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Nobody needs your AI game or AI movie

In the comments to Building an AI game studio: what we’ve learned so far | Hacker News, someone notes:

let’s just grant that someday, the tech will be mature enough that this is possible, and let’s even say it goes beyond videogames to movies, to visual art, to graphic design, to writing, etc. Let’s say that AI gets to a place where any joe blow can put in a prompt, and get a competent, and even let’s be generous and say good product out of it. A solid 8/10. So… who the hell is going to buy it? Because videogames as an industry is already entirely saturated with products that range a whole spectrum from utter dogshit to amazing works of technical expertise, writing, design, etc. There are over 70,000 games on Steam alone now, with 9,000 added in the last 9 months. If this tech actually got to this place, there will be exponentially more games, because all you have to do is tell an AI what you want to play.

And you can take that further: Movies are also highly saturated as an industry, especially as larger studios move ever further into less making “movies” or “series” and just making “content” endlessly remixing their intellectual properties. So now, all of those companies (and all the people who like their stuff) can now just make their own Iron Man movie? Their own Wandavision? Just endlessly making and remaking and remaking, as though tons of people aren’t already sick to death of all the television programs and movies that are being made?

And again, you can just keep extending this to any media: print, music, art… we have more of everything now than we ever have before and the goal of companies like Adobe, like OpenAI, etc. is to put even more powerful creative tools into even more hands, broadening the group of people who can create stuff but like… even if you take it as granted that this can be done…

Who the hell is watching all of this stuff? Who is playing all of these games? And why in the world would you pay to watch someone else’s AI movie when you can pay to generate your own with whatever you want in it? Why would you ever buy a game off Steam again if you can just ask your game making AI to make you the exact game you want, even just copying the damn description out of steam?

All I see this doing is potentially killing off dozens of creative industries and funneling shit tons of creative control and platform-style power to a handful of massive corporations, running warehouses full of fucking graphics cards, to generate the same games, the same movies, the same music, over, and over, and over, to suit everyone’s personal taste, and absolutely destroying entire rainforest’s worth of electricity to accomplish it. And like… why do we want that?

This is a great point. When something becomes common it loses all value. The great Tulip deflation. Critical mass was reached.

When one can design movies in less time than it takes to write a review, it means there will be millions of movies created every day instead of thousands every year. You might watch your close friends’ designer movies, the same way the pre-Great War intelligentsia used to read our best friends’ poetry.

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