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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

"Humans should do now useless work that can be done for fractions of a cent on a machine" is a capitalism problem not an AI problem.

Can you imagine how cool the future is going to be where 1 dev shops can have the voice acting chops previously reserved for big budget AAA games?

If AI art in whatever form it takes is just as good as the human made then we're golden. If it's worse but cheap enough that some choose it then they never actually wanted quality, cheaper was just never on offer before.

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Even AAA games could go back to having more dialogue choices than (1) be paragon of goodness or (2) be an enormous asshole

I'd love to go back to written scripts in RPGs instead of voice acting, honestly. Morrowind over the games that came later. The lack of dialog really hurts RPG.

The voice acting in Fallout New Vegas was excellent. Obviously having only written dialog is much cheaper to produce. But I think the bottleneck will ultimately be how many hours are allocated to the writers and designers (e.g. making branching conversations)

AI will be a huge force multiplier for NPC writing as well

The problem isn't voice acting, it's bad voice acting that takes longer than reading the text. Judicious use of good voice acting is engaging and adds value.

> The problem isn't voice acting,

It is when they literally don't hire enough actors. IIRC Fallout 3 was the worst offender for this, the first 2 hours of the game has like 6 celebrity VAs, the next 80 hours has like 3 male VAs and 2 female VAs and one of the male VAs has an insanely distinctive voice that gets used every other NPC and even on a child at one point.

It's laughably bad no exec didn't push to fix that before shipping. But yeah probably blew all the VA budget on the celebs that can't fill the amount of voice required for the entire game, same issue with Destiny by Bungie where hiring too expensive talent even drove who got killed in the plot and who the stories were about.

Sure it is. With voice acting, you can't have the sheer quantity of dialog that you could if you just used text. Voice acting takes time and dollars to produce. Text takes way way less of both, which results in allowing you to have a lot more of it (see: Morrowind vs subsequent games).

I really want to ask someone about Loom

I think the goal is you tell the AI to make you the game you want to play. We don't need other people to create content for us.

I think this is a possible final form of paradigm shift for generative AI.

> We don't need other people to create content for us.

I do. Creative works are an act of communication. I am not interested in creative works that aren't a person communicating with me.

That's fine, and you can still consume other's peoples content. Nothing has to change for you.

However Billions of people are creative and had just lacked the time, energy finances, to investment in the act of being creative.

People have huge discussions on what they'd change or fix in tv shows, what worked and what didn't.

Now we can empower them as well.

> Nothing has to change for you.

If it's not possible for me to distinguish between real people and fake people, then yes, quite a lot changes for me.

If you can't distinguish between real people and fake people, that's quite a different discussion.

Let me give you an example Rocket League transmits nothing to me, I've never cared for it other than something I play with my friends

It could be 100% AI generated, it wouldn't change a thing (For me), A creative work doesn't NEED to have a soul to fulfill a purpose, it does if what you care for is the message or the media

One does not get to handwave past critical problems with the globally dominant mode of social organization. This shit is an actual problem. Given the obvious (no amount of unemployment is going to convince the folks with power and influence to make the jump to luxury space communism) there isn't much to be rosy about here.

Exactly this. It's mind boggling that people seem to be focusing almost entirely on the use cases AI will enable, with no regard at all to how people will pay their bills once their jobs have been automated away. The reaction I see here and similar forums elsewhere seems to be "yeah yeah, it'll all work out, don't worry, now will you just leave us alone so we get on with making sure AGI arrives ASAP?". Wild...

I can’t think of a time we have ever worried about saving people’s jobs from new technology. If we actually do it now, it might be the first time in history.

You mean "stopped deploying technology in order to saving jobs" instead of "worried about it"

yes, I saw someone angry because how dare people don't expect his new AI era coming.

Trickle-down will continue to work just fine, for those sufficiently handsome, well-mannered and obedient for entertaining the equity lords.

In that future, a human architect isn't necessary.

I like how you think AI is just going to stop at utopia.

And that's great! Are we not happy that machines can take even more load off humans than they could before?

Well no obviously not because we're both have-nots. Our ability to survive is is based on being useful and selling ourselves to the haves. Anything that reduces the need for human labor makes their lives better and our lives worse for some reason we seem to put up with. The treadmill were on just got faster.

How anyone sees this as a problem with AI and not capitalism when AI is just the latest in a long line of progress that's turned the knob I can't understand.

The death of all human achievement abe fulfillment is "great" because capitalism?

Lol.

If nothing else, the dumbstruck looks on these people's faces will at least be funny in a spiteful way.

capitalism didn't invent costs

While cost is a concept that is applicable in any economic system, capitalism places a particular emphasis on it.

In a capitalist system, the cost is an essential factor of price, and firms are primarily motivated by profit maximization, which requires minimizing costs. Therefore, capitalists tend to prioritize cost-cutting measures such as outsourcing, automation, and downsizing to increase their profits.

Other economic systems would have different priorities -- and could choose to put greater value on human happiness.

> Therefore, capitalists tend to prioritize cost-cutting measures

That's not awful. Cost is a bad thing

A key problem with capitalism is that externalities are not accounted for. Overall costs can increase, but because of the lack of accounting and an imperfect market.

In any system you want to cut costs. You want to generate the same output for less input (time+resources), as that gives you more time+resources to do other things.

> Cost is a bad thing

Is it? Stated as an absolute like this, I disagree. Take the cost of paying employees, for instance. I think it's hard to argue that's a bad thing. Employees are also customers, providing a revenue source that leads to profit.

That is a cost, but not to the company.

The employees are doing work, they are spending their time. That should be reduced.

At the end of the chain is either someone spending time, spending health, or using natural resources. Those are the costs.

Far better for a company to simply give the money to the employee, receive the same amount of work in return, but not have the employee spending any time

What's better, paying someone $100 to dig a hole and fill it back in, or give that person $100?

Imagine a world where every need is met without having to do anything, with no costs - to humans, to the environment, to resources.

Think how much time that gives to people to be free to do what they want

You are describing a utopia. There is no reason to think such a thing is possible, and there is a whole ton of history that indicates it is not.

It's not a technological problem. It's a greed problem. The people who control the resources are not going to just give them away for nothing.

“we’re golden”

At first blush it looks that way. However, for every gem born there will be a thousand pieces of schlock made possible through AI scripts, voices and art that we’ll have to sift through. Once all that becomes the norm nothing about those games will stand out more than the others making it just as hard to woo customers.

For instance, if I told you a new movie came out and it has sound and color and choreographed fight scenes and special effects and maybe plot, would you want to see it? Not without serious convincing I imagine as all that stuff is par for the course. Sure there will be some initial novelty capitalized by first movers but it’ll get old quickly.

So your vision comes to life and you’re more productive but not necessarily more profitable or reaching a larger audience than before unless you’re one of the lucky ones. You’ll still be competing with AAA which can focus their attention elsewhere and/or produce more games since they get the same benefits with greater capital and marketing. Certainly artists and voice actors are not so golden.

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