AI has no good purpose. It exists only to allow the greedy to kill otherwise good jobs. It does not matter if they succeed or not. Them trying is the main problem.

Suffice it to say, I am even less likely to play indie games now, knowing that any one of them might be an accomplice. Despite my very low expectations, I still gave every Unity and Unreal game a chance, but AI is simply unacceptable. Indies had the chance to be social, to value more than money, to form a team of passionate workers, but even they have failed.

I don't feel threatened by AI anything.

Not too long ago I tried out this starryAI website. The idea is that you enter some text -- my son told me to enter "Cat dressed up like James Bond" --  and the AI came up with this . . .

Gamewise, I even found text-adventure-like AI Dungeon to be ultimately disappointing. Sure, the ability to type in anything and have the AI move the plot forward based on your input is a very cool concept. But there were many times where the AI failed miserably -- like forgetting character's names two sentences later or suddenly mentioning a skyscraper in an ancient fantasy world.

And this is all besides the fact that AI Dungeon and similar programs cost a LOT to even keep running and you have to be online for them to work. 

Like alicecomma implied , I don't even see AI being very good for concept art -- or concept story, for that matter.

Ultimately, human-created content is going to prevail.

A lot of good points. I will mention though: giving examples of AI making 'bad art' doesn't mean it's not production ready.

DALL-E/Midjourney has been available to the public for 1 month and there are already indie games being made entirely from its output:

https://twitter.com/Nao_u_/status/1558595111147425792

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/x00s3h/so_i_think_its_a_complete_myth_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/wkk6e0/finally_got_some_aigenerate...

I would not make assumptions about what this tech can/cannot do. Blanket assumptions like "well it wont be able to do 3D", "well it can't animate" are being challenged literally 4 weeks after release lol

But I think everyone should be aware of where the envelope is being pushed.

I was personally pretty taken aback by these two (and for fun note the weird signature it reproduced in the first one):

I can spot a lot of 'mistakes' but they're all kinda in the realm of human-like mistakes (repeat tea cups, strange hair physics, strange eye angle etc).

But when you see these- you gotta remember: the little quirks of the style were all made by human artists, not 'thought up' by AI. With the top image, I really wanted to know which artists it learned the cloth shading from! But I can't. No sources/no trace of who or where it learned from. Really disappointing.

I'm getting pretty rambly but I think this is really a crux issue:

Derivative work has generally been fine in art because human artists are fairly transparent and supportive of other artists.

"Wow, I love your landscapes. Who are you inspired by?" is something you can ask a human artist, and likely get a response. This keeps art very transparent. I think what's so bothersome about AI art is that it produces end products (paintings) but nothing else. To me, visual art is much more than just a JPEG you look at. But maybe to other people it's just that? Idk

"A lot of good points. I will mention though: giving examples of AI making 'bad art' doesn't mean it's not production ready."

I think of visual elements in my game as illustrations. I think of a Banksy as art. I was referring to AI not understanding the human condition and the propaganda needed to reach the ignorant and apathetic.

I like the AI games you posted. I'm glad people can be independent. I've been on the planet for decades and have found no one to collaborate with. What do you think about generated music?

I have some issues with these strawmen arguments.

"But what if you sell it? What if you don't credit them at all? What if you had a machine make the collages? What if you made 1000 collages per minute? What if one of those collages became wildly popular, and sold for more than their 10 salaries combined?"

Comparing this to music for a moment, we can ask the same thing of sampling. If I like an artist that samples work, am I obliged to go explore the original work? Well, the answer imo falls into how much is changed from the original work. Paying respects to the original is good practice, sure, and is something that every fan of sampling should do, but, to use a real-world example, liking the glitch-trance of Everywhere at the End of Time doesn't mean that I need to start developing an affinity for 40s contemporary ballroom jazz.

If the piece is different enough for the original to warrant existing, and yet isn't presented as an entirely original work (read: it's honest about being derived from other works and created through the heavy usage of some program), I'm not going to be bitter.

And as far as the "throw shit at a wall until it sticks" argument goes, yeah, that pisses me off, but that's more of a problem in that attention is warranted as monetary gain in today's information economy moreso than a fault of AI. To use another example, if all those stupid toy/Elsagate channels on Youtube become fully automated, I'm not going to suddenly be pissed that they're not made by humans, I'm going to be pissed that Youtube let their system get so lazy and predictable that it can be that easily gamed. "Don't hate the player, hate the game."

"AAA studios can use AI art too, yeah? I agree that saving indies money is nice, but it's only achieved through cutting indie artists out of the gamedev space."

Yeah. Indies and AAA have the same tools to produce similar products. That's what "level the playing field" means.

And it doesn't really cut indies out of gamedev space. In fact, there are VNs I've seen on here that use AI art to supplement character portraits. As much as I dislike them personally, I can't fault the method since its just someone using a tool to supplement for their lack of specialized skill elsewhere. It's the exact same thing as someone using a pre-made game engine instead of coding their own.

That strawman argument isn't even true when we look at outliers that only appear in the AAA scene. Very few indie games, if any, have access to something as robust as the Fox Engine, or character designs as recognizable as Nomura's (though the latter can be replicated). And that's to say nothing of the marketing budgets that AAA has access towards! AI doesn't take these types of resources away from AAA. So really, it's not changing the status quo because AAA still has those types of technological advantages and more.

I'd like to end by highlighting that AI derives from patterns that exist, and tries to derive from what it's learned. A human can still compete in that regard so long as it's art has something to stand out. I have zero doubts that(, say,) Temmie Chang's art could be replicated by an AI (given three years), but the pieces would still ultimately be recognized as "Temmie Chang," which ends up advertising her work so long as she would be active enough to remain in public consciousness otherwise. The secret to survive in a post-AI marketplace would be the same as our scene now with several thousands of humans each trying their own style - being distinguished enough in a work that's happenstance popular would proliferate the artist, human or not, above the rest of the white noise of competition.

If you want an artist you can discuss a project with, who will respond to your concerns, make relevant contributions and produce something close to exactly what you need, hire a human.

If you want semi-random stuff, go with the AI.

If you're an artist trying to get by making semi-random art and hoping someone will buy it, time to look at refining your business model and asking what your artistic contribution really is...

Art isn't about showing you what's there - phototgraphy has taken that over - it's now about showing you what could be there and what should be there.  Art is about the communication of complex concepts.  Sure you can take a bunch of random stuff and try to reverse engineer a meaning into it - humans a pretty good at that, but it's about as artistic as reading goat entrails.  A good artist should understand at least some of the meaning they are putting into their work and be able to explain that, at least partially, to other people (although for really great art, they should be able to get that communicated meaning from the image).

Anyone tried suing the folks that make/run these AIs for stylistic for copyright infringement, or fraud?  Unless clearly indicated otherwise, an image in the style of one of the old masters is a forgery...