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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Everyone who worked on this is a traitor to the human race. Why do we need to make it impossible to make a living as an artist? Who thinks an endless tsunami of garbage “content” churned out by machines dropping the bottom out of all artistic disciplines is a good idea?

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> Everyone who worked on this is a traitor to the human race.

Have we felt this way for all other large scale advances in human history?

That's a question too generic. But yes, I guess? And people get Nobel prizes to point out that said advances have been causing the downfall of empires and nations.

To try to put a positive spin on it..

It enables smaller teams to put out better quality products

Imagine you're an artist that wants to create a video game but you suck at development. You could leverage AI to get good enough code and have amazing art

On the other side someone who invested their entire skill tree in development can have amazing code and passable art

The more I think about it the more it seems this AI revolution will hurt big companies the most. Most people have no hope of competing with a AAA game studio because they don't have the capital. Maybe this levels the playing field?

I am an artist. I have friends who like to code. I could leverage talking to my friends and saying "hey anyone wanna fool around and make some games". I could get Unreal and one of the 800 game templates available on their store for prices ranging from $0 to a few hundred bucks and start plopping my art in there and fiddling around. There's a bazillion art assets on there for the programmer with no art skills, too. And there's a section on the Unreal forums for people to say "hey I have this set of skills, who wants to make a game with me?".

Or we could all just generate a bunch of completely unmaintanable code or some uncopyrightable art, sounds great.

Your unpaid friend or a Unity game template is unlikely to be enough to compete with medium+ scope games

Can't forget animation or sound either. Someone needs to work on the actual game design too! Whose job is it for the marketing? Hope someone has video editing skills to show it off well. Who even did the market research at the start?

It's.. a lot. So normally you have to reallllyyy simplify and constrain what you're capable of

AI might change that. Not now of course but one day?

Undertale Exists.

Baba is You Exists.

Nethack Exists (and similar games).

Dwarf Fortress Exists.

Mountains of Indie Horror games made of Unity Store assets exist.

Coal, LLC exists.

Cookie Clicker Exists.

Balatro Exists.

And Stardew Valley... which took 4-5 years. Vampire Survivors. I'm aware of these. They all have one thing in common: limited in scope or massively simplified in some area

Dwarf Fortress still has basically no animations after close to 20 years in development, and spent most of its life in ascii for good reason. The final art pack I'm fairly sure was contracted out

That's my point. Larger scoped projects are gated by capital or bigger founding teams. Maybe they don't have to be. Maybe in the future 3 friends could build a viable Overwatch competitor

PUBG?

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, although ChatGPT said that was 30 people, which surprises me.

I'll defer to .... original Counter Strike and the original Firearms mod

I mean, the point I'm trying to make is that AI could be used to expand the scope of what can be achieved. I never said that it's impossible to develop any game without it

I do. Free art for everyone, and it's great.

B...b...b...but the gate! There's nobody guarding the gate!

I want to piggyback off what you’ve said, but for *additional* problems with this:

To me, this is terrifying. Major use-cases presented on this page:

  * photo editing / post-processing
  * branding
  * infographics

Photo editing and post-processing seems like the “least harmful” version of this. Doing moderate color-space tweaks or image extensions based on the images themselves seems like a “relatively not-evil” activity and will likely make a lot of artwork a bit nicer. The same technology will probably also be able to be used to upscale photos taken on Pixel cameras, which might be nice. MOSTLY. It’ll also call into question any super-duper-upscaled visuals when used as evidence for court and the “accuracy of photos as facts” - see the fake stuff Samsung did with the moon; but far, far more ubiquitous.

However, Branding and Infographics are where I have concerns.

Branding - it’s AI art, so it can’t be copyrighted, or are we just going to forget that?

—

Infographics, though. We know that AI frequently hallucinates - and even hallucinates citations themselves, so … how can we generated infographics if they’re magicking into existence the stats used in the infographics themselves?!

Copyright is done, for better or worse. Up until very recently, many if not most HN'ers would have considered that a GOOD thing.

Capitalism, at work. Wherever there is a cost, there will be attempts made at cost efficiency. Google understands that hiring designers or artists is expensive, and they want to offer a cheaper, more effective alternative so that they can capture the market.

In a coffee shop this morning I saw a lady drawing tulips with a paper and pencil. It was beautiful, and I let her know... But as I walked away I felt sad that I don't feel that when browsing online anymore- because I remember how impressive it used to feel to see an epic render, or an oil painting, etc... I've been turned cynical.

On the flip side, it can be good for the environment. Instead of spending tons of resources burning a car or doing a bunch of setup to get a shot, we can prompt it using relatively fewer energy resources.

(Shrug) If you expect to coast through an uneventful, unchallenging career, neither art nor technology are going to be great options for you. Learn to mine coal or something, I guess.

Or... put your hands on the most amazing art tools since the Renaissance and go make something awesome.

No one using these tools will produce anything even a tenth as impressive as what was born out of the Renaissance, since their efforts were born of mastery, understanding, patience, a keen eye, and a love of nature and life. One who outsources their creativity and thinking to a machine will produce meaningless 'art' as empty as the shrinking contours of their mind as it withers away from non-use. Our world is not want for more quantity as we already drown in excess, and the quality and meaning inherit in masterful works of art born out of ones own hands will one day once again find their way to the center of our consciousness, as the world learns again that the value of art lies not solely in its appearances, but in its revelation of the human soul by means of Beauty, by which a human endeavors by great effort and skill to impart some aspect of their fleeting glimpse of the divine and sacred nature of being, by which our being here now as people of this earth and time consists of, which binds us all, now and through our history and our future.

upskill or gtfo.

Is this a personal opinion, your opinion as a Google employee or Google's position on the matter?

Have you cleared this statement with comms/PR?

Do you want OP to 'get the fuck out' if they don't upskill or is this a general statement related to artists?

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