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Discussion about using AI in game dev

A topic by sassion created 7 days ago Views: 263 Replies: 19

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Hello ,

Why do most people think that using AI is just a simple thing : just write a prompt, and everything will appear like magic

There's a whole workflow when using AI, especially to generate assets; it makes things easier, but on the other side, you have to understand and learn its mechanics.

Also, to make an AI useful, it is necessary that you learn and master the principles of game development.

I want to know your feedback about using AI: Does it devalue the game development process or the inverse ?

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TheMetalCarrotDev7 days ago(+2)

I feel that there's a place for AI generated content, even if I agree with the transparency of disclosing about it.

I've actually played a digital card game or two that wouldn't have been the same without AI assets.

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sassion7 days ago(+1)

I agree with you; the hand corrections made on the generated AI assets can sometimes be better than making an asset from scratch

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redonihunter7 days ago(+2)

Why do most people think that using AI is just a simple thing

Because people want simple answers to comlex things. AI bad is a simple answer. And devalueing the work spent on an ai image is quickly done by claiming it is simple. I tried once for fun. I failed, or rather I saw my limitations. If I were to make a game I probably would use a 3d or 2d engine or use renders - and still no artists would get commissions...

Sure, if you know what you are doing, creating images is a hell a lot faster than digitally creating them with templates in your sophisticated image creation software and is hell a lot faster than painting it on paper or canvas.

And even if you know nothing of the other ways, using an ai tool will give some output. And good luck with consistency, if you have a character.

Those people probably also think that taking a photo is a simple thing. After all, there is no such thing as professional photographers, now that everyone has a high resolution camera in their pockets all the time. ;-)

It is just a different skill set. I guess a skilled photographer and editor would qualify for many things a good ai operator would need to know: spot and select the good ones.

about using AI: Does it devalue the game development process or the inverse ?

It devalues some games. But it heavily depends. Some games get value from AI. Some even get existence, because they would not have been possible without it. But that the most popular games rarely feature games with ai is not a coincicence or because of ai hate. I think it also correlates with general budget and professionalism. So, hobby games tend to have more ai and professional games less. On the artwork side at least.

As for the development process itself... how do you compare the value in that? If it gets you quick results and keeps you going, that is value. If it bores you or you are frustrated because you can't get a consistent main character with ai, that's bad and no value. You might learn new skills, which sounds like value. But you might focus on skills that do not advance your game development, which sounds like less value.

With game development in particular, there is the thing with game engines. Does it give value to the game development process, if you use an engine, instead of using basic os library calls?

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hechelion7 days ago (1 edit) (+3)

You can't compare the amount of work needed by an indie developer between creating content by hand and using a prompt, they are not comparable, one is vastly simpler than the other.

No matter how much you want to justify your workflow, it is much, much simpler than doing it without AI, if it weren't this way, you wouldn't even be considering it.

You have people who don't care how you made your game and they don't care if you used AI or not. They only care about the result and a song or a nice image created by AI will be more eye-catching than what you can do in a traditional way.

But there are other people who don't want to consume products created with the help of AI.

If you want to use AI, use it, you know better than anyone what is best for you in the process of creating your game, but respect your consumers by being honest, inform them if you used AI and let them decide if they want to consume that type of product or not.

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redonihunter7 days ago(+2)

they are not comparable, one is vastly simpler than the other.

Yes. A skilled artist can create a satisfying line art within a minute with only paper and a pen. It is like writing in pictures, once you have that skill. I would call that simple.

You do can compare those things, but the scale of simplicity does not apply.

An analogy would be to compare taking a photo of a scene vs painting it with oil or water colors on canvas. The required skill is different. And now people have cameras available all the time, which need very little skill with the technology to get a photo at all.

So, to get a result with a prompt, that is easy. Just hit enter after writing. To get the result you wanted with a prompt, is vastly more complicated and often involves hand editing the result and sifting through hundreds of outputs - not unlike taking photos.

And I want to enter a third option into the ring. Procedural rendering. That's pretty advanced these days, but not really complicated, once the engine is there. You just adjust some sliders or hit random and there's your reuseable character. Even ready to use in real time. Simple, ain't it.

The issue I have with AI images is, that they look boring. It is all the same and most of it is thus immediatly recogniseable. Ironically it takes skill to use AI images effectively. Just not the skill to draw by hand.

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Eldwood4 days ago(+1)

AI feeds on hand-created art in the most literal sense. Without hand-created art to train on, there would be no AI art.

The problem with most AI models is that they are obviously infringing on copyright by being trained on unlicensed copyrighted materials. This is likely to bite the companies that produce these models, and those that use these models, in the ass in the near future.

I have no problem with AI algorithms so long as you train them exclusively on your own art. I have a problem with copyright theft, where people take other people's art, remix it through an AI algorithm, and claim to own the copyright on the result.

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redonihunter4 days ago(+3)

Without hand-created art to train on, there would be no AI art.

One particular method would not exist. There was AI art before, as AI is a very poor choice of words, as it would include all sorts of machine generated things.

If you would imagine a world where training a model by human made art would be illegal, there are still other ways to make a machine create images. So, there would be "AI art", just not the thing we currently understand by that word.

they are obviously infringing

It is not obvious. If it were, it would be forbidden from day one, everywhere.

When an art student looks at art works and gets inspiration, even imitates techniques and then creates a new work, how can that artist claim copyright. The basis of that work was obviously infringed from other works, just remixed and with some added random bits to create something new.

The only difference is, that the remixing was done inside a human mind.

Maybe read this one here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work to understand that it is anything but obvious. Also, copyright ist the right to copy. An AI work that used training data is not a copy.

You can't copyright the knowledge how things look. If you teach a black box how things look and it has the ability to understand a prompt and use that knowledge to create something, that poses a lot of interesting questions with a lot of non obvious and probably conflicting answers.

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Magicsofa4 days ago(+2)

It is not obvious. If it were, it would be forbidden from day one, everywhere.

You are putting way too much faith in governing bodies. In reality, governments often need significant pressure before ruling on something "obvious"

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redonihunter4 days ago(+1)

Oh, I did mean that literal. It just is not obvious how to handle llm systems and their capabilities. It is a new concept. Anyone claiming it is obivous just has their own opinion and tries to convince other people with non arguments. It is a type of fallacy. Propably this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

But we need real arguments and reasoning to deal with llm in the future. The tech won't go away. And arguments of an ethical nature can be overcome and what then? Arguments that machines take human jobs? Those never worked.

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Eldwood4 days ago (2 edits) (+1)

There is a clear legal difference between human brains and computers. There has to be in order for copyright to work, because every time I consume a copyrighted work, I am creating a copy in my brain. I can legally read a short poem and have a perfect copy of that in my brain. If I later write down the poem that's now in my brain, that's when I'm breaking copyright - not before.

There is a legal technique called clean-room design to create a functional clone of something without breaking copyright law. It involves two teams of engineers working together. The first team examines the original and writes a specification. The second team creates the clone according to the specification without looking at the original. In order for this technique to work, the following all have to be true:

It is legal for the first team to examine the original.
Examining the original taints the first team. Because they now carry around a copy of the original in their brain, any clone they create will now legally be a derivative work.
The specification that the first team creates is not itself tainted.

Any argument that it should be legal to do something on a computer if it's legal to do the same thing in a human brain is either an argument against copyright itself or an argument in favor of government thought control. I can sort of get behind the former, but our governments and courts have decided differently. The latter is completely unconscionable.

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redonihunter3 days ago(+1)

My argument was, that is was not obvious.

And your clean room design has also issues that are not obvious. You might not break "copyright" under certain circumstances, but you will break trademarks and other legal barriers, like patents. Also, this is just to circumvent having used a "copy". Which too would be circumvented by using a llm.

So how would a clean room aproach look like for an image or a work of art? Oh, and no, you do not break copyright by writing down a poem you remembered. You break copyright by publishing it, because you distribute a "copy" and you did not have the "right to copy". But this interpretation is different world wide.

Using a work to create another work without permission is not a copyright breach, unless you use exact portions of that work. It might be a licensing issue or other legal stuff. But not copyright. That clean room approach was for example used to recreate functionality of software code, because, of course, afterwards there were accusations that portions of the code were used.

So in other words: as I said, you can't copyright the knowledge how something looks. Or what it does in case of software. You might give a patent if you have a broken patent law.

Aso a llm basically uses the hash value of a work. Some earlier version might have had portions of original works inside the database, but when you read about the complaints against those systems it was about the content of those databases and decidedly not the output of the llm.

I stand by my opinion. It is not obvious how to handle llm generative ai systems. Neither legally, nor in society, nor in art. Or games. The emerging consens among players seems to be, to prefer human made art. The emerging consens among software developers seems to be, yeah, another tool to play with that can churn out templates in a hurry and find semantical errors in a programming language.

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Magicsofa4 days ago(+2)

The workload is the least problematic aspect of AI. Although, I do think this could become a major problem... what if we get to a point where you don't need to learn much about principles of game development? I agree that current technology isn't there yet, but if eventually you can generate entire games using a few prompts, then your "it still takes effort" angle will disappear. You will succumb to your own justification as your potential customers decide more and more to simply generate their own game instead...

Anyway, the main issues right now, at least in my opinion, are leeching off other people's work, and depletion of real-world resources. And although the reduced workload isn't my first line of attack, it does still bother me a little bit. It comes off as lazy. I don't agree with you that "you have to understand and learn its mechanics." Unless you can program your own AI, you don't understand the mechanics. All you understand is that if you type in something different, you'll get a different result. It's like saying that someone who knows how to hit the gas and break pedals and turn the steering wheel, understands the mechanics of a vehicle. But all they actually need to understand is the interface.

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redonihunter4 days ago(+2)

the main issues right now, at least in my opinion, are leeching off other people's work

How are your thoughts about using a game engine?

The leeching is only seen negative because some artists do not want to have their art be teaching material. Yet in sofware and especially game development, basing your work on other people's work is a fundamental principle. Actually it would not be possible for most developers to create something like a game, without relying on previous works, libaries and full blown game engines. Often even the game principle itself is copied.

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Anton4 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Usually, teachers consent to teach, and get paid for their work. Here, you have a company building a software using source material it has not paid for and selling it to you.
Theses AI tools aren’t individuals who are learning, they are products developped by some of the biggest companies in the world.
In order to build the software in question, companies needs a country level of energy (and water). I don’t like unity and epic, but last I check, they didn’t directly subsidized coal plants, unlike the ai companies https://archive.is/NXe3D
Making games using those tools devalue the craft of making games on top of justifying bad actors against the climate crisis.

I understand the drive for using thoses tools, they seem cheap to use, but the costs is just deferred and we will all be paying it. Some of us have already started paying that cost and it feel sour when people are denying the obvious harms they already cause and the potential for future disaster they represent.

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redonihunter3 days ago(+1)

Here, you have a company building a software using source material it has not paid for and selling it to you.

So your argument would fall flat against all models that use licensed source material. And against ai material that was not purchased. You know you can download a model and create stuff on your home pc? I tried it once. That consumes less power than me playing a game.

In order to build the software in question, companies needs a country level of energy (and water)

Uhm. Nope. What really needs country level of energy is crypto currency. Datacenters just meet the demand of all the internet and stuff. Around 2% of global energy was used on that even before AI. Hating on datacenter energy consumption also means, you should not use google maps to navigate. Or browse on Itch, for that matter. Or watching Netflix and Co.

I really wonder why people now use all these arguments against the evil ai, but I never noticed the same outcry against crypto. And crypto is many times worse in that regard.

Anyway, depending on the use case, a search query to an ai system might even be more efficient than using the same quere several times on a normal internet search till you find what you are looking for. And if it would be more costly but no one would pay for it, it will dwindle down.

But we are actually speaking about ai in games, are we not. Do you think the devs struggling with budget use a lot of money on AI art? If they had that kind of money, they could easily pay real artists. You can download an ai system and use it on your own pc. Not all those systems are from the evil big tech companies. Some are open source.

Making games using those tools devalue the craft of making games

So my question to you too:

How are your thoughts about using a game engine?

Juding from your post, you might consider using a game engine as devaluing the craft. There be amateurs churning out a "game" by clicking some stuff together and call themselves developers, after all.

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Anton2 days ago

Ah yes the local data set my bad you are right, good job

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Magicsofa3 days ago

I don't see what is relevant about using resources made by others, with permission of course. I even pay for them sometimes. But artists or coders or anyone else who has had their work flushed down a digital toilet have -zero- chance of getting paid, or even recognized. The reason is that what comes out the other side is akin to a sewer pipe dumping the whole mix as one homogenized stew.

Now if people want to train on their own datasets that's fine. To be honest, I feel that this might be a self-correcting problem... or perhaps, not a problem in the first place. There's a lot of talk about how "this changes everything", but so far nothing really innovative has come out of it. Will it ever?

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Louis Dubois3 days ago(+2)

I think everyone is really bored about the constant debate about AI or not AI.

But just consider that you may not be a full AI user or a full-manual-traditional or digital-natural-painting user.

You may use all available tools that exist in the moment you live, and mix it all together, using one at a certain step of creation, others later. That's what most people will be doing in a few years (others will stay with what they use of course).

You can start by an AI image, then paint over it, recycle it again through AI, then return to paint on it.
You can even use the part of the datasets that have to do with public domain classical styles.
You can also use AIs that are ethical in all its stages as Microsoft's Bing.
Or Mitsue-diffusion that only uses CC0 or Public Domain, donations, etc.
And you can train your own styles.
Or create them from your own images, colors, combinations of your works.

You can do all that.
Then what are you? What will be the majority of creators in let's say 5 years? They will be AI users to you, or won't be artists? They may be using AI + all their other skills together. Then what sense will have to separate or tag them?

On the other side, for assets, I am all agreeing with that, as there is always a bunch of people sending bad stuff flooding everything. That should have its limits.
But on a final product, a game, I think there is no sense in that.

I think the focus should be in no-flooding, and not in no-AI.

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redonihunter3 days ago(+3)

Well said. Especially software developers adopted the tech. And if you use Photoshop to create digital art, they do not only have procedural filters and effects, they also have generative llm stuff at work. I do not know how those models were created, but a thing like generative fill to enlarge the background around an object or when cutting out an object, is just too good a tool to ignore.

I wonder how "paper & canvas" artists think about digital artists. You can do things with gradient color schemes and a buncha digital effects that are very hard to do with actual paint on a physical object. Same for sketching and overlays and filling out shapes with color. Or a thing like undo.

Sure, using gen ai lowers the entry skill bar a lot. But if you lack the skills to edit the ai output, you have a bit of a problem.

I guess it is the worst with assets. Maybe that is the reason why there are so many ai assets. Creating a consistent character is hard with ai. Creating a standalone background or an icon is quite easy in comparison.

Currently, most AI games did not impress me much. The usage of AI (art) would rather degrade the game, than enhance it. But those games probably would not have been made at all, without AI. So, whatever, as there are a lot of non AI games that did not impress me too.

As for declarations, I would welcome a declaration about human art and other things as well: was it done by underpaid, overworked, exploited artists or even children in a sweat shop? Made with AI is a bit short sighted, as there are a lot of different AI. Was there not this anectode about the British wanting to have those cheap stuff that was made in Germany in the 19th century be declared as well to avoid it? Funny how that turned out.

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