Players Cancel System Shock Remake Pre-Orders Over AI-Generated Art Controversy - by theabyss
Starker on 5/5/2023 at 15:06
I guess the people here who have been sharing AI-generated Thief artwork should now officially consider themselves cancelled.
Jason Moyer on 6/5/2023 at 00:00
I only play games that have a human hand-placing each pixel on the screen in real time as I'm playing.
rachel on 6/5/2023 at 21:41
The AI stuff is peanuts compared to how messy the whole thing has been. I backed the original KS and honestly I’m so over it I wasn’t even aware there was a new controversy. Again.
Such a waste. :tsktsk:
JumpinBlackjackFlash on 7/5/2023 at 11:39
How the taff does Night Dive keep screwing up? I remember they used to be at least decent once upon a time.
heywood on 8/5/2023 at 16:59
Is this Night Dive screwing up, or are people over-reacting?
There's nothing to see here if you ask me.
henke on 8/5/2023 at 19:32
Prime Matter posted the AI tweet, not Night Dive.
And as far as I can tell from the article, one person claimed to have cancelled their preorder.
I think using AI art, even just for a marketing tweet, sucks. But this is a storm in a teacup.
theabyss on 9/5/2023 at 15:33
I guess there is no going back when it comes to AI now, but the players or consumers do have a voice. If the community as a whole rejects content that is generated by AI (which is really just art taken from artists and used without their permission to train the AI) then they might back off.
heywood on 10/5/2023 at 16:17
The vast majority of human artists are derivative and rely just as much on existing artwork for ideas and inspiration.
I'm going to blow off work for a few minutes to expand on Jason's point.
About 100 years ago, people made animated shorts by hand drawing and photographing one frame at a time. Then somebody figured out that you could layer artwork on celluloid and didn't have to redraw it all every frame, you only had to redraw the cel that was changing. Then there were multi-level camera setups to automate the motion of objects over a background with realistic parallax for perception of scene depth. And using actors and rotoscoping to make human characters move realistically. The processes became efficient enough for Disney to make feature length animated films. As computers got more powerful and cheaper, animation started going digital in the 1980s and 1990s. Early digital animation required a great deal of effort and technology investment, but now a consumer can make animated shorts on an iPad to share with friends, using free art from any number of online repositories.
Snow White's production team had 32 animators, hundreds of artists, and a thousand assistants. The vast majority of them had no creative input and performed tedious, repetitive work. Consider what they were able to accomplish with 1930s technology, versus something like Cars (2006) which was made with about the same number of animators, fewer artists, and vastly fewer assistants. The latter is a vastly richer and more complex work thanks to computer automation tools, because they allowed the artists to spend more of their time exploring and expressing their ideas and less time on the mechanics of creating the work. When I was dicking around in the 80s with making simple sprite games on an Atari 400 and C64, I had to specify every pixel in code. It took me months to make my own Joust clone. Now a smart person like Henke can prototype a 3D third person game with physics in a weekend because of the tools.
AI art programs are just the next generation of content creation tools. They change the skill set needed to be a good artist, but they don't replace the artist, because they don't supply the vision and intent. They're going to enable development teams to make bigger, richer, more detailed, more realistic looking game worlds. They're also going to enable independent developers to make bigger and fancier looking games. If previous history is any indication, they're not going to put artists out of work. The advances in automating animation I referred to above only led to more artists and animators working in Hollywood.
theabyss on 12/5/2023 at 18:38
Thank you for taking the time for a longer reply but I am not sure I can agree with you on all points. I think there is a big difference between an artist who takes a couple of images to form a mood board for inspiration, and letting an AI train on artwork from actual artists. I think a lot of people wouldn't have a problem with it, if in the end didn't involve making money off of it where the artists weren't compensated for. Many stock companies, for instance, want you to link to your reference image if you want to upload your hand drawn illustration for instance for that very reason.
I think in the end it will not amount in more jobs for artists but significantly less. Before you had a modeler and texture artist for the model, and now it is generated by AI, then you had an animator - now you have AI, then you needed environmental artists - now mostly generated by AI, and the dialog and story...guess what...generated by AI, with maybe one guy overseeing the whole development and adjusting things to his vision as you called it. Of course, we are not going backwards, but just as they learned later on in the automobile industry, that is is better to leave certain jobs to humans and not robots, the entertainment industry should learn that the human touch just makes for better entertainment. (Btw. back in the day I painstakingly changed the sprites for a C64 game called Falcon Patrol in the machine code as well to insert my own aircrafts ..haha..good times)