That's quite bleak, and I hold an opposing view. My main view is people are generally quite good to discern AI cruft from "human-made" paintings, games, and music. As soon as it will be impossible to make money from AI cruft, the AI cruft will disappear. As a (hobby) game developer myself, no AI tool I have used has ever made me feel "wow, this is great". It has always required multiple iterations of feedback. I tried tools like Meshy too. I ended up hiring a part-time 3D designer from Indonesia, who is a joy to work with.

I think the number of people who can't tell and don't care is far more overwhelming, and has been for pretty much the entirety of history. Also, AI doesn't prevent you from expressing yourself, much as e.g. using Gamemaker instead of programming it yourself would prevent you from making a really good game. It's a tool and it has lowered the barrier of entry to the floor, so there is gonna be a heck of a lot more low quality stuff, but I think there will also be a lot of really good stuff that wouldn't exist otherwise.

I suggest that while many people might express that they have no interest at all in art, that doesn't mean that they don't passively recognise it and reap the benefits of high-quality design.

I'm talking about videogames specifically, as it is the topic I'more familiar/invested in.

I definitely don't think they will disappear, or the current dynamics will change substantially, only their scale will.

As someone that is not artistically inclined, I have the same chance of producing appealing art and assets with AI than I have with pre-AI tools (yes, I tried).

But for people that ARE artistically inclined, skilled at using composition, color palettes, have strong fundamentals, etc... AI will be just another tool in their belt, and if they are able to integrate it with their own sensibilities and existing tools, there is little reason to think they won't be able to come up with art that it at least as compelling as that created with "old" tools, especially as now it is increasingly possible to exert a level of control on what is being generated.

Tools available to digital artists have evolved from having to paint pixel by pixel in the 80s to advanced layer and filter editing in photoshop (not to mention all the advanced tools available for 3D), this is "just" another evolution.

And yes, regardless of that, the market will be flooded by AI-generated slop, as the barriers of entry have lowered significantly; but the market was oversaturated already, and low-effort and asset flip games were a large part of daily releases.

Users still reward appealing, high-effort games, and they will likely keep doing so; the top of the iceberg will remain the same, and the ignored, forgotten bottom, augmented by the slop releases, will just get 10 times bigger.

What if I made a machine that live streamed my thoughts (via brainwaves) as images/video, i.e. a window into the imagination? That would involve both AI (necessarily) and communication.

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Delusional thinking, I don’t know a single person that plays video games in order to connect with the creator of the game. They definitely play them to connect with others who play the same game. The only people not playing games due to AI are people who make a political issue out of it and are virtue signaling to their group and a small number of people with a massive chip on their shoulder about automation in media.

I have to agree. This is especially noticeable in software; it’s impossible to distinguish manual work from the generated kind. There’s no point in appealing to the human element here, the buyer simply doesn’t see the difference. But fortunately, for now, we still have work.

Did you watch the video? Her point is to use AI's productivity gains to iterate faster on the creative aspects.

As a SWE and also an art director;

firstly, great post and you're spot on. On the art side, it was already that way before AI art, just that the smallest of customers didn't know how to access it.

Coding is just as much like woodworking as art and design are. The core of the matter is intent, or what people call intentionality in the architecture.

What I tell clients is: You want your code to be consistent and maintanable, so someone fully understands the edge cases. Or you want the design to be consistent across the company. You could easily hire someone to do one art piece that was 90% on point, and then haphazardly hire someone else to do one that was 90% okay based on that... and very quickly the overall structure will decohere.

So, I'm not talking about someone selling socks on Etsy, but if you've already invested a few million in branding and/or code architecture, that is an asset you own and control. Do you really want to inject potential AI slop into that in a process that's going to degrade it further in each subsequent step, just to save a few bucks?

I also like how people are becoming more aware of the difference... this thread is enlightening[0]... but I believe that what a few people are conscious of, 90% of people are subconsciously aware of, and knowing how to manipulate subconscious associations with imagery has always been the true art and magic of graphic design. Design in particular is widely misunderstood, even by people who call themselves designers. It has almost nothing to do with making something look subjectively decent (the bare minimum), and everything to do with knowing more references than your audience knows they know. So when AI becomes a recognizable visual trope, we've won.

>> it's going to be a tough market for artisans because fewer and fewer people are forced to buy the fruits of your intellectual labor.

Once everyone has a WordPress site, who needs a web designer? It turns out a lot of people. And I've begun getting random queries from people who have vibe-coded apps asking me to "fix" them. When everyone has a bike, people dream of owning a car. When everyone has a car, people dream of owning a plane. What makes them tick isn't the velocity, it's the cachet.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/1wwyqiw/the_made_...

> For the vast majority of paying customers or social media appreciators, that low-effort slop is sufficient. It's cheap, fast, and gets better with every passing month. So if your overriding goal is to scale to win in that marketplace, then you can only scale by giving up on quality and artistry. It's a race to the bottom

I've arrived at the conclusion, that we can probably do without software developers rather than graphic designers. The slopocalypse is oozing into the real-world, where more and more businesses advertise their services with AI-generated art, if we want to call it even art at all. It's either overloaded and nonsensical advertisements, horrendous and lovecraftian depictions of food, or corporate designs that just scream that everything the business does is just cheap and low-quality. My bet is on graphic designers having a small renaissance, because obviously AI-generated art will become a signal for cheap, lazy, and low-quality business practices.

I find it amusing how there are two completely opposite but similarly defeatist points as the top comments. I think if the market is saturated with low-effort slop then the only way to stand out is to produce something that is noticeably different. I don't think boasting that you did it without AI is the best way to do that (it's quite possible to be very skilled and yet make something utterly generic): the best way is to be different, however you did it.

Don’t see how scaling mediocre content is a winning strategy. Quality will go up and we all win.

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Year after year, I keep seeing people talk about various races to the bottom.

And yet all the things (in particular the technology things) just keep getting better and better?

5 years ago. Now Elevenlabs has v4 voices so nothing like that is any longer viable.

And here's what is actually happening with this line of thinking. It's not a judgenent about the art being good or not, it's an attempt at pushing out and othering anyone who disagrees with this purity spiral.

I've accidentally come across some AI music on Spotify, most were pretty meh, but a few were good enough for me to favourite and even follow the artist because they seemed to have a knack for knocking out stuff I liked

I've tried creating AI songs myself with Suno and Minimax, the melody is usually pretty decent but the lyrics tended to be distractingly boring and cringe. I think there is a significant factor of style and taste there that makes is so that given what I imagine are the same tools, that artist is able to create things that I much prefer to my own

Out of curiosity do you think I'm AI? XD

It's a good talk and worth watching. The title doesn't really reflect what the talk is about, which is more about how to not lose those things while using AI tools. The title could maybe even be described as a kind of trojan horse because the answer (to the question of how to scale), if you read between the lines, seems to be basically: don't. Slow down and be intentional about every detail, focus on the user, and don't lower your standards.

Honestly I think I disagree. If you take photography as an art for example, the "scale" was pretty technology constrained for a long while.

I’m not sure what “scaling” is even supposed to mean here. The video’s thumbnail and description advocate against “zombie UI” (whatever that means as well — probably the typical AI slop-style UI). The pressing issue is that there is a dearth of good (great) UI, scaling or not, and that was already the case in the years before the use of LLMs. We need more instances of really good UI before we can talk about scaling.

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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html