7 ms·

amazing advances this year. Remember the guy who created the 2d platformer thats based on time, what was it called again? He spent around $100k+ just for the ar

amazing advances this year. Remember the guy who created the 2d platformer thats based on time, what was it called again? He spent around $100k+ just for the art, which I am pretty sure was a huge expenditure for him, with this software he could have done it virtually for free without much artistic talent at all.

DeRock 3y ago
The game was called “Braid”
drorco 3y ago
At the quality of the current output, I think players still easily differentiate between AI generated art and hand-created art. Maybe in future versions this will be less noticeable. 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.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  The AI stuff is a style though. I'm seeing it happening now in the art world, where the quirks of the model become part of the appeal of the work. Won't be long until a game with good enough mechanics comes along and blows up I think.
  - __loam 3y ago
    For me the model "quirks", eg. all the mistakes they make, are a huge turnoff.
    - NBJack 3y ago
      For better or worse, I agree with your sentiment, but that will probably change. Consider how many kinds of foods and clothing are mass produced; we often consider something made by hand to be precious, and even a higher value, but we have become accustomed to the tradeoffs for cheaper solutions. It may not be our generation, but it's conceivable future generations will be less inclined to differentiate as we do (if only based on the exposure to what this kind of art generation offers at an early age).
      - __loam 3y ago
        I'm not convinced this is true. The economics of cultural production are far more winner take all than the economics of food and clothing production. Higher quality work gets more of the limited attention in that economy. AI work is doomed to fail because of this dynamic.
        AlecSchueler 3y ago
        Everything gets re-appropriated by art, from mpeg frame skips to messy bedrooms. 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.
        __loam 3y ago
        Using it that way requires intention. Developing that intention is hard to do if all you ever do is pull the one armed bandit hoping for AI to produce what you want.
        AlecSchueler 3y ago
        Of course, any tool still requires a skilled artist to make good use of it.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  If these levels were used in a game I was playing, they would not certainly not stand out to me as AI generated. It's possible if I was specifically asked to try to figure out if they were AI then I would succeed, but even that I'm not sure of.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Would that even be legal for a commercial game? Personal use, a mod, or a free experiment is one thing, but a shipping game is a different can of worms.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
The sad thing though is that $100k on art wasn’t wasted. It allowed an artist to make art and a living. I’m down the with tech and I’ve even written a typing game that generates Minecraft stories with a LLM and imagines them with stable diffusion for my daughter to learn typing with. But - my mom is an artist and she spent her career starving between sales and commissions. The fact the models have ingested their work and careers and can now replace them is sad. 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?
- adventured 3y ago
  We're never moving post scarcity. There is no scenario where that outcome is going to occur. Logistics alone guarantee that won't happen. Existence by its very nature is bound up in scarcity. There will always be various critical elements that provide a scarcity restriction on humanity and the rest (the less scarce) will always collide against that scarcity bottleneck. 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).
  - fragmede 3y ago
    > We're never moving post scarcity. 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.
tltimeline2 3y ago
Yeah- imagine paying people for their work.

DeRock 3y ago

The game was called “Braid”

drorco 3y ago

At the quality of the current output, I think players still easily differentiate between AI generated art and hand-created art. Maybe in future versions this will be less noticeable. 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.

AlecSchueler 3y ago
The AI stuff is a style though. I'm seeing it happening now in the art world, where the quirks of the model become part of the appeal of the work. Won't be long until a game with good enough mechanics comes along and blows up I think.
- __loam 3y ago
  For me the model "quirks", eg. all the mistakes they make, are a huge turnoff.
  - NBJack 3y ago
    For better or worse, I agree with your sentiment, but that will probably change. Consider how many kinds of foods and clothing are mass produced; we often consider something made by hand to be precious, and even a higher value, but we have become accustomed to the tradeoffs for cheaper solutions. It may not be our generation, but it's conceivable future generations will be less inclined to differentiate as we do (if only based on the exposure to what this kind of art generation offers at an early age).
    - __loam 3y ago
      I'm not convinced this is true. The economics of cultural production are far more winner take all than the economics of food and clothing production. Higher quality work gets more of the limited attention in that economy. AI work is doomed to fail because of this dynamic.
      - AlecSchueler 3y ago
        Everything gets re-appropriated by art, from mpeg frame skips to messy bedrooms. 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.
        __loam 3y ago
        Using it that way requires intention. Developing that intention is hard to do if all you ever do is pull the one armed bandit hoping for AI to produce what you want.
        AlecSchueler 3y ago
        Of course, any tool still requires a skilled artist to make good use of it.
sebzim4500 3y ago
If these levels were used in a game I was playing, they would not certainly not stand out to me as AI generated. It's possible if I was specifically asked to try to figure out if they were AI then I would succeed, but even that I'm not sure of.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Would that even be legal for a commercial game? Personal use, a mod, or a free experiment is one thing, but a shipping game is a different can of worms.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

The sad thing though is that $100k on art wasn’t wasted. It allowed an artist to make art and a living. I’m down the with tech and I’ve even written a typing game that generates Minecraft stories with a LLM and imagines them with stable diffusion for my daughter to learn typing with. But - my mom is an artist and she spent her career starving between sales and commissions. The fact the models have ingested their work and careers and can now replace them is sad. 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?

adventured 3y ago
We're never moving post scarcity. There is no scenario where that outcome is going to occur. Logistics alone guarantee that won't happen. Existence by its very nature is bound up in scarcity. There will always be various critical elements that provide a scarcity restriction on humanity and the rest (the less scarce) will always collide against that scarcity bottleneck. 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).
- fragmede 3y ago
  > We're never moving post scarcity. 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.

tltimeline2 3y ago

Yeah- imagine paying people for their work.