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Comment by benoau | Hacker News Reader

Yep this is a huge enabler - previously having someone "do art" could easily cost you thousands for a small game, a month even, and this heavily constrained what you could make and locked you into what you had planned and how much you had planned. With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art, audio etc it's an incremental cost if any, you can explore ideas, you can throw art out, pivot in new directions.

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The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time.

It all started going wrong with the printing press.

>> The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time.

> It all started going wrong with the printing press.

Nah. We hit a tipping point with social media, and it's all downhill from here, with everything tending towards slop.

Rousseau speaks of this.

Scale matters. We're probably producing 100x content than we were making in the 1990s and 1 billion x more than in the 1690s.

We have probably greatly increased quality volume since then, but not 100x or 1 billion x.

Grey Goo disaster, but it’s informational rather than physical.

Bad faith argument. Did the printing press write shitty books? No. It didn’t even write books. Does AI write shitty books? Yes. Constantly. Millions.

Books took exactly the same amount of time to write before and after the printing press— they just became easier to reproduce. Making it easier to copy human-made work and removing the humanity from work are not even conceptually similar purposes.

Nitpick: the press of course did remove the humanity from book-copying work, before that the people copying books often made their own alterations to the books. And had their own calligraphic styles etc.

But my thought was that the printing press made the printed work much cheaper and accessible, and many many more people became writers than had been before, including of new kinds of media (newspapers). The quality of text in these new papers was of course sloppier than in the old expensive books, and also derivative...

Printing a book, either by hand or with printing equipment, is incomparably different to authoring a book. One is creating the intellectual content and the other is creating the artifact. The content of the AI-generated slop books popping up on Amazon by the hundred would be no less awful if it was hand-copied by a monk. The artifact of the book may be beautiful, but the content is still a worthless grift.

What primarily kept people from writing was illiteracy. The printing press encouraged people to read, but in its early years was primarily used for Bibles rather than original writing. Encouraging people to write was a comparatively distant latent effect.

Creating text faster than you can write is one of the primary use cases of LLMs— not a latent second-order effect.

Initially the printing press resulted in LESS writers, because people just copies others works. In fact, they had to establish something called intellectual property law in order to encourage people to write again.

It was the other way around. See eg https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-a... - "In 1843 alone 14,000 new works were published in Germany, close to the publication rate today in per capita terms." .. "Publishers knew that once a manuscript was out in public it could be cheaply copied by other printing press owners, so instead they sought out new manuscripts in pursuit of a first mover advantage on publishing. In addition, they created fancy special editions for wealthy customers to differentiate their product from what other printers could easily copy with mass market paperbacks."

That's 140 years after the point I made?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

And four centuries after the Gutenberg printing press.

Imagine if you had to hire a designer if you wanted to build a web application or mobile app, at a cost of perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands.

Would we be better off?

I doubt it.

Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count?

It’s definitely not better for the general public. Designers can’t even be replaced by AI as effectively as authors. They make things sorta ’look designed’ to people that don’t understand design, but have none of the communication and usability benefits that make designers useful. The result is slicker-looking, but probably less usable than if it was cobbled together with default bootstrap widgets, which is how it would have been done 2+ years ago. If an app needs a designer enough to not be feasible without one, AI isn’t going to replace the designer in that process. It just makes the author feel cool.

> Do you consider designers part of “we” or is it only the computer people that count?

Well you're not going to build a web application if you're a designer, at best you can contribute to one.

Of course that's changing in their favour with AI too - and it's fantastic if they can execute their vision themselves without being held back because they didn't pursue a different field or career choice, without having to go on a long sidequest to acquire that knowledge.

You think vibe coding web apps, and by proxy most other coding, will pay anything more than whatever the cheapest developer in Vietnam is willing to charge for it? I definitely don’t think so. AI is killing the labor market for all of these skills. Right now it can only actually replace the lowest end of both fields, but as people upskill trying to outrun it (and then those above them, and then those above them,) and the tools get better, most of the market will get flooded and all of our pay will drop off a cliff. If ideas are so cheap to execute that anyone can do it, and everything is apparently fair use if you pass it through an NN somehow, then anyone can copy it, just as easily, and that will be a FAR more profitable business model. If that’s true, then once again, the only people with successful products are the ones that have the money for giant marketing expenditures. So pretty much exactly like today except a fraction as many people get paid to do it.

I haven’t spoken to a single developer that doesn’t believe they’re too special to have to worry about that. There’s going to be a lot of people that think they’re in the top 5% of coders at their totally safe company that suddenly realize door dash is their best bet for income.

The idea that having more web apps is always a benefit to people assumes a never-ending demand for more web apps. The economy and job market aren’t jibing with that assessment at the moment. Fewer people getting paid for this stuff is just going to mean that the people on top will just get paid more.

I'd argue a game developer should make their own art assets, even if they "aren't an artist". You don't have to settle for it looking bad, just use your lack of art experience as a constraint. It usually means going with something very stylized or very simple. It might not be amazing but after you do it for a few games you will have pretty decent stuff, and most importantly, your own style.

Even amateurish art can be tasteful, and it can be its own intentional vibe. A lot of indie games go with a style that doesn't take much work to pull off decently. Sure, it may look amateurish, but it will have character and humanity behind it. Whereas AI art will look amateurish in a soul-deadening way.

Look at the game Baba Is You. It's a dead simple style that anyone can pull off, and it looks good. To be fair, even though it looks easy, it still takes a good artist/designer to come up with a seemingly simple style like that. But you can at least emulate their styles instead of coming up with something totally new, and in the process you'll better develop your aesthetic senses, which honestly will improve your journey as a game developer so much more than not having to "worry" about art.

This is a financial dead-end for almost everyone who tries it. You're not just looking for "market fit" you're also asking for "market tolerance", it's a very rare combination.

There’s been no market discussed here, the discussion up to here has been about a hobby project, there is no reason to find market fit or market tolerance.

You can have awful art and develop a good gameplay loop, during play testing with friends/testers you can then get feedback that what you are doing is actually worth spending some money on assets and at that point you have a much better understanding of what that should even look at.

Having an AI available to generate art seems a lot more like shaving the yak than an enabler. You never needed good art to make a good game, you need it for a polished game and that comes later.

Making a game is already a financial dead end. The only way to make money doing it is by dumping a lot of resources into marketing, or by making the game extremely good. AI art won't get you the quality you need, but making your own art will improve your gamedev skills in a sustainable direction.

It’s enabler for everyone, so you still don’t have any advantage just like you didn’t before that.

The only difference is you spend less on art but will spend same in other areas.

Literally nothing changed

The difference is you have autonomy now - the same autonomy as a person building a web application or app able to put together a serviceable UI/UX without any other person - without the sacrifice of "programmer art" or cobbling together free asset packs.

> With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art

Imagery

AI does not produce art.

Not that it matters to anyone but artists and art enjoyers.

Is that an argument against the quality, saying that AI cannot (or some weaker claim like that it does not usually) produce "art"? Else, is it an argument of provenance, akin to how copyright currently works, where the same visual representation is "art" if a human makes it and is not "art" if an AI makes it?

When pedantry pays the bills this will be a helpful mindset.

I don’t see this as a claim that the AI is doing art. He’s just saying, that the art can be created at low incremental cost.

Like, if we were in a world where only pens existed, and somebody was pitching the pencil, they could say “With a pencil if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as many edits, it's an incremental cost, you can explore ideas and make changes without throwing the whole drawing away.”

Stop trying to impose your narrow-minded definition of art onto other people. If you disagree, that's fine, but you've lost my respect the moment you tell someone else that their definition of art is wrong.

Art without intention isn't art. The entire point of art is the human intention by it. The pattern on linoleum isn't art. The beautiful wood grain in my table isn't art. And shitty AI images/music aren't art.

The human intention doesn't disappear just because the execution involves algorithms instead of paintbrushes - digital or otherwise.

It very much does. When I commission a piece of art, I am not the artist. Art without intention, without an artist, is not art.

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