I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:
“AI” has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?
Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.
All that cool magic wand and fancy ass filter shit in photoshop? Those are increasingly “AI” tools that will analyze the image and extrapolate what should or should not be “behind” something and so forth.
Coding? if you AREN’T using a tool to generate stubs and even tests at this point then you are wasting your own time.
Audio? Again, the same “AI” filters already exist. Same with tools to detect pauses or to split up dialogue and so forth.
The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and “events” in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.
Same with art and even CGI. You aren’t going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren’t going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.
And… same with writing. Ask ChatGPT to write your screenplay? It is going to be bad. Use the proper prompts to get the “voice” of a character right or to generate some background dialogue that you won’t even correctly hear because the mics are focused on Meg Ryan faking an orgasm? Suddenly you have a better “product” than everyone else who just tells extras to wing it or putty around. Same with having a Black Scottish Chick sound like she isn’t written by some white dude.
Your point about the screenplay reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves with armchair commenters on AI these days.
Yeah, if you hop on ChatGPT, use the free version, and just ask it to write a story, you’re getting crap. But using that anecdotal experience to extrapolate what the SotA can do in production is a massive mistake.
Do professional writers just sit down at a computer and write out page after page into a final draft?
No. They start with a treatment, build out character arcs, write summaries of scenes, etc. Eventually they have a first draft which goes out to readers and changes are made.
To have an effective generative AI screenplay writer you need to replicate multiple stages and processes.
And you likely wouldn’t be using a chat-instruct fine tuned model, but rather individually fine tuned models for each process.
Video game writing is going to move more into writing pipelines for content generation than it is going to be writing final copy. And my guess is that most writers are going to be very happy when they see the results of what that can achieve, as they’ll be able to create storytelling experiences that are currently regarded as impossible, like where character choices really matter to outcomes and aren’t simply the illusion of choice to prevent fractalizing dialogue trees too much early on.
People are just freaking out thinking the tech is coming to replace them rather than realizing that headcounts are going to remain the same long term but with the technology enhancing their efforts they’ll be creating products beyond what they’ve even imagined.
Like, I really don’t think the average person - possibly even the average person in the industry - really has a grasp of what a game like BG3 with the same sized writing staff is going to look like with the generative AI tech available in just about 2-3 years, even if the current LLM baseline doesn’t advance at all between now and then.
A world where every NPC feels like a fleshed out dynamic individual with backstory, goals, and relationships. Where stories uniquely evolve with the player. These are things that have previously been technically impossible given resource constraints and attempts to even superficially resemble them ate up significant portions of AAA budgets (i.e. RDR2). And by the end of the next console generation, they will have become as normative as things like ray tracing or voiced lines are today.
While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all “an LLM can’t do that” discussions):
Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.
If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren’t “wasting time” writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.
In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.
But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.
This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to “get the job done”. And unlike with farm work and factory work… there isn’t really anything on the horizon for all the “creative” workers to do.
They largely are going to remain the same. Specific roles may shift around as specific workloads become obsolete, and you will have a handful of companies chasing quarterly returns at the cost of long term returns by trying to downsize keeping the product the same and reducing headcount.
But most labor is supply constrained not demand constrained, and the only way reduced headcounts would remain the status quo across companies is if all companies reduce headcounts without redirecting improved productivity back into the product.
You think a 7x reduction in texturing labor is going to result in the same amount of assets in game but 1/7th the billable hours?
No, that’s not where this is going. Again, a handful of large studios will try to get away with that initially, but as soon as competitors that didn’t go the downsizing route are releasing games with scene complexity and variety that puts their products to shame that’s going to bounce back.
If the market was up to executives, they’d have a single programmer re-releasing Pong for $79 a pop. But the market is not up to executives, it’s up to the people buying the products. And while AI will allow smaller development teams to produce games in line with today’s AAA scale products, tomorrow’s AAA scale products are not going to be possible with significantly reduced headcounts, as they are definitely not going to be the same scale and scope as today’s leading games.
A 10 or even 100 fold increase in worker productivity only means a similar cut in the number of workers as long as the product has hit diminishing returns on productivity investment, and if anything the current state of games development is more dependent on labor resources than ever before, so it doesn’t seem we’ve hit that inflection point or will anytime soon.
Edit: The one and only place I can foresee a significant headcount drop because of AI in game dev is QA. They’re screwed in a few years.
I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:
“AI” has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?
Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.
The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and “events” in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.
Same with art and even CGI. You aren’t going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren’t going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.
And… same with writing. Ask ChatGPT to write your screenplay? It is going to be bad. Use the proper prompts to get the “voice” of a character right or to generate some background dialogue that you won’t even correctly hear because the mics are focused on Meg Ryan faking an orgasm? Suddenly you have a better “product” than everyone else who just tells extras to wing it or putty around. Same with having a Black Scottish Chick sound like she isn’t written by some white dude.
Your point about the screenplay reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves with armchair commenters on AI these days.
Yeah, if you hop on ChatGPT, use the free version, and just ask it to write a story, you’re getting crap. But using that anecdotal experience to extrapolate what the SotA can do in production is a massive mistake.
Do professional writers just sit down at a computer and write out page after page into a final draft?
No. They start with a treatment, build out character arcs, write summaries of scenes, etc. Eventually they have a first draft which goes out to readers and changes are made.
To have an effective generative AI screenplay writer you need to replicate multiple stages and processes.
And you likely wouldn’t be using a chat-instruct fine tuned model, but rather individually fine tuned models for each process.
Video game writing is going to move more into writing pipelines for content generation than it is going to be writing final copy. And my guess is that most writers are going to be very happy when they see the results of what that can achieve, as they’ll be able to create storytelling experiences that are currently regarded as impossible, like where character choices really matter to outcomes and aren’t simply the illusion of choice to prevent fractalizing dialogue trees too much early on.
People are just freaking out thinking the tech is coming to replace them rather than realizing that headcounts are going to remain the same long term but with the technology enhancing their efforts they’ll be creating products beyond what they’ve even imagined.
Like, I really don’t think the average person - possibly even the average person in the industry - really has a grasp of what a game like BG3 with the same sized writing staff is going to look like with the generative AI tech available in just about 2-3 years, even if the current LLM baseline doesn’t advance at all between now and then.
A world where every NPC feels like a fleshed out dynamic individual with backstory, goals, and relationships. Where stories uniquely evolve with the player. These are things that have previously been technically impossible given resource constraints and attempts to even superficially resemble them ate up significant portions of AAA budgets (i.e. RDR2). And by the end of the next console generation, they will have become as normative as things like ray tracing or voiced lines are today.
That’s a win win all around.
While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all “an LLM can’t do that” discussions):
Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.
If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren’t “wasting time” writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.
In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.
But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.
This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to “get the job done”. And unlike with farm work and factory work… there isn’t really anything on the horizon for all the “creative” workers to do.
They largely are going to remain the same. Specific roles may shift around as specific workloads become obsolete, and you will have a handful of companies chasing quarterly returns at the cost of long term returns by trying to downsize keeping the product the same and reducing headcount.
But most labor is supply constrained not demand constrained, and the only way reduced headcounts would remain the status quo across companies is if all companies reduce headcounts without redirecting improved productivity back into the product.
You think a 7x reduction in texturing labor is going to result in the same amount of assets in game but 1/7th the billable hours?
No, that’s not where this is going. Again, a handful of large studios will try to get away with that initially, but as soon as competitors that didn’t go the downsizing route are releasing games with scene complexity and variety that puts their products to shame that’s going to bounce back.
If the market was up to executives, they’d have a single programmer re-releasing Pong for $79 a pop. But the market is not up to executives, it’s up to the people buying the products. And while AI will allow smaller development teams to produce games in line with today’s AAA scale products, tomorrow’s AAA scale products are not going to be possible with significantly reduced headcounts, as they are definitely not going to be the same scale and scope as today’s leading games.
A 10 or even 100 fold increase in worker productivity only means a similar cut in the number of workers as long as the product has hit diminishing returns on productivity investment, and if anything the current state of games development is more dependent on labor resources than ever before, so it doesn’t seem we’ve hit that inflection point or will anytime soon.
Edit: The one and only place I can foresee a significant headcount drop because of AI in game dev is QA. They’re screwed in a few years.
I bet we’ll have full self driving cars by then, too!