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(1 edit) (+6)

i'm glad i'll finally be able to filter all this annoying junk out of asset search results-- but frankly, i do wish itch would just ban AI entirely. it is harmful to the planet, it's harmful to artists, it's harmful to the internet as a whole (ask wikipedia editors how they feel about it) and even if you don't really care about artists, the planet, or the continued availability of trustworthy information on the internet, it's currently in kind of a legal grey area in terms of what you can and can't sell. gamedevs using it really do so at their own peril.

(+3)

It can be used and abused like any tool. Personally, I wouldn't be able to make the slice-of-life RPG I'm working on right now without AI-generated art. I don't have the artistic experience to make the assets I need myself, I don't have the money to hire artists (who thus aren't missing out on work anyway), and I doubt there's free art assets that fit what I need for the game. If my game miraculously takes off, I'd love nothing more than start a Kickstarter to raise money to hire artists who could replicate the ingame art from Midjourney, but as it is, on a student budget and making a freeware game, it's a pretty big ask to hire professionals to do the art for me.

tl;dr, it's a bit black-and-white to claim AI hurts artists when I literally couldn't have made the game I've dreamt of making for a long time without the assistance of AI. Again, all AI generators are tools that can be used or abused, they're not inherently good or bad.

I really liked Austin McConnell's take after he received a lot of criticism for using AI-generated art and voices in a video he made.

Also feel it's grasping at straws to use AI-generated articles on WP as an argument against AI-generated assets in games.

(+2)

Sure you could. You could draw some crap art, plenty of fucking fantastic RPGs have taken this approach in the past and it didn’t hinder them at all. Working with and around your limitations is part of the craft.

I can only speak for myself, but I find projects with visuals that have poor technical quality significantly more impressive than ones with AI art–regardless of how you feel about the financial aspect, in the former case it’s immediately clear that the creator actually gave enough of a shit to try.

(2 edits)

Tried replying directly to Hughes and got an error message for some reason.

Fair enough. I'm considering trying my hand at tracing photos of the places I'm taking photos of and seeing if I can make backgrounds that way (unless I just slap filters on the photos and call it a day), but drawing people? I think that's too high a hurdle for me, thank you. Also there's the slight issue that I want my game to actually be done at some point. So far I've written 20 000 words (or roughly 44 pages) of dialogue and narration and I've only covered a fraction of the scenes I'm planning to make. If/when the game is done, it'll probably be novel-length in terms of narration/dialogue. Then there's all the time to spend coding, testing, bug fixing, taking photos of locations, etc. Learning to draw people on top of that sounds unrealistic, to say the least.

Sure, you could say people should work around their limitations, but I'd rather my game looks good. And I mean, I'll also be sourcing my music from others, probably a combination of free and licensed works, yet I don't think anyone is going to criticize me for not trying to make my own music, you know?  To be frank, I don't understand why the moment we talk of AI, suddenly there's this expectation that creators are supposed to do everything ourselves, or gatekeep creativity by saying it has to be done a certain way, otherwise it shouldn't be done at all.

Also, see the vid by Austin that I linked to.