(AI)Moral Hazard
There are a lot of strong feelings out there regarding the use of AI to generate artwork or other assets for videogames. Regardless of where you fall on the “training” aspect of AI, it seems clear that a game developer opting for AI art is taking away an employment possibility for a human artists.
One possibility I had not previously imagined though, is when a paid human artist themselves (allegedly) uses AI to generate the art:
Released as part of [Project Zomboid] build 42, these new images for the survival game seemingly contain some visual anomalies that may be attributable to AI generation tools. In the picture of the person using the radio, for example, the handle of the radio is misaligned with its main casing, the wire on the headphones seems to merge into the character’s hair, and there is an odd number of lines on the stand-up microphone – on one side of the microphone there are five indentations, but on the other side, which ought to be symmetrical, there are six.
It is worth noting that this is all forum speculation – AI has not been proven, although it certainly seems suspicious. Moreover, the “AAA concept artist” commissioned is not some rando, but the very one that did the still-used cover art of Project Zomboid from back in 2011. So this particular controversy is literally the worst of all possible worlds: game developer did the right thing by hiring a professional artist with proven track record for thousands of dollars, and received either AI-assisted artwork (bad), or non-AI artwork with human error that is now assumed to be because of AI (worse).
All of which is a complete distraction to another otherwise commendable game update (worst).
“Either way, they are gone for now – likely forever, as frankly after two years of hard work from our entire team in getting build 42 done, it would break my heart if discussion as to whether we’d used AI on a few loading screens that were produced externally to the company pretty recently was to completely overshadow all that effort and passion and hard work the team put into getting B42 out there.”
Truly, it is an unenviable time to be an artist. AI technology is only going to improve, and as it does, you will be increasingly competing against both “Prompt Engineers” and anonymous internet sleuths hunting for clues to “expose” you for Reddit karma. Eventually, AI-generated content will be so prevalent that none of it will matter; I could imagine ads that are dynamically drawn in, say, anime-style because it noticed you had CrunchyRoll open in another tab, or with the realistic likeness of a TV star from your most-watched Netflix show.
Right now, utilizing AI as a business is a sign of being cheap and invites controversy. Perhaps it remains so, presuming the ad-based hellscape imagined above. But at a certain point, AI will probably figure out symmetry and how many Rs are in strawberry and we will likely be none the wiser.
Or we will just assume everything is AI-generated and it won’t matter. Same difference.
Posted on December 26, 2024, in Commentary and tagged Ad, AI, Art, Capitalist Dystopian Hellscape, Controversy, Project Zomboid. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
If we can’t tell, can it matter? We’ll be down to the old “authenticity” argument again and no-one’s ever really managed to nail that down to anyone’s satisfaction, so we’ll basically just be back where we were.
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Perhaps the industry at large will settle on a specific label, like “Organic.” As in, created entirely by an organic person.
But more seriously, yeah, we’re probably headed towards a more federated, curated experience. Specific game publishers loudly proclaiming “no AI used” or whatever, and then the market deciding if they are willing to pay for that.
Or perhaps I’m just being cynical, and widespread use of AI-generation will lead to a utopia of players “creating” their own perfect games. Which, admittedly, could be pretty cool if you could correct certain parameters or generated new content or whatever. “Fallout 4 but with quests like New Vegas.”
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Eventually it will come down to cost. AI generation is currently being offered at unsustainable low prices relative to the processing power required to turn out what currently passes for AI quality work. At some point end users will have to pay the actual price, not the loss leader levels of current pricing, and then the balance will be whether a prompt engineer and a subscription with re-use rights to a quality AI is more or less expensive than having an actual artist do it. The artists will still win some of the time, but it will put a hard cap on the artist’s own price model.
This assumes that AI generated art will get substantially better. So far, that falls under the category of “facts not in evidence” save for a few parlor tick presentations and the low effort “make me an icon for a hot bar button” things we get now.
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Very true. Sometimes I catch myself imagining that AI “source code” will eventually be leaked or stolen by whomever, and then it will be out in the wild. However, there’s not much you could do with it if it costs $700k/day to run (e.g. ChatGPT). The current models rely on brute force computations, to my understanding, so perhaps there is a future in which someone figures out the shortcuts and it becomes less centralized. Or perhaps it always has to be “all possible information all the time” in order to work like we expect it to.
Interesting times.
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