[HN Gopher] Game prototype using AI assisted graphics
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Game prototype using AI assisted graphics
Author : smusamashah
Score : 312 points
Date : 2023-01-08 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.traffickinggame.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.traffickinggame.com)
| snvzz wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| sabertoothed wrote:
| Very cool. This is clearly where we're heading.
| votu wrote:
| [dead]
| epaulson wrote:
| Maybe it's because I don't know the workflow to do game character
| design, but it looks like the only AI used in the character
| creation here was the initial character design? Like, before in a
| normal process you'd get a human artist to draw you a character
| on that "model" sheet, giving you a front/side/back view of the
| character, and then take that 2d drawing and hand it off to a 3d
| modeler who would turn it into a 3D mesh and start taking the 2d
| drawings and turn them into textures, and then rigging them for
| animation controls.
|
| It seems like all of that 2d->3d conversion is still being done
| by a human in this workflow, and so the "only" part that's being
| done is the 2d drawings. Now, my drawing skills would put me in
| the lower half of an average 4th grade class, so it's more than I
| could do, but it still seems like we're quite a ways from going
| from a couple of prompts to get a 2d design sheet, then a mesh
| and textures that match that 2d design, and then a rigged mesh,
| and then motion data to attach to that rigged mesh to give some
| basic animations.
|
| So, while this is super-cool, it still feels like we're a long
| way from saying "I want a plumber with a thick mustache wearing
| blue overalls, a red shirt, and red cap. And now I want him to be
| able to jump and squat coming down." and start putting that into
| my game asset library.
| dagmx wrote:
| There are ways to go from this art directly to 3D models and
| I'm sure tons of people will post links to them.
|
| But I want to point out quality and artistic knowledge.
|
| The poster is clearly a talented artist. They knew how to
| direct the images to what they wanted and likely rejected many
| iterations before they got to this point.
|
| They knew how to then take that image and translate it to 3D ,
| and make it come together. They knew how to make a topology
| flow that makes sense for their prototype etc...
|
| I think a lot of people see "good output" and forget about the
| process and knowledge+experience required to make something
| good.
|
| I take photography as an example. Every one with the means
| likely has a camera today. It still takes a brilliant eye to
| take an amazing photo.
|
| You could take two brilliant photographers and someone without
| expertise to a gorgeous location. The two experienced
| photographers will have a higher likelihood to come out with
| amazing but very different images. The layperson could maybe
| take a good photo but the chances are much lower because they
| likely don't have the experience to think about composition or
| story telling.
|
| I liken these advancements in AI to that. Yeah, some people
| will put out pretty images, but there's so much more that goes
| into making something great out of it that people underestimate
| hacker_9 wrote:
| There is a lot of content in games. The AAA games can have
| single artists work on _one_ character for the whole game. The
| author even says it saved him 5 days, and look how small the
| scene is he 's talking about! AI has the ability to scale up
| the production quality of games, whilst taking half the time or
| less.
|
| This kind of tech enables an indie to build a prototype with AI
| generated content, where the art direction is clear, then get
| funded in order to hire artists for the touch up. Kickstarters
| are often very visual, so this kind of stuff is required up
| front.
| makz wrote:
| Why whenever there's an article like this they never say the name
| of the AI took they used?
| fritzo wrote:
| Why whenever there's generated art like this they never credit
| artists who generated the training data?
| dandellion wrote:
| They never credit the developers that wrote the libraries
| either, nor the researchers that came up with the algorithm,
| or von Neumann...
| kleer001 wrote:
| Because that would be a series of tortuously long
| encyclopedias that nobody would read.
| garblegarble wrote:
| Is this really _that_ fundamentally different from a human
| artist? Indeed, the person generating the art has what they
| want in their head, just as any other artist does, they 're
| building prompts seeking to realise that vision on the screen
| (with tooling, just like a traditional artist would). Yes
| this is a new tool that requires far less technical
| proficiency with traditional techniques - people have
| constantly criticised new tooling (e.g. the criticisms
| sometimes still levelled at digital artists)
|
| Further, even if you totally discount the human agency in
| this process & view it as a machine doing everything: we
| don't expect human artists to add a credit on each of their
| works to all the artworks they have viewed in their life and
| the experiences that came together to form an artwork or even
| their particular style.
|
| I'd argue the networks are clearly transformative (since the
| network weights aren't large enough to contain the actual
| input artworks). It may not be as transformative as a human
| learning process (although then again, what is the learning
| 'storage' capacity of a human compared to a 4GB weights
| file?)
| numpad0 wrote:
| Because they don't know, and they have incentives to not
| know.
| chillfox wrote:
| It's Midjourney (you can tell from the way weights and
| parameters in the prompts are done). But yes, would be nice if
| they said it.
| finnh wrote:
| Maybe the author edited the post since you looked, but it is
| stated:
|
| > Prompt building
|
| > I started by ordering the AI (Midjourney in this proto, but I
| use stable diffusion more) to make me a model sheet with
| turnaround images of a character.
| aroman wrote:
| The author stated early on in the article that they used
| MidJourney and later Stable Diffusion.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| [dead]
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Making my first 2d game using some ai art from midjourney. It's
| like having an assistant that works for me. But I still have to
| tell it what I want and fix mistakes and do the animations. Using
| midjourney and chat.open.ai to help. In my case it hasn't killed
| jobs as I would not have a budget to hire anyone anyway. However
| I'm able to fulfill my vision for the game, just getting ai help
| the low level stuff. So it's making things easier and I can make
| something better with my time. And I think ai will boost
| productivity while reducing time and effort. So a huge boost, in
| bring up people with low skills to make something useful. Most
| people don't want to make things from scratch.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Beaver117 wrote:
| With new breakthroughs like this I try to be extremely open
| minded. The potential is endless. We could have entire AI
| generated AR/VR worlds in just a decade or two that we couldn't
| really believe was possible a decade ago. And obviously that will
| need many many more jobs to sustain, so the k only downside is
| some people will have to get more education/training/skills to
| qualify because basic drawing won't be useful enough anymore.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Author of this article has responded in this reddit thread
| https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/105ozmw/ex...
| groar wrote:
| It would have been fun to see how AI generated voice (like
| https://www.enginn.tech ) could be integrated as well (and have
| an estimate of how much time it saves)
| Kukumber wrote:
| I'm not interested in games made using/helped an/by AI
|
| Hopefully a tag will appear on steam to filter out that junk
|
| It devaluates what art, creativity and passion are
|
| It'll take down that civilization faster than a pandemic or a
| social media algorithm
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Those tags won't appear and nobody will be collecting the data
| that would be necessary for them anyway. AI generation will be
| more pervasive than Photoshop and all your favorite art and
| artists will be using AI. You will change your mind.
| NicoleJO wrote:
| All the images here were stolen from artists who were not
| credited nor paid for their graphics.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I am extremely skeptical, because this looks so good. To my eyes
| the images produced look orders of magnitude better than what
| current software is capable of producing. Let alone from multiple
| perspectives with absolutely perfect coherence. What tool was
| used?
|
| Stuff like Dall-e is still far from producing anything like that.
| Those are absolutely perfect idealized/stylized human proportions
| with minimal weirdness. The only thing that even hints at neural
| network generation (at a glance at least) are the eyes in the
| second model sheet, but even that could be reasonably argued to
| be style.
|
| I could fully believe this is from a specialized art tool akin to
| some sort of a 2D version of Metahumans [1] but I'd be floored if
| this was actually generated from a generic neural network style
| tool.
|
| [1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman
| siraben wrote:
| Based on the prompt information we have, "-v 4 -ar 3:2" are
| options that are provided to Midjourney. -v 4 indicates version
| 4 of their model (which produces very aesthetically pleasing
| output) and -ar 3:2 specifies an aspect ratio of 3 by 2.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I have played with SD enough and have been following its
| subreddit. It's definitely doable with Stable Diffusion too.
| Does need some prompt engineering and other things but doable.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I had the same reaction when I tried midjourney but this looks
| very believable.
|
| https://www.midjourney.com/app/feed/all/
|
| I don't think generic AIs are the right approach anyway, I
| think we're better off with precise procedural models with a
| lot of knobs and some knowledge of rules (eg. metahumans).
|
| Maybe you can put an AI in front of it to generate what you
| want using the procedural models, but pixel output is just not
| good enough for games.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > but pixel output is just not good enough for games.
|
| I've been using https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN to
| increase AI renders resolution, it works very very well on
| some styles, you can easily x4 or x8 the resolution if you
| know what you're doing and have some photoshop knowledge for
| the cleanup
| chillfox wrote:
| Midjourney will do that easily if you get good at doing the
| prompts. Getting good takes reading the manual and spending a
| few hours working on 2-3 designs.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Midjourney produces this quality now with very little
| tinkering. If you use --v 4 --q 2 to get version 4 at highest
| quality it takes surprisingly little prompt work to get amazing
| images.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Midjourney is eons beyond its next best competitor (probably
| Dall-e 2). This quality is easily achievable.
| klntsky wrote:
| > Stuff like Dall-e is still far from producing anything like
| that
|
| It is not, you just have to try many times and post-process a
| lot.
| thom wrote:
| We'll see how this turns out, but if we're in the "this is
| clearly a lie" phase of AI progress then that seems pretty big.
| TillE wrote:
| I believe that an AI can generate this sort of thing, it's
| just odd that a brief prompt to a general-purpose art AI can
| consistently generate an extremely specific model sheet like
| this.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > it's just odd that a brief prompt to a general-purpose
| art AI can consistently generate an extremely specific
| model sheet like this.
|
| Well it's trained on thousands of character sheets so it's
| not so surprising after all, it still generates a lot of
| garbage too
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| This is mid journey which is trained specifically for game
| like things unlike a general model like dalle. I've seen
| people make incredible concept art with it
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I wouldn't say consistently, for a given prompt a lot of
| seeds will be total garbage. It's not uncommon even when
| you're very good at prompting and tuning the model to need
| to generate 20+ images with the same prompt to find
| something that's close to what you want.
| cableshaft wrote:
| An artist recently was banned from the r/art subreddit[1]
| because the moderator thought it was A.I. art when it wasn't.
| So yeah, we are at that point.
|
| [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3p9yg/artist-banned-
| from-ar...
| dagmx wrote:
| We've always been at that point because art is a spectrum
| with no defined boundaries.
|
| There is no single metric for quality, and there's been
| tons of artists who put out generic work in the past that
| have been mistaken for plagiarism in a similar vein.
|
| Art is not a Boolean, therefore neither are comparisons
| [deleted]
| liuliu wrote:
| It is possible. You even have textual inversion trained to do
| exactly this: https://civitai.com/models/3036/charturner-
| character-turnaro...
|
| Consistent character creation is a big topic the community
| interested in and there are many tricks people use for that
| purpose.
| lm28469 wrote:
| You can definitely do that right now in midjourney 4, go on
| their discord and search for "character sheet" or "character
| design" and you'll find high quality examples with coherent
| front/side/back view
|
| Once you know what tokens trigger the right answers it's
| relatively easy to get where you want, as usual with these tool
| you should be flexible when it comes to details, but the
| overall design can be defined
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm mostly just shocked that the model can produce what
| appear to be entirely consistent models of the same character
| from different views. I can be convinced, but I was also
| equally skeptical.
|
| Because that implies a kind of cohesive conceptual
| understanding of a single object, that I didn't think the
| current architecture was able to model that. So many image
| outputs of humans are perfectly fine in local areas, but then
| they have three arms or a hand where a foot should be or
| something.
|
| I mean, the chosen character isn't _perfectly_ consistent --
| e.g. the side view shows a kind of metal badge on the vest
| that doesn 't exist in the front view, while the back view
| shows a kind of mid-thigh holster (?) that doesn't appear on
| the front view, plus the vest on the back view is a few
| inches shorter. Similarly the collar is popped on the front
| view, but not the other two.
|
| But nevertheless, it's basically about 99% right. And I
| simply don't understand how that's possible, unless there
| author did about ten thousand tries and is showing the _only_
| ones that happened to be nearly entirely consistent, somehow
| just mostly by chance. (Maybe because they 're particularly
| close to the real-life characters used for training?)
| minxomat wrote:
| > kind of cohesive conceptual understanding of a single
| object
|
| It doesn't, it just requires character sheets in the
| training set, the rest is basically a style transfer.
| Sakos wrote:
| So, uh, is every artist going to be out of the job in the
| next 5 years?
| simion314 wrote:
| >So, uh, is every artist going to be out of the job in the
| next 5 years?
|
| No, probably artists also ask if ChatGPT will replace
| developers and they can just ask the AI write me the code
| for a cool RPG game, make it in CoolLang and use NN for NPC
| AI, also make it super efficient and optimized and similar
| keywords.
|
| This tools will be used by artists in their workflow, they
| will be more productive so more high quality art will be
| created .
| numpad0 wrote:
| The author seems to be a 3D artist, and claims to have
| spent 18 hours for this work, that he estimates as 5 days
| worth, that he thinks not copyrightable. To me it seems to
| be just raising the bar/granting more productivity for
| artists with prior skills and abilities to read the room.
| Multicomp wrote:
| My understanding re: copyright was that the raw output of
| the AI cannot be copyrighted. But his rigging and mesh
| maps and otherwise creatively-directed work to take that
| raw material and make it look good? Surely he has
| copyright on those?
|
| It's just that in theory, anybody else can take the raw
| output of the AI and do all that extra work on it
| themselves with no copyright violation.
| harrylove wrote:
| Short-sighted employers will probably cut staff. The other
| more likely scenario is that teams will be asked to produce
| more work faster by letting AI handle the boilerplate.
| Creative directors and producers will run a lot more
| experiments with fresh ideas and then use the expert skills
| of their teams to produce a cohesive, polished product.
|
| The end result may be that we get a ton of mediocre, high-
| fructose-corn-syrup art at first. The hype for that will
| last about three months. We'll also see an increase in
| typical fare from big studios as they figure out how to
| monetize long-tail content. And then occasionally there
| will be a true work of art or a new form of art we haven't
| seen yet.
|
| Supply and demand.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I personally don't think so, it made incredible progress
| very fast but it stagnates now. The more precise design you
| want the less likely you'll be able to generate it. It's
| usually very nice looking at first but once you look at the
| details it completely breaks apart, it's a bit like in a
| dream.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Honestly, I expect the number of art roles at gaming
| companies to drop precipitously over the next couple of
| years.
|
| Right now you have a creative director who defines the
| style of art and a bunch of early-to-mid-career
| artists/designers who then create all the assets you need
| (and there are a lot of assets, so there's plenty of work
| to go around). Soon that'll be a creative director defining
| the style, AI producing most of the assets, and a few
| designers cleaning up what the AI produces. In a few years,
| those few designers probably won't be needed.
|
| I think a lot of artists who take commercial art/design
| type jobs to pay the bills are going to be out of work
| soon, and that's a serious problem that we should be
| looking to get ahead of as a society.
|
| On the plus side, this will be a huge boon for indie game
| devs - they'll be able to create AAA-level assets for their
| games at extremely low cost. For better or worse (for
| better and worse, really), the times, they are a-changin'.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Having working on a bunch of AAA games, having the same
| number of artists making a lot more assets is a way more
| likely outcome than having less artists make the same
| stuff as today - especially if you take in account the
| trends of making everything have huge worlds with lots of
| detail.
| wincy wrote:
| This is what I was thinking even though I'm totally
| outside the gaming industry. It seems like the appetite
| for good quality artwork in video games is absolutely
| insatiable.
|
| If you can hack out unique stuff in hours, not days,
| suddenly every building in every city of GTA can have
| bespoke furniture and stuff that's absolutely
| unimaginable to us right now as assigning a dev to spend
| three days modeling a couch used in one place is absurd.
|
| This is how we get one step closer to actual realistic or
| extremely detailed environments.
|
| I was playing God of War and the attention to detail in a
| room filled with treasure, how it reacts when you hit it
| with your weapon and coins fly everywhere, it was
| amazing.
|
| Imagine what these same devs could do where their
| workflow takes 1/10th or 1/100th the time.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I think this is probably true in the short term, but in
| the long term I think the ability of AI to create art
| will outpace the need for more new assets. Right now
| there's definitely cleanup that needs to be done on AI-
| generated stuff, but the need for that will diminish
| quickly. I'd be shocked if by the end of the decade we
| still had artists cleaning up AI work.
|
| Games may need 1000x the assets they do now, but if AI is
| 10000x faster at creating them than humans are, then
| you're still going to see a big reduction in the number
| of humans needed. Eventually we'll get to the point where
| the game's AI is procedurally generating assets during
| gameplay (and eventually you'll get AI just generating
| the games).
| simion314 wrote:
| >I think a lot of artists who take commercial art/design
| type jobs to pay the bills are going to be out of work
| soon, and that's a serious problem that we should be
| looking to get ahead of as a society.
|
| They can learn this new tools and be 100x more productive
| and make more money. The AI tool will not replace the
| artistic taste and creativity , some boring low quality
| work will be automated but artists can be more productive
| with this new tools and say finish the artwork for a
| novel or game much faster, so making more money.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| 100x is a mighty big number.
|
| I'll take you at 1:1 odds that the salary of even the
| highest paid 10% of art directors in the United States,
| as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, does not
| see even a 10 times increase in their salary over 5 years
| (that is to say, in 2027.m01.08, the BLS reports below
| 10*$194,130). Loser gives the winner one Snickers bar.
|
| https://www.bls.gov/ooh/arts-and-design/art-directors.htm
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Yeah but if you make artists 100x more productive the
| natural consequence is that there will be far fewer
| employed artists.
|
| The senior ones will probably be ok (as you say, they
| might even get a payrise, given how much impact a single
| individual will be able to have) but people just joining
| the industry now are likely screwed.
| simion314 wrote:
| No, there will be more art.
|
| Say I would like to make a Visual novel but it will take
| an artist 100 hours to illustrate it, if he can do it 10x
| faster then I can have him illustrate 10 of my novels
| with the same money. Nobody loses and my VN readers can
| enjoy 10x more content.
|
| Btw this AI tools work a lot better if you sketch
| something first, so I can see a very productive artist
| doing a rough sketch then using AI then manually touching
| stuff after. Also an artist could train the AI with his
| style and with his characters and keep the model private
| and use it over and over again.
| mentos wrote:
| I think it could mean games have the same art budget but
| make 100x the art content to compete with studios that
| use the innovation to slash their headcount..
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Automation and better technology massively reduced the
| fraction of the population that works in farming, whilst
| simultaneously we ended up with a food surplus. Machine
| translation definitely had an impact on the human
| translation industry. Seems likely that this is what will
| happen for art.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| The majority of that work is today already outsourced to
| art "sweatshops" in cheap cost of living countries. You
| have one art director telling them to create 100 of this
| armor and 30 of this creature. The biggest impact will be
| at the bottom of the ladder
| simion314 wrote:
| >The majority of that work is today already outsourced to
| art "sweatshops" in cheap cost of living countries. You
| have one art director telling them to create 100 of this
| armor and 30 of this creature. The biggest impact will be
| at the bottom of the ladder
|
| Do you think that in future the art director will do the
| work himself using AI? Or he will hire the same people
| but instead of 100 armors he will ask for 10k armors,
| more armors more chances to sell them to players.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Seems like unless something changes you'll still need
| some people with "taste" going through the hundreds of
| iterations looking for the right fit. Probably not the
| director. Still I think the team size will be cut down
| fairly drastically
| simion314 wrote:
| I don't think drastically. Have yu tried the AI tools?
|
| It is not like you can just describe what is in your mind
| and it will appear, from what I read in people workflow
| description it is a more involved work, including
| training a model (I seen someone trained a model for RPG
| fantasy characters for example), then creating some
| starting sketch, generating many images, selecting good
| candidates, then use in-painting to fix out of place
| stuff, then use photoshop/krita to fix stuff .
|
| I think it is like with programming, we have higher level
| languages and libraries and the number of developer
| increased because we can do a lot more stuff then just
| starting each time from assembly. So in this case the
| same artists will just produce more, we will not have to
| wait 6 months for a visual novel to have an update, we
| will not need to wait years for some indie game to be
| done , but yeah it is possible that some patt of the
| money that goes to art will end up for a short period of
| time in the pockets of soem art director , but
| competition would fix that.
| aenvoker wrote:
| There was an article recently about how AAA games are
| requiring so much content lately that any development
| cycles starting today would need to target the
| PlayStation 6. I think there's still some room for
| improvements in productivity.
| numpad0 wrote:
| There's no imperatives for selling plastic discs at $79.
| What that tells is just how much opportunities there are
| for busywork sharing in console games.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| But is that assuming that content production will
| continue at its same pace? Unless it was an AI-focused
| article, it probably wasn't accounting for the changes
| we're going to see.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Environment art is another thing that's already being
| automated with simpler tools (speedtree etc). No one has
| time to fill in the trees and rocks for an open world by
| hand. Games are only getting more demanding as people
| expect more and more detailed worlds
| px43 wrote:
| Right now the lines are kind of blurred between people
| who make great art, and people who have the technical
| skills to create nice graphical imagery.
|
| Lets say that someone gets a character design dropped on
| their desk, and are told to create some graphics of that
| character running through a field, climbing a tree,
| jumping through a window, all using the identical style
| as the character design sheet. I don't really think
| there's a lot of real artistry going on there, despite
| the fact that the person with the skills to perform that
| work today almost certainly developed those skills while
| creating their own personal art portfolio.
|
| I have not worked in the gaming industry, but what I hear
| is that a lot of gaming studios today hire up legions of
| technically skilled people, and grind them to death in
| sweatshop-like conditions, while not actually utilizing
| any of their creative talent.
|
| My hope is that this new tech will empower real artists
| to massively multiply their productivity, so they can
| focus on creating new beautiful styles, stories, and
| personalities for their characters, rather than spending
| all day painting.
|
| It kind of feels like a Gutenberg Press scenario. Before
| the Printing Press, you had to have thousands of artists
| transcribing books, copying the images in great detail,
| and using their impeccable handwriting to ensure that
| each page was as legible as their source material. I'm
| sure that back then it felt like thousands of artists
| were losing their jobs to these machines, but it ended up
| creating an explosion of literacy and enabled subsequent
| generations to publish their work at a scale that was
| never before possible.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| As a non-artist, I'm hesitant to say what's real artistry
| and what's not, but I definitely agree that there's a
| more creative component to work of a creative director
| defining the art style vs. an entry-level artist building
| assets in that style.
|
| Still, I think one of the things that will be lost is the
| ability of those entry-level artists to learn and develop
| so they can get to the point of being qualified for the
| really creative art jobs. My feeling is that these AI
| tools will really entrench the existing art-director-
| level folks in AAA gaming in their roles, and the only
| path to break into this kind of game art design will be
| by creating your own games entirely.
|
| As for the sweatshop conditions, I totally agree - the
| gaming industry is notorious for being awful to its
| employees, and it's good that that will likely end. On
| the other hand, is it a plus to end that by just
| eliminating the jobs entirely? I dunno.
| kleiba wrote:
| Back in the 80's, some of the defining games of the decade were
| made by a single person, and dev teams hardly consisted of more
| than two or three people. With the progress in computer hardware,
| with better resolutions and 3D cards, games developed too, into a
| space where the best games on the market required teams of 200+
| people to design, develop, produce, market, and sell them.
|
| Then, in the 2000's, the indie scene started to gain traction in
| the public eye. Not because they could compete with AAA studios
| on their game courts, but because they found clever and novel
| ways to make games that piqued gamer's interest who were perhaps
| a bit bored with the increasingly formulaic output they saw from
| major game developers.
|
| But indie games also _had_ to retract to such alternative game
| ideas because producing top of the line games had just gone way
| too far out of reach for a small team with a small budget - let
| alone a one-man studio.
|
| I think we're at the beginning of new dawn in independent game
| development. The tools available, even if you just look at open
| source tools, has never been so rich as they today. Now, with AI
| entering the scene, the dependence on very large teams will
| likely go down more and more, at least when combined with clever
| game design.
|
| Will one person be able to create a solo project that challenges
| the AAA games of the top-selling studios any time soon? Of course
| not. But I think we're on the verge of another indie game
| revolution.
|
| AI threatens entire professions in a way that was previously
| thought impossible. Even a couple of years ago, hardly anyone
| would have imagined that jobs that typically require years of
| practice, training and skill could become equally under pressure
| as the traditional labour jobs that have been replaced by robots.
| We cannot even begin to imagine the the long-term effect on the
| economy at large.
|
| On the upside, for gaming, the consumer will likely benefit from
| this development as new avenues and opportunies are opened to
| indie developers. Creating a character sheet automatically is
| just the beginning. This trend will continue, and it is
| absolutely foreseeable that further parts of the design process
| will be automated. Music and game sound generation will also be
| perfected by AI in the very near future. Actually, that is
| probably true for all game assets, it's just a matter of time.
|
| Even storytelling - if future games even need predesigned
| narratives (why not let an enticing story develop on the fly,
| thanks to AI, that really takes every user action into account
| and puts it into a coherent context?).
|
| We're living in the future.
| Closi wrote:
| You are right, and to go a step further - Generating full games
| with AI is possible _now_. Computer games that weren 't even
| considered possible 2 years ago.
|
| I've been playing text-based adventure games that I have made
| with ChatGPT and they are fascinating. Try the below command in
| ChatGPT (don't read the text below if you actually want to play
| it though!).
|
| > Hi, I would like to play a text-based adventure game with
| you. I will say commands and you will respond either describing
| the situation or saying what the characters have said.
| Responses should be kept fairly short. The game will not end
| until I say the word 'endthegame'. In a combat situation, you
| will tell me how many hitpoints the character I am in combat
| with has, and I will describe the attack - you will evaluate
| that attack and decide how many hitpoints to deduct from the
| enemy. The game is set on a spaceship, however the spaceship is
| under attack. There is a portal gun. Part of the solution
| should be to teleport to the enemy ship and kill the enemies,
| and this should be telegraphed to the player after a few turns.
| The goal will be to stop the enemy ship from destroying our
| ship. I will say some things that will not be possible in
| context, or that are too vague, and if this happens you should
| respond saying why I cannot do the action, or that it was too
| vague. In general you should try and accomodate the players
| actions though, even if they have negative consequences - but
| not allow them if they are too vague or are multi-step.
|
| Can the above now be considered 'source code' to a game? A
| text-based game which is fun to play (at least I find it fun!)
| and with free-flowing narrative, where your actions have
| consequences.
|
| It's pretty wild to go into this game, where you can go up to
| characters and start 'proper' relationships with them, talk in
| natural language, and be able to make genuine choices about how
| to solve a problem that the developer didn't even dream of.
| roywiggins wrote:
| You can also generate an infinite amount of quasi-educational
| text adventures by prompting it with a historical or
| fictional setting. Give it a piece of classic literature and
| it will try to come up with something on-theme.
| Closi wrote:
| That would be awesome! Huge opportunity in education.
|
| I'm still experimenting with the right prompts to make
| gameplay fun.
|
| Without prompts GPT-3 will tend to 'play the game for you'
| or allow you to do non-sensical actions (e.g. if a house is
| on fire, and your command is 'blow the fire out with your
| gigantic lungs', it will respond with 'you blow the fire
| out!' rather than 'you blow but this does not have any
| effect'), but if you tell it to ignore actions that would
| not work it tends to go 'on rails' and expect a specific
| sequence of actions from the player, so just trying to
| balance those two things!
| cmehdy wrote:
| Imagine a system of tags and account linking which pair your
| preferred games and genres (on steam and others) to your
| goodreads list, your spotify, etc.. and generate assets and
| narrative based on that, while using existing game engines (and
| their increasingly complex automations) to put those things
| together into a multimedia experience. Maybe for a while this
| could create a genre like "RPGMaker" games did, but it has the
| potential to be more.
|
| For a while at least coherence and consistency are not within
| reach of those systems, but that doesn't seem impossible.
| Perhaps for a little while longer I can see jobs emerging for
| curator of prompts, able to fine tune the experience for what
| is being generated and knowledgeable about the rapidly changing
| state of the art.
| [deleted]
| eezurr wrote:
| Fortunately/unfortunately (depending on your POV), there's a
| constant variable that limits all output, and that is peoples
| time. Instead what we'll see is the collapse of the pillars of
| culture (much like the collapse of the music industry, when the
| supply 10xed and delivery time fell to 0). Everyone will be
| king of a small anthill.
|
| For a more pertinent current example, all you need to do is
| compare the mobile games industry to the computer games
| industry. The cost to make a mobile game is very low, and tons
| of games are released every day. The cost to make a successful
| mobile game is still very high, because all the money that is
| saved on development costs are spent in marketing instead.
|
| Also, the video market collapsed in the 80s precisely because
| of low quality/oversupply games.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
|
| So perhaps, it is the marketers that have a bright future from
| all of this.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| Is there a trick to get output like this? I have been trying out
| the different models/sites/oss setups when they show up here and
| I get _nothing_ like this. I dont even get the images others use
| as examples. I felt like I am obviously doing it wrong. I try
| example prompts and prompts people suggest they used and I still
| get images that are as bad as if I tried to make them myself. To
| me this is crazy and almost unbelievable that it was generated,
| mostly because my experience has been completely opposite. Im on
| the fence about the artiest debate, but seeing this, I think its
| more the ones that keep their jobs are the ones who gain a new
| skill as prompt artiest*. To me that seems like a very valuable
| and real skill going forward.
|
| [*] kinda like early 'web designers' that needed to learn
| javascript
| rashkov wrote:
| I had this experience with midjourney until I found out there
| were certain keywords I had to include to enable their newer
| engines
| smusamashah wrote:
| I would recommend you to lurk around /r/StableDiffusion
| fab1an wrote:
| What exactly are you struggling with? The main challenge with
| Midjourney is to open up a broader style pallete, while the out
| of the box vanilla results are usually amazing in v4.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| Had not tried Midjourney, probably as I dont usually bother
| with discord. Just tried it out and while the results are
| probably better than anything I had before, there are a lot
| of weird things going on (per my usual experience) that dont
| seem to appear in examples other peoples use and def not in
| the topic post; distorted faces, extra body parts, weird
| 'deformities', proportions etc... Here are both variations
| and upscales of the same prompt (-> which is probably my
| issue?). This was without reading the 'tips' or looking
| through /r/StableDiffusion yet. It still really seems like
| prompting is an art form and skill that really needs to be
| learned, or atleast have the skills to touch-up the images.
|
| ::a happy family in the middle of a nucular wasteland:: (I
| just realized I spelt nuclear wrong, does that matter?)
|
| [original] https://cdn.midjourney.com/2685df56-6e1a-4828-9bd5
| -2960271d2...
|
| [upscaled] https://cdn.midjourney.com/b7363830-0a77-4362-86bb
| -a1bc30ff7...
|
| [variation] https://cdn.midjourney.com/cf9d990b-0745-4ef5-b97
| 7-31cbd0efc...
|
| [variations] https://cdn.midjourney.com/7337ed7f-041b-43d0-86
| 26-2b3992fbd...
|
| [upscaled] https://cdn.midjourney.com/a29c53da-e9cf-4192-88cd
| -d56d4e2d3...
|
| [variations]https://cdn.midjourney.com/497b5044-605c-42f8-b28
| 5-868515211...
|
| [upscaled] https://cdn.midjourney.com/dcdc1eb6-c5a0-4df9-9cc9
| -93fa8cf12...
|
| [variations] https://cdn.midjourney.com/46822f7a-b90f-4119-9c
| ee-4f3967dc3...
| mdorazio wrote:
| That's... not close to enough in your prompt. I suggest you
| go browse the v4-showcase channel and look at the prompts
| other people are using (users will sometimes share).
| Alternatively go to a site like prompthero.com and look up
| some examples. At a minimum, you need to use the --v 4
| trigger to get it to use the new (better) model. You also
| generally need to tell it what style you want with some
| more description.
|
| Fwiw, I've found stable diffusion outputs to be mostly crap
| in comparison to DALL-E and Midjourney. DALL-E seems to
| output results closest to what you ask for with low-
| specificity prompts, and Midjourney tends to give the most
| "stylistic" results like what you would see on a digital
| art site.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| "A.I. art" is neither A.I. nor art. After you make a neural
| network the first thing that occurs to you is that it's useless
| without tons of data. In this instance our data is art made my
| people. Using assets without permission or a licensing agreement
| is theft. To make things worse corporations are charging for this
| theft. Basically "A.I. art" is another way to say "theft as a
| service (TaaS)."
| dorgo wrote:
| >After you make a neural network the first thing that occurs to
| you is that it's useless without tons of data.
|
| What about self-learning chess engines? All they take as input
| are the rules of chess. And the output (the games they play)
| can sometimes be described as peaces of art. My point is that
| it should be possible for AI to create art without tons of
| (input) data. Even if it is not what we experience at the
| moment.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Chess is a very large but finite system. It's also a game
| largely based on memorization. Both things are handled
| extremely by computers. I consider terms like "self-learning"
| to be disingenuous or at best an exaggeration. At the moment
| it is not possible for a machine to make art because it has
| no consciousness. By definition art can only be made by a
| human mostly because we have agency.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Copyright infringement is not theft because you are not
| depriving the rightful owner of something. AI art is not
| copyright infringement because the results are transformative
| (really transformative), so you would have to explain how AI
| art directly became theft. Also, neural networks are not
| "useless", there is virtually an infinite number of
| permutations that can be achieved with generative models.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| The algorithm has no agency so it's not making art, art is
| made by humans. It's data theft. The art is data. You could
| also think of it in terms of counterfeiting too.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Art is made by a human using the tool to create the image,
| such as a photographer using a machine called a "camera", a
| digital artist using a computer, or a traditional artist
| using a paintbrush, also you seem to have completely
| ignored the part where I state how absurd it is to call it
| "theft."
| slowhadoken wrote:
| A human who pushes a button on a counterfeiting machine
| isn't a machinist, economist, or artist.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Deja vu, this has also been said for photographers and
| digital artists.
| [deleted]
| quadcore wrote:
| Never occurred to me until now that a capable artist may just
| have a lot more jobs available to him once the AI-to-image
| revolution will be fully rolling. E.g. some kid will create a
| video game with AI art, sell tons of it and then need artists to
| make the updates. In other words, AI facilitates entry to the
| digital art world which leads to the need of artists. It's like
| free samples.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I'd love to believe this was true but I absolutely can't
| imagine that it is. If the art doesn't need to be created by a
| person, which is what people are shooting for, here, the only
| artist you'd need is an art director. The world simply doesn't
| need a zillion art directors. Until we figure out how to treat
| people as intrinsically worthwhile and not not punish them for
| being made redundant by automation, it will always be a
| catastrophe for everyone targeted. It was true for auto
| manufacturing, it will be true for artists, and it will be true
| for workaday software developers. Just the way it is.
| kukx wrote:
| Actually we may need a lot more "art directors" than we have
| today, especially if they are to direct AI. At least
| temporarily, until they get AIed as well.
| 9530jh9054ven wrote:
| >Until we figure out how to treat people as intrinsically
| worthwhile and not not punish them for being made redundant
| by automation, it will always be a catastrophe for everyone
| targeted.
|
| Doesn't that beg the question if a person is intrinsically
| worthwhile?
|
| From where I sit, a person's worth is usually measured by
| others first and foremost, specifically by what they provide
| for them. Either in the rational economic (providing a good
| or service) or the irrational emotional value (enjoyment of
| their presence). I can't honestly say that someone is going
| to always be able to provide the latter value.
|
| I'm someone that inherently can't provide any emotional value
| to someone else, being how much of an incel I resemble (I'm
| unable be a friend to anyone, and I'm not fond of my family).
| Thus my only worth to others is what economic value that I
| can provide, and my... issues will be tolerated for that.
| Take away that my economic capability, then what good is
| someone like me then?
|
| It's probably just my long winded way of saying... at least
| to me, figuring out how to treat people as intrinsically
| worthwhile won't happen unless people believe other people
| are intrinsically worthwhile. And I don't foresee that ever
| happening.
| kukx wrote:
| Hold on, Christianity states that everyone is intrinsically
| valuable, that everyone is made in the image of God and we
| are children of God. At least it is my understanding.
| 9530jh9054ven wrote:
| True. I believe Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim have similar
| beliefs as well in the value of a human life. But belief
| doesn't always translate into action.
|
| Just a living example; many homeless shelters here forbid
| the use of drugs, even if it means turning the user out
| into the cold and near certain death. For many of the
| people operating the shelters, the value of that person
| isn't worth the cost of what they might due because of
| the addiction. Not just in economic, but in emotional and
| mental fatigue for the operators.
|
| I supposed then that the question could more correctly
| stated as: Do people view all others as valuable enough
| to expend a given amount time, energy, and resources on
| to support? And that I still believe the answer is likely
| no.
| voxl wrote:
| It's unfortunate that God doesn't exist and Christianity
| is just modern mythology then.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's a common misconception in Christianity that God is
| just a 'being among beings'. It's more akin to the belief
| in existence itself, which is itself an absurdity once
| you think about it enough :) Some people may protest that
| they are part of reality though...
|
| https://nwcatholic.org/voices/bishop-robert-barron/who-
| god-i...
| archon1410 wrote:
| Weird article. How does one pray to "being itself", how
| does "being itself" take the form of a human, as
| Christians hold?
|
| I'm sure they have complicated answers for that, how what
| seems like a more powerful version of a human, Jesus
| Christ, seemingly a being among beings, is actually the
| same thing as "being itself". They have a whole field for
| it, Christology. But in that, and in clarifying how
| "being itself" can have a will, make other beings "in its
| image" and generally interfere in mundane worldy-animal
| affairs, they should at least feel a little embarrassed
| when they claim to be nothing more than rational persons
| believing in "being" and deriding new atheists for not
| getting that.
|
| He seems to understand but ignores completely that
| atheists aren't primarily talking about weird sorts of
| panentheism and so on in their denial of God, and when
| they are, they offer sophisticated arguments, rather than
| the non-arguments he presents.
| hooande wrote:
| Your worth isn't determined by how much money you make or
| how many friends you have. You're a unique, thinking being
| that is experiencing reality. Your value is that you exist,
| you're something as opposed to nothing.
|
| If other humans see you as being valuable, that's great.
| but that has nothing to do with who _you_ are.
| rjknight wrote:
| This really wasn't true for earlier developments like
| Photoshop, though. People assumed that it would remove the
| need for specialist graphic designers, but in reality it made
| graphic designers much more productive _and_ drove the
| average standard of graphic design much higher. The result
| was that the increase in demand for graphic design matched or
| even exceeded the increase in supply.
| Closi wrote:
| I think this is an optimistic take - one technology can
| improve productivity and drive an industry, while the next
| technology can turn that same industry on it's head.
|
| Take for example the traditional 'Travel Agent' job - a
| role which was initially revolutionised by computing
| technologies such as SABRE and digital hotel reservations
| (improving profits and productivity while lowering cost!).
| Then the next technology came along, and over a period of
| 20 years was completely absorbed by Booking.com, AirBnB and
| SkyScanner (who could offer a more convenient service with
| a tiny fraction of the staff).
|
| Technologies help you become more productive, until they
| rewrite the market and make you redundant.
| eurticket wrote:
| Sure, but automation and innovation doesn't always skew
| positively.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I feel like this is closer to cloud computing services than
| an automated factory, and cloud computing did not decrease
| the number of jobs for devs.
|
| This post shows you still need a pretty high level of skill
| to convert the results of a prompt into a workable 3d model.
| It just means people who are mid level graphic artists need
| to add to their skillset. The same thing happened to the devs
| whose only skill was slapping together some HTML/CSS & JS,
| they had to get better or become irrelevant.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| But cloud computing did basically eliminate the sysadmin
| role. They were forced to learn tons of new skills to
| become "site reliability engineers" instead.
| [deleted]
| williamcotton wrote:
| The art is being created by a person. You cannot do what OP
| did and it's not just because you don't know Blender. It's
| also because they are a talented visual artist to begin with.
| They have sensibilities that you don't and will make better
| decisions while using tools like this.
| nazka wrote:
| Yes but by artists you mean (artists - 2d artists). Because as
| a 2d artist that's gonna hurt. And with these models sucking
| all the current total creativity, and styles, with a world
| where this is going to hit them, the overall new creativity and
| art created will decrease and AI copying previous styles and
| arts will start and increase.
|
| And then maybe modeling will take a hit too?
|
| I do think it's cool thought. But ya I am not that happy with
| what I was saying. Could still be a good thing overall?? Who
| knows.
| kcb wrote:
| AI image modification is already a thing. If the AI can
| generate the image then surely it can make updates to it.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Think about how difficult it is for a visual artist to scale
| their productivity when using paints and a canvas, compared to
| a Wacom, and now compared to a tool like this. They might be
| able to keep up with the ownership class at this rate!
| ketzo wrote:
| I think this is a good and optimistic take, but you have to
| imagine AI art will only get better from here -- how long until
| it closes the loop?
| kukx wrote:
| The best artists will thrive, I am not so sure about the rest.
| It seems very likely that the simple graphic jobs will be taken
| over by AI.
| [deleted]
| _spduchamp wrote:
| I'm curious to see more cases of game engine in a neural network
| like this... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32749988
| 101008 wrote:
| I am working on a game proof of concept as well (to share a
| gameplay on YouTube to see if it attracts enough interest) and I
| have been using IA as well to generate the images and so far it
| has been a wonderful experience.
|
| I feel really bad for artists because unless you need something
| very specific or a big studio, you are going to be replaced
| sadly.
| [deleted]
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| a) 90 perecent of an AI's success is in a large and well-
| curated training dataset.
|
| b) Training datasets can only be made by humans.
|
| c) A paid tier of Stable Diffusion is obviously coming. It will
| be differentiated by a better (and more custom) training
| dataset.
|
| d) No serious developer would be caught dead using the stock
| free tier Stable Diffusion.
|
| e) Big studios will most certainly hire closely-guarded artists
| to curate and expand their proprietary training datasets.
| smusamashah wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1045u8t/my.
| .. someone made this pixel art model and selling it for $65.
| If you see the shared samples it really is worth the money.
| You can make really good pixel art using this.
|
| SD is open source, the paid stuff is going to be the paid
| models like this I think.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > b) Training datasets can only be made by humans.
|
| AI can make training datasets too.
|
| For example to replace the human generated stuff from stable
| diffusion you could have some random-ish image generator
| coupled with some sort of image classification AI. As long as
| you have a good enough classification AI (or even more than
| one) that tells you what images are, you can focus on random-
| ish image generator algorithms to generate training data for
| another AI to generate images from descriptions.
|
| (this is obviously with lots of handwaving and there will be
| problems that need to be solved - e.g. to avoid 99% of the
| generated training data be stuff like "noise on noise" but
| have some form of variety :-P), but the point is AIs
| generating data for other AIs is something that isn't far
| fetched and you don't need to think in terms of a single AI
| either)
| ausbah wrote:
| how is the generated data not just worse than already
| existing data
| rolph wrote:
| this sounds like Artificial Imagination
| bavell wrote:
| I believe Tesla has been doing some form of this to expand
| their training datasets.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| You can also feed Goggle Street View or equivalent for a
| good start.
|
| (though https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Freedom_
| of_panora... may matter here)
| 101008 wrote:
| I pay for MidJourney, $10 per month. So far has been a great
| experience.
| GaggiX wrote:
| If the datasets were well curated, we would sample directly
| from the learned distribution instead of using high
| classifier-free guidance but by extracting image-text-pairs
| from the Common Crawl web data dump you're not really
| creating a well curated dataset.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That's actually backwards.
|
| They won't be able to compete just on data because lots of
| people are producing custom models, and they can be blended
| together like a stylistic and thematic pallet. Plus, if you
| own the pipeline you can use embeddings, dreambooth in
| specific elements and set it up in batch mode doing a random
| walk through the latent space for cheap. This stuff is not
| hard to set up and run, and with money and expertise, you can
| create something that is both unique looking relative to
| other AI art, and more optimized for your workflow than a
| service.
|
| Image gen services will compete on ease of use, general
| quality and access to models that are larger than can fit in
| 24-48g vram without a big up front cost. There will probably
| be some services that provide specific features that people
| use even if they own their own pipelines, but the core
| customers will be smaller shops who don't use it enough to
| justify a real investment.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Sure but then you need one senior artist to curate rather
| than hundreds (including outsourced) artists that the current
| workflow uses
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| You'd need both, of course. And huge teams of artists
| churning out proprietary dataset updates constantly.
|
| The current situation where you'd download billions of free
| images off the Internet only works once, and only if you
| somehow justify it as a research endeavour. Once this thing
| is monetized intellectual property laws will kick in.
| alextheparrot wrote:
| I think some of your points are myopic -- the same thing was
| said for language models, but RLHF and RLAF [0] clearly show
| a trajectory of the models getting better at doing this self-
| improvement process with less "humans are special"ness.
|
| A tool like Copilot can more or less automatically improve
| via telemetry, I'd expect the same thing as image models
| catch-up. I'd also expect the human signals to get further
| and further downstream of the actual creation process (e.g.
| Gameplay tester reports visual bug versus artist manually
| edits character)
|
| [0] https://www.anthropic.com/constitutional.pdf
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| This only works if you ignore intellectual property laws,
| which isn't gonna happen once AI leaves the "research lab"
| phase and becomes a commercial industry.
| alextheparrot wrote:
| This comment confuses me a bit, as AI improving via
| feedback on its generations introduces no new concerns.
| Which new intellectual property concerns are introduced
| via reinforcement learning?
|
| An aside, but people use and pay for Copilot, it is out
| of the research lab phase.
| dagmx wrote:
| Imho this is the perspective of inexperience in the art domain
| and an extrapolation from still concepts to full worlds, and
| not acknowledging that art is as much the skill to put things
| in the medium as it is to have a developed eye.
|
| Even indie games need very bespoke art. Yeah, you can now
| generate images that are passable, but that doesn't expand to
| making a cohesive world of items unless you've developed an eye
| for it like the person in the original post has. Hell, their
| post shows how important artists are because they needed that
| pre-existing knowledge to convert from an image to a useable
| state.
|
| This also doesn't expand to making fun animation or lighting
| that works for your game, or to interesting visual effects.
|
| The concept art in the post are pretty generic looking within
| the genre. If that's all people are aiming for, then fine, but
| it's highly reductive to say it'll replace artists. It'll be a
| tool in the tool chest.
|
| None of that is even touching on how much artists are involved
| in making sure a game also runs well on the system, while
| working with engineers.
|
| I really just don't think people understand how much art
| direction goes into even indie games. Something like fire watch
| or journey is immense.
|
| Let's take the concept examples in this image. Why do any of
| the details exist in there? Once you start thinking about the
| details of the world, you'll start wanting to fine tune things.
| As you do this, surprise! you've turned into an artist
| yourself.
|
| I just think we don't teach art appreciation , or even
| appreciation for things outside our domain, to people. We see
| "image is good" and think that's all an artist brings.
| Engineers are especially susceptible to this. We think in
| binary results.
|
| So it's easy to think "it'll replace my need for artists" if
| that's our mindset, but I think that line of thinking comes
| from not understanding that the journey is an important part of
| the result.
| [deleted]
| MarinReiter wrote:
| Unless necessary regulations are put in place that stop people
| from stealing art to use in training datasets, then yes. Those
| artists are going to get replaced. We should be discussing how
| to regulate these AIs.
| hexomancer wrote:
| Originally "computer" was used to refer to people who would
| "compute". They were all replaced by electronic computers.
|
| I don't think many would claim that the world would be a
| better place if regulations were put in place to limit
| electronic computers in order to keep human computers
| employed.
| MarinReiter wrote:
| 1 - Not the same situation. No one stole already-done work
| from the people who used to "compute" to create the
| computers themselves, or its output.
|
| 2 - You're twisting my argument. I don't care if artists
| are employed or not, or that some jobs are transitioned out
| from the economy. I care that people who put in work get
| the value proportional to that work. You should, too.
|
| When you use one of these AIs that have been fed millions
| of images in order to train them and generate an effective
| output, you are necessarily consuming the images
| themselves, without which the AI wouldn't do anything. In
| that process, the artists - whose copyrighted work is,
| again, fundamental to the development of the tool - have
| been paid nada, they have not even consented to the use of
| their images in the training process. How does that track?
|
| This would be a very different conversations if these AIs
| only used public domain art, of which there's plenty. But
| then again, it wouldn't be much profitable, would it?
| bombela wrote:
| Should artists be forced to live without the internet nor
| access to the outside, so that they can never get
| inspiration from other artists?
|
| Of course not. So why is it different for an AI?
| panzerboiler wrote:
| No difference at all. Let's read books written by an AI.
| Play games designed and coded by an AI. Enjoy art painted
| by an AI. Debate with an AI on the internet. Listen to
| music composed and performed by an AI. Pretty soon, let's
| watch movies directed, edited and played by an AI. In the
| process, let's give the same AI also all the prompts, so
| it can learn what we want to read, play, enjoy, listen to
| and watch. Let's remove ourselves from the whole picture.
| Enjoy decay.
| bavell wrote:
| Yeah, this is the direction I worry about. Why bother
| being creative when the AIs "do it better"? How many
| people will bother paying for human art when AIs "do it
| better"? Will human creativity be relegated to a tiny
| niche in a sea of AI content? Will this all but erase
| paid human art except for highly specialized and narrow
| niches? Am I too pessimistic?
| hexomancer wrote:
| Computers have been playing chess way better than humans
| for many years, yet it has not prevented people from
| playing chess and enjoying it. Also human chess game have
| way more viewers than computer games despite objectively
| being lower quality.
| MarinReiter wrote:
| Are you implying that the process of training the AI with
| images, which usually involves statistic models, is in
| any way similar to the process by which a human brain
| creates images? Or that the way people look up references
| is similar to the way AIs use images? Because if that's
| the case, I'm afraid you have a very odd idea of how
| these AIs function.
|
| Otherwise, you have to agree that we're talking about
| apples and oranges here.
|
| AIs don't get "inspiration". They get the source images
| they need to function. An AI also can't produce an output
| that's outside of the realm of their dataset.
| neonbjb wrote:
| I theorize (but cannot prove) that the processes
| underpinning creativity in the human mind are exactly the
| same statistical processes that ML models use.
|
| Think about it: you live your life. You experience
| things. You experience art, and experience emotions or
| have interactions with other humans grounded in that art.
| You form connections with certain styles or techniques.
|
| If you then turn around to create art, you form in your
| mind a general idea of what you want to create. You then
| draw on your past experiences to actually create the
| physical art. What process other than statistical
| extraction from your mind could it come from?
|
| For sure I believe there are things that we don't
| understand about the human mind. I think the impact of
| drug use on art creation is very interesting, for
| example. It indicates that random chemical processes in
| our brains can play a large determining role in the
| actions we take (and in this case, the things that we
| create).
|
| But to say that humans do not use some sort of inbaked
| statistical world model in the creative process seems
| wrong to me.
| educaysean wrote:
| My creative process as a character illustrator is
| different than the creative process for a watercolor
| painter or a graphic designer. If I forced you to answer
| with a yes/no, would you confidently agree that their
| processes are different enough to be considered "apples
| and oranges"? I'm not sure what such statements
| establish, if anything at all.
|
| And if I told you that, as someone who has done art for
| decades, that the human creative process is very similar
| to how an AI is trained on existing images, would you
| believe me and move on?
|
| > Because if that's the case, I'm afraid you have a very
| odd idea of how these AIs function.
|
| The design of neutral nets, by definition, were derived
| from the workings of the human brain.
| MarinReiter wrote:
| That's the thing - no, they weren't. They were _inspired_
| by how neurons communicate with each other. But that 's
| not "the workings of the human brain", you're making an
| incorrect abstraction, same with these AI.
|
| Why should I believe you and move on? "making art for
| decades" doesn't make you an authority on any of the
| relevant subjects: "how art is processed in the brain"
| nor "how AI processes these images." I don't think you
| understand the fundamental differences between the
| process of looking up references/inspiration and
| kitbashing.
| educaysean wrote:
| I was an academically trained professional artist who is
| now an engineer. I "stole" work all the time as an artist
| by absorbing and fusing the specific elements that I
| found to be neat in all my heroes and idols. I was
| considered to be very creative and talented by everyone
| around me. This wasn't some shameful secret I held. This
| is exactly what artists are meant to do when they're
| encouraged to "study art history".
|
| This isn't some hypothetical. I went through the art
| portfolio scene and survived 4 years of critiques - I
| know about the sacred process called the "creative
| process". None of my and my peers' work would exist
| without the inspiration of the centuries of art work that
| stood before us. This is what we call art in the industry
| and by the public masses. The criteria you established
| for "why AI art isn't art" applies directly to the
| "conventional art". So I have to ask, why is AI art
| different?
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| I'm working on a game, but I want to hire an artist who has
| never even seen another piece of art from another artist so
| we can come up with a totally original style. Unfortunately,
| they all seem to have been trained on stupid museums and art
| books. Can you help me find my truly original artist? I pay a
| nice hiring bounty.
| dahart wrote:
| I remember a short story, maybe by Orson Scott Card, that
| imagined a world where child prodigy artists were isolated
| and not allowed to see art or listen to music, to ensure
| their creations were untainted.
|
| The issues of copyright infringement with AI are real
| though. Much of today's AI is directly copying subregions
| of training data, and can sometimes be prompted to
| reproduce images from the training data verbatim. Humans
| don't do that unintentionally, even though sometimes they
| do mean to steal from others. Suggesting that art school is
| the same thing as a training dataset is a bit hyperbolic.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Songmaster?
| dahart wrote:
| I think I read the shorter version in Maps In a Mirror...
| aenvoker wrote:
| What you are talking about is Overfitting. It only
| happens with images that appear way too many times in too
| many forms in the training set. Usually with the most
| iconic images of all time, such as the Mona Lisa. And,
| naturally, hyper-iconic images are the first thing that
| come to mind for humans when they test for the issue
| because those images are seared into our brains too.
|
| And, much like with our brains, when it happens it
| doesn't actually exactly reproduce parts of the source
| image. But, you have actively pay attention to notice
| what happened. It makes an image that is overly similar
| _conceptually_. To our brains that _feels_ the same. So,
| that's enough to convince someone at a glance that it is
| the same.
|
| But, if you look at an overfit result of "The Beatles
| Abbey Road album cover", you'll see things like: Band
| members are crossing the road, but they are all
| variations of Ringo. Vehicles from that era are in the
| background, but they are in a different arrangement and
| none of them are directly from the source. The Band
| members are wearing suits, but they are the wrong style
| and color. There are the wrong number of stripes on the
| road. It's not the same as a highly skilled human drawing
| an iconic image from memory. But, it sure is darn
| similar.
|
| And, besides all that, everyone working in the tech
| considers the overfitting of iconic images to be a
| failure case that is being actively addressed. It won't
| be long before it stops happening entirely.
|
| In the meantime, I'd challenge anyone to try to make an
| overfit result that significantly reproduces a specific
| work of every promoter's favorite, Greg Rutkowski, using
| Dall-e, Midjourney or the Stable Diffusion models
| released directly by Stability AI. Greg's pixels aren't
| in the model file to be copied. Only a conceptual
| impression of his style.
| dahart wrote:
| > What you are talking about is Overfitting.
|
| Not really, though that is another legitimate issue.
|
| I was talking about 1) the fundamental training and
| inference process, which remembers pixels, not concepts
| or techniques. Today's AI learns to create imagery in a
| fundamentally different way than people do. And 2) image
| generation AI based on text prompts like Stable Diffusion
| can easily be asked to reproduce training data by having
| a prompt that is narrow and specific enough. This is not
| over fitting, it's a function of the fact that some
| inputs are quite unique, and you can use the prompt to
| focus on that uniqueness.
| aenvoker wrote:
| The training process looks at pixels. Gets an impression
| of the relationships between words and curves in images.
| But, to say it "remembers pixels" is pretty loaded
| language that implies copying pixels into the model file.
|
| I'd like to see examples of using SD to copy some
| specific piece of art that hasn't been plastered millions
| of times across the internet. Sure, you can get a decent
| Mona Lisa knock off. Maybe even a strong impression of
| the Bloodbourne game cover art marketing material. But,
| reproducing a specific painting from Rutkowski would be
| quite a surprise to me.
| dahart wrote:
| Hehe adding artist names to the prompt is one of the most
| common ways people are getting closer to copying.
| https://lwneal.com/rutkowski.html
|
| Here are the examples you requested:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/image-generating-ai-
| can-co...
|
| Yes the training process looks at pixels, because that's
| all it has. That's the point. Humans don't look at
| pixels, they learn ideas. It's not in the least bit
| surprising that AI models shown a bunch of examples
| sometimes replicate their example inputs, examples are
| all they have, and they are built specifically to
| reproduce images similar to what they see, I'm not sure
| why you consider that idea "loaded".
| aenvoker wrote:
| Again, naming Rutkowsi invokes an impression of his
| style. But, copies none of his paintings.
|
| Read the paper. What I found is that a random sampling of
| the database naturally found a small subset of images
| that are highly duplicated in the database. Researchers
| we able to derive methods to produce results that give
| strong impressions of images such as: a map of the United
| States, Van Gogh's _Starry Night_ , and the cover of
| _Bloodborne_ :P with some models and not at all with
| others. The researchers caution against extrapolating
| from their results.
|
| > We speculate that replication behavior in Stable
| Diffusion arises from a complex interaction of factors,
| which include that it is text (rather than class)
| conditioned, it has a highly skewed distribution of image
| repetitions in the training set, and the number of
| gradient updates during training is large enough to
| overfit on a subset of the data.
| [deleted]
| yrgulation wrote:
| [dead]
| atum47 wrote:
| This looks great. How long did it took you?
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Who needs open world when you can have imagined world. Walk into
| any door and have the AI make up the room. Very exciting future.
| modeless wrote:
| The possibilities of AI generated dialogue, story, voice
| acting, music, etc are very exciting too. None of this is close
| to working yet but there's a clear path from where we are now.
| It's only a matter of time. Entertainment will never be the
| same.
| [deleted]
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > As these images are created by an AI, no one has a claim to
| their copyright.
|
| Debatable. There have been instances where artist signatures have
| appeared in the AI output. And if there is a profit motive then
| case for fair use is weaker.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Signatures generated from scratch like the rest of the image, I
| think is an important aspect to specify.
| Popeyes wrote:
| Wasn't there a ruling where an AI art couldn't be copyrighted
| because it had no creator. So sucks if you make a game and then
| all your art assets get ripped for some other game.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| The law is in flux. So until the legislature weighs in or a
| case reaches the higher courts that is a very real risk.
|
| Imagine a hugely popular game found to have clearly
| unlicensed copyrighted works, even in only fragments. It
| could become expensive legally and in reputation. (Especially
| for big publishers and devs who may be seen to profit from
| unlicensed copies of work from starving artists.)
| pronlover723 wrote:
| I'm curious how they went from character sheet to fully rigged
| model.
|
| It sounds like they hand created the model, and hand rigged it,
| and the entire process took 18 hours (entire meaning from 0 to
| game proto) so building the model, applying UVs, and rigging, was
| some sub-portion of that 18 hours
|
| Does that fit other people's experience of how long it generally
| takes someone to model, UV map, and rig a character?
|
| edit: If it's not clear, it sounds like it took 4-6 hours to
| model, map, rig. Since they still had to spend time generating
| the character sheet, generating the city and alley, and turning
| it all into a playable prototype in that same 18 hours
| hacker_9 wrote:
| It does, once you have the character sheet, you put these
| together in blender and use them as reference for the 3d model,
| so everything comes out in proportion and its just grind really
| to place the vertices.
|
| The rigging + animation is done by mixamo's AI so just touch up
| after.
|
| He had to do a UV unwrap and then align the textures to this,
| this is time consuming just because it requires thinking about
| where to split the 3d model, to place the seams, then to fit it
| all in a texture, where you have to think about how much space
| to give each texture (more space = more quality). And then map
| the texture into this space too. This is a known pain in the 3d
| modelling for decades and no doubt AI will solve this in the
| next decade.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| By skipping straight to a low-poly model rather than sculpting
| a high-poly model and then retopologizing, the author saved an
| immense amount of time. UV mapping I expect they wouldn't have
| saved much time. The AI texture maps (complete with baked in
| shadows and lighting that wouldn't work in all lighting
| conditions) saved them an immense amount of time, but doesn't
| include the normal mapping step that would usually occur with
| the high/poly low workflow. Of course there are some artifacts
| there but the end result is really good for a prototype for a
| low budget indie game.
|
| Using Mixamo once again saves an huge amount of time over hand
| rigging the mesh and instantly gives you access to a large
| library of animations that can be projected onto the Mixamo
| rig.
|
| This is a very clever use of the available tools by very
| experienced character artist in my opinion. Your average HN
| reader is not going to be able to achieve this in 4, 18 hours
| or otherwise due to simply not having the required skillset to
| get from one end of the workflow to the other. Kudos to the
| author.
| tombert wrote:
| Related, I have been experimenting with using Stable Diffusion
| (SD) to generate game textures for a project I've been working
| on.
|
| The results its been giving me for cobblestone and grass have
| been generally "good enough", though I've not found a good way to
| force SD to generate textures that easily tesselate with each
| other, forcing me to modify the generated stuff a bit before I
| actually use them.
|
| Still, that's only like another 10-30 minutes of additional work
| on my end for a texture, and it means I get a unique texture
| without having to be terribly artistically inclined. I think AI
| art is really going to make lives easier for indie game devs.
| spyder wrote:
| Another cool demo generating textures with stable diffusion
| directly in blender:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG7B29FBZKU
| [deleted]
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| How long until we have blender output "action LLMs"?
| tshadley wrote:
| Dreamfusion -- text-to-3d seems like it might be useful here
| eventually: https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ (once successfully
| opensourced, see https://github.com/ashawkey/stable-dreamfusion)
|
| Rigging also looks like it could have a decent AI/DNN solution:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.00559.pdf
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Once there is a good 3D model generator I'll probably have to
| quit my job and start making games again. That's incredibly
| time consuming to create even low poly models for someone who
| is not very good at it. I remember trying to make a moose and
| after a few weeks of time it was somewhat passable but with no
| animation or rigging
| petermcneeley wrote:
| You can just pay an artist. Afaik Jon Blow did not make any
| of the art for Braid.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| That's the problem - I don't have the money to pay someone
| to work full time for a year or two
| buildbot wrote:
| Not everyone can or wants to- maybe they want to be the
| artist through AI
| nmfisher wrote:
| Finding an artist who is (1) capable, (2) reliable and (3)
| available is no mean feat. I can totally understand why
| someone would prefer to spend hours (if not days) using an
| AI tool.
| ummonk wrote:
| You gotta use sculpting tools like ZBrush / Substance Painter
| or 3d Coat to do make models like a low poly mouse.
| txnf wrote:
| I've played around with these mesh inference methods, and while
| I certainly value and respect the progress that has been made
| by people working in this field - Something feels fundamentally
| off about it - as if they aren't being quite ambitious enough.
|
| Consider shape-net - while being able to generate samples from
| the shape-net distribution would be a very impressive
| achievement, and these would certainly be useful as "assets"
| (decorations in a game scene), they don't have any of the real
| structure of these objects that would allow real interaction.
| They are effectively just inflatable decoys compared to real
| objects.
|
| In short, "AI" isn't going to replace the artists, it's going
| to massively amplify their productivity and we don't know of
| any limit to consumer demand for realism and rich interactivity
| in games. If anything the number of game artists is going to
| increase, only the bar will be raised on the quality of their
| product.
| eslaught wrote:
| When I asked for a squirrel with a hoodie, it gave me one with
| two heads:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/UIBXXvj.png
|
| We're definitely at the point where these tools can do amazing
| things, and yet they still manage to make bizarre defects in
| the output that no human would ever imagine.
| withinboredom wrote:
| It's almost like AI takes malicious compliance to a whole new
| level.
| ianbicking wrote:
| I'll be curious to see if text-to-3d is better than text-to-2d
| with some other 2d-to-3d process.
|
| I guess text-to-3d offers the potential of automatically
| creating entire worlds with very little human/artist
| intervention. But text-to-2d matches current processes with
| more chances for an artist to intervene, and also has more
| training material for art styles.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| It'll probably start with 2d -> 3d because a lot of work has
| already been put into tools to automatically take images and
| convert them to 3d. Ultimately direct to 3d will work better,
| but we will probably need more 3d data for it to reach it's
| potential, so 2d -> 3d might last for a while. In the
| interim, people will do all sorts of hacks on top of 2d -> 3d
| to reduce the amount of required human intervention.
| minxomat wrote:
| Rigging has come a long way with AccuRig and Cascadeur in 2022,
| approaching diminishing returns.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| AI assisted graphics have the potential of allowing small teams
| of developers (3-10) to create beautiful indie games without
| breaking the bank and letting them focus more on the story and
| gameplay mechanics. We already have 2D masterpieces like Hollow
| Night made by 3 people, I would love if this tech lead to more
| decentralization in game publishing so instead of 100 people
| making a single game we had 5 teams of 20 people making 5 equally
| good games
| fhd2 wrote:
| ... which leads to further saturation, which means you need a
| sizable marketing budget and/or a lot of luck for anyone to
| discover and pay for your game. If it was up to me, I'd rather
| pay for art than ad space. But using a Red Dead Redemption
| quote: "You can't fight change".
| hacker_9 wrote:
| Not at all. This means we are no long tying production
| quality of a game to how much money the developers have
| access to. It enables real creativity. Right now do you not
| think the AAA market is satured with yet another first person
| shooter etc? Creativity has lost out to capitalism, this will
| bring it back.
| dqpb wrote:
| Why can Netflix and Spotify figure it out but the game
| industry can't?
| garblegarble wrote:
| Alternatively you rely on curators to surface that quality
| work. We have plenty of books in the world, and curation and
| personal recommendations (as well as an author's reputation
| over multiple books) seem to work quite well there.
|
| Also since you can realise your artistic vision for a lower
| budget, you don't need to make back a gigantic outlay so
| you're not needing to take a huge risk that needs to have a
| massive reach on the launch week
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