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Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

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Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#161

Post by eek2121 »

lordnacho wrote: post #152
safog wrote: post #52

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs. It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work. Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be ama…

Mini-mills. AI isn't going to jump in there and do you another Sistine Chapel or Godfather. You have a restaurant, it needs some random Chinese/Italian/Mexican artwork. Are you going to buy a poster? No way, just generate it and hang it up. You have a kid who needs to be entertained. Do I get a team of 200 to write me Frozen, world class singers to sing the songs, and animators? No. We'll start with our own 5-minute…

Not unless they stop using copyrighted material it won't.

Remember, the legal cases are still ongoing.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#162

Post by fnimick »

kraig911 wrote: post #149
xnorswap wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful what you wish for, the soul of Blizzard is long dead. You can see this with Diablo 4, which is a completely soulless ARPG. With the latest season 3 launched yesterday, it's just not a fun game and it's clear that whatever processes and people they have at Activision Blizzard, they haven't got something in place that lets someone say, "Wait, shouldn't this be fun?". While D3 had it's fair criticism at launc…

It's just sad I guess this is an example of post consumerism. Maybe making games for the sake of profit and not fun it was just a matter of time. I was an avid Overwatch player and just seeing how Kotick essentially destroyed that team from within at Blizzard because to some the price of the stock is the only thing that is a measure of value of a public company.

> to some the price of the stock is the only thing that is a measure of value of a public company.

Who are the people who invest in a public company for any reason other than to have their numbers go up? That's the entire point. They could be putting out absolute garbage, as long as it makes money (and more profit than your alternative of 'fun games'), that's all that matters.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#163

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

eek2121 wrote: post #161
lordnacho wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mini-mills. AI isn't going to jump in there and do you another Sistine Chapel or Godfather. You have a restaurant, it needs some random Chinese/Italian/Mexican artwork. Are you going to buy a poster? No way, just generate it and hang it up. You have a kid who needs to be entertained. Do I get a team of 200 to write me Frozen, world class singers to sing the songs, and animators? No. We'll start with our own 5-minute…

Not unless they stop using copyrighted material it won't. Remember, the legal cases are still ongoing.

I think that restriction would cut the dataset by 90%.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#164

Post by eek2121 »

seydor wrote: post #87

Last time the stock market was surging, everyone was hiring. This time it's different

I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now entering the scene?

Then again, I don't know what I would pivot to. I thought about building a startup. However it is not a good time to be doing that either.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#165

Post by teddyh »

mgcross wrote: post #125
safog wrote: post #52

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs. It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work. Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be ama…

An artist (illustrator) friend sent me this link (NSFW) of another artist detailing his process of using img2img to stylize/enhance his illustrations: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDb1ax Cheesecake content aside, I love seeing AI image generation used as an aid to an artist rather than replacing the artist.

That lower left arm is much too long in the AI generated rendering. Granted, it’s also a bit too long in the drawing, but the rendering makes it even longer.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#166

Post by cma »

eek2121 wrote: post #161
lordnacho wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mini-mills. AI isn't going to jump in there and do you another Sistine Chapel or Godfather. You have a restaurant, it needs some random Chinese/Italian/Mexican artwork. Are you going to buy a poster? No way, just generate it and hang it up. You have a kid who needs to be entertained. Do I get a team of 200 to write me Frozen, world class singers to sing the songs, and animators? No. We'll start with our own 5-minute…

Not unless they stop using copyrighted material it won't. Remember, the legal cases are still ongoing.

Didn't Adobe Stock essentially opt everyone in the library in before springing it on them?

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#167

Post by cj »

safog wrote: post #52

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs. It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work. Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be ama…

My sister owns an etsy shop that sells customized items.

They have a graphic designer who's in photoshop all day doing the same repetitive task for each item that's ordered.

This is the first category of jobs to be killed off. It can't already be killed off because it requires some human judgement (at least right now) to make sure photographs on a custom ornament are centered and cropped in a visually appealing way.

I can see AI killing off that kind of low skill graphic design with very limited judgement calls (or creativity) needed.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#168

Post by [deleted] »

whoswho wrote: post #18
iammjm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you already seen Zerospace?[1] I think it also looks great and there are some SC/SC2 pros involved in making it [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/

As a grown ass man who played Vikings/rnrr/superman/War1/War2 / War2BNE /SC1/ SC1X/{basically every released and unreleased blizzard title including alphas}, I really really wish I could see a successor game that doesn’t have pinups of women that look like they have yoga tights and crop tops for armor. It would be nice to have a game that’s a bit less thirsty.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#169

Post by [deleted] »

safog wrote: post #52

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs. It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work. Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be ama…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#170

Post by quonn »

lordnacho wrote: post #152
safog wrote: post #52

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs. It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work. Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be ama…

Mini-mills. AI isn't going to jump in there and do you another Sistine Chapel or Godfather. You have a restaurant, it needs some random Chinese/Italian/Mexican artwork. Are you going to buy a poster? No way, just generate it and hang it up. You have a kid who needs to be entertained. Do I get a team of 200 to write me Frozen, world class singers to sing the songs, and animators? No. We'll start with our own 5-minute…

Maybe it will, maybe it won't.

It took Amazon a decade to have a serious impact on the economy, even though it was working from day one. Now we have AI technology that's only half working. So what the impact will be and when is anyone's guess.

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