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I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demons

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art and I have a budget of about $0. So I get asset packs off Itch.io and they generally drive the direction of my games because I get what I get (and I don’t get upset). But that’s changed dramatically this year. I’ll spend an hour working through graphics design and generation and then I’ll have what I need. I tweak as I go. So now I can have assets for whatever game I’m thinking of. Mind you this is barrier to entry. These are shovelware quality assets and I’m not running a business. But now I’m some guy on the internet who can fulfil a hobby of his and develop a skill. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help! It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat.

ta12653421 1y ago
Regarding assets, check out Nano Banana: https://github.com/PicoTrex/Awesome-Nano-Banana-images/blob/main/README_en.md https://github.com/PicoTrex/Awesome-Nano-Banana-images/blob/... For you the example of "extract object and create iso model" should be relevant :)
SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
> "AI" is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. If you ask an LLM to generate some imagery, in what way have you entered visual arts? If you ask an LLM to generate some music, in what way have you entered being a musician? If you ask an LLM to generate some text, in what way have you entered writing?
Havoc 1y ago
Yeah that seems accurate. I mainly use AI for selfhosting/homelab stuff and the leverage there is absolutely wild - basically knows "everything".
poszlem 1y ago
I introduced my mother to Suno, a tool for music generation, and now she creates hundreds of little songs for herself and her friends. It may not be great art, but it’s something she always wanted to do. She never found the time to learn an instrument, and now she finally gets to express herself in a way she loves. Just an additional data point.
cjbarber 1y ago
Yes! Barrier to entry down, competition goes up, barrier to being a standout goes up (but, many things are now accessible to more people because some can get started that couldn't before). Easier to start, harder to stand out. More competition, a more effective "sort" (a la patio11).
mallowdram 1y ago
The genericizing of aesthetics is far more cost than benefit. This is a completely false claim: "reducing barriers to entry" if the barrier includes the progression of creativity. Once the addict of AI becomes entranced to genericized assets, it deforms the cost-benefit. If we take high-level creativity and deform, really horizontalize the forms, they have a much higher cost, as experience become generic. AI was a complete failure of imagination.
tombert 1y ago
Yeah, that's how I feel about it as well. For a large chunk of my life, I would start a personal project, get stuck on some annoying detail (e.g. the server gives some arcane error), get annoyed, and abandoned the project. I'm not being paid for this, and for unpaid work I have a pretty finite amount of patience. With ChatGPT, a lot of the time I can simply copypaste the error and get it to give me ideas on paths forward. Sometimes it's right on the first try, often it's not, but it gives me something to do, and once I'm far enough along in the project I've developed enough momentum to stay inspired. It still requires a lot of work on my end to do these projects, AI just helps with some of the initial hurdles.
- czbond 1y ago
  > For a large chunk of my life, I would start a personal project, get stuck on some annoying detail ... I am the same way. I did Computer Science because it was a combination of philosophy and meta thinking. Then when I got out, it was mainly just low level errors, dependencies, and language nuance.
  - tombert 1y ago
    Yeah exactly. I did CS because I love math and computability theory and logic and distributed computation, and I will have an interesting enough idea I want to play with, but I'll get stuck on some bullshit with Kubernetes or systemd or Zookeeper or firewalls or something that's decidedly not an interesting problem for me, but something necessary that I need to actually do my idea. Being able to get ChatGPT to generate basic scaffold stuff, or look at errors, help me resolve dependencies, or even just bounce ideas off of, really helps me maintain progress. You could argue that I'm not learning as much than if I fought through it, and that's probably true, but I am absolutely learning more than I would have if I had just quit the project like I usually did.
silenced_trope 1y ago
I'm also a hobbyist gamedev that struggles with the art side. Can I ask what AI tools you've been using most?
cactusplant7374 1y ago
I have been doing the exact same thing with assets and also it has helped me immensely with mobile development. I am also starting to get a feel for generating animated video and am planning to release a children’s series. It’s actually quite difficult to write a prompt that gets you exactly what you want. Hopefully that improves.
benoau 1y ago
Yep this is a huge enabler - previously having someone "do art" could easily cost you thousands for a small game, a month even, and this heavily constrained what you could make and locked you into what you had planned and how much you had planned. With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art, audio etc it's an incremental cost if any, you can explore ideas, you can throw art out, pivot in new directions.
- risyachka 1y ago
  It’s enabler for everyone, so you still don’t have any advantage just like you didn’t before that. The only difference is you spend less on art but will spend same in other areas. Literally nothing changed
  - benoau 1y ago
    The difference is you have autonomy now - the same autonomy as a person building a web application or app able to put together a serviceable UI/UX without any other person - without the sacrifice of "programmer art" or cobbling together free asset packs.
- lifeformed 1y ago
  I'd argue a game developer should make their own art assets, even if they "aren't an artist". You don't have to settle for it looking bad, just use your lack of art experience as a constraint. It usually means going with something very stylized or very simple. It might not be amazing but after you do it for a few games you will have pretty decent stuff, and most importantly, your own style. Even amateurish art can be tasteful, and it can be its own intentional vibe. A lot of indie games go with a style that doesn't take much work to pull off decently. Sure, it may look amateurish, but it will have character and humanity behind it. Whereas AI art will look amateurish in a soul-deadening way. Look at the game Baba Is You. It's a dead simple style that anyone can pull off, and it looks good. To be fair, even though it looks easy, it still takes a good artist/designer to come up with a seemingly simple style like that. But you can at least emulate their styles instead of coming up with something totally new, and in the process you'll better develop your aesthetic senses, which honestly will improve your journey as a game developer so much more than not having to "worry" about art.
nostrademons 1y ago
I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. And for those that can't (legal, for example, or various SaaS vendors) the AI usually has a good idea of what services you'd want to engage. Ironically though, having lots of people found startups is not good for startup founders, because it means more competition and a much harder time getting noticed. So its unclear that prosumers and startup founders will be the eventual beneficiary here either. It would be ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity because tasks that were frequently large-dollar-value transactions now become a consumer asking their $20/month AI to do it for them.
- mnky9800n 1y ago
  But if startups have less specialist needs they have less overall startup costs and so the amount of seed money needed goes down. This lowers the barrier for entry for a lot of people but also increases the number of options for seed capital. Of course it likely will increase competition but that could make the market more efficient.
- bossyTeacher 1y ago
  > I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. You are missing the other side of the story. All those customers, those AI boosted startups want to attract also have access to AI and so, rather than engage the services of those startups, they will find that AI does a good enough job. So those startups lost most of their customers, incoming layoffs :)
  - ares623 1y ago
    Then there's the 3rd leg of the triangle. If a startup built with AI does end up going past the rest of the pack, they will have no technical moat since the AI provider or someone else can just use the same AI to build it.
catlifeonmars 1y ago
I have a similar problem (available assets drive/limit game dev). What is your workflow like for generative game assets?
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  It’s really nothing special. I don’t do this a lot. Generally I have an idea I’ve written down some time ago, usually from a bad pun like Escape Goat (CEO wants to blame it all on you. Get out of the office without getting caught! Also you’re a goat) or Holmes on Homes Deck Building Deck Building Game (where you build a deck of tools and lumber and play hazards to be the first to build a deck). Then I come up with a list of card ideas. I iterate with GPT to make the card images. I prototype out the game. I put it all together and through that process figure out more cards and change things. A style starts to emerge so I replace some with new ones of that style. I use GIMP to resize and crop and flip and whatnot. I usually ask GPT how to do these tasks as photoshop like apps always escape me. The end result ends up online and I share them with friends for a laugh or two and usually move on.
  - sillyfluke 1y ago
    You said you had a budget about 0 in your top post. Was that for the pre-AI era or does that apply to your new AI flow as well? If it's still about 0, I'm guessing you're using primarily AI to learn how to do stuff and not using it mostly to generate assets? Is that a correct assumption? Edit: also, where can we play Escape Goat.
    - catlifeonmars 1y ago
      Hear. Where can we play escape goat?
  - larrry 1y ago
    Those games sell themselves on name alone, are they playable anywhere?
  - danielscrubs 1y ago
IAmGraydon 1y ago
I'm wondering a good way to create 2D sprite sheets with transparency via AI. That would be a game changer, but my research has led me to believe that there isn't a good tool for this yet. One sprite is kind of doable, but a sprite animation with continuity between frames seems like it would be very difficult. Have you figured out a way to do this?
- larrry 1y ago
  I’ve been building up animations for a main character sprite. I’m hoping one day AI can help me make small changes quickly (apply different hairstyles mainly). So far I haven’t seen anything promising either. Otherwise I have to touch up a hundred or so images manually for each different character style… probably not worth it
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  I think an important way to approach AI use is not to seek the end product directly. Don’t use it to do things that are procedurally trivial like cropping and colour palette changes, transparency, etc. For transparency I just ask for a bright green or blue background then use GIMP. For animations I get one frame I like and then ask for it to generate a walking cycle or whatnot. But usually I go for like… 3 frame cycles or 2 frame attacks and such. Because I’m not over reaching, hoping to make some salable end product. Just prototypes and toys, really.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  I dont use AI for image generation so I dont know how possible this is, but why not generate a 3D model for blender to ingest, then grab 2D frames from the model for the animation?
  - raincole 1y ago
    Because, uh, literally everything. But the main reason is that modeling is actually the easy (easiest) part of the workflow. Rigging/animating/rendering in the 2D style you want are bigger hurdles. And SOTA AIs don't even do modeling that well.
- 1y ago
Gigachad 1y ago
It's good for prototypes, where you want to test the core gameplay ideas without investing a ton early on. But you're going to have to replace those assets with real ones before going live because people will notice.
- raincole 1y ago
  People will notice and still buy it if your game has done something else right. Source: https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-of-genai-games-on-steam https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...
WalterBright 1y ago
I enjoy using AI generated art for my presentations.
- awjlogan 1y ago
  I chuckled seeing it in the first presentation of the conference. By the end of the conference, it was numbingly banal.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Well, you still have to come up with something interesting.
zwnow 1y ago
Funny how everyone is just okay with the basis for all this art being stolen art by actual humans. Zero sense of ethics.
- hyperbovine 1y ago
  Not clear that being able to sample from a distribution == stealing.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    Given that "AI" training needs millions of books, papers and web pages, it is a derivative work of all those books. Humans cannot even read a fraction of that and still surpass "AI" in any creative and generative domain. "AI" is a smart, camouflaged photocopier.
    - hyperbovine 1y ago
      Photocopiers are legal. And every piece of art that has ever been produced is derivative.
      - zwnow 1y ago
        Photocopying books for example is in fact not legal. Same goes for redistribution of art u stole.
  - zwnow 1y ago
    I dont care how you phrase it. Its no secret that art was stolen from artists. Image generation is thievery.
    - namdnay 1y ago
      Is it the same if it’s a human doing the learning? If I spend my youth looking at art, I’d any work I then do “theft”?
sixtyj 1y ago
Easy entry not equals getting rich.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  Something like 200,000 new songs are uploaded to music services every day because tech lowered the barrier to entry. How's that working? Lots and lots of new rich musicians?
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  In fact one could argue it makes it harder; if the barrier to entry for making video games is lowered, more people will do it, and there's more competiton. But in the case of video games there's been similar things already happening; tooling, accessible and free game engines, online tutorials, ready-made assets etc have lowered the barrier to building games, and the internet, Steam, itch.io, etcetera have lowered the barrier to publishing them. Compare that to when Doom was made (as an example because it's a good source), Carmack had to learn 3d rendering and making it run fast from the scientific text books, they needed a publisher to invest in them so they could actually start working on it fulltime, and they needed to have diskettes with the game or its shareware version manufactured and distributed. And that was when part was already going through BBS.
  - sixtyj 1y ago
    Yeah, you’re right. Ease of entry brings more creative people into the industry, but over time it all boils down to ~5 hegemons, see FAANG - but those are disrupted over time by the next group (and eventually bought out by those hegemons). Offtopic: I once read a comment that starting a company with the goal of exiting is like constantly thinking about death :)
iamacyborg 1y ago
> It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat. It’s worth reading William Deresiewicz‘ The Death of the Artist. I’m not entirely convinced that marketing that everyone can create art/games/whatever is actually a net positive result for those disciplines.
- taurath 1y ago
  If people are making art to get rich and failing, it doesn’t kill artists, who’d be making art anyway, it kills the people trying to earn money from their art. Do we need Quad-A blockbuster Ubisoft/Bethesda/Sony/MS/Nintendo releases for their artistic merit, or their publishers/IP owners needs to make money off of it? Ditto the big4 movie studios. Those don’t really seem to matter very much. The whole idea of tastemakers, who they are and whether they should be trusted (indie v/s big studio, grass roots or intentionally cultivated) seems like it ebbs and flows. Right now I’d hate to be one of the bigs, because everything that made them a big is not working out anymore.
  - iamacyborg 1y ago
    People are wanting to make a living by making art, not to get rich. I highly recommend reading the book I mentioned as you don’t seem to have a particularly nuanced understanding of the actual struggles at play. Perhaps an analogy you’ll understand is what happens to the value of a developer’s labour when that labour is in many ways replicated by AI and big AI companies actively work to undermine what makes your labour different by aggressively marketing that anyone can so what you so with their tools.
    - squigz 1y ago
      Isn't this just a result of technological progress? Technology has displaced entire fields of labor for... well, ever. I'm not unsympathetic to the problems this introduces to those workers, but I'm really not sure how it could be prevented; we can of course mitigate the issues by providing more social support to those affected by such progress. In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people, I have a hard time looking at it as anything but a net positive for society.
RataNova 1y ago
Totally agree that what AI is doing right now feels more like the GarageBand/iMovie moment than the iPhone moment. It's democratizing creativity, not necessarily creating billion-dollar companies. And honestly, that's still a big deal
- quantum2022 1y ago
  Yes, maybe what people create with it will be more basic. But is 'good enough' good enough? Will people pay for apps they can create on their own time for free using AI? There will be a huge disruption to the app marketplace unless apps are so much better than an AI could create it's worth the money. So short Apple? :) On the other hand, many, many more people will be creating apps and charging very little for them (because if it's not free or less than the value of my time, I'm building it on my own). This makes things better for everyone, and there'll still be a market for apps. So buy Apple? :)
- deergomoo 1y ago
  The difference is you still need to express creativity in your use of GarageBand and iMovie. There is nothing creative about typing "give me a picture of x doing y" into a form field. Also, "democratizing"? Please. We're just entrenching more power into the small handful of companies who have been able to raise and set fire to unfathomable amounts of capital. Many of these tools may be free or cheap to use today, but there is nothing for the commons here.
- oblio 1y ago
  The thing is... Elbow grease makes the difference. If you're just generating images using AI, you only get 80% there. You need at least to be able to touch up those images to get something outstanding. Plus, is getting 1 billion bytes of randomness/entropy from your 1 thousand bytes of text input really <your> work?
  - userbinator 1y ago
    Plus, is getting 1 billion bytes of randomness/entropy from your 1 thousand bytes of text input really <your> work? I think what AI has made and will make many more people realise is that everything is a derivative work. You still had to prompt the AI with your idea, to get it to assemble the result from the countless others' works it was trained on (and perhaps in the future, "your" work will then be used by others, via the AI, to create "their" work.)

ta12653421 1y ago

Regarding assets, check out Nano Banana: https://github.com/PicoTrex/Awesome-Nano-Banana-images/blob/main/README_en.md https://github.com/PicoTrex/Awesome-Nano-Banana-images/blob/... For you the example of "extract object and create iso model" should be relevant :)

SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago

> "AI" is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. If you ask an LLM to generate some imagery, in what way have you entered visual arts? If you ask an LLM to generate some music, in what way have you entered being a musician? If you ask an LLM to generate some text, in what way have you entered writing?

Havoc 1y ago

Yeah that seems accurate. I mainly use AI for selfhosting/homelab stuff and the leverage there is absolutely wild - basically knows "everything".

poszlem 1y ago

I introduced my mother to Suno, a tool for music generation, and now she creates hundreds of little songs for herself and her friends. It may not be great art, but it’s something she always wanted to do. She never found the time to learn an instrument, and now she finally gets to express herself in a way she loves. Just an additional data point.

cjbarber 1y ago

Yes! Barrier to entry down, competition goes up, barrier to being a standout goes up (but, many things are now accessible to more people because some can get started that couldn't before). Easier to start, harder to stand out. More competition, a more effective "sort" (a la patio11).

mallowdram 1y ago

The genericizing of aesthetics is far more cost than benefit. This is a completely false claim: "reducing barriers to entry" if the barrier includes the progression of creativity. Once the addict of AI becomes entranced to genericized assets, it deforms the cost-benefit. If we take high-level creativity and deform, really horizontalize the forms, they have a much higher cost, as experience become generic. AI was a complete failure of imagination.

tombert 1y ago

Yeah, that's how I feel about it as well. For a large chunk of my life, I would start a personal project, get stuck on some annoying detail (e.g. the server gives some arcane error), get annoyed, and abandoned the project. I'm not being paid for this, and for unpaid work I have a pretty finite amount of patience. With ChatGPT, a lot of the time I can simply copypaste the error and get it to give me ideas on paths forward. Sometimes it's right on the first try, often it's not, but it gives me something to do, and once I'm far enough along in the project I've developed enough momentum to stay inspired. It still requires a lot of work on my end to do these projects, AI just helps with some of the initial hurdles.

czbond 1y ago
> For a large chunk of my life, I would start a personal project, get stuck on some annoying detail ... I am the same way. I did Computer Science because it was a combination of philosophy and meta thinking. Then when I got out, it was mainly just low level errors, dependencies, and language nuance.
- tombert 1y ago
  Yeah exactly. I did CS because I love math and computability theory and logic and distributed computation, and I will have an interesting enough idea I want to play with, but I'll get stuck on some bullshit with Kubernetes or systemd or Zookeeper or firewalls or something that's decidedly not an interesting problem for me, but something necessary that I need to actually do my idea. Being able to get ChatGPT to generate basic scaffold stuff, or look at errors, help me resolve dependencies, or even just bounce ideas off of, really helps me maintain progress. You could argue that I'm not learning as much than if I fought through it, and that's probably true, but I am absolutely learning more than I would have if I had just quit the project like I usually did.

silenced_trope 1y ago

I'm also a hobbyist gamedev that struggles with the art side. Can I ask what AI tools you've been using most?

cactusplant7374 1y ago

I have been doing the exact same thing with assets and also it has helped me immensely with mobile development. I am also starting to get a feel for generating animated video and am planning to release a children’s series. It’s actually quite difficult to write a prompt that gets you exactly what you want. Hopefully that improves.

benoau 1y ago

Yep this is a huge enabler - previously having someone "do art" could easily cost you thousands for a small game, a month even, and this heavily constrained what you could make and locked you into what you had planned and how much you had planned. With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art, audio etc it's an incremental cost if any, you can explore ideas, you can throw art out, pivot in new directions.

risyachka 1y ago
It’s enabler for everyone, so you still don’t have any advantage just like you didn’t before that. The only difference is you spend less on art but will spend same in other areas. Literally nothing changed
- benoau 1y ago
  The difference is you have autonomy now - the same autonomy as a person building a web application or app able to put together a serviceable UI/UX without any other person - without the sacrifice of "programmer art" or cobbling together free asset packs.
lifeformed 1y ago
I'd argue a game developer should make their own art assets, even if they "aren't an artist". You don't have to settle for it looking bad, just use your lack of art experience as a constraint. It usually means going with something very stylized or very simple. It might not be amazing but after you do it for a few games you will have pretty decent stuff, and most importantly, your own style. Even amateurish art can be tasteful, and it can be its own intentional vibe. A lot of indie games go with a style that doesn't take much work to pull off decently. Sure, it may look amateurish, but it will have character and humanity behind it. Whereas AI art will look amateurish in a soul-deadening way. Look at the game Baba Is You. It's a dead simple style that anyone can pull off, and it looks good. To be fair, even though it looks easy, it still takes a good artist/designer to come up with a seemingly simple style like that. But you can at least emulate their styles instead of coming up with something totally new, and in the process you'll better develop your aesthetic senses, which honestly will improve your journey as a game developer so much more than not having to "worry" about art.

nostrademons 1y ago

I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. And for those that can't (legal, for example, or various SaaS vendors) the AI usually has a good idea of what services you'd want to engage. Ironically though, having lots of people found startups is not good for startup founders, because it means more competition and a much harder time getting noticed. So its unclear that prosumers and startup founders will be the eventual beneficiary here either. It would be ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity because tasks that were frequently large-dollar-value transactions now become a consumer asking their $20/month AI to do it for them.

mnky9800n 1y ago
But if startups have less specialist needs they have less overall startup costs and so the amount of seed money needed goes down. This lowers the barrier for entry for a lot of people but also increases the number of options for seed capital. Of course it likely will increase competition but that could make the market more efficient.
bossyTeacher 1y ago
> I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. You are missing the other side of the story. All those customers, those AI boosted startups want to attract also have access to AI and so, rather than engage the services of those startups, they will find that AI does a good enough job. So those startups lost most of their customers, incoming layoffs :)
- ares623 1y ago
  Then there's the 3rd leg of the triangle. If a startup built with AI does end up going past the rest of the pack, they will have no technical moat since the AI provider or someone else can just use the same AI to build it.

catlifeonmars 1y ago

I have a similar problem (available assets drive/limit game dev). What is your workflow like for generative game assets?

Waterluvian 1y ago
It’s really nothing special. I don’t do this a lot. Generally I have an idea I’ve written down some time ago, usually from a bad pun like Escape Goat (CEO wants to blame it all on you. Get out of the office without getting caught! Also you’re a goat) or Holmes on Homes Deck Building Deck Building Game (where you build a deck of tools and lumber and play hazards to be the first to build a deck). Then I come up with a list of card ideas. I iterate with GPT to make the card images. I prototype out the game. I put it all together and through that process figure out more cards and change things. A style starts to emerge so I replace some with new ones of that style. I use GIMP to resize and crop and flip and whatnot. I usually ask GPT how to do these tasks as photoshop like apps always escape me. The end result ends up online and I share them with friends for a laugh or two and usually move on.
- sillyfluke 1y ago
  You said you had a budget about 0 in your top post. Was that for the pre-AI era or does that apply to your new AI flow as well? If it's still about 0, I'm guessing you're using primarily AI to learn how to do stuff and not using it mostly to generate assets? Is that a correct assumption? Edit: also, where can we play Escape Goat.
  - catlifeonmars 1y ago
    Hear. Where can we play escape goat?
- larrry 1y ago
  Those games sell themselves on name alone, are they playable anywhere?
- danielscrubs 1y ago

IAmGraydon 1y ago

I'm wondering a good way to create 2D sprite sheets with transparency via AI. That would be a game changer, but my research has led me to believe that there isn't a good tool for this yet. One sprite is kind of doable, but a sprite animation with continuity between frames seems like it would be very difficult. Have you figured out a way to do this?

larrry 1y ago
I’ve been building up animations for a main character sprite. I’m hoping one day AI can help me make small changes quickly (apply different hairstyles mainly). So far I haven’t seen anything promising either. Otherwise I have to touch up a hundred or so images manually for each different character style… probably not worth it
Waterluvian 1y ago
I think an important way to approach AI use is not to seek the end product directly. Don’t use it to do things that are procedurally trivial like cropping and colour palette changes, transparency, etc. For transparency I just ask for a bright green or blue background then use GIMP. For animations I get one frame I like and then ask for it to generate a walking cycle or whatnot. But usually I go for like… 3 frame cycles or 2 frame attacks and such. Because I’m not over reaching, hoping to make some salable end product. Just prototypes and toys, really.
lelanthran 1y ago
I dont use AI for image generation so I dont know how possible this is, but why not generate a 3D model for blender to ingest, then grab 2D frames from the model for the animation?
- raincole 1y ago
  Because, uh, literally everything. But the main reason is that modeling is actually the easy (easiest) part of the workflow. Rigging/animating/rendering in the 2D style you want are bigger hurdles. And SOTA AIs don't even do modeling that well.
1y ago

Gigachad 1y ago

It's good for prototypes, where you want to test the core gameplay ideas without investing a ton early on. But you're going to have to replace those assets with real ones before going live because people will notice.

raincole 1y ago
People will notice and still buy it if your game has done something else right. Source: https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-of-genai-games-on-steam https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...

WalterBright 1y ago

I enjoy using AI generated art for my presentations.

awjlogan 1y ago
I chuckled seeing it in the first presentation of the conference. By the end of the conference, it was numbingly banal.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Well, you still have to come up with something interesting.

zwnow 1y ago

Funny how everyone is just okay with the basis for all this art being stolen art by actual humans. Zero sense of ethics.

hyperbovine 1y ago
Not clear that being able to sample from a distribution == stealing.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  Given that "AI" training needs millions of books, papers and web pages, it is a derivative work of all those books. Humans cannot even read a fraction of that and still surpass "AI" in any creative and generative domain. "AI" is a smart, camouflaged photocopier.
  - hyperbovine 1y ago
    Photocopiers are legal. And every piece of art that has ever been produced is derivative.
    - zwnow 1y ago
      Photocopying books for example is in fact not legal. Same goes for redistribution of art u stole.
- zwnow 1y ago
  I dont care how you phrase it. Its no secret that art was stolen from artists. Image generation is thievery.
  - namdnay 1y ago
    Is it the same if it’s a human doing the learning? If I spend my youth looking at art, I’d any work I then do “theft”?

sixtyj 1y ago

Easy entry not equals getting rich.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago
Something like 200,000 new songs are uploaded to music services every day because tech lowered the barrier to entry. How's that working? Lots and lots of new rich musicians?
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
In fact one could argue it makes it harder; if the barrier to entry for making video games is lowered, more people will do it, and there's more competiton. But in the case of video games there's been similar things already happening; tooling, accessible and free game engines, online tutorials, ready-made assets etc have lowered the barrier to building games, and the internet, Steam, itch.io, etcetera have lowered the barrier to publishing them. Compare that to when Doom was made (as an example because it's a good source), Carmack had to learn 3d rendering and making it run fast from the scientific text books, they needed a publisher to invest in them so they could actually start working on it fulltime, and they needed to have diskettes with the game or its shareware version manufactured and distributed. And that was when part was already going through BBS.
- sixtyj 1y ago
  Yeah, you’re right. Ease of entry brings more creative people into the industry, but over time it all boils down to ~5 hegemons, see FAANG - but those are disrupted over time by the next group (and eventually bought out by those hegemons). Offtopic: I once read a comment that starting a company with the goal of exiting is like constantly thinking about death :)

iamacyborg 1y ago

> It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat. It’s worth reading William Deresiewicz‘ The Death of the Artist. I’m not entirely convinced that marketing that everyone can create art/games/whatever is actually a net positive result for those disciplines.

taurath 1y ago
If people are making art to get rich and failing, it doesn’t kill artists, who’d be making art anyway, it kills the people trying to earn money from their art. Do we need Quad-A blockbuster Ubisoft/Bethesda/Sony/MS/Nintendo releases for their artistic merit, or their publishers/IP owners needs to make money off of it? Ditto the big4 movie studios. Those don’t really seem to matter very much. The whole idea of tastemakers, who they are and whether they should be trusted (indie v/s big studio, grass roots or intentionally cultivated) seems like it ebbs and flows. Right now I’d hate to be one of the bigs, because everything that made them a big is not working out anymore.
- iamacyborg 1y ago
  People are wanting to make a living by making art, not to get rich. I highly recommend reading the book I mentioned as you don’t seem to have a particularly nuanced understanding of the actual struggles at play. Perhaps an analogy you’ll understand is what happens to the value of a developer’s labour when that labour is in many ways replicated by AI and big AI companies actively work to undermine what makes your labour different by aggressively marketing that anyone can so what you so with their tools.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Isn't this just a result of technological progress? Technology has displaced entire fields of labor for... well, ever. I'm not unsympathetic to the problems this introduces to those workers, but I'm really not sure how it could be prevented; we can of course mitigate the issues by providing more social support to those affected by such progress. In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people, I have a hard time looking at it as anything but a net positive for society.

RataNova 1y ago

Totally agree that what AI is doing right now feels more like the GarageBand/iMovie moment than the iPhone moment. It's democratizing creativity, not necessarily creating billion-dollar companies. And honestly, that's still a big deal

quantum2022 1y ago
Yes, maybe what people create with it will be more basic. But is 'good enough' good enough? Will people pay for apps they can create on their own time for free using AI? There will be a huge disruption to the app marketplace unless apps are so much better than an AI could create it's worth the money. So short Apple? :) On the other hand, many, many more people will be creating apps and charging very little for them (because if it's not free or less than the value of my time, I'm building it on my own). This makes things better for everyone, and there'll still be a market for apps. So buy Apple? :)
deergomoo 1y ago
The difference is you still need to express creativity in your use of GarageBand and iMovie. There is nothing creative about typing "give me a picture of x doing y" into a form field. Also, "democratizing"? Please. We're just entrenching more power into the small handful of companies who have been able to raise and set fire to unfathomable amounts of capital. Many of these tools may be free or cheap to use today, but there is nothing for the commons here.
oblio 1y ago
The thing is... Elbow grease makes the difference. If you're just generating images using AI, you only get 80% there. You need at least to be able to touch up those images to get something outstanding. Plus, is getting 1 billion bytes of randomness/entropy from your 1 thousand bytes of text input really <your> work?
- userbinator 1y ago
  Plus, is getting 1 billion bytes of randomness/entropy from your 1 thousand bytes of text input really <your> work? I think what AI has made and will make many more people realise is that everything is a derivative work. You still had to prompt the AI with your idea, to get it to assemble the result from the countless others' works it was trained on (and perhaps in the future, "your" work will then be used by others, via the AI, to create "their" work.)