It feels like a lot of people on the pro-AI side of this debate think making art is some kind of magical activity that is totally inaccessible to them. The reality is the barrier to entry is a pen and paper and 10 minutes a day. There are a ton of resources online to learn about how to produce art without surrendering all your creativity to the AI slot machine, that don't involve stealing 400 million images.
I could glibly say the same about programming but it’s just not true. Anyone can learn to write a script to do some simple task, but they are not a programmer. The ability to go from a vision to a high quality output that accurately represents your vision requires years of work for most people, in any field.
And yet, so ready are we to discard those millennia of earned experience in favor of statistically generated sludge. Instead of glibly saying the same about programming, we glibly dismiss the role of the artist in making art. In another comment on this thread, someone talks about how Jon Blow could have saved $100,000 on art for Braid if he had used an ai system like this, perhaps not understanding that the art of Braid is a critical component of what makes it Braid.
If Karma is real, games made with uninteresting AI art will fail as we generate a sea of low-effort sludge.
Yeah, that won’t happen. As with anything; by far and large most people don’t care. As long as it’s fun, people will play. That statically generated sludge looks often better than what most humans come up with and sure, some (very few) humans are still better, but not for very long. That said, the speed and price of using AI are so much better and if you have 0 talent, like me, you can iterate for days for pennies. There is no going back.
I’ve always practiced art, after all my mother is an artist. I simply don’t have the mechanical aptitude. I enjoy creating my art, but my art is entirely mine and has no aesthetic value to anyone else. In making a game, you need an ability to create a consistent style that speaks to a topic. I can’t do that despite all practice. I think I’m not alone.
I tried to learn; took years of courses. I cannot. I have no feel for it. AI, for me, is a lifesaver for game art and web design. In a pepsi test, I found no one (of our clients, which is all who matter for this for me, and that is for web design, not art) who can see the difference between human or ai, so that’s that then.
