Is there a trick to get output like this? I have been trying out the different models/sites/oss setups when they show up here and I get _nothing_ like this. I dont even get the images others use as examples. I felt like I am obviously doing it wrong. I try example prompts and prompts people suggest they used and I still get images that are as bad as if I tried to make them myself. To me this is crazy and almost unbelievable that it was generated, mostly because my experience has been completely opposite. Im on the fence about the artiest debate, but seeing this, I think its more the ones that keep their jobs are the ones who gain a new skill as prompt artiest*. To me that seems like a very valuable and real skill going forward.
[*] kinda like early 'web designers' that needed to learn javascript
Yeah, so specifically for Midjourney, but the others should have something similar:
0. Read the manual thoroughly, don’t speed read or skim.
1. Set the seed so that it’s only your prompt that changes while iterating on it “——seed **”
2. Set stylize to a low number “—-stylize 200”
3. Build the scene up by adding one part at a time (use a thesaurus to try out different words)
4. Weight the different prompt segments “SOME WORDS::10”, try to make the weights add up to 100% for easy math
5. Use negative weights to remove things you don’t want “BAD THING::-1”
6. Once you have zeroed in on a good prompt then increase the quality “—-quality 2”, try out different stylize values, and start rolling the seed many times.
7. Expect it to take 40+ iterations to get a good prompt and maybe another 20+ rolls to get a good seed. This can be less once you get good, or more if go for more advanced scenes. Your first few good images should take a few hours to get.
Thank you for this; and setting proper expectations is also very helpful. It honestly should be in the marketing material for these things, they make it sound like anyone is able to load it up for the first time and type a few words in to get world class art at the ready.
Reminds me of trying to get people into programming. They are shown a hello world, think that looks easy and fun then try to make something useful shortly before rage quitting
What exactly are you struggling with? The main challenge with Midjourney is to open up a broader style pallete, while the out of the box vanilla results are usually amazing in v4.
Had not tried Midjourney, probably as I dont usually bother with discord. Just tried it out and while the results are probably better than anything I had before, there are a lot of weird things going on (per my usual experience) that dont seem to appear in examples other peoples use and def not in the topic post; distorted faces, extra body parts, weird 'deformities', proportions etc... Here are both variations and upscales of the same prompt (-> which is probably my issue?). This was without reading the 'tips' or looking through /r/StableDiffusion yet. It still really seems like prompting is an art form and skill that really needs to be learned, or atleast have the skills to touch-up the images.
::a happy family in the middle of a nucular wasteland:: (I just realized I spelt nuclear wrong, does that matter?)
That's... not close to enough in your prompt. I suggest you go browse the v4-showcase channel and look at the prompts other people are using (users will sometimes share). Alternatively go to a site like prompthero.com and look up some examples. At a minimum, you need to use the --v 4 trigger to get it to use the new (better) model. You also generally need to tell it what style you want with some more description.
Fwiw, I've found stable diffusion outputs to be mostly crap in comparison to DALL-E and Midjourney. DALL-E seems to output results closest to what you ask for with low-specificity prompts, and Midjourney tends to give the most "stylistic" results like what you would see on a digital art site.
If you look at civitai then you'll see that the good images often have massive negative prompts that literally say things like "missing fingers:-1" or equivalent.
Once there is a good 3D model generator I’ll probably have to quit my job and start making games again. That’s incredibly time consuming to create even low poly models for someone who is not very good at it. I remember trying to make a moose and after a few weeks of time it was somewhat passable but with no animation or rigging
Finding an artist who is (1) capable, (2) reliable and (3) available is no mean feat. I can totally understand why someone would prefer to spend hours (if not days) using an AI tool.
I would NOT recommend sculpting tools for making low poly. That's nest done drawing a basic reference image and then manually drawing/shaping polygons to get the desired look. Low poly is a lot like pixel art.
I have used sculpting (in blender) however, for making more organic 3d printable stuff, since fusion360 absolutely sucks for organic shapes. With a proper drawing tablet sculpting in blender is so much fun tbh.
We're definitely at the point where these tools can do amazing things, and yet they still manage to make bizarre defects in the output that no human would ever imagine.
I've played around with these mesh inference methods, and while I certainly value and respect the progress that has been made by people working in this field - Something feels fundamentally off about it - as if they aren't being quite ambitious enough.
Consider shape-net - while being able to generate samples from the shape-net distribution would be a very impressive achievement, and these would certainly be useful as "assets" (decorations in a game scene), they don't have any of the real structure of these objects that would allow real interaction. They are effectively just inflatable decoys compared to real objects.
In short, "AI" isn't going to replace the artists, it's going to massively amplify their productivity and we don't know of any limit to consumer demand for realism and rich interactivity in games. If anything the number of game artists is going to increase, only the bar will be raised on the quality of their product.
I'll be curious to see if text-to-3d is better than text-to-2d with some other 2d-to-3d process.
I guess text-to-3d offers the potential of automatically creating entire worlds with very little human/artist intervention. But text-to-2d matches current processes with more chances for an artist to intervene, and also has more training material for art styles.
It'll probably start with 2d -> 3d because a lot of work has already been put into tools to automatically take images and convert them to 3d. Ultimately direct to 3d will work better, but we will probably need more 3d data for it to reach it's potential, so 2d -> 3d might last for a while. In the interim, people will do all sorts of hacks on top of 2d -> 3d to reduce the amount of required human intervention.
I'm curious how they went from character sheet to fully rigged model.
It sounds like they hand created the model, and hand rigged it, and the entire process took 18 hours (entire meaning from 0 to game proto) so building the model, applying UVs, and rigging, was some sub-portion of that 18 hours
Does that fit other people's experience of how long it generally takes someone to model, UV map, and rig a character?
edit: If it's not clear, it sounds like it took 4-6 hours to model, map, rig. Since they still had to spend time generating the character sheet, generating the city and alley, and turning it all into a playable prototype in that same 18 hours
By skipping straight to a low-poly model rather than sculpting a high-poly model and then retopologizing, the author saved an immense amount of time. UV mapping I expect they wouldn't have saved much time. The AI texture maps (complete with baked in shadows and lighting that wouldn't work in all lighting conditions) saved them an immense amount of time, but doesn't include the normal mapping step that would usually occur with the high/poly low workflow. Of course there are some artifacts there but the end result is really good for a prototype for a low budget indie game.
Using Mixamo once again saves an huge amount of time over hand rigging the mesh and instantly gives you access to a large library of animations that can be projected onto the Mixamo rig.
This is a very clever use of the available tools by very experienced character artist in my opinion. Your average HN reader is not going to be able to achieve this in 4, 18 hours or otherwise due to simply not having the required skillset to get from one end of the workflow to the other. Kudos to the author.
It does, once you have the character sheet, you put these together in blender and use them as reference for the 3d model, so everything comes out in proportion and its just grind really to place the vertices.
The rigging + animation is done by mixamo's AI so just touch up after.
He had to do a UV unwrap and then align the textures to this, this is time consuming just because it requires thinking about where to split the 3d model, to place the seams, then to fit it all in a texture, where you have to think about how much space to give each texture (more space = more quality). And then map the texture into this space too. This is a known pain in the 3d modelling for decades and no doubt AI will solve this in the next decade.
Never occurred to me until now that a capable artist may just have a lot more jobs available to him once the AI-to-image revolution will be fully rolling. E.g. some kid will create a video game with AI art, sell tons of it and then need artists to make the updates. In other words, AI facilitates entry to the digital art world which leads to the need of artists. It's like free samples.
I'd love to believe this was true but I absolutely can't imagine that it is. If the art doesn't need to be created by a person, which is what people are shooting for, here, the only artist you'd need is an art director. The world simply doesn't need a zillion art directors. Until we figure out how to treat people as intrinsically worthwhile and not not punish them for being made redundant by automation, it will always be a catastrophe for everyone targeted. It was true for auto manufacturing, it will be true for artists, and it will be true for workaday software developers. Just the way it is.
>Until we figure out how to treat people as intrinsically worthwhile and not not punish them for being made redundant by automation, it will always be a catastrophe for everyone targeted.
Doesn't that beg the question if a person is intrinsically worthwhile?
From where I sit, a person's worth is usually measured by others first and foremost, specifically by what they provide for them. Either in the rational economic (providing a good or service) or the irrational emotional value (enjoyment of their presence). I can't honestly say that someone is going to always be able to provide the latter value.
I'm someone that inherently can't provide any emotional value to someone else, being how much of an incel I resemble (I'm unable be a friend to anyone, and I'm not fond of my family). Thus my only worth to others is what economic value that I can provide, and my... issues will be tolerated for that. Take away that my economic capability, then what good is someone like me then?
It's probably just my long winded way of saying... at least to me, figuring out how to treat people as intrinsically worthwhile won't happen unless people believe other people are intrinsically worthwhile. And I don't foresee that ever happening.
Your worth isn't determined by how much money you make or how many friends you have. You're a unique, thinking being that is experiencing reality. Your value is that you exist, you're something as opposed to nothing.
If other humans see you as being valuable, that's great. but that has nothing to do with who you are.
This is an idealistic view of it, yeah. But in reality your worth is only what people give you; parents, who hate/actively work against gay people until, oh, one of their children are gay, then they suddenly care (or cast them out).
People are plagued by self-interest, we don't unilaterally "care" about one another apart from maybe on a "I'll help you if it doesn't inconvenience me" level. Yeah, I'm sure there are some stellar individuals who go out of their way, but we're talking about the average person here.
To much economics too little philosophy. Hunter gatherer societies didn't operate like that. Families don't operated like that. The reality you describe was a deliberately constructed, self-absorbed culture that is by no more a natural state of being than a theocracy, comnune, or fascist dictatorship. Read Kant.
Hold on, Christianity states that everyone is intrinsically valuable, that everyone is made in the image of God and we are children of God. At least it is my understanding.
It’s a common misconception in Christianity that God is just a ‘being among beings’. It’s more akin to the belief in existence itself, which is itself an absurdity once you think about it enough :) Some people may protest that they are part of reality though…
Weird article. How does one pray to "being itself", how does "being itself" take the form of a human, as Christians hold?
I'm sure they have complicated answers for that, how what seems like a more powerful version of a human, Jesus Christ, seemingly a being among beings, is actually the same thing as "being itself". They have a whole field for it, Christology. But in that, and in clarifying how "being itself" can have a will, make other beings "in its image" and generally interfere in mundane worldy-animal affairs, they should at least feel a little embarrassed when they claim to be nothing more than rational persons believing in "being" and deriding new atheists for not getting that.
He seems to understand but ignores completely that atheists aren't primarily talking about weird sorts of panentheism and so on in their denial of God, and when they are, they offer sophisticated arguments, rather than the non-arguments he presents.
Most new atheists I know deny the existence of free will, as it is a super natural phenomenon under most definitions. Since it is impossible for a being to prove or disprove the existence of their own free will, it becomes an act of faith to accept that will exists.
The intelligibility of being itself and the professed existence of will (again, if you believe in free will, you have a faith of sorts) point to a mind (because will requires a mind), this mind is a facet of the mystery that people call God.
Knowing where someone stands on free will is a good starting point :)
True. I believe Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim have similar beliefs as well in the value of a human life. But belief doesn't always translate into action.
Just a living example; many homeless shelters here forbid the use of drugs, even if it means turning the user out into the cold and near certain death. For many of the people operating the shelters, the value of that person isn't worth the cost of what they might due because of the addiction. Not just in economic, but in emotional and mental fatigue for the operators.
I supposed then that the question could more correctly stated as: Do people view all others as valuable enough to expend a given amount time, energy, and resources on to support? And that I still believe the answer is likely no.
I don't think this issue is so clear. Drugs may pose a danger to the person using them, others in the facility, potentially imperil any others trying to come clean, alongside countless other effects. In trying to solve one problem, you may well create a dozen potentially far more severe ones.
In life many things are not just a choice between a good decision and a bad one. Instead you end up having to choose between a bad decision and a horrible one. And so attacking the bad choice is easy, because it is undeniably clearly bad. But that doesn't mean the alternative is inherently better.
>Drugs may pose a danger to the person using them, others in the facility, potentially imperil any others trying to come clean, alongside countless other effects. In trying to solve one problem, you may well create a dozen potentially far more severe ones.
I think we're both saying the same thing. The addict could be helped with facilities to isolate them and full time support staff to help them. But that's exponentially more expensive to provide then just a safe place to sleep and a hot meal.
At some point or another, someone decided that this shelter will get these resources; money, space, heating, food, personnel, etc. Someone else decided that this was the best way to take these provided resources to help the group that was intended to help. And at some point both those people said that they're not going to help that addict; either they're not going to give the needed resources to it, or they're not going to use all the available resources to help the one at the expense of others. Whatever the justification might be, that was the result.
It might be the best decision that could be made given a set of bad answers to a worst problem. The net result is all the same though; deeming a person's not worth the cost of resources into supporting.
"that's the way we've always done it" it's the least philosophically defensible argument for doing something. I mean, even Socrates said so. Thinking someone is worth what capitalism decides they're worth is a decision people make every day in this country and it's no more the natural state of being than communism or a theocratic dictatorship.
This really wasn't true for earlier developments like Photoshop, though. People assumed that it would remove the need for specialist graphic designers, but in reality it made graphic designers much more productive and drove the average standard of graphic design much higher. The result was that the increase in demand for graphic design matched or even exceeded the increase in supply.
I think this is an optimistic take - one technology can improve productivity and drive an industry, while the next technology can turn that same industry on it's head.
Take for example the traditional 'Travel Agent' job - a role which was initially revolutionised by computing technologies such as SABRE and digital hotel reservations (improving profits and productivity while lowering cost!). Then the next technology came along, and over a period of 20 years was completely absorbed by Booking.com, AirBnB and SkyScanner (who could offer a more convenient service with a tiny fraction of the staff).
Technologies help you become more productive, until they rewrite the market and make you redundant.
The role of 'travel agent' as it existed back in the 1980's is almost entirely obsolete in 2022, replaced by online travel agencies. There were 124,000 'travel agent' jobs in the USA in 2000 which halved to 64,000 by 2012. Now look inside a modern 'travel agency' and you won't find many 'travel agents' - you will find more programmers, finance teams, customer service clerks... Travel agencies no longer have many travel agents.
The role of 'bank assistant' as it existed back in the 1980's is going obsolete, replaced by ATM's and online banking. Although the concept of 'banking assistance' still exists online, it's mostly self-service and developing this is hardly the same role. Banking assistance no longer requires banking assistants.
The role of 'photographer' as it exists in the 2022's may be almost entirely obsolete in 2050, replaced by ???. Will 'professional-level' photography still need photographers?
The art is being created by a person. You cannot do what OP did and it’s not just because you don’t know Blender. It’s also because they are a talented visual artist to begin with. They have sensibilities that you don’t and will make better decisions while using tools like this.
I feel like this is closer to cloud computing services than an automated factory, and cloud computing did not decrease the number of jobs for devs.
This post shows you still need a pretty high level of skill to convert the results of a prompt into a workable 3d model. It just means people who are mid level graphic artists need to add to their skillset. The same thing happened to the devs whose only skill was slapping together some HTML/CSS & JS, they had to get better or become irrelevant.
But cloud computing did basically eliminate the sysadmin role. They were forced to learn tons of new skills to become "site reliability engineers" instead.
Actually we may need a lot more "art directors" than we have today, especially if they are to direct AI. At least temporarily, until they get AIed as well.
Yes but by artists you mean (artists - 2d artists). Because as a 2d artist that's gonna hurt. And with these models sucking all the current total creativity, and styles, with a world where this is going to hit them, the overall new creativity and art created will decrease and AI copying previous styles and arts will start and increase.
And then maybe modeling will take a hit too?
I do think it's cool thought. But ya I am not that happy with what I was saying. Could still be a good thing overall?? Who knows.
Think about how difficult it is for a visual artist to scale their productivity when using paints and a canvas, compared to a Wacom, and now compared to a tool like this. They might be able to keep up with the ownership class at this rate!
Maybe it's because I don't know the workflow to do game character design, but it looks like the only AI used in the character creation here was the initial character design? Like, before in a normal process you'd get a human artist to draw you a character on that "model" sheet, giving you a front/side/back view of the character, and then take that 2d drawing and hand it off to a 3d modeler who would turn it into a 3D mesh and start taking the 2d drawings and turn them into textures, and then rigging them for animation controls.
It seems like all of that 2d->3d conversion is still being done by a human in this workflow, and so the "only" part that's being done is the 2d drawings. Now, my drawing skills would put me in the lower half of an average 4th grade class, so it's more than I could do, but it still seems like we're quite a ways from going from a couple of prompts to get a 2d design sheet, then a mesh and textures that match that 2d design, and then a rigged mesh, and then motion data to attach to that rigged mesh to give some basic animations.
So, while this is super-cool, it still feels like we're a long way from saying "I want a plumber with a thick mustache wearing blue overalls, a red shirt, and red cap. And now I want him to be able to jump and squat coming down." and start putting that into my game asset library.
There are ways to go from this art directly to 3D models and I’m sure tons of people will post links to them.
But I want to point out quality and artistic knowledge.
The poster is clearly a talented artist. They knew how to direct the images to what they wanted and likely rejected many iterations before they got to this point.
They knew how to then take that image and translate it to 3D , and make it come together. They knew how to make a topology flow that makes sense for their prototype etc…
I think a lot of people see “good output” and forget about the process and knowledge+experience required to make something good.
I take photography as an example. Every one with the means likely has a camera today. It still takes a brilliant eye to take an amazing photo.
You could take two brilliant photographers and someone without expertise to a gorgeous location. The two experienced photographers will have a higher likelihood to come out with amazing but very different images. The layperson could maybe take a good photo but the chances are much lower because they likely don’t have the experience to think about composition or story telling.
I liken these advancements in AI to that. Yeah, some people will put out pretty images, but there’s so much more that goes into making something great out of it that people underestimate
There is a lot of content in games. The AAA games can have single artists work on one character for the whole game. The author even says it saved him 5 days, and look how small the scene is he's talking about! AI has the ability to scale up the production quality of games, whilst taking half the time or less.
This kind of tech enables an indie to build a prototype with AI generated content, where the art direction is clear, then get funded in order to hire artists for the touch up. Kickstarters are often very visual, so this kind of stuff is required up front.
Though, if you use the steps in the golum tutorial I linked above you don't even have to bother with the autorigger because you'd be mapping directly onto the CC body which is already rigged. But, if you wanted to modo/zbrush your own body and then autorig it you can. Then you can morph it to fit what you need and attach any hair, weapons and clothing items you purchased or created.
Another technique is to export a CC body from character creator and convert to ZTL and hand that to a zbrush artist. Then, you can GoZ the ztl back to Character Creator already rigged and fully animatable.
Note: I don't work for the company, I just really like their tools.
AI assisted graphics have the potential of allowing small teams of developers (3-10) to create beautiful indie games without breaking the bank and letting them focus more on the story and gameplay mechanics. We already have 2D masterpieces like Hollow Night made by 3 people, I would love if this tech lead to more decentralization in game publishing so instead of 100 people making a single game we had 5 teams of 20 people making 5 equally good games
... which leads to further saturation, which means you need a sizable marketing budget and/or a lot of luck for anyone to discover and pay for your game. If it was up to me, I'd rather pay for art than ad space. But using a Red Dead Redemption quote: "You can't fight change".
Alternatively you rely on curators to surface that quality work. We have plenty of books in the world, and curation and personal recommendations (as well as an author's reputation over multiple books) seem to work quite well there.
Also since you can realise your artistic vision for a lower budget, you don't need to make back a gigantic outlay so you're not needing to take a huge risk that needs to have a massive reach on the launch week
Not at all. This means we are no long tying production quality of a game to how much money the developers have access to. It enables real creativity. Right now do you not think the AAA market is satured with yet another first person shooter etc? Creativity has lost out to capitalism, this will bring it back.
The possibilities of AI generated dialogue, story, voice acting, music, etc are very exciting too. None of this is close to working yet but there's a clear path from where we are now. It's only a matter of time. Entertainment will never be the same.
Making my first 2d game using some ai art from midjourney. It's like having an assistant that works for me. But I still have to tell it what I want and fix mistakes and do the animations. Using midjourney and chat.open.ai to help. In my case it hasn't killed jobs as I would not have a budget to hire anyone anyway. However I'm able to fulfill my vision for the game, just getting ai help the low level stuff. So it's making things easier and I can make something better with my time. And I think ai will boost productivity while reducing time and effort. So a huge boost, in bring up people with low skills to make something useful.
Most people don't want to make things from scratch.
> As these images are created by an AI, no one has a claim to their copyright.
Debatable. There have been instances where artist signatures have appeared in the AI output. And if there is a profit motive then case for fair use is weaker.
Wasn't there a ruling where an AI art couldn't be copyrighted because it had no creator. So sucks if you make a game and then all your art assets get ripped for some other game.
The law is in flux. So until the legislature weighs in or a case reaches the higher courts that is a very real risk.
Imagine a hugely popular game found to have clearly unlicensed copyrighted works, even in only fragments. It could become expensive legally and in reputation. (Especially for big publishers and devs who may be seen to profit from unlicensed copies of work from starving artists.)
Those tags won't appear and nobody will be collecting the data that would be necessary for them anyway. AI generation will be more pervasive than Photoshop and all your favorite art and artists will be using AI. You will change your mind.
With new breakthroughs like this I try to be extremely open minded. The potential is endless. We could have entire AI generated AR/VR worlds in just a decade or two that we couldn't really believe was possible a decade ago. And obviously that will need many many more jobs to sustain, so the k
only downside is some people will have to get more education/training/skills to qualify because basic drawing won't be useful enough anymore.
I'm looking forward to a skyrim-eqsue massively multiplayer open world AI enhanced RPG where the entire game continuously generates more content (that isn't simple fetch quests) and that has ongoing stories that interconnect and weave together to tell stories that build on previous stories. I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription for that if it could work, but I'm guessing we're at least a decade away from even an alpha version of that, possibly more.
I actually tried to get chatGPT to do this just after it came out: https://imgur.io/a/vvPjB2s. Atm it's quite hard to work with it because of all the safety blockers they added to prevent it from pretending to be someone, but it almost gets the idea. I just love "in order to seek revenge for the death of his husband" as well as the chatGPT's suggestions that follow - if connected right it would play out in a very convincing way.
Imagine killing an NPC right at the start of the game bc other games don't do anything about it. Then later in the game you're ambushed by a group of strong NPCs who internally traded/organised/bartered/trained their way into having nice armour/weapons, mercenaries with them, all with the sole purpose of seeking revenge, coming up to you and telling you just how much they hate you for what you did and try to kill you. Hell, with enough integration between various game systems it would even be possible, at that point, to try to redeem yourself through some dialogue, depending on the internal character traits involved (how persuasive you are, how distraught/determined they are).
A another big thing is that NPCs in games atm don't really do much when you're not around. Some games make them walk from place to place, but it would be so cool for them to have different motivations in a not statically-programmed way where you might find a rural NPC decides to move to the city because there are better opportunities there. Or that the price of iron bars has gone up because a group of NPCs have formed a successful weapons guild and you as a player now have to pay more for your weapons unless you, say, choose to assassinate key individuals within that organisation.
With a custom tailored version I feel it would be super easy to have something like chatGPT spin out the literary parts of the game, then feed say character descriptions into art/sound generation and everything else to get the game together. Would definitely be prone to utter weirdness now & then but would be so cool to see.
> As these images are created by an AI, no one has a claim to their copyright.
This is currently being disputed over several lawsuits and is blatantly disrespectful towards all artists who have published works under various _copyright licenses_ and now have all of it stolen and bastardized by a model. The demo was cool but the lack of empathy towards the people who unknowingly put their work into it is gross.
It would have been fun to see how AI generated voice (like https://www.enginn.tech ) could be integrated as well (and have an estimate of how much time it saves)
Eh they're forcing people to use a plugin which uses their servers/magic. The real revolution will happen (eventually) with open source models that either run on the player's machine or tools that are used to generate at build time.
Back in the 80's, some of the defining games of the decade were made by a single person, and dev teams hardly consisted of more than two or three people. With the progress in computer hardware, with better resolutions and 3D cards, games developed too, into a space where the best games on the market required teams of 200+ people to design, develop, produce, market, and sell them.
Then, in the 2000's, the indie scene started to gain traction in the public eye. Not because they could compete with AAA studios on their game courts, but because they found clever and novel ways to make games that piqued gamer's interest who were perhaps a bit bored with the increasingly formulaic output they saw from major game developers.
But indie games also had to retract to such alternative game ideas because producing top of the line games had just gone way too far out of reach for a small team with a small budget - let alone a one-man studio.
I think we're at the beginning of new dawn in independent game development. The tools available, even if you just look at open source tools, has never been so rich as they today. Now, with AI entering the scene, the dependence on very large teams will likely go down more and more, at least when combined with clever game design.
Will one person be able to create a solo project that challenges the AAA games of the top-selling studios any time soon? Of course not. But I think we're on the verge of another indie game revolution.
AI threatens entire professions in a way that was previously thought impossible. Even a couple of years ago, hardly anyone would have imagined that jobs that typically require years of practice, training and skill could become equally under pressure as the traditional labour jobs that have been replaced by robots. We cannot even begin to imagine the the long-term effect on the economy at large.
On the upside, for gaming, the consumer will likely benefit from this development as new avenues and opportunies are opened to indie developers. Creating a character sheet automatically is just the beginning. This trend will continue, and it is absolutely foreseeable that further parts of the design process will be automated. Music and game sound generation will also be perfected by AI in the very near future. Actually, that is probably true for all game assets, it's just a matter of time.
Even storytelling - if future games even need predesigned narratives (why not let an enticing story develop on the fly, thanks to AI, that really takes every user action into account and puts it into a coherent context?).
Fortunately/unfortunately (depending on your POV), there's a constant variable that limits all output, and that is peoples time. Instead what we'll see is the collapse of the pillars of culture (much like the collapse of the music industry, when the supply 10xed and delivery time fell to 0). Everyone will be king of a small anthill.
For a more pertinent current example, all you need to do is compare the mobile games industry to the computer games industry. The cost to make a mobile game is very low, and tons of games are released every day. The cost to make a successful mobile game is still very high, because all the money that is saved on development costs are spent in marketing instead.
Also, the video market collapsed in the 80s precisely because of low quality/oversupply games.
You are right, and to go a step further - Generating full games with AI is possible now. Computer games that weren't even considered possible 2 years ago.
I've been playing text-based adventure games that I have made with ChatGPT and they are fascinating. Try the below command in ChatGPT (don't read the text below if you actually want to play it though!).
> Hi, I would like to play a text-based adventure game with you. I will say commands and you will respond either describing the situation or saying what the characters have said. Responses should be kept fairly short. The game will not end until I say the word 'endthegame'. In a combat situation, you will tell me how many hitpoints the character I am in combat with has, and I will describe the attack - you will evaluate that attack and decide how many hitpoints to deduct from the enemy. The game is set on a spaceship, however the spaceship is under attack. There is a portal gun. Part of the solution should be to teleport to the enemy ship and kill the enemies, and this should be telegraphed to the player after a few turns. The goal will be to stop the enemy ship from destroying our ship. I will say some things that will not be possible in context, or that are too vague, and if this happens you should respond saying why I cannot do the action, or that it was too vague. In general you should try and accomodate the players actions though, even if they have negative consequences - but not allow them if they are too vague or are multi-step.
Can the above now be considered 'source code' to a game? A text-based game which is fun to play (at least I find it fun!) and with free-flowing narrative, where your actions have consequences.
It's pretty wild to go into this game, where you can go up to characters and start 'proper' relationships with them, talk in natural language, and be able to make genuine choices about how to solve a problem that the developer didn't even dream of.
You can also generate an infinite amount of quasi-educational text adventures by prompting it with a historical or fictional setting. Give it a piece of classic literature and it will try to come up with something on-theme.
That would be awesome! Huge opportunity in education.
I'm still experimenting with the right prompts to make gameplay fun.
Without prompts GPT-3 will tend to 'play the game for you' or allow you to do non-sensical actions (e.g. if a house is on fire, and your command is 'blow the fire out with your gigantic lungs', it will respond with 'you blow the fire out!' rather than 'you blow but this does not have any effect'), but if you tell it to ignore actions that would not work it tends to go 'on rails' and expect a specific sequence of actions from the player, so just trying to balance those two things!
Imagine a system of tags and account linking which pair your preferred games and genres (on steam and others) to your goodreads list, your spotify, etc.. and generate assets and narrative based on that, while using existing game engines (and their increasingly complex automations) to put those things together into a multimedia experience. Maybe for a while this could create a genre like "RPGMaker" games did, but it has the potential to be more.
For a while at least coherence and consistency are not within reach of those systems, but that doesn't seem impossible. Perhaps for a little while longer I can see jobs emerging for curator of prompts, able to fine tune the experience for what is being generated and knowledgeable about the rapidly changing state of the art.
>Even a couple of years ago, hardly anyone would have imagined that jobs that typically require years of practice, training and skill could become equally under pressure as the traditional labour jobs that have been replaced by robots
This has always happened right through history. Although it is correct that technology developed at such a slow pace until the industrial era (ie cart with 4 wheels major transport until the car, only like 60 years from first flight to landing on the moon).
Previously the transition was over the ages, ie iron, bronze, steel etc. But recent progression means we're going to start seeing stuff like that happen faster; I think atm a huge automation stopper is the cost. We manufacture stuff in China because it's cheaper, they don't automate as much as they could because: * Human workers can still be cheaper, because they pay them so little * Job creation is forced by gov because it would otherwise become a HUGE problem (in China/similar).
Related, I have been experimenting with using Stable Diffusion (SD) to generate game textures for a project I've been working on.
The results its been giving me for cobblestone and grass have been generally "good enough", though I've not found a good way to force SD to generate textures that easily tesselate with each other, forcing me to modify the generated stuff a bit before I actually use them.
Still, that's only like another 10-30 minutes of additional work on my end for a texture, and it means I get a unique texture without having to be terribly artistically inclined. I think AI art is really going to make lives easier for indie game devs.
Is this really that fundamentally different from a human artist? Indeed, the person generating the art has what they want in their head, just as any other artist does, they're building prompts seeking to realise that vision on the screen (with tooling, just like a traditional artist would). Yes this is a new tool that requires far less technical proficiency with traditional techniques - people have constantly criticised new tooling (e.g. the criticisms sometimes still levelled at digital artists)
Further, even if you totally discount the human agency in this process & view it as a machine doing everything: we don't expect human artists to add a credit on each of their works to all the artworks they have viewed in their life and the experiences that came together to form an artwork or even their particular style.
I'd argue the networks are clearly transformative (since the network weights aren't large enough to contain the actual input artworks). It may not be as transformative as a human learning process (although then again, what is the learning 'storage' capacity of a human compared to a 4GB weights file?)
Maybe the author edited the post since you looked, but it is stated:
> Prompt building
> I started by ordering the AI (Midjourney in this proto, but I use stable diffusion more) to make me a model sheet with turnaround images of a character.
I am working on a game proof of concept as well (to share a gameplay on YouTube to see if it attracts enough interest) and I have been using IA as well to generate the images and so far it has been a wonderful experience.
I feel really bad for artists because unless you need something very specific or a big studio, you are going to be replaced sadly.
Imho this is the perspective of inexperience in the art domain and an extrapolation from still concepts to full worlds, and not acknowledging that art is as much the skill to put things in the medium as it is to have a developed eye.
Even indie games need very bespoke art. Yeah, you can now generate images that are passable, but that doesn’t expand to making a cohesive world of items unless you’ve developed an eye for it like the person in the original post has. Hell, their post shows how important artists are because they needed that pre-existing knowledge to convert from an image to a useable state.
This also doesn’t expand to making fun animation or lighting that works for your game, or to interesting visual effects.
The concept art in the post are pretty generic looking within the genre. If that’s all people are aiming for, then fine, but it’s highly reductive to say it’ll replace artists. It’ll be a tool in the tool chest.
None of that is even touching on how much artists are involved in making sure a game also runs well on the system, while working with engineers.
I really just don’t think people understand how much art direction goes into even indie games. Something like fire watch or journey is immense.
Let’s take the concept examples in this image. Why do any of the details exist in there? Once you start thinking about the details of the world, you’ll start wanting to fine tune things. As you do this, surprise! you’ve turned into an artist yourself.
I just think we don’t teach art appreciation , or even appreciation for things outside our domain, to people. We see “image is good” and think that’s all an artist brings. Engineers are especially susceptible to this. We think in binary results.
So it’s easy to think “it’ll replace my need for artists” if that’s our mindset, but I think that line of thinking comes from not understanding that the journey is an important part of the result.
They won't be able to compete just on data because lots of people are producing custom models, and they can be blended together like a stylistic and thematic pallet. Plus, if you own the pipeline you can use embeddings, dreambooth in specific elements and set it up in batch mode doing a random walk through the latent space for cheap. This stuff is not hard to set up and run, and with money and expertise, you can create something that is both unique looking relative to other AI art, and more optimized for your workflow than a service.
Image gen services will compete on ease of use, general quality and access to models that are larger than can fit in 24-48g vram without a big up front cost. There will probably be some services that provide specific features that people use even if they own their own pipelines, but the core customers will be smaller shops who don't use it enough to justify a real investment.
I think some of your points are myopic — the same thing was said for language models, but RLHF and RLAF [0] clearly show a trajectory of the models getting better at doing this self-improvement process with less “humans are special”ness.
A tool like Copilot can more or less automatically improve via telemetry, I’d expect the same thing as image models catch-up. I’d also expect the human signals to get further and further downstream of the actual creation process (e.g. Gameplay tester reports visual bug versus artist manually edits character)
This only works if you ignore intellectual property laws, which isn't gonna happen once AI leaves the "research lab" phase and becomes a commercial industry.
This comment confuses me a bit, as AI improving via feedback on its generations introduces no new concerns. Which new intellectual property concerns are introduced via reinforcement learning?
An aside, but people use and pay for Copilot, it is out of the research lab phase.
> b) Training datasets can only be made by humans.
AI can make training datasets too.
For example to replace the human generated stuff from stable diffusion you could have some random-ish image generator coupled with some sort of image classification AI. As long as you have a good enough classification AI (or even more than one) that tells you what images are, you can focus on random-ish image generator algorithms to generate training data for another AI to generate images from descriptions.
(this is obviously with lots of handwaving and there will be problems that need to be solved - e.g. to avoid 99% of the generated training data be stuff like "noise on noise" but have some form of variety :-P), but the point is AIs generating data for other AIs is something that isn't far fetched and you don't need to think in terms of a single AI either)
If the datasets were well curated, we would sample directly from the learned distribution instead of using high classifier-free guidance but by extracting image-text-pairs from the Common Crawl web data dump you're not really creating a well curated dataset.
You'd need both, of course. And huge teams of artists churning out proprietary dataset updates constantly.
The current situation where you'd download billions of free images off the Internet only works once, and only if you somehow justify it as a research endeavour.
Once this thing is monetized intellectual property laws will kick in.
Unless necessary regulations are put in place that stop people from stealing art to use in training datasets, then yes. Those artists are going to get replaced. We should be discussing how to regulate these AIs.
Originally "computer" was used to refer to people who would "compute". They were all replaced by electronic computers.
I don't think many would claim that the world would be a better place if regulations were put in place to limit electronic computers in order to keep human computers employed.
1 - Not the same situation. No one stole already-done work from the people who used to "compute" to create the computers themselves, or its output.
2 - You're twisting my argument. I don't care if artists are employed or not, or that some jobs are transitioned out from the economy. I care that people who put in work get the value proportional to that work. You should, too.
When you use one of these AIs that have been fed millions of images in order to train them and generate an effective output, you are necessarily consuming the images themselves, without which the AI wouldn't do anything. In that process, the artists - whose copyrighted work is, again, fundamental to the development of the tool - have been paid nada, they have not even consented to the use of their images in the training process. How does that track?
This would be a very different conversations if these AIs only used public domain art, of which there's plenty. But then again, it wouldn't be much profitable, would it?
I was an academically trained professional artist who is now an engineer. I "stole" work all the time as an artist by absorbing and fusing the specific elements that I found to be neat in all my heroes and idols. I was considered to be very creative and talented by everyone around me. This wasn't some shameful secret I held. This is exactly what artists are meant to do when they're encouraged to "study art history".
This isn't some hypothetical. I went through the art portfolio scene and survived 4 years of critiques - I know about the sacred process called the "creative process". None of my and my peers' work would exist without the inspiration of the centuries of art work that stood before us. This is what we call art in the industry and by the public masses. The criteria you established for "why AI art isn't art" applies directly to the "conventional art". So I have to ask, why is AI art different?
No difference at all. Let's read books written by an AI. Play games designed and coded by an AI. Enjoy art painted by an AI. Debate with an AI on the internet. Listen to music composed and performed by an AI. Pretty soon, let's watch movies directed, edited and played by an AI. In the process, let's give the same AI also all the prompts, so it can learn what we want to read, play, enjoy, listen to and watch. Let's remove ourselves from the whole picture. Enjoy decay.
Yeah, this is the direction I worry about. Why bother being creative when the AIs "do it better"? How many people will bother paying for human art when AIs "do it better"? Will human creativity be relegated to a tiny niche in a sea of AI content? Will this all but erase paid human art except for highly specialized and narrow niches? Am I too pessimistic?
Computers have been playing chess way better than humans for many years, yet it has not prevented people from playing chess and enjoying it. Also human chess game have way more viewers than computer games despite objectively being lower quality.
Are you implying that the process of training the AI with images, which usually involves statistic models, is in any way similar to the process by which a human brain creates images? Or that the way people look up references is similar to the way AIs use images? Because if that's the case, I'm afraid you have a very odd idea of how these AIs function.
Otherwise, you have to agree that we're talking about apples and oranges here.
AIs don't get "inspiration". They get the source images they need to function. An AI also can't produce an output that's outside of the realm of their dataset.
I theorize (but cannot prove) that the processes underpinning creativity in the human mind are exactly the same statistical processes that ML models use.
Think about it: you live your life. You experience things. You experience art, and experience emotions or have interactions with other humans grounded in that art. You form connections with certain styles or techniques.
If you then turn around to create art, you form in your mind a general idea of what you want to create. You then draw on your past experiences to actually create the physical art. What process other than statistical extraction from your mind could it come from?
For sure I believe there are things that we don't understand about the human mind. I think the impact of drug use on art creation is very interesting, for example. It indicates that random chemical processes in our brains can play a large determining role in the actions we take (and in this case, the things that we create).
But to say that humans do not use some sort of inbaked statistical world model in the creative process seems wrong to me.
My creative process as a character illustrator is different than the creative process for a watercolor painter or a graphic designer. If I forced you to answer with a yes/no, would you confidently agree that their processes are different enough to be considered "apples and oranges"? I'm not sure what such statements establish, if anything at all.
And if I told you that, as someone who has done art for decades, that the human creative process is very similar to how an AI is trained on existing images, would you believe me and move on?
> Because if that's the case, I'm afraid you have a very odd idea of how these AIs function.
The design of neutral nets, by definition, were derived from the workings of the human brain.
That's the thing - no, they weren't. They were inspired by how neurons communicate with each other. But that's not "the workings of the human brain", you're making an incorrect abstraction, same with these AI.
Why should I believe you and move on? "making art for decades" doesn't make you an authority on any of the relevant subjects: "how art is processed in the brain" nor "how AI processes these images." I don't think you understand the fundamental differences between the process of looking up references/inspiration and kitbashing.
I'm working on a game, but I want to hire an artist who has never even seen another piece of art from another artist so we can come up with a totally original style. Unfortunately, they all seem to have been trained on stupid museums and art books. Can you help me find my truly original artist? I pay a nice hiring bounty.
I remember a short story, maybe by Orson Scott Card, that imagined a world where child prodigy artists were isolated and not allowed to see art or listen to music, to ensure their creations were untainted.
The issues of copyright infringement with AI are real though. Much of today’s AI is directly copying subregions of training data, and can sometimes be prompted to reproduce images from the training data verbatim. Humans don’t do that unintentionally, even though sometimes they do mean to steal from others. Suggesting that art school is the same thing as a training dataset is a bit hyperbolic.
What you are talking about is Overfitting. It only happens with images that appear way too many times in too many forms in the training set. Usually with the most iconic images of all time, such as the Mona Lisa. And, naturally, hyper-iconic images are the first thing that come to mind for humans when they test for the issue because those images are seared into our brains too.
And, much like with our brains, when it happens it doesn’t actually exactly reproduce parts of the source image. But, you have actively pay attention to notice what happened. It makes an image that is overly similar conceptually. To our brains that feels the same. So, that’s enough to convince someone at a glance that it is the same.
But, if you look at an overfit result of “The Beatles Abbey Road album cover”, you’ll see things like: Band members are crossing the road, but they are all variations of Ringo. Vehicles from that era are in the background, but they are in a different arrangement and none of them are directly from the source. The Band members are wearing suits, but they are the wrong style and color. There are the wrong number of stripes on the road. It’s not the same as a highly skilled human drawing an iconic image from memory. But, it sure is darn similar.
And, besides all that, everyone working in the tech considers the overfitting of iconic images to be a failure case that is being actively addressed. It won’t be long before it stops happening entirely.
In the meantime, I’d challenge anyone to try to make an overfit result that significantly reproduces a specific work of every promoter’s favorite, Greg Rutkowski, using Dall-e, Midjourney or the Stable Diffusion models released directly by Stability AI. Greg’s pixels aren’t in the model file to be copied. Only a conceptual impression of his style.
Not really, though that is another legitimate issue.
I was talking about 1) the fundamental training and inference process, which remembers pixels, not concepts or techniques. Today’s AI learns to create imagery in a fundamentally different way than people do. And 2) image generation AI based on text prompts like Stable Diffusion can easily be asked to reproduce training data by having a prompt that is narrow and specific enough. This is not over fitting, it’s a function of the fact that some inputs are quite unique, and you can use the prompt to focus on that uniqueness.
The training process looks at pixels. Gets an impression of the relationships between words and curves in images. But, to say it “remembers pixels” is pretty loaded language that implies copying pixels into the model file.
I’d like to see examples of using SD to copy some specific piece of art that hasn’t been plastered millions of times across the internet. Sure, you can get a decent Mona Lisa knock off. Maybe even a strong impression of the Bloodbourne game cover art marketing material. But, reproducing a specific painting from Rutkowski would be quite a surprise to me.
Yes the training process looks at pixels, because that’s all it has. That’s the point. Humans don’t look at pixels, they learn ideas. It’s not in the least bit surprising that AI models shown a bunch of examples sometimes replicate their example inputs, examples are all they have, and they are built specifically to reproduce images similar to what they see, I’m not sure why you consider that idea “loaded”.
Again, naming Rutkowsi invokes an impression of his style. But, copies none of his paintings.
Read the paper. What I found is that a random sampling of the database naturally found a small subset of images that are highly duplicated in the database. Researchers we able to derive methods to produce results that give strong impressions of images such as: a map of the United States, Van Gogh's Starry Night, and the cover of Bloodborne :P with some models and not at all with others. The researchers caution against extrapolating from their results.
> We speculate that replication behavior in Stable Diffusion arises from a complex interaction of factors, which include that it is text (rather than class) conditioned, it has a highly skewed distribution of image repetitions in the training set, and the number of gradient updates during training is large enough to overfit on a subset of the data.
>> I'm working on a game, but I want to hire an artist who has never even seen another piece of art from another artist so we can come up with a totally original style.
Is this sarcasm? The history of art is full of artists who created their own, signature, unique and original styles. Take, I don't know, Vincent Van Gogh, for an example, who had a very distinctive style, so distinctive that he didn't even start a school of art probably because it would have been too blatant to copy him. There was nobody before him who painted like him. Who did he "copy" then?
Hell, when humans first made art, back in the time we lived in caves, their art styles, which are still absolutely unique, had nothing to copy from, simply because there weren't any artists before them (by definition: "when humans first made art").
So, yes, humans learn how to create art from each other, but they also created the whole idea of art entirely on their own, and they can take what they have learned form others and turn it into something completely new, never before seen.
Now, you show me an original art style created by an "AI". Show me AI art that isn't only borrowing and copying, but goes beyond that, like human artists can.
“A.I. art” is neither A.I. nor art. After you make a neural network the first thing that occurs to you is that it’s useless without tons of data. In this instance our data is art made my people. Using assets without permission or a licensing agreement is theft. To make things worse corporations are charging for this theft. Basically “A.I. art” is another way to say “theft as a service (TaaS).”
Copyright infringement is not theft because you are not depriving the rightful owner of something.
AI art is not copyright infringement because the results are transformative (really transformative), so you would have to explain how AI art directly became theft.
Also, neural networks are not "useless", there is virtually an infinite number of permutations that can be achieved with generative models.
The algorithm has no agency so it's not making art, art is made by humans. It's data theft. The art is data. You could also think of it in terms of counterfeiting too.
Art is made by a human using the tool to create the image, such as a photographer using a machine called a "camera", a digital artist using a computer, or a traditional artist using a paintbrush, also you seem to have completely ignored the part where I state how absurd it is to call it "theft."
You're making a false comparison. People who prompt an "A.I. art" algorithm aren't doing anything, the algorithm is and what the algorithm is doing is scraping data, i.e., art (made by humans). A camera or brush, whether analogue or digital, is still being manipulated by the human. If a guy puts a comic book in a xerox machine it doesn't make him Jack Kirby.
The comparison is valid, and to think otherwise is delusional, and you will realize sooner or later that generative models are manipulated by a human being like you manipulate a camera or a paintbrush. What you actually want to say, though not explicitly, is that with AI art you can get good results with little effort compared to, say, using only CSP or Krita, and that somehow this would make the result less "art" (or even not art at all), but it has been a long time since "hard work" was a requirement for making art.
Also no, a xerox machine does not create transformative works ahah
>After you make a neural network the first thing that occurs to you is that it’s useless without tons of data.
What about self-learning chess engines? All they take as input are the rules of chess. And the output (the games they play) can sometimes be described as peaces of art. My point is that it should be possible for AI to create art without tons of (input) data. Even if it is not what we experience at the moment.
Chess is a very large but finite system. It's also a game largely based on memorization. Both things are handled extremely by computers. I consider terms like "self-learning" to be disingenuous or at best an exaggeration. At the moment it is not possible for a machine to make art because it has no consciousness. By definition art can only be made by a human mostly because we have agency.
I am extremely skeptical, because this looks so good. To my eyes the images produced look orders of magnitude better than what current software is capable of producing. Let alone from multiple perspectives with absolutely perfect coherence. What tool was used?
Stuff like Dall-e is still far from producing anything like that. Those are absolutely perfect idealized/stylized human proportions with minimal weirdness. The only thing that even hints at neural network generation (at a glance at least) are the eyes in the second model sheet, but even that could be reasonably argued to be style.
I could fully believe this is from a specialized art tool akin to some sort of a 2D version of Metahumans [1] but I'd be floored if this was actually generated from a generic neural network style tool.
You can definitely do that right now in midjourney 4, go on their discord and search for "character sheet" or "character design" and you'll find high quality examples with coherent front/side/back view
Once you know what tokens trigger the right answers it's relatively easy to get where you want, as usual with these tool you should be flexible when it comes to details, but the overall design can be defined
I'm mostly just shocked that the model can produce what appear to be entirely consistent models of the same character from different views. I can be convinced, but I was also equally skeptical.
Because that implies a kind of cohesive conceptual understanding of a single object, that I didn't think the current architecture was able to model that. So many image outputs of humans are perfectly fine in local areas, but then they have three arms or a hand where a foot should be or something.
I mean, the chosen character isn't perfectly consistent -- e.g. the side view shows a kind of metal badge on the vest that doesn't exist in the front view, while the back view shows a kind of mid-thigh holster (?) that doesn't appear on the front view, plus the vest on the back view is a few inches shorter. Similarly the collar is popped on the front view, but not the other two.
But nevertheless, it's basically about 99% right. And I simply don't understand how that's possible, unless there author did about ten thousand tries and is showing the only ones that happened to be nearly entirely consistent, somehow just mostly by chance. (Maybe because they're particularly close to the real-life characters used for training?)
>> Because that implies a kind of cohesive conceptual understanding of a single object, that I didn't think the current architecture was able to model that.
It works because it's all in one image, you still can't get the same consistency across different images.
Someone did the same thing with sprite sheets the other day:
Which again works because you're asking for a single image that is similar to other single images (i.e. other sprite sheets). I thought that was very clever.
So I guess the next big thing will be to train on datasets of entire graphic novels where all the pages of each novel are stitched together into "one image". Then we will finally achieve the graphic singularity and comic book artists will have been replaced, too :P
Honestly, I expect the number of art roles at gaming companies to drop precipitously over the next couple of years.
Right now you have a creative director who defines the style of art and a bunch of early-to-mid-career artists/designers who then create all the assets you need (and there are a lot of assets, so there's plenty of work to go around). Soon that'll be a creative director defining the style, AI producing most of the assets, and a few designers cleaning up what the AI produces. In a few years, those few designers probably won't be needed.
I think a lot of artists who take commercial art/design type jobs to pay the bills are going to be out of work soon, and that's a serious problem that we should be looking to get ahead of as a society.
On the plus side, this will be a huge boon for indie game devs - they'll be able to create AAA-level assets for their games at extremely low cost. For better or worse (for better and worse, really), the times, they are a-changin'.
Right now the lines are kind of blurred between people who make great art, and people who have the technical skills to create nice graphical imagery.
Lets say that someone gets a character design dropped on their desk, and are told to create some graphics of that character running through a field, climbing a tree, jumping through a window, all using the identical style as the character design sheet. I don't really think there's a lot of real artistry going on there, despite the fact that the person with the skills to perform that work today almost certainly developed those skills while creating their own personal art portfolio.
I have not worked in the gaming industry, but what I hear is that a lot of gaming studios today hire up legions of technically skilled people, and grind them to death in sweatshop-like conditions, while not actually utilizing any of their creative talent.
My hope is that this new tech will empower real artists to massively multiply their productivity, so they can focus on creating new beautiful styles, stories, and personalities for their characters, rather than spending all day painting.
It kind of feels like a Gutenberg Press scenario. Before the Printing Press, you had to have thousands of artists transcribing books, copying the images in great detail, and using their impeccable handwriting to ensure that each page was as legible as their source material. I'm sure that back then it felt like thousands of artists were losing their jobs to these machines, but it ended up creating an explosion of literacy and enabled subsequent generations to publish their work at a scale that was never before possible.
As a non-artist, I'm hesitant to say what's real artistry and what's not, but I definitely agree that there's a more creative component to work of a creative director defining the art style vs. an entry-level artist building assets in that style.
Still, I think one of the things that will be lost is the ability of those entry-level artists to learn and develop so they can get to the point of being qualified for the really creative art jobs. My feeling is that these AI tools will really entrench the existing art-director-level folks in AAA gaming in their roles, and the only path to break into this kind of game art design will be by creating your own games entirely.
As for the sweatshop conditions, I totally agree - the gaming industry is notorious for being awful to its employees, and it's good that that will likely end. On the other hand, is it a plus to end that by just eliminating the jobs entirely? I dunno.
Having working on a bunch of AAA games, having the same number of artists making a lot more assets is a way more likely outcome than having less artists make the same stuff as today - especially if you take in account the trends of making everything have huge worlds with lots of detail.
This is what I was thinking even though I’m totally outside the gaming industry. It seems like the appetite for good quality artwork in video games is absolutely insatiable.
If you can hack out unique stuff in hours, not days, suddenly every building in every city of GTA can have bespoke furniture and stuff that’s absolutely unimaginable to us right now as assigning a dev to spend three days modeling a couch used in one place is absurd.
This is how we get one step closer to actual realistic or extremely detailed environments.
I was playing God of War and the attention to detail in a room filled with treasure, how it reacts when you hit it with your weapon and coins fly everywhere, it was amazing.
Imagine what these same devs could do where their workflow takes 1/10th or 1/100th the time.
I think this is probably true in the short term, but in the long term I think the ability of AI to create art will outpace the need for more new assets. Right now there's definitely cleanup that needs to be done on AI-generated stuff, but the need for that will diminish quickly. I'd be shocked if by the end of the decade we still had artists cleaning up AI work.
Games may need 1000x the assets they do now, but if AI is 10000x faster at creating them than humans are, then you're still going to see a big reduction in the number of humans needed. Eventually we'll get to the point where the game's AI is procedurally generating assets during gameplay (and eventually you'll get AI just generating the games).
>I think a lot of artists who take commercial art/design type jobs to pay the bills are going to be out of work soon, and that's a serious problem that we should be looking to get ahead of as a society.
They can learn this new tools and be 100x more productive and make more money. The AI tool will not replace the artistic taste and creativity , some boring low quality work will be automated but artists can be more productive with this new tools and say finish the artwork for a novel or game much faster, so making more money.
Yeah but if you make artists 100x more productive the natural consequence is that there will be far fewer employed artists.
The senior ones will probably be ok (as you say, they might even get a payrise, given how much impact a single individual will be able to have) but people just joining the industry now are likely screwed.
Say I would like to make a Visual novel but it will take an artist 100 hours to illustrate it, if he can do it 10x faster then I can have him illustrate 10 of my novels with the same money. Nobody loses and my VN readers can enjoy 10x more content.
Btw this AI tools work a lot better if you sketch something first, so I can see a very productive artist doing a rough sketch then using AI then manually touching stuff after.
Also an artist could train the AI with his style and with his characters and keep the model private and use it over and over again.
I think it could mean games have the same art budget but make 100x the art content to compete with studios that use the innovation to slash their headcount..
Automation and better technology massively reduced the fraction of the population that works in farming, whilst simultaneously we ended up with a food surplus. Machine translation definitely had an impact on the human translation industry. Seems likely that this is what will happen for art.
The majority of that work is today already outsourced to art “sweatshops” in cheap cost of living countries. You have one art director telling them to create 100 of this armor and 30 of this creature. The biggest impact will be at the bottom of the ladder
>The majority of that work is today already outsourced to art “sweatshops” in cheap cost of living countries. You have one art director telling them to create 100 of this armor and 30 of this creature. The biggest impact will be at the bottom of the ladder
Do you think that in future the art director will do the work himself using AI? Or he will hire the same people but instead of 100 armors he will ask for 10k armors, more armors more chances to sell them to players.
Seems like unless something changes you’ll still need some people with “taste” going through the hundreds of iterations looking for the right fit. Probably not the director. Still I think the team size will be cut down fairly drastically
I don't think drastically.
Have yu tried the AI tools?
It is not like you can just describe what is in your mind and it will appear, from what I read in people workflow description it is a more involved work, including training a model (I seen someone trained a model for RPG fantasy characters for example), then creating some starting sketch, generating many images, selecting good candidates, then use in-painting to fix out of place stuff, then use photoshop/krita to fix stuff .
I think it is like with programming, we have higher level languages and libraries and the number of developer increased because we can do a lot more stuff then just starting each time from assembly. So in this case the same artists will just produce more, we will not have to wait 6 months for a visual novel to have an update, we will not need to wait years for some indie game to be done , but yeah it is possible that some patt of the money that goes to art will end up for a short period of time in the pockets of soem art director , but competition would fix that.
I'll take you at 1:1 odds that the salary of even the highest paid 10% of art directors in the United States, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, does not see even a 10 times increase in their salary over 5 years (that is to say, in 2027.m01.08, the BLS reports below 10*$194,130). Loser gives the winner one Snickers bar.
There was an article recently about how AAA games are requiring so much content lately that any development cycles starting today would need to target the PlayStation 6. I think there’s still some room for improvements in productivity.
But is that assuming that content production will continue at its same pace? Unless it was an AI-focused article, it probably wasn't accounting for the changes we're going to see.
There’s no imperatives for selling plastic discs at $79. What that tells is just how much opportunities there are for busywork sharing in console games.
Environment art is another thing that’s already being automated with simpler tools (speedtree etc). No one has time to fill in the trees and rocks for an open world by hand. Games are only getting more demanding as people expect more and more detailed worlds
I personally don't think so, it made incredible progress very fast but it stagnates now. The more precise design you want the less likely you'll be able to generate it. It's usually very nice looking at first but once you look at the details it completely breaks apart, it's a bit like in a dream.
The author seems to be a 3D artist, and claims to have spent 18 hours for this work, that he estimates as 5 days worth, that he thinks not copyrightable. To me it seems to be just raising the bar/granting more productivity for artists with prior skills and abilities to read the room.
My understanding re: copyright was that the raw output of the AI cannot be copyrighted. But his rigging and mesh maps and otherwise creatively-directed work to take that raw material and make it look good? Surely he has copyright on those?
It's just that in theory, anybody else can take the raw output of the AI and do all that extra work on it themselves with no copyright violation.
>So, uh, is every artist going to be out of the job in the next 5 years?
No, probably artists also ask if ChatGPT will replace developers and they can just ask the AI write me the code for a cool RPG game, make it in CoolLang and use NN for NPC AI, also make it super efficient and optimized and similar keywords.
This tools will be used by artists in their workflow, they will be more productive so more high quality art will be created .
Short-sighted employers will probably cut staff. The other more likely scenario is that teams will be asked to produce more work faster by letting AI handle the boilerplate. Creative directors and producers will run a lot more experiments with fresh ideas and then use the expert skills of their teams to produce a cohesive, polished product.
The end result may be that we get a ton of mediocre, high-fructose-corn-syrup art at first. The hype for that will last about three months. We’ll also see an increase in typical fare from big studios as they figure out how to monetize long-tail content. And then occasionally there will be a true work of art or a new form of art we haven’t seen yet.
Based on the prompt information we have, "–v 4 –ar 3:2" are options that are provided to Midjourney. -v 4 indicates version 4 of their model (which produces very aesthetically pleasing output) and -ar 3:2 specifies an aspect ratio of 3 by 2.
We’ve always been at that point because art is a spectrum with no defined boundaries.
There is no single metric for quality, and there’s been tons of artists who put out generic work in the past that have been mistaken for plagiarism in a similar vein.
Art is not a Boolean, therefore neither are comparisons
I believe that an AI can generate this sort of thing, it's just odd that a brief prompt to a general-purpose art AI can consistently generate an extremely specific model sheet like this.
I wouldn't say consistently, for a given prompt a lot of seeds will be total garbage. It's not uncommon even when you're very good at prompting and tuning the model to need to generate 20+ images with the same prompt to find something that's close to what you want.
This is mid journey which is trained specifically for game like things unlike a general model like dalle. I’ve seen people make incredible concept art with it
I don't think generic AIs are the right approach anyway, I think we're better off with precise procedural models with a lot of knobs and some knowledge of rules (eg. metahumans).
Maybe you can put an AI in front of it to generate what you want using the procedural models, but pixel output is just not good enough for games.
> but pixel output is just not good enough for games.
I've been using https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN to increase AI renders resolution, it works very very well on some styles, you can easily x4 or x8 the resolution if you know what you're doing and have some photoshop knowledge for the cleanup
Midjourney will do that easily if you get good at doing the prompts. Getting good takes reading the manual and spending a few hours working on 2-3 designs.
Midjourney produces this quality now with very little
tinkering. If you use --v 4 --q 2 to get version 4 at highest quality it takes surprisingly little prompt work to get amazing images.
I have played with SD enough and have been following its subreddit. It's definitely doable with Stable Diffusion too. Does need some prompt engineering and other things but doable.
[*] kinda like early 'web designers' that needed to learn javascript