I owe a lot to AI for getting my start in game dev. A lot of the concerns raised here are great points that need to be taken seriously (danger of flooding the platform, exploitation of artist labor without compensation), but overall I am very excited for what AI will open up for game design, especially on a platform like Itch.
The games I’ve made so far have been very specific explorations of the strangeness of AI-generated content, and so in some ways they are niche use cases, but I do feel the technology is already at a point where it can be a huge boost to many solo developers. Especially for prototyping and game jams, it is extremely useful. If the alternative is stock assets, AI-generated assets made from scratch will clearly lead to more interesting experiences.
Yes, a platform flooded with AI-generated asset packs would not be great. But I honestly don’t think that is the direction we’re moving in, because the tools are evolving fast enough that people are already generating their own custom assets based on their exact needs (that’s the whole point of this tech, right?). There will still be a market for high quality, carefully crafted assets, but the value of lower quality assets will literally fall to zero and (hopefully) fade away.
Kyle Kukshtel (designer of CANTATA) wrote a post on this a little while ago. I completely agree with his main point, that the only jobs AI will be taking away are the lowest level ones that were already made miserable by commodification.
The other concern, the exploitation of artist labor, is more serious, but there are reasons to think the tech is in the process of adopting a fairer model for the future. I realize hoping that tech would ever choose the ‘fairer’ path probably sounds laughably naïve, but there are signs the public (and legal) pressure on this subject is having an impact (StableDiffusion making it harder to prompt artist names to mimic style is one). There are also ways that artists might soon be more directly compensated through generation. PixelVibe, a tool specifically for game dev that just launched (I just tried it out for their game jam last week), has said they are looking to work directly with artists to build specific models on their site.
If the tech does move in this direction, and if the compensation models are at least a little more generous than say Spotify, then AI could truly be a net positive for everyone. And I am definitely excited to see all the new voices that it will empower to make games here.