For anyone interested in starting their own Godot journey, it’s hard to go wrong with Heartbeast. He just posted a new video this week to get a game done _today_!
I wonder if there's even a point in learning game programming today, when the whole industry is about to be changed.
Why bother with laborious programming and traditional modeling and rendering techniques, when AI can generate playable photo realistic worlds in seconds based on prompts by the player itself?
Tech like Google's Genie is still primitive in comparison, but we're a few short generations away from surpassing what can be done with traditional game programming.
Personalized media and interactive experiences are just around the corner, which is both scary and exciting.
>Why bother with laborious programming and traditional modeling and rendering techniques, when AI can generate playable photo realistic worlds in seconds based on prompts by the player itself?
Because art - of which game development is a subset - is a form of creative expression, intended for humans to communicate to other humans. Note that this is a separate dimension to the purely technical aspect of content creation, which AI is increasingly capable of.
AI doesn't create art, it generates product. If your only view of programming is labor to generate product, then yes, maybe you should quit, because it's likely AI will replace you. But if you consider programming, asset creation, design etc as means of creative expression, then AI is unacceptable, because it can only express generalities. None of those games are going to be fun, engaging, thought provoking or expressive. You're never going to get the unique fingerprint of the author. That such games may be technically complete and minimally viable products is besides the point. It's just extruded entertainment product.
Human creative expression being suboptimal and maladaptive in a world where all culture is generated by machines only makes it more necessary.
> None of those games are going to be fun, engaging, thought provoking or expressive.
I think you're vastly overestimating what entertainment means for most people, and underestimating the capabilities of AI today, and in the very near future.
People spend countless hours in idle clickers, chance games, and many other "simple" time wasters. Entertainment doesn't have to be thought provoking.
Though what makes you think AI couldn't craft such experiences as well? Can't it already come up with thought provoking stories today?
FWIW, I used to think like you a ~year ago. Art is art, AI can't replace artists, etc. And to some extent I still think that will be true. There will always be a demand for human-created art and products.
But for the vast majority of people, the ability to say what they want to experience, and be able to control all aspects of that experience, will be much more engaging and personal than anything another human could ever create.
>FWIW, I used to think like you a ~year ago. Art is art, AI can't replace artists, etc.
On the contrary, I think AI can and will replace artists, and the ruthless, cynical exploitation of artists and commoditization of talent by companies using AI is what bothers me. I can even concede that AI generated art can be considered art (as generative art is already established as such) - I just don't think the wholesale replacement of human creative effort with AI results in an equivalent exchange of value. It's fine for the low-effort stuff that never meant anything to anyone beyond being a means to making a quick buck, but that isn't what all creative effort should be. Not everything is cookie clickers and time wasters.
I mean, look at the debacle around the Willy Wonka "Experience" in Glasgow. That was mostly generated by AI. That's the future of everything.
>But for the vast majority of people, the ability to say what they want to experience, and be able to control all aspects of that experience, will be much more engaging and personal than anything another human could ever create.
You can't control all aspects of that experience with AI, that isn't how it works. The only way you can do that is by actually doing that, and that requires effort, and study, and hiring people. The end result of AI can't be personal, because AI can only work with what already exists within its training set. And anyone with the same model and settings can create exactly the same thing, which renders any intent on the part of the human being meaningless with regards to the end result.
> You can't control all aspects of that experience with AI, that isn't how it works.
Huh? You can already do that with text and static images _today_. Doing that for video is almost here, and long-form entertainment will be next.
> The end result of AI can't be personal, because AI can only work with what already exists within its training set.
That's not true, even today. Techniques like RAG and very large context sizes can augment the training data with anything the user wants.
The end result can indeed be very personal. Imagine interacting as yourself (so not a role or character) with your deceased relatives, favorite celebrities, romantic interests, etc. They will refer to you by name, and know detailed information about you. No video game programmer and artist can craft such experiences for you, let alone in the time it takes you to think about it and communicate it to the AI.
> Imagine interacting as yourself (so not a role or character) with your deceased relatives, favorite celebrities, romantic interests, etc. They will refer to you by name, and know detailed information about you.
Is an AI generated facsimile of my dead relatives supposed to mean something to me? It's not a person. It's a thing generated from what I can only assume is their publicly accessible social media data and probabilistic conjecture, taken without their consent.
Celebrities? Again, it isn't them. AI generated Einstein or James Cagney can't offer up any real insight, because they can't know anything not already in their data set that isn't randomly generated. It's all superficial.
Romantic interests? I mean, sure, you could strap on vr googles and a fleshlight and fuck the AI generated facsimile of your crush but it isn't the same. It's just closing your eyes and beating off with extra steps, and probably a subscription.
I think you're confused about the difference between "personalized" and "personal" here.
> No video game programmer and artist can craft such experiences for you, let alone in the time it takes you to think about it and communicate it to the AI.
Of course they could, people already do it, it's called identity theft. There is nothing an AI could do that human beings couldn't do given time, because AI works from human-generated data. That AI could do it faster is a bit of a red herring, since we're talking about quality of experience, not speed of turnaround.
I can tell you're engaged with the fantasy and it isn't likely that we're going to find common ground here. But I'm looking at what AI is already being used for and all of it - all of it is worse than the human-created content it replaces.
Two things to say here. First, an AI might be great for some things but we are a very long way from AI having an artistic vision, let alone understand why games are fun, how to create new mechanics, innovate, and come up with a unique art style.
Second, you assume players know what they want to play so they can prompt it. You also assume this in a broader sense on all "personalized content". I think that the value of totally AI created media is completely unproven - if you only get what you can describe, it's going to a boring time. We like content envisioned by other people.
For an AI to actually create a meaningful, full length game, movie or series - we might be decades away if this is even possible without AGI.
Disagree, it might be 2 years away. You can give a prompt to a game dev team and they'll create a unique art style game that you like, so your argument that users don't know what they want is useless.
ChatGPT came out a bit more than 1 year. Now we have 60 second highly realistic and creative videos generated. Movies aren't that far out. Games aren't either.
There is no way we are two years away from an AI creating a meaningful movie or videogame without humans being part of this process.
Sora is very cool and definitely shows progress but it is still far from what's needed for a story where people interact with each other or the environment.
You sound like the Dota o
player that was beaten by AI in 1v1, but claimed that AI will never beat him in 5v5 bcs in his eyes, team play requires a sophistication that he can't see AI to ever perform. Of course he's wrong.
It was incredibly hard to think an AI would beat someone in 1v1. Yet, they did it. There's no reason to believe an AI won't beat them in 5v5, even though the problem seemes orthogonal to the problem of 1v1.
60 seconds is mind blowing during just 2 years. Progress will accelerate, 2 or 4 years might be enough to fill the remaining gap.
That's fair, and you're entitled to your opinion as well. :)
I will just say that 5 years ago the state of AI[1] was quite primitive compared to today, and 10 years ago modern advancements were practically unthinkable. There is no sign of progress slowing down, and we can assume that it will only accelerate. So I suspect that 5 years from now it will be even more entrenched in and transformative to our lives, in ways we haven't imagined yet.
https://youtu.be/PjN9w_egTeA?si=evG941ZWrwNYi4X0