5 ms·

Feels like the inevitable rise of AI powered content generation will at least free up _some_ resources at some point, right?

by thom 6y ago

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
So that demand can expand to fill all available space? Yes.
HellDunkel 6y ago
It probably already is. Texture delighting is already on the horizon combined with infinite texture scaling this will be a great help for artists.
- skohan 6y ago
  Yeah I feel like AI powered content generation tools which can automate a lot of the grunt-work will be the real game-changer
belugacat 6y ago
Jevon’s Paradox [0] suggests that it won’t; the freed up resources will just be used for other things. Tooling for 3D modeling/texturing/rigging/etc is significantly more complex and powerful than it was 20 years ago, yet Pixar doesn’t need fewer artists for a movie today compared to Toy Story - in fact quite the opposite. AI techniques useful to artists will get folded in the tooling and enable artists to make even more detailed/complex games & movies, but that doesn’t mean the AAA games of 2030 will require fewer artists. However, talented small teams will likely be able to leverage them to create things that would have been inconceivable from a small team a decade ago. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- mprovost 6y ago
  A more specific version of Jevon's paradox for the VFX industry is Blinn's Law [0] which states that "rendering time tends to remain constant, even as computers get faster." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Blinn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Blinn
Andrex 6y ago
I wonder if that's a little "be careful what you wish for"...
somehnrdr14726 6y ago
During the indie dev renaissance in the 2010's, procedurally generated content received a lot of investment and attention. (Today's marketers would call this AI generated content.) The idea was that your small indie team could keep up with the big content demand since you had algorithms generating seemingly evergreen content for your players. What happens in practice is that the players begin playing your game at a meta level, learning how the generative process itself works; effectively removing the benefit of procgen content. As an example, consider Spelunky which claims it can generate millions of unique caverns to explore. If you assess that claim visually, it's true. But watch the streamers play and you will see that they 'speak' the algorithm. By observing the shape of a cavern in one area of a map, they know the algorithm had to make a specific concession elsewhere in the map. So this content isn't really procedural for them anymore. Even if the "AI" content generators get more intelligent, it won't free up resources. Mechanically interesting content, as demonstrated by the indie games of the last decade, is just a different form of handmade content. A designer hand made the procgen algorithms. Players ultimately bond with the designer(s), no matter what meta level they build the content at. In a hand-built game you might start to get a sense for where the designers hide treasure chests. In a procgen game you learn the algorithms themselves and how to predict and abuse them. There's another form of game content, story content, which remains an edge for humans. Algorithms, or "AI" if you must, can't compete here. It would be the same as waiting for AI that can write award winning movie scripts. The marriage of story content and mechanical content is a superior game-making formula to the procgen approach. So the _some point_ you refer to is probaby far away still.
- adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  Your claim that people learning to play the game "effectively removes the benefit" of procgen content is false. Games like Spelunky are played by people for much longer than the average indie game precisely because the process of learning the meta-game takes time but is still engaging. If you want to calculate how much "AI generation" or "procgen" is freeing up resources you also want to look at how long people are playing these games for and how many resources were used in making them. If indie teams of 2 or 3 can collectively make the world play their games for longer than it plays games made by much bigger teams, then that's a definite freeing up of resources. And this is what's happening today to some extent.
mxskelly 6y ago
Just like it has been for the past like, five years or whatever. Sure. It's always on the horizon. (Read: Never gonna happen)
mediaman 6y ago
Tools to make art content have gotten dramatically better in the last 10 years. Systems such as Substance, which create algorithmic textures to replace manual texture creation in Photoshop, have resulted in at least a 10x increase in productivity. Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.) So, yes, we will see AI in content generation, but it isn't going to be in the form of replacing art bottlenecks. It will manifest in new tooling for artists, who will become more productive, and there will be even fewer artists who have good mastery of these tools, and the demand of quality will increase further. Which would lead to similar bottlenecks to today, though I believe artists will be paid better, and it will become even tougher to break in.
- vkou 6y ago
  > Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.) But are the artists treated better than they were a decade ago? The wife of a good friend of mine is a digital artist. She works on films. The pay in her field is crap, as are the working conditions - meanwhile, competition for paying jobs is fierce. When computers became an order of magnitude cheaper, the demand for, and the pay rate for computer programmers sky-rocketed. It doesn't seem like the same thing happened with artists.
  - mediaman 6y ago
    It's a good question. I don't know about film, but I do have visibility into the game artist market. The pay is OK but not fantastic: generally in the 60-80k range, depending on experience. Many of the very low paying jobs ($15/hr types) have disappeared. And I do know decent artists that frequently get recruiter calls, albeit usually for a couple large poorly managed studios that have trouble filling positions. I think it depends a lot on the exact nature of the work being done as an artist. If it's more technical, it seems to demand better wages, but in games there are still some fairly nontechnical roles that are either paid poorly or farmed out to offshore agencies. Work conditions still aren't great, but this is mostly at bigger studios.

Feels like the inevitable rise of AI powered content generation will at least free up _some_ resources at some point, right?

by thom 6y ago

Feels like the inevitable rise of AI powered content generation will at least free up _some_ resources at some point, right?

ReactiveJelly 6y ago

So that demand can expand to fill all available space? Yes.

HellDunkel 6y ago

It probably already is. Texture delighting is already on the horizon combined with infinite texture scaling this will be a great help for artists.

skohan 6y ago
Yeah I feel like AI powered content generation tools which can automate a lot of the grunt-work will be the real game-changer

belugacat 6y ago

Jevon’s Paradox [0] suggests that it won’t; the freed up resources will just be used for other things. Tooling for 3D modeling/texturing/rigging/etc is significantly more complex and powerful than it was 20 years ago, yet Pixar doesn’t need fewer artists for a movie today compared to Toy Story - in fact quite the opposite. AI techniques useful to artists will get folded in the tooling and enable artists to make even more detailed/complex games & movies, but that doesn’t mean the AAA games of 2030 will require fewer artists. However, talented small teams will likely be able to leverage them to create things that would have been inconceivable from a small team a decade ago. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

mprovost 6y ago
A more specific version of Jevon's paradox for the VFX industry is Blinn's Law [0] which states that "rendering time tends to remain constant, even as computers get faster." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Blinn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Blinn

Andrex 6y ago

I wonder if that's a little "be careful what you wish for"...

somehnrdr14726 6y ago

During the indie dev renaissance in the 2010's, procedurally generated content received a lot of investment and attention. (Today's marketers would call this AI generated content.) The idea was that your small indie team could keep up with the big content demand since you had algorithms generating seemingly evergreen content for your players. What happens in practice is that the players begin playing your game at a meta level, learning how the generative process itself works; effectively removing the benefit of procgen content. As an example, consider Spelunky which claims it can generate millions of unique caverns to explore. If you assess that claim visually, it's true. But watch the streamers play and you will see that they 'speak' the algorithm. By observing the shape of a cavern in one area of a map, they know the algorithm had to make a specific concession elsewhere in the map. So this content isn't really procedural for them anymore. Even if the "AI" content generators get more intelligent, it won't free up resources. Mechanically interesting content, as demonstrated by the indie games of the last decade, is just a different form of handmade content. A designer hand made the procgen algorithms. Players ultimately bond with the designer(s), no matter what meta level they build the content at. In a hand-built game you might start to get a sense for where the designers hide treasure chests. In a procgen game you learn the algorithms themselves and how to predict and abuse them. There's another form of game content, story content, which remains an edge for humans. Algorithms, or "AI" if you must, can't compete here. It would be the same as waiting for AI that can write award winning movie scripts. The marriage of story content and mechanical content is a superior game-making formula to the procgen approach. So the _some point_ you refer to is probaby far away still.

adnzzzzZ 6y ago
Your claim that people learning to play the game "effectively removes the benefit" of procgen content is false. Games like Spelunky are played by people for much longer than the average indie game precisely because the process of learning the meta-game takes time but is still engaging. If you want to calculate how much "AI generation" or "procgen" is freeing up resources you also want to look at how long people are playing these games for and how many resources were used in making them. If indie teams of 2 or 3 can collectively make the world play their games for longer than it plays games made by much bigger teams, then that's a definite freeing up of resources. And this is what's happening today to some extent.

mxskelly 6y ago

Just like it has been for the past like, five years or whatever. Sure. It's always on the horizon. (Read: Never gonna happen)

mediaman 6y ago

Tools to make art content have gotten dramatically better in the last 10 years. Systems such as Substance, which create algorithmic textures to replace manual texture creation in Photoshop, have resulted in at least a 10x increase in productivity. Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.) So, yes, we will see AI in content generation, but it isn't going to be in the form of replacing art bottlenecks. It will manifest in new tooling for artists, who will become more productive, and there will be even fewer artists who have good mastery of these tools, and the demand of quality will increase further. Which would lead to similar bottlenecks to today, though I believe artists will be paid better, and it will become even tougher to break in.

vkou 6y ago
> Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.) But are the artists treated better than they were a decade ago? The wife of a good friend of mine is a digital artist. She works on films. The pay in her field is crap, as are the working conditions - meanwhile, competition for paying jobs is fierce. When computers became an order of magnitude cheaper, the demand for, and the pay rate for computer programmers sky-rocketed. It doesn't seem like the same thing happened with artists.
- mediaman 6y ago
  It's a good question. I don't know about film, but I do have visibility into the game artist market. The pay is OK but not fantastic: generally in the 60-80k range, depending on experience. Many of the very low paying jobs ($15/hr types) have disappeared. And I do know decent artists that frequently get recruiter calls, albeit usually for a couple large poorly managed studios that have trouble filling positions. I think it depends a lot on the exact nature of the work being done as an artist. If it's more technical, it seems to demand better wages, but in games there are still some fairly nontechnical roles that are either paid poorly or farmed out to offshore agencies. Work conditions still aren't great, but this is mostly at bigger studios.