Time to touch this hot topic a bit, today’s gaming news recap was full of AI related news, opinion pieces and interviews, feel like it’s a good time to look at it from my angles today. Not gonna do any moral and ethical grandstanding here, because I don’t think I’m a beacon of ethics and moral myself and I surely play/use/consume other things that aren’t clean from ethics and moral perspective.
My general opinion on AI is cautiously optimistic – I do believe it’s here to stay and it can do a lot of good for us, but it needs to be used right and regulated well. In terms of genAI specifically I’m fine with using it as assisting tool, but not as main force in creative process – filters, upscaling, coding assistance, editing, and more, but not actually generating art, writing texts and so on. Reasons for that are simple – creative process is about expressing yourself, creating something that you want to put out there for others to see. Substituting that with machine output just replaces you, you aren’t even needed there really, sure you write prompts, but all the outputs are just machine stitching what someone else made together in different ways.
Can argue that if you can’t draw, for example, genAI can manifest your ideas into graphic form that otherwise you would never be able to draw and without money for artists would never commission. I think that situation might be fair, but then are those ideas that good, is the output really worth generating – we all have ideas, but very few actually deserve the spotlight. Charging money or expecting something in exchange for machine just plagiarising something for you is questionable on multiple levels too – from ethical, to actual law standpoints. And it becomes way worse when we are talking about big corporations, that clearly can afford commissions and even payrolling whole department of artists of writers, but instead act like some poor indie devs replacing creativity with plagiarism. Corpo world in general is what can make AI a real problem for us, why regulation is really important, but I think quite a lot of damage already was done and will be done until any regulations appear.
In practical fields I think gathering lots of knowledge and providing easy access to people who need some answers or advices is actually really good, but creativity should be creating something new, not rehashing what was already created. New fresh art should always be prioritized, appreciated and rewarded, even if at some point AI slop will become normalized, otherwise we’ll just get swallowed by gray uniformal ugly mass of mediocrity.
When it’s about blogging for example, I do use a plugin that checks grammar and helps with some stylistic issues, but I picked one that is open source and runs locally, without crazy AI functionality that most of them have. Just my personal choice and I won’t be judging if someone uses some more AI heavy plugin to improve their texts. As long as it’s their texts, generating texts for your own blog just makes it GPTs blog, not yours, in my opinion. I want to read what’s on someone’s mind, not what machine “thinks”, I can get some model and ask it if I’m interested in what it thinks, don’t need to read it through third party. I guess you can use some assistance for article structure skeleton, but today for example I read about game writer experiences with that and they said that following AI’s structure just filling blanks makes them less inspired. I can see it myself somewhat, even though my posts can get a little bit of a mess I guess, but it’s my raw thought output that flows better without limitations. Need to structure it myself and edit afterwards a bit more, I guess skill issue + laziness + lack of time.
GenAI replacing streamers sounds like a fun gimmick to some extent, but I would never watch something like that outside of some funny clip highlights. Beauty of streaming is just raw unedited personality of the streamer, their interactions with the game and with their chat or with real world and chat in case of IRL streams. For now we didn’t get to the level of AIs with real personality, so nothing outside of some gimmicky models that imitate someone or just learned to be terminally online and fit with memes and streaming subculture. Can see it working good replacing some channels covering drama or some news for those who need just that, not personalities, will be way better at analyzing and gathering information, pumping it out 24/7 without food, sleep, and bathroom breaks. Assisting in content creation though – some good way to automatically edit and adapt content for other formats and platforms for me as someone who doesn’t have editor budgets? Sounds great, but my content is kinda hard for that. For now no assisting tools in my pipeline, but I’m not against it. And while I’m not usually planning to die on any hills, I do feel like if I ever will somehow completely replace myself with AI, then I’m probably just done with streaming and cashing out on it I guess. I do stream because I enjoy doing it, otherwise I would be switching my workplace in a moment considering my income is getting gigamogged even by my part time working friend who’s already unhappy with his numbers.
Really complicated topic, will be interesting to see how perception changes over the years, but I hope it will be improving our lives or worst case just bring us more ways to degen (already happening I guess). Especially interesting to see how it all evolves since currently Asia is already embracing AI full speed while West is having difficulties. To be honest I’m happy that we are having some discussions and not just accepting it, because western corpas would love to push it full speed on their terms with way less care about people.