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> Computer programmers and tech companies are not just robbing artists, but robbing all of humanity of the necessities that we need in order to have a fair chance at this world

A fair chance at what exactly? Creating corporate memphis for Big Co?

Besides, isn't AI just a tool that humans use? Unless I am missing something, people still prompt the AI, curate it's output, and edit the final results. Perhaps this will make art accessible to more people, thus giving everyone a fairer chance in this world.

You are right in some respects. There are moral issues, and this is a machine coming for (parts of) your job.

That said, it is not theft, however you slice it. What you express is what a lot of other workers feel when they see automation and mechanisation making progress in squeezing them out of their jobs. It is normal to be afraid, but you are not going to stop the tide. Some people will get out of business, some people will keep doing their thing until they retire, and over a generation or two a shift will have happened.

If it makes you feel better, pretty much no job is immune from this, in the same way that all manual labour is susceptible to be replace with robots. Other people will feel the same way you do now before long.

If it's not reproducing protectable expressions then it's not theft on any level, but merely another tool for producing art, albeit at an industrial scale. This happens in every profession eventually. It's simply your turn.

For my part, I'm quite content with this state of affairs. Now, rather than paying exorbitant amounts of money for lackluster results from artists, people can use so-called AI to generate decent results on the cheap. On a long enough timeline this should result in the price of art assets for games dropping into the basement where they belong, taking the price of games with them in the process. The public benefits, while intermediaries lose. I fail to see the problem.

TL;DR Humanity should not be compelled to dwell in darkness so candlemakers can continue to profit.

I certainly don't see how not using AI is dwelling in darkness. We can have a very nice and functional society without it.

You also say that you hope AI will drop the price of art to the basement where it belongs. What if AI drops the cost of generating a computer program to the basement where it belongs, and programmers will be paid minimum wage? Would you be so content then?

Frankly, the attitude on this board is dismaying, but that is expected because the people who are benefiting from AI with higher salaries are currently the programmers. It has nothing to do with logic or fairness, only selfishness.

You clearly aren't familiar with the state of advancement in being able to develop an app in the last 40 years.

I have a rigorous academic background in computer science and you don't see me throwing a tantrum that your average layman today can fire up unity or RPG maker to create games without having a firm grasp of rigid body Newtonian physics, game loops, asset management, graphic drivers, and handrolled x86 assembly.

I started programming on a 486 and graphing calculators and have used some pretty modern frameworks and languages as well. It's great that you have an academic background. I assure you I have a very rigorous one also, including publications, and I have a very deep knowledge of many technical disciplines.

My argument is not that we should avoid everything that makes tasks easier, but that AI does it on a fundamentally different scale, and that should be treated with caution.

It's like salt. I put salt on my food, but not too much. Some restaurants put way too much salt on their food but you can still eat there. AI is like eating handfuls of it, which will kill you.

> What if AI drops the cost of generating a computer program to the basement where it belongs, and programmers will be paid minimum wage? Would you be so content then?

I'd be more than happy to get rid of the "programmers" that are generating the same quality code as Copilot. Engineers are employed to translate human needs into tangible system designs, that they have to write code to do so is mostly an artefact of our current system-building methodology. In fact, I would be immensely happy if I could get rid of that part.

> Engineers are employed to translate human needs into tangible system designs,

I mean, isn't this with achievable prompt refinement?

One could argue that it wouldn't satisfy some $arbitrary_dimension (scalability, accessibility, whatever), but you can imagine it wouldn't be hard to get there with prompt refinement eventually, especially on an AI trained to satisfy SWE requirement (and not talking about GH's Copilot,which is an early application of a fairly young technology)

Right now, how DALL-E works is that you enter a prompt, it gives you a few images, you fine tune your prompt, and after a few rounds you may pick an image and maybe polish it before you can use it.

What would the co-pilot equivalent be? You give it a prompt, it generates a few repos, but then you still have to understand the whole project to judge that it respects the system needs and restrictions. After a few rounds, maybe you will have to change up the code a little, but 90% code will be written by the machine. I, for one, welcome this future -- because once again, this "prompt refinement" iteration is where our human creativity is used most effectively; I think it's a significant improvement over writing boilerplate code every time.

Then again, it also seems we perform worse when using AI tools, so maybe I'm wrong https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622

> I certainly don't see how not using AI is dwelling in darkness. We can have a very nice and functional society without it.

We can also have a very nice and functional society without penicillin, hot water, or fire... but nobody argues in favor of getting rid of those things just because doing so would make lives more profitable for the few. In fact, most people would be horrified by the selfishness of such a suggestion.

> You also say that you hope AI will drop the price of art to the basement where it belongs. What if AI drops the cost of generating a computer program to the basement where it belongs, and programmers will be paid minimum wage? Would you be so content then?

I would, yes, since I'm not employed as a software engineer and I'm tired of cleaning up after those who are who can't write programs worth a damn.

> Frankly, the attitude on this board is dismaying, but that is expected because the people who are benefiting from AI with higher salaries are currently the programmers. It has nothing to do with logic or fairness, only selfishness.

...or we recognize your class interest for what it is and we are not impressed. Everyone is made obsolete at some point. shrug Learn to code, I guess?

1. Of course I don't argue for getting rid of penicillin. Each invention has its own merits and each should be debated separately without making an analogy to another.

2. I am not personally worried about being made obsolete. I can code just fine and have extensive coding experience, and I can do a lot of other things as well. Nonetheless, I am still opposed to it. My opinion is just that we should slow down, examine how disruptive AI can be.

3. I only ask that we be more cautious towards technology. Currently our modus operandi is invent and release anything, as long as it makes money, which I think is crazy.

Why do you think the price of art assets for games belong in the basement? Do you value it so little? What about games themselves?

Not sure of this is what's they're referring to, but there are people who misrepresent their skills, and they tend to produce unsatisfactory results when commissioned. Scammers, I guess? This particular scam seem to be inbreeding within the indie gamedev community (no proof on this, just a hunch based on anecdotes).

Funny enough (because it's about AI Vs Artists), you can see some of these scammers here.

https://youtu.be/5GO2xKmZsVo

Because of the massive needs for modern AAA games, budgets have increased dramatically, which leads to more risks for publishers and distributors, which leads to more conservatism in game design. Look at things like open-world games: we cannot have 2 models for a given type of objects, so we have a lot of designers churning out variations. This is mindless, thankless, and hugely expensive. I soir think that more AI to speed up this sort of things would be a good thing. Yes, there would not be as much demand for 3D modellers. Instead of having 20 people, you’d have 3 and a bunch of computers. On the other hand, it would be much easier to create large assets for both AA and AAA games.

As usual, the devil is in the details. But we need more nuance in these debates.

Rather I value AAA titles so little that I'd rather see the price attached to art assets come down so that more companies can afford to enter the field and compete on a level playing field. In short: I want to see more competition, and lowering the cost to enter the market is one way of doing that.

Nonsense. The "art" you're creating is derivative of art other people made which you saw and learned from/incorporated into your own work.

More to the point, much of modern art is derivative nonsense that lacks soul - which is why it's modern artists who are scared of AI. Their work is easy to mimic.

AI isn't going to replace a Van Gogh anytime soon.

> Nonsense. The "art" you're creating is derivative of art other people made which you saw and learned from/incorporated into your own work.

Do you then believe humanity has exhausted its well of original thoughts? That would includes you and this statement, by the way (unless you hold yourself in unnaturally high regard, or are a rogue AI)

Edit: phrasing