I think these issues will get bigger over time, because: (1) Dialog is the weakest area of video games in terms of interactivity. Video game dialog and scenes with characters can be up to the...
I think these issues will get bigger over time, because:
(1) Dialog is the weakest area of video games in terms of interactivity. Video game dialog and scenes with characters can be up to the standards of a Hollywood film, but it is produced like a Hollywood film. Games like Elden Ring can have a high level of interactivity in terms of absolutely everything except dialog where they are at best like a "choose-your-own-adventure" book.
Now, the technological problem is that machines don't understand language well, not only does chatbot technology promise an advance but it will inspire people to attempt develop games with more interactive dialog even before the technology is really there.
In the short-term more interactivity means more hours of voice and motion capture performance but in the long-term it means a performance that's designed to be cut and pasted at a fine grain or be used to train a model that can be synthesized to create performances.
(2) People working at the low end, such as "visual novels" already have a choice between using plain text or voicing a scene. When you factor in paying a voice actor and the effort it takes to direct them you'd better believe we all have an eye on TTS technology, but TTS is nowhere near being good enough. I'm going to particularly call out the need for a TTS to receive direction because whether you have your friend do voice acting or hire a star direction makes all the difference and I think it will be more so for next-generation TTS.
Sure, the costs of developing AAA games are brutal and those developers will be out for any technology that can get costs down but there are a lot of people who would never think of hiring a union voice actor waiting for a breakthrough in TTS.
(3) There are video-game adjacent technologies such as VR. In VR itself, I don't know if people are going to accept the immersion breaking of reading text in dialogs, particularly if VR does expand its market. I think there is also the possibility that web experiences could be voiced, which a lot of people would dismiss as annoying, but given how much interest there is in dialog heavy video, podcasts and such, there might be a market. If VR is going to become a real "metaverse" I'm certain that the kind of business that spends profitably on SEO and a web presence is going to have to be able to be able to afford to make a VR experience and that's going to be a revolution in cost cutting for video game like content.
They’re on borrowed time. LLMs and voice synthesis will soon outdo what voice actors can in a commercial game - probably within 3 years we will see a AAA game with completely dynamic voiced...
They’re on borrowed time. LLMs and voice synthesis will soon outdo what voice actors can in a commercial game - probably within 3 years we will see a AAA game with completely dynamic voiced dialog.
Edit: Let me pose an idea - could AI actually shrink the economy? Could it be so much cheaper and make so many people unemployable that any country introducing it is making the wrong decision for themselves?
Yeah but it always feels kinda sterile. Like I'll be the first to admit that I can't always tell. But even then once I learn I just don't wanna interact with it anymore. It feels lifeless no...
Yeah but it always feels kinda sterile. Like I'll be the first to admit that I can't always tell. But even then once I learn I just don't wanna interact with it anymore. It feels lifeless no matter what. It lacks any subtly or nuance. Doesn't have spontaneity. Those things will be programmed in but there's still that odd feeling that comes with it.
Has anyone tried to make an LLM trained deeply on text in a specific style? As is, the popular ones just kind of average out everything and in the case of OpenAI are fine tuned on textbooks. Which...
Has anyone tried to make an LLM trained deeply on text in a specific style? As is, the popular ones just kind of average out everything and in the case of OpenAI are fine tuned on textbooks. Which is not the most rich prose to say the least.
There are lots and lots of LLM tools that help you prompt the AI into speaking in a certain tone. But I’d love to try something deeper. A big enough studio could afford to build such a model. And gamers have the hardware to run the end result. I would expect a small 7 billion parameter model that solely exists to be a Skyrim NPC would blow my mind.
I don’t know of any in-depth information, but I came across this on Tildes: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/09/introducing-ai-powered-assistants-characters-and-creative-tools/.
As part of an animated short I'm making, I found a service that will alter my voice with AI, as opposed to synthesizing it using TTS. It was surprisingly hard to find a service that would do this...
It feels lifeless no matter what. It lacks any subtly or nuance. Doesn't have spontaneity. Those things will be programmed in but there's
As part of an animated short I'm making, I found a service that will alter my voice with AI, as opposed to synthesizing it using TTS. It was surprisingly hard to find a service that would do this to a recorded audio clip, there are a metric ton of tools designed to do it in realtime for Vtubers.
It's fairly good, the result uses very close to my same inflection and tone while altering the pitch and timbre (and accent, if desired) to sound like someone I cannot possibly sound like. Most importantly the timing of phenoms remains exactly the same, allowing me to use the same recording to generate both facial animation as well as AI voice actors.
It's definitely not perfect. Some of the emotional peaks get smoothed out a bit, and some of the AI characters definitely sound better than others, but it was good enough that friends I showed it to asked if I hired voice actors.
I don't want a future where 90+% of dialog is completely ai generated. But historically speaking, technological advances tend to introduce more jobs than they take away. In this theoreitical...
could AI actually shrink the economy? Could it be so much cheaper and make so many people unemployable that any country introducing it is making the wrong decision for themselves?
I don't want a future where 90+% of dialog is completely ai generated. But historically speaking, technological advances tend to introduce more jobs than they take away. In this theoreitical future, there may be less voice actors, but there will be more sound designers and editors needed to process and properly fine tune these audios to make sure they fit.
I could see a symbiotic relationship happen. Voice actors are paid to create a voice and train a model. The model learns from their voice, and the actor can come in and act out specific dialog...
I could see a symbiotic relationship happen. Voice actors are paid to create a voice and train a model. The model learns from their voice, and the actor can come in and act out specific dialog that just isn't hitting the mark with the trained model. I feel it would give us the best of both worlds, impactful dialog that the voice actor and director can work together to perfect for those hard hitting scripted scenes, and less important filler dialog that the AI can get good enough to make the game more interactive.
Reading these neverending 'AI is taking jobs and workers are pushing back' posts always makes me uneasy; I simply don't see any resistance working in the long term. No amount of legislature and...
Reading these neverending 'AI is taking jobs and workers are pushing back' posts always makes me uneasy; I simply don't see any resistance working in the long term. No amount of legislature and ethics are going to dampen the blow that AI will inevitably do to all of these fields, because it's simply easier and cheaper, and for as long as we're a society that values profit over human experiences the cheaper option for the same product will always win.
Maybe, hopefully, we will see more people going into lines of work they enjoy that can't benefit from automation easily. OR, it could get worse... When electricity made it to the common household...
Maybe, hopefully, we will see more people going into lines of work they enjoy that can't benefit from automation easily. OR, it could get worse...
When electricity made it to the common household and dishwashers, vaccuums, washing machines, dryers, etc became available, it was marketed as something that will "allow the housewife to have more free time" but instead, it only increased the standards of what a "clean" house was. As in, she was expected to put in the same amount of work, but in addition to the machinery's work. So maybe our jobs' effort expectation will stay the same but it will be expected to be of higher quality, or on an even faster turn around time. I shudder saying that, because it reminds me of how I could never find a job description while job hunting that didn't have the "you'll get to work in a fast paced environment and be crippled under the crushing weight of looming deadlines! Apply now, because these spots are filling fast for this once in a lifetime opportunity!" All for a measly pay of like, $15 an hour. It's not even living wage anymore...
While I agree that this is the correct and hopeful line of thinking, AI is not being bent toward those otherwise defunct jobs. The OP is talking about AI replacing voice actors, a job many people...
While I agree that this is the correct and hopeful line of thinking, AI is not being bent toward those otherwise defunct jobs. The OP is talking about AI replacing voice actors, a job many people aspire to and one that takes a high degree of skill and training to do well. And obviously VAs aren't alone in being threatened by this new technology.
If you look at AIs proposed use cases in the last year, you'll see it's primarily in the arts. Software like Midjourney threatens career artists and illustrators, even photographers; ChatGPT can write novels, poetry, and academic papers (albeit not well); AI can modulate and mimic voices. Society and legislators are allowing entertainment companies to use this tech to cut the most expensive aspects of their budget, the creative jobs that people actually do want to do, and if we assume a capitalist viewpoint, of course they would. It makes the most financial sense!
I would love to see the supermarket register replaced with an AI, or toll booth operators, or any number of jobs like that, but frankly the labour is likely just too cheap to replace with an expensive machine. In the mean time, why should we let AI make art and write poetry while we're stuck in the monotonous jobs? At the risk of hyperbolising: shall we send AI to the beach next weekend, while we work to pay for its vacation? Perhaps AI would like to sip a latte in a nice cafe while it works? It's silly, but isn't that kind of what's happening now?
It really is just a result of art being reduced to a commercial product. We remove any sort of individual artistic expression and just consume products. It is really sad and I am dumbfounded at...
It really is just a result of art being reduced to a commercial product. We remove any sort of individual artistic expression and just consume products. It is really sad and I am dumbfounded at how many people are seemingly excited at being able to generate a movie, song or novel just by a prompt of their personal taste. For me art is ultimately about communication between human beings. If we remove the human element, what is even the point anymore?
This is one of the reasons I find all the talk about art and AI to be a bit misleading, and perhaps that’s because we don’t actually have a good catch-all word for creative work that’s made for...
This is one of the reasons I find all the talk about art and AI to be a bit misleading, and perhaps that’s because we don’t actually have a good catch-all word for creative work that’s made for other purposes.
Art, to me, is exactly as you say it: connection, communication, expression. The vast majority of art never makes any money, and people do it anyway because the act of creation and performance is a goal in and of itself.
Since we don’t live in a world with UBI or guaranteed food and shelter, the majority of people outside the few who manage to make money on works of true expression either take an unrelated job and create art as a hobby, or they take a related kind-of-creative job that commoditises their skill set and maybe works in a few bits of their expressiveness if they’re lucky (and maybe doesn’t - it’s a wide spectrum).
So we end up in this conversation about machines potentially displacing creative workers, but then conflate it with deep questions about the humanity of expression. Those people may be artists, but their paid creative work is far more often for entertainment or advertising or influence or any number of other things, and their works of true art are far more often unpaid.
Machines won’t come for art, but they may well come for commercialised creative output. Problem is we conflate the two things in language and in concept, and the people who create both are often one and the same. Like you said, the real issue is the commercialisation - that’s what’s led to this uneasy truce between creative skill and necessary income in the first place.
it is the ultimate goal of quite a few creators, and arguably a lot of comsumers. Either to make their own personal perfect game/song/movie tailored just for them, or to generate their own media...
It is really sad and I am dumbfounded at how many people are seemingly excited at being able to generate a movie, song or novel just by a prompt of their personal taste
it is the ultimate goal of quite a few creators, and arguably a lot of comsumers. Either to make their own personal perfect game/song/movie tailored just for them, or to generate their own media and share with others. Think about how easy it is to talk about your "cool idea" for this game idea, and then think about how many even attempt to make the bare bones prototype of said cool idea.
It sort of breaks down when it comes to multiplayer games, but otherwise it's not a surprising conclusion to run into. And I'm not exactly immune to it either. It's not like I want to spend years learning 3d modeling so I can model up, rig, skin, texture, and animate a high fidelity, game-ready character for my game. But that's the only of 3 possible routes if the alternatives are 1) find someone who can do this and pay them money I don't have or 2) pray I find exactly what I need online.
But I digress. I think other content would still be important for that very reason. I would never imagine the kinds of creations or ideas that creators like Kojima or Ito or Ghibli would come up with. Even if it's simply because they have an entirely different culture they grew up in and was exposed to. It'd be extremely hard to think outside my box without at least peering into others at the bare minimum.
The human element is knowing the "really cool" seed idea and curating the output. This isn't Borges' infinite Library of Babel [though someone could easily write a "show me something interesting"...
It is really sad and I am dumbfounded at how many people are seemingly excited at being able to generate a movie, song, or novel just by a prompt of their personal taste. For me, art is ultimately about communication between human beings. If we remove the human element, what is even the point anymore?
The human element is knowing the "really cool" seed idea and curating the output. This isn't Borges' infinite Library of Babel [though someone could easily write a "show me something interesting" or "I'm feeling lucky" slot machine that automates & randomizes the prompts if they wanted]. As the other commenters said, it allows one to try ideas without wasting years grinding out the prerequisite skills to achieve acceptable production quality. It's easier to evaluate whether the creative goal is any good when you're not distracted by beginner flaws in the sketch. Even when the computer goofs up the hands, it's still easier to edit the problem spots than to start from scratch.
AI art makers are directors and editors instead of the technicians of a traditional artist.
Automation always wins in the long run. Barely anyone cared when AI took over other people's jobs, now that creatives are feeling the sting its all too real to them. Instead of fighting against...
Automation always wins in the long run. Barely anyone cared when AI took over other people's jobs, now that creatives are feeling the sting its all too real to them. Instead of fighting against automation, we should be fighting for a economic system which won't collapse because of it.
I compose classical music for a living. At the moment the field of music is relatively safe from AI, but anyone thinking it's impervious from its effects are deluding themselves; one day, there...
I compose classical music for a living. At the moment the field of music is relatively safe from AI, but anyone thinking it's impervious from its effects are deluding themselves; one day, there will be AI that can write music as convincing as modern day composers. And I often ask myself, if I lived in that world, would I still write music? And if I did, would anyone actually listen to it? Is there even a point in having AI write music, or would we just be stripping another aspect of humanity away from ourselves for the purposes of scientific progress?
Ultimately it becomes a question of balancing the rational march of technology against the irrational human experience - Maybe in a post-scarcity world, there would be things that we could automate, but shouldn't, solely for the purposes of letting people have some semblance of a purpose. More broadly, in a post-scarcity society, would most people even work, or would machines just do everything? Punching above my philosophical paygrade here, but I think people would want to have jobs for the purpose of having meaning, even it it's objectively 'suboptimal' for society.
When it comes to Detroit, I think the right read is that it is really “The Big Three” and the UAW vs the world as opposed to them really being opposed to the other. If the auto industry wants...
When it comes to Detroit, I think the right read is that it is really “The Big Three” and the UAW vs the world as opposed to them really being opposed to the other. If the auto industry wants something they are listened to by the Republicans, if the union wants something they are listened to by the Democrats. If they pull together they win.
The auto industry has to navigate threats and opportunities such as the EV transition, foreign competition from new entrants like Vietnamese and China, and eventually a populist backlash to high car prices and the associated autobesity. Having postured that they’ve had a big fight and made concessions you will see their lobbyists do masterwork at getting politicians to forget promises they’ve made to everyone else and keep issues like autobesity off the agenda.
Would it be possible for governments to outright ban the use of AI in certain industries?. Can imagine game devs already push audio/voice dialogue onto the lowest priority - same ones probably be...
Would it be possible for governments to outright ban the use of AI in certain industries?.
Can imagine game devs already push audio/voice dialogue onto the lowest priority - same ones probably be really skint and use A.I instead of experienced voice actors in games - wouldnt put it past EA or Activision of Bethesda to go cheap cheap
They could probably ban it, but would it actually change anything? If governments in the 18th century had banned industrial textile mills for the purposes of keeping workers' jobs, would all our...
They could probably ban it, but would it actually change anything? If governments in the 18th century had banned industrial textile mills for the purposes of keeping workers' jobs, would all our clothes be handmade today, and 10 times the price?
Or would one government somewhere have refused to ban it, just to be able to completely corner the market and get some strategic advantages over everyone else? Because with how much of a key...
Or would one government somewhere have refused to ban it, just to be able to completely corner the market and get some strategic advantages over everyone else?
Because with how much of a key technology AI currently is, I can't see any major power banning it outright, not even banning certain applications of it. And I also can't see a ban on such a tech being practically enforcable. All it takes is abundant data, an abundant GPU, and some brains.
In theory yes. But they likely wouldn't. Economically, they'd simply be shooting themselves in the foot as countries that don't ban AI start to outpace their own entertainment industries. Western...
In theory yes. But they likely wouldn't. Economically, they'd simply be shooting themselves in the foot as countries that don't ban AI start to outpace their own entertainment industries. Western countries already struggle (relatively speaking) to many Eastern countries due to differences in labor costs, and now these countries can produce more content with less workers, workers who may or may not be paid even less than they are right now (which is usually severely underpaid to begin with).
There's also simply the logistics of tech. Tech moves fast and we still have some governments arguing about lootboxes, some 8 years later and as many large studios are moving towards different models anyway. in 8 years current AI they legislate on may not even be relevant.
They’ll use A.I. to make games like Genshin Impact so long as they answer something like “The Toronto Blue Jays beat the Boston Red Sox” when asked “What happened on June 4, 1989?” Experienced is...
They’ll use A.I. to make games like Genshin Impact so long as they answer something like “The Toronto Blue Jays beat the Boston Red Sox” when asked “What happened on June 4, 1989?”
Experienced is an important attribute because I remember complaining bitterly to Trish Ledoux in the 1990s about the awful voice actors Viz hired for anime dubs but by 2010 some of those people were doing great work on video games. By that point you had some companies like Idea Factory that would put together a star cast of Japanese voice actors and then get English voice actors good enough that you’d want to replay the game to enjoy both performances.
I am hoping to live to see interactive characters get so good that somebody can do a sketch comedy routine with a video game character reflected in a mirror and bring the house down.
I think these issues will get bigger over time, because:
(1) Dialog is the weakest area of video games in terms of interactivity. Video game dialog and scenes with characters can be up to the standards of a Hollywood film, but it is produced like a Hollywood film. Games like Elden Ring can have a high level of interactivity in terms of absolutely everything except dialog where they are at best like a "choose-your-own-adventure" book.
Now, the technological problem is that machines don't understand language well, not only does chatbot technology promise an advance but it will inspire people to attempt develop games with more interactive dialog even before the technology is really there.
In the short-term more interactivity means more hours of voice and motion capture performance but in the long-term it means a performance that's designed to be cut and pasted at a fine grain or be used to train a model that can be synthesized to create performances.
(2) People working at the low end, such as "visual novels" already have a choice between using plain text or voicing a scene. When you factor in paying a voice actor and the effort it takes to direct them you'd better believe we all have an eye on TTS technology, but TTS is nowhere near being good enough. I'm going to particularly call out the need for a TTS to receive direction because whether you have your friend do voice acting or hire a star direction makes all the difference and I think it will be more so for next-generation TTS.
Sure, the costs of developing AAA games are brutal and those developers will be out for any technology that can get costs down but there are a lot of people who would never think of hiring a union voice actor waiting for a breakthrough in TTS.
(3) There are video-game adjacent technologies such as VR. In VR itself, I don't know if people are going to accept the immersion breaking of reading text in dialogs, particularly if VR does expand its market. I think there is also the possibility that web experiences could be voiced, which a lot of people would dismiss as annoying, but given how much interest there is in dialog heavy video, podcasts and such, there might be a market. If VR is going to become a real "metaverse" I'm certain that the kind of business that spends profitably on SEO and a web presence is going to have to be able to be able to afford to make a VR experience and that's going to be a revolution in cost cutting for video game like content.
They’re on borrowed time. LLMs and voice synthesis will soon outdo what voice actors can in a commercial game - probably within 3 years we will see a AAA game with completely dynamic voiced dialog.
Edit: Let me pose an idea - could AI actually shrink the economy? Could it be so much cheaper and make so many people unemployable that any country introducing it is making the wrong decision for themselves?
Yeah but it always feels kinda sterile. Like I'll be the first to admit that I can't always tell. But even then once I learn I just don't wanna interact with it anymore. It feels lifeless no matter what. It lacks any subtly or nuance. Doesn't have spontaneity. Those things will be programmed in but there's still that odd feeling that comes with it.
Has anyone tried to make an LLM trained deeply on text in a specific style? As is, the popular ones just kind of average out everything and in the case of OpenAI are fine tuned on textbooks. Which is not the most rich prose to say the least.
There are lots and lots of LLM tools that help you prompt the AI into speaking in a certain tone. But I’d love to try something deeper. A big enough studio could afford to build such a model. And gamers have the hardware to run the end result. I would expect a small 7 billion parameter model that solely exists to be a Skyrim NPC would blow my mind.
Do Meta’s new “AI characters” count? I don’t know a lot about them, but they seem like they’d translate well into a game or something.
Do you have a link so I can learn more about this?
I don’t know of any in-depth information, but I came across this on Tildes: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/09/introducing-ai-powered-assistants-characters-and-creative-tools/.
As part of an animated short I'm making, I found a service that will alter my voice with AI, as opposed to synthesizing it using TTS. It was surprisingly hard to find a service that would do this to a recorded audio clip, there are a metric ton of tools designed to do it in realtime for Vtubers.
It's fairly good, the result uses very close to my same inflection and tone while altering the pitch and timbre (and accent, if desired) to sound like someone I cannot possibly sound like. Most importantly the timing of phenoms remains exactly the same, allowing me to use the same recording to generate both facial animation as well as AI voice actors.
It's definitely not perfect. Some of the emotional peaks get smoothed out a bit, and some of the AI characters definitely sound better than others, but it was good enough that friends I showed it to asked if I hired voice actors.
I don't want a future where 90+% of dialog is completely ai generated. But historically speaking, technological advances tend to introduce more jobs than they take away. In this theoreitical future, there may be less voice actors, but there will be more sound designers and editors needed to process and properly fine tune these audios to make sure they fit.
I wonder if this is different, because AI can chip away at most jobs.
I could see a symbiotic relationship happen. Voice actors are paid to create a voice and train a model. The model learns from their voice, and the actor can come in and act out specific dialog that just isn't hitting the mark with the trained model. I feel it would give us the best of both worlds, impactful dialog that the voice actor and director can work together to perfect for those hard hitting scripted scenes, and less important filler dialog that the AI can get good enough to make the game more interactive.
I'm assuming this is probably what will happen. Or hope I guy.
Reading these neverending 'AI is taking jobs and workers are pushing back' posts always makes me uneasy; I simply don't see any resistance working in the long term. No amount of legislature and ethics are going to dampen the blow that AI will inevitably do to all of these fields, because it's simply easier and cheaper, and for as long as we're a society that values profit over human experiences the cheaper option for the same product will always win.
Maybe, hopefully, we will see more people going into lines of work they enjoy that can't benefit from automation easily. OR, it could get worse...
When electricity made it to the common household and dishwashers, vaccuums, washing machines, dryers, etc became available, it was marketed as something that will "allow the housewife to have more free time" but instead, it only increased the standards of what a "clean" house was. As in, she was expected to put in the same amount of work, but in addition to the machinery's work. So maybe our jobs' effort expectation will stay the same but it will be expected to be of higher quality, or on an even faster turn around time. I shudder saying that, because it reminds me of how I could never find a job description while job hunting that didn't have the "you'll get to work in a fast paced environment and be crippled under the crushing weight of looming deadlines! Apply now, because these spots are filling fast for this once in a lifetime opportunity!" All for a measly pay of like, $15 an hour. It's not even living wage anymore...
But eh, pessimists gonna pess, I guess.
While I agree that this is the correct and hopeful line of thinking, AI is not being bent toward those otherwise defunct jobs. The OP is talking about AI replacing voice actors, a job many people aspire to and one that takes a high degree of skill and training to do well. And obviously VAs aren't alone in being threatened by this new technology.
If you look at AIs proposed use cases in the last year, you'll see it's primarily in the arts. Software like Midjourney threatens career artists and illustrators, even photographers; ChatGPT can write novels, poetry, and academic papers (albeit not well); AI can modulate and mimic voices. Society and legislators are allowing entertainment companies to use this tech to cut the most expensive aspects of their budget, the creative jobs that people actually do want to do, and if we assume a capitalist viewpoint, of course they would. It makes the most financial sense!
I would love to see the supermarket register replaced with an AI, or toll booth operators, or any number of jobs like that, but frankly the labour is likely just too cheap to replace with an expensive machine. In the mean time, why should we let AI make art and write poetry while we're stuck in the monotonous jobs? At the risk of hyperbolising: shall we send AI to the beach next weekend, while we work to pay for its vacation? Perhaps AI would like to sip a latte in a nice cafe while it works? It's silly, but isn't that kind of what's happening now?
It really is just a result of art being reduced to a commercial product. We remove any sort of individual artistic expression and just consume products. It is really sad and I am dumbfounded at how many people are seemingly excited at being able to generate a movie, song or novel just by a prompt of their personal taste. For me art is ultimately about communication between human beings. If we remove the human element, what is even the point anymore?
This is one of the reasons I find all the talk about art and AI to be a bit misleading, and perhaps that’s because we don’t actually have a good catch-all word for creative work that’s made for other purposes.
Art, to me, is exactly as you say it: connection, communication, expression. The vast majority of art never makes any money, and people do it anyway because the act of creation and performance is a goal in and of itself.
Since we don’t live in a world with UBI or guaranteed food and shelter, the majority of people outside the few who manage to make money on works of true expression either take an unrelated job and create art as a hobby, or they take a related kind-of-creative job that commoditises their skill set and maybe works in a few bits of their expressiveness if they’re lucky (and maybe doesn’t - it’s a wide spectrum).
So we end up in this conversation about machines potentially displacing creative workers, but then conflate it with deep questions about the humanity of expression. Those people may be artists, but their paid creative work is far more often for entertainment or advertising or influence or any number of other things, and their works of true art are far more often unpaid.
Machines won’t come for art, but they may well come for commercialised creative output. Problem is we conflate the two things in language and in concept, and the people who create both are often one and the same. Like you said, the real issue is the commercialisation - that’s what’s led to this uneasy truce between creative skill and necessary income in the first place.
it is the ultimate goal of quite a few creators, and arguably a lot of comsumers. Either to make their own personal perfect game/song/movie tailored just for them, or to generate their own media and share with others. Think about how easy it is to talk about your "cool idea" for this game idea, and then think about how many even attempt to make the bare bones prototype of said cool idea.
It sort of breaks down when it comes to multiplayer games, but otherwise it's not a surprising conclusion to run into. And I'm not exactly immune to it either. It's not like I want to spend years learning 3d modeling so I can model up, rig, skin, texture, and animate a high fidelity, game-ready character for my game. But that's the only of 3 possible routes if the alternatives are 1) find someone who can do this and pay them money I don't have or 2) pray I find exactly what I need online.
But I digress. I think other content would still be important for that very reason. I would never imagine the kinds of creations or ideas that creators like Kojima or Ito or Ghibli would come up with. Even if it's simply because they have an entirely different culture they grew up in and was exposed to. It'd be extremely hard to think outside my box without at least peering into others at the bare minimum.
The human element is knowing the "really cool" seed idea and curating the output. This isn't Borges' infinite Library of Babel [though someone could easily write a "show me something interesting" or "I'm feeling lucky" slot machine that automates & randomizes the prompts if they wanted]. As the other commenters said, it allows one to try ideas without wasting years grinding out the prerequisite skills to achieve acceptable production quality. It's easier to evaluate whether the creative goal is any good when you're not distracted by beginner flaws in the sketch. Even when the computer goofs up the hands, it's still easier to edit the problem spots than to start from scratch.
AI art makers are directors and editors instead of the technicians of a traditional artist.
Well the union strikes are slowing that down thankfully.
Automation always wins in the long run. Barely anyone cared when AI took over other people's jobs, now that creatives are feeling the sting its all too real to them. Instead of fighting against automation, we should be fighting for a economic system which won't collapse because of it.
I compose classical music for a living. At the moment the field of music is relatively safe from AI, but anyone thinking it's impervious from its effects are deluding themselves; one day, there will be AI that can write music as convincing as modern day composers. And I often ask myself, if I lived in that world, would I still write music? And if I did, would anyone actually listen to it? Is there even a point in having AI write music, or would we just be stripping another aspect of humanity away from ourselves for the purposes of scientific progress?
Ultimately it becomes a question of balancing the rational march of technology against the irrational human experience - Maybe in a post-scarcity world, there would be things that we could automate, but shouldn't, solely for the purposes of letting people have some semblance of a purpose. More broadly, in a post-scarcity society, would most people even work, or would machines just do everything? Punching above my philosophical paygrade here, but I think people would want to have jobs for the purpose of having meaning, even it it's objectively 'suboptimal' for society.
When it comes to Detroit, I think the right read is that it is really “The Big Three” and the UAW vs the world as opposed to them really being opposed to the other. If the auto industry wants something they are listened to by the Republicans, if the union wants something they are listened to by the Democrats. If they pull together they win.
The auto industry has to navigate threats and opportunities such as the EV transition, foreign competition from new entrants like Vietnamese and China, and eventually a populist backlash to high car prices and the associated autobesity. Having postured that they’ve had a big fight and made concessions you will see their lobbyists do masterwork at getting politicians to forget promises they’ve made to everyone else and keep issues like autobesity off the agenda.
Would it be possible for governments to outright ban the use of AI in certain industries?.
Can imagine game devs already push audio/voice dialogue onto the lowest priority - same ones probably be really skint and use A.I instead of experienced voice actors in games - wouldnt put it past EA or Activision of Bethesda to go cheap cheap
They could probably ban it, but would it actually change anything? If governments in the 18th century had banned industrial textile mills for the purposes of keeping workers' jobs, would all our clothes be handmade today, and 10 times the price?
Or would one government somewhere have refused to ban it, just to be able to completely corner the market and get some strategic advantages over everyone else?
Because with how much of a key technology AI currently is, I can't see any major power banning it outright, not even banning certain applications of it. And I also can't see a ban on such a tech being practically enforcable. All it takes is abundant data, an abundant GPU, and some brains.
In theory yes. But they likely wouldn't. Economically, they'd simply be shooting themselves in the foot as countries that don't ban AI start to outpace their own entertainment industries. Western countries already struggle (relatively speaking) to many Eastern countries due to differences in labor costs, and now these countries can produce more content with less workers, workers who may or may not be paid even less than they are right now (which is usually severely underpaid to begin with).
There's also simply the logistics of tech. Tech moves fast and we still have some governments arguing about lootboxes, some 8 years later and as many large studios are moving towards different models anyway. in 8 years current AI they legislate on may not even be relevant.
They’ll use A.I. to make games like Genshin Impact so long as they answer something like “The Toronto Blue Jays beat the Boston Red Sox” when asked “What happened on June 4, 1989?”
Experienced is an important attribute because I remember complaining bitterly to Trish Ledoux in the 1990s about the awful voice actors Viz hired for anime dubs but by 2010 some of those people were doing great work on video games. By that point you had some companies like Idea Factory that would put together a star cast of Japanese voice actors and then get English voice actors good enough that you’d want to replay the game to enjoy both performances.
I am hoping to live to see interactive characters get so good that somebody can do a sketch comedy routine with a video game character reflected in a mirror and bring the house down.