Popular iPad design app Procreate is coming out against generative AI, and has vowed never to introduce generative AI features into its products. The company said on its website that although machine learning is a “compelling technology with a lot of merit,” the current path that generative AI is on is wrong for its platform.
Procreate goes on to say that it’s not chasing a technology that is a threat to human creativity, even though this may make the company “seem at risk of being left behind.”
Procreate CEO James Cuda released an even stronger statement against the technology in a video posted to X on Monday.
Ironically, I think AI may prove to be most useful in video games.
Not to outright replace writers, but so they instead focus on feeding backstory to AI so it essentially becomes the characters they’ve created.
I just think it’s going to be inevitable and the only possible option for a game where the player truly chooses the story.
I just can’t be interested in multiple choice games where you know that your choice doesn’t matter. If a character dies from option a, then option b, c, and d kill them as well.
Realising that as a kid instantly ruined telltale games for me, but I think AI used in the right way could solve that problem, to at least some degree.
Something like using a LLM to make actually unique side quests in a Skyrim-esque game could be interesting.
The side quest/bounty quest shit in something like Starfield was fucking awful because it was like, 5 of the same damn things. Something capable of making at least unique sounding quests would be a shockingly good use of the tech.
Honestly, I think that…
AI is going to revolutionize the game industry.
AI is going to kill the game industry as it currently exists.
Generative AI will lead to a lot of real-time effects and mechanics that are currently impossible, like endless quests that don’t feel hollow, realistic procedural generation that can convincingly create everything from random clutter to entire galaxies, true photorealistic graphics (look up gaussian splatting, it’s pretty cool), convincing real-time art filters (imagine a 3d game that looks like an animated Van Gogh painting), and so on.
Generative AI is going to result in a hell of a lot of layoffs and will likely ruin people’s lives.
Generative AI will eventually open the door to small groups of devs being able to compete with AAA releases on all metrics.
Generative AI will make studios with thousands of employees obsolete. This is a double-edged sword. Fewer employees means fewer ideas; but on the other side, you get a more accurate vision of what the director originally intended. Fewer employees also will also mean that you will likely have to be a genuinely creative person to get ahead, instead of someone who knows how to use Maya or Photoshop but is otherwise creatively bankrupt. Your contribution matters far more in a studio of <50 than it does in a studio of >5,000; as such, your creative skill will matter more.
A lot of people will have to be retrained because they will no longer be creative enough to make a living off of making games.
Tbh, I think game development is one of the few places that generative AI will actually have a significant benefit; however I also think it will completely scramble the industry once it starts being widely adopted, and it’ll be a long time before the dust settles.
I’ve no idea where you’re getting these predictions from. I think some of them are fundamentally flawed if not outright incorrect, and don’t reflect real life trends of generative AI development and applications.
Gonna finish this comment in a few, please wait.
I think the big difference is that you seem to think that AI has peaked or is near its peak potential, while I think AI is still just getting started. Will generative AI ever progress beyond being a gimmick? I don’t know, but I suspect it will eventually.
Admittedly I had not thought about the licensing and advertising aspect. That’s a bit of a blind spot for me because it’s not something I tend to care about. You’re correct there.
I mean, maybe I could have phrased it better, but what else are you gonna do? They have to make a living somehow and if they can’t get hired in the game industry anymore, you gotta help them find somewhere else they can work.
That’s a fair assessment. I’m still not sure if popular AI tech is on an exponential or a sigmoid curve, but I tend towards the latter. Note, however, that the industry at large is starting to believe it’s just not worth it. Even worse, the entities at the forefront of AI are unsustainable—they’re burning brightly right now, but the cash flow required to keep a reaction on this scale going is simply too large. If you’ve got time and are willing, please check the linked article by Ed (burst damage).
My bad, I try to trim down the fat while editing, but I accidentally removed things I shouldn’t. As I said, it’s a nitpick, and I understand the importance of helping those who find themselves unhirable. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought it came across a little mean, even if it wasn’t your intent. I try to gently “poke” folks when I see stuff like this because artists get enough undeserved crap already.
Yeaaahh… artists are really hard on themselves too. I make art myself, albeit not professionally; and I tend to be extremely hard on myself. I think maybe some of my comments about creativity are the result of my own self-negativity bleeding through.
Yeah, ultimately a lof of devs are trying to make “story generators” relying on the user’s imagination to fill in the blanks, hence rimworld is so popular.
There’s a business/technical model where “local” llms would kinda work for this too, if you set it up like the Kobold Horde. So the dev hosts a few GPU instances for GPUs that can’t handle the local LLM, but users with beefy PCs also generate responses for other users (optionally, with a low priority) in a self hosted horde.