alt Hacker NewsYeah, this is absolutely light years off being useful in production.
People just see fancy demos and start crapping on about the future, but just look at stable diffusion. It's been around for how long, and what serious professional game developers are using it as a core part of their workflow? Maybe some concept artists? But consistent style is such an important thing for any half decent game and these generative tools shit the bed on consistency in a way that's difficult to paper over.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about game design and experimenting with SD/Flux, and the only thing I think I could even get close to production that I couldn't before is maybe an MTG style card game where gameplay is far more important than graphics, and flashy nice looking static artwork is far more important than consistency. That's a fucking small niche, and I don't see a lot of paths to generalisation.
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> been around for how long, and what serious professional game developers are using it as a core part of their workflow?
Are you in the game industry? If you’re not how would you even know they have not? As someone with some connections in the industry and may soon get more involved personally, I know at least one mobile gaming studio with quite a bit of funding and momentum that has started using a good deal of AI-generated assets that would have been handcrafted in the past.
Yeah the big problem I have with my field is that there seems to be stronger incentives to be chasing benchmarks and making things look good than there is to actually solve the hard problems. There is a strong preference for "lazy evaluation" which is too dependent on assuming high levels of ethical presentation and due diligence. I find it so problematic because this focus actually makes it hard for people to publish who are tackling these problems. Because it makes the space even noisier (already incredibly noisy by the very nature of the subject) and then it becomes hard to talk about details if they're presumed solved.
I get that we gloss over details, but if there's anywhere you're allowed to be nuanced and be arguing over details should it not be in academia?
(fwiw, I'm also very supportive of having low bars to publication. If it's void of serious error and plagiarism, it is publishable imo. No one can predict what is important or impactful, so we shouldn't even play that game. Trying to decide if it is "novel" or "good enough for <Venue>" is just idiotic and breeds collusion rings and bad actors)
Stable Diffusion and AI in general seems to be big in marketing at least. A friend decided to abandon engineering and move to marketing and the entire social media part of his job is making a rough post, converting it to corporate marketing language via AI and then generating an eye catching piece of AI art to slap on top.
When video generation gets easy he'll probably move to making short eye catching gifs.
When 3D models and AI in general improve I can imagine him for example generating shitty little games to put in banners. I've been using an adblocker for so long I don't know what exists nowadays but I remember there being banners with "shoot 5 ducks" type games where the last duck kill opens the advertisers website. Sounds feasible for an AI to implement reliably. If you can generate different games like that based on the interests of the person seeing the ad you can probably milk some clicks.