"AI Fans" Have No Imagination
They understand neither AI nor game development, yet lecture us on both.
Ever since crypto fell face down and started twitching, crypto chuds have been itching for a new scam. We blinked, and Lensa appeared. But AI art generation isn’t new - DALL-E and Midjourney have been around for ages now, but most consumers weren’t paying for them, and they were little more than a toy. So why were Lensa and the other profile pic generators such a hit?
Anyone who’s worked in marketing knows that people’s favorite thing is themselves.
Don’t argue with me on this one, I can see your social media manager nodding along from here. Ask them about their favorite gaming memories, their favorite champion, their best whatever and your replies will be full for a week. So when you get a computer to draw beautiful pictures of people’s favorite thing - themselves - they’re more than a happy to fork over some cash. So now Lensa is sitting on a big pile of your photos and we probably won’t regret that in the future.
But now dipshits are claiming AI is the future of game development, and it’s going to make indie games all AAA-quality. So why are they saying so many dumb things this time?
They want jobs prompting for concept art
Unfortunately, they don’t know what they’re asking for, and if they did, they’d know that the AI generators they love are actually not a good tool for it.
To explain why, we have to ask: what is the purpose of concept art?
I’m not going to explain it, because Delaney King already has, and she did it better than I would have, in this thread, which you should read.
Of particular interest is the bit where she talks about how concept art can be supposed to convey how something works - it informs the next steps of production. AI image generators don’t understand how things work. They don’t understand a person, or how the idea someone has in their head of a particular 3D object represented in 2D should move. They only know that certain things go together. They don’t know a person should have four fingers and a thumb, just that pictures of people have stuff like that at the end of it, which is why AI routinely draws people with too many fingers, or recommends books that don’t exist.
The thread above demonstrates a concept art mistake - not thinking through how a character will behave in game. Driving, sitting, or shooting, for example.
Concept art is about understanding, and AI fundamentally does not understand - it correlates.
So with their primary pitch off the table, they accuse developers of not liking AI, or not understanding it. But that’s not true at all, because…
Developers are already using AI for things, just not that
Animation, for example. Have you seen FIFA ‘22? Traditionally with fast-moving games, you need to have short animations so your characters can be responsive at any time. Blending can help but the transitions out of long detailed animations often look weird and forced when it’s purely programmatic. But EA’s “HyperMotion” technology is trained on massive datasets of pro soccer, and now the machine learning algorithm knows how people actually transition between those moves, and can dynamically adjust to create realistic motion, because it learned how humans move. If I wasn’t paying attention, much of this in-game footage would look real.
A new technique called Adversarial Skill Embedding let AIs teach themselves how to do attacks, which then become dynamic animations. This shit is absolutely phenomenal. It empowers developers and animators to be able to key in precisely what they want but not have to be locked into just their premade animations or blends.
This stuff promises to make games so much more immersive as NPCs, enemies, opponents move realistically. Goodbye capsule skaters, no more ‘feet sliding through the air’, we can have a future where characters move in response to things because they know how to do that.
There’s so much cool stuff AI can do. We’ve barely scratched the surface. But we’re using it to solve our actual problems, and they don’t understand that because they don’t know what our actual problems are, because they are hypothesizing based on an imaginary version of game development they made up.
Be wary of anyone who claims to have a solution to your problems when they don’t understand what your problems are.
Until next time.
for those we have lost
for those we can yet save