while the modern day games industry has no shortage of souless cashgrabs, forcing AI art into them will undoubtably be one of the worst ones, ai art is souless, harmful and bereft of charm and creativity. it is, with no hyperbole, the worst thing that could happen to this industry, even worse, i might say than a full on crash. it hurts artists, by depriving talented people out of a hard earned job, it stifles creativity for reasons that should be very readily apparent and it hurts the player, as the product we get will be a husk of creativity, a vessel that just exists to be flashy and get our money, instead of capturing our hearts and imagination. companies are already beginning this decent into soulessness, the new microsoft game "high on life" has been very open about using ai art in its environmental details, mainly posters, epic game's fornite has dabbled into AI generated music for its events and on places like steam we have entire games that are now AI generated, though with the quality of your average steam game, it may admittedly be hard to tell just which one it is. these games can never reach the highs of any of the games we have from the past, an ai can never write a better story than 428, never make music better than the likes of kota hoshino and it can never make characters more memorable than the casts of games like nier and amnesia, an ai story will never influance your life, never make you cry and they won't stick with you for months and years, without that human touch it will never be special.
i have always been against this form of generation, even in the games we have now things such as procedural generation just don't interest me, even if the game is good, i find these systems often just lack something special that makes me come back to the games i do love, i feel like an ai developed system would be much of the same, a catalyst for good gameplay, perhaps, but nothing more than that, a level generated by an AI will never have the memorability of the likes of the spencer mansion or the ecliptic express, at best it'll have the memorability of your average hades map, and even with my time in that game, i could not tell you a single battle room by memory. the same can be said for character designs, very few AI art images i have seen have really stuck out to me, you'd never want a figure of an ai made character, because so many look the same.
one of the other major issues with this is the effect this will put genuinely talented artists out of work, this industry will costcut in any way they can at the expense of the workers, and concept artists will be one of the first ones to be put out of work when companies can just use AI for this, this would be devistating both for those workers, who absoltely deserve better, as well as for us, as the art that will come out of it will be souless garbage, no creativity, no heart, no charm, just prompts and stolen styles. art. i am afraid for the future of this industry under systems of AI, that all the creativity i love in bigger proects will die out in favour of this cheap, derivitive garbage, that it will be the worst of our current landscape, but on a larger scale and impossible to avoid outside of smaller indie projects, indie projects that even now must be supported if creativity in this industry has any chance of being saved. AI and capitalism cannot co-exist, and while, ideally, we would do away with capitalism, getting rid of AI may be the best we can do, until laws are strong enough to protest artists and their work, AI should never be used in any form on these games, weather its art, voicework or music, the projets deserve better and so do we, don't let the cryptobros tell you otherwise.
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