonathan Blow were compensated for every copy of Braid out there, I'm sure he would be quite happy to be (even more) rich.
So even in a post-digital-scarcity world, artists and programmers need to get paid, and so we have various DRM schemes, the first of which is the copyright system in the first place, but that works about as well as trying to make water not wet. Movies are leaked onto torrent sites like Rarbg (RIP) and people make copies all day long. libgen mirrors are still around despite the best efforts of the copyright regime. But let's be honest with ourselves, digital goods themselves are already post scarcity, we just haven't figured out how to incentivize the creation of works in our half-post-scarcity world and have no idea on how to move forwards.
Alternate solutions are out there, but we have no experience as a society in upending large social contracts (like copyright). You can easily imagine a system where what's popular gets tracked, and money flow to the creators of the media that people are actually watching and consuming. It would be a more draconian system than the DRM we have right now, but on the other hand, if it promotes the arts, then maybe it's worth it.
The artist will make art without reward. They always have. But few can do it for a living. Fewer will in this next phase.
To be clear, that is according to the definition you've made up. The commonly understood definition includes many or most of peoples' desires. Travel, housing, vacations, iphones, advanced health care, entertainment, higher education, etc.
> I think we are actually there, but have induced a scarcity economy with extreme imbalances and fake incentives to toil for toils sake.
Even in western countries, millions of people are struggling with basic costs of housing, energy, and even food. I mean people who actually work many hours every day and earn money are struggling with these things. We seem to be a long way off it even for your "basic necessities" definition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy
To your point, they do. However I’d assert that’s mostly due to income inequality and false scarcity to induce labor for labors sake.
And I'd assert it's not mostly due to income inequality.
If Karma is real, games made with uninteresting AI art will fail as we generate a sea of low-effort sludge.
I'm sure in many AI proponents' minds, this is the exact definition of "wasted": a human does something that machines can do.
(I'm still on the fence over this topic)
Why should we care about your mum, and not the guy who creates buggy whips?? Or the guy who runs the ferry that crosses the river who will be out of their job because of the new bridge?
Where do you draw the line at caring?
Everybody is an artist, and everybody can create and share art for themselves and the people around them. That is art at is best, in my opinion. Commercialization and mass production and display and distribution of "art" is what degrades it for me.
> Especially as we move post scarcity, I hope we can build a WPA like entity - perhaps, in a crazy twist, funded by AI?
Post-scarcity will never happen because even the people with mansions in many countries, billion-dollar yachts, and fleets of private airplanes do not have enough. And 10 billion people can't even live like them. Why would the people who own most of the capital suddenly collectively decide they would like to share the production with the rest of the world?
But if it did happen, we should not pay artists for art. We should give everybody enough so that if anybody wanted to paint a picture or hammer some metal into a horseshoe or knit a sweater or write some assembly code, they could do so.
As a game dev, I think at this stage AI can be a helpful utility, but it does not replace a designer's touch for professionally looking games.
Many of the quirks of our technology, like audio distortion for example, quickly become key components of certain styles. I remember as a child growing up in a funny valley after the acceptance of analogue distortion but before the widespread adaption of digital distortion.
Right now I'm thinking of someone like James Gerde, where the frame-to-frame shifts of AI imagination are part of the aesthetic. I think it's only a matter of time before this effect is matched up with something that makes emotional sense, and then it will blow up.
Personal use, a mod, or a free experiment is one thing, but a shipping game is a different can of worms.