Fuck it, make it anyway

Well no I, wasn't doing that either. Because it would be kind of silly to take someone else's code and say "I made this" just because I ran some build script, wouldn't it?

>I think the reason so many people are frustrated is that they _know_ they are falling behind, they _know_ the thing that they like doing is not something they can easily get employed to do.

I'm frustrated because I'm in a den of thieves and no one sees anything wrong with it. These constant "car vs. horse carriage" metaphors miss the whole point, and isn't even correct (a car did not need to reference a horse).

People love talking about how efficient LLMs made them but don't ever seem to acknowledge how this is also linked to how scams and grifts have gone through the roof. I get 20+ spam calls a day and need to wade around a sea of slop just to enjoy my day-to-day. That's on top of a mess of a job market with thousands of fake resumes clogging up recruiter boxes, rampant cheating in schools, and the entire mess that is my country's politics.

It's not just "fear of losing my job" (I lost that long ago, I adapted and did what I needed to do to survive). I've had to constantly adapt all my life, that's not the primary issue. But adaptation comes with the expectation of new goals and passions and overall optimism of the fututre. That's not the case at all right now.

The issue is everything else around me literally collapsing and yet people are just sipping their tea here acting like it's just AI envy. The gaslighting is annoying, the apathy is alarming. If no one else is going to pick up the broken glass, what's the point of anything?

>Now is the time a lot of us should be contemplating our next move in life. Not easy given we're about to enter a period of utter economic chaos that makes the industrial revolution look tame.

And what of those still in school or just graduating? They never got a life to move on from. Do they just drown due to the folly of systems set in motion long before they were born?

>Good AI art takes time and effort and taste and usually some amount of traditional skills.

Sure. But I think it's more than safe to say, that the rotten barrel of rotten apples easily makes the 1-2 "high effort AI art" apples rotten as well. If the entire internet wasn't flooded with slop, it'd be harder to argue that AI is a slop generator. But well... the proof is in the pudding.

>There is room for all of it

The flood of slop begs to differ. I'm used to needing to wade through lakes of horrible low quality crap to find gems I seek. But the friction needed is immense. If that kind of effort is needed to traverse social media, the reaction will not be tame.

>I'm sick of having to skulk around in the shadows with the things I've made for fear of tripping some Shrill Cancel Protocol.

Then you should be as angry at the slop generators as the anti-AI crowd. You're affected by it too, after all.

>And if you're worried about your traditional art job, organize

That is the only shining light as of late. Lot more news of game studios actually unionizing. Better late than never.

>AI isn't the problem.

Nope, not primarily. It's who wields them and stands to beneit. Which of course is the wealthy owners. It's always the wealthy owners.

>It is a world in which video game designers get to make higher quality games faster really such a bad one?

If that's what was happening it would be great. But we already saw the mobile market as a canary in the coalmine for how this shakes out, and the Steam marketplace is going that direction too. Lots of stuff out there very much not even worth a download, let alone worth paying for and hoping to derive enjoyment from. It may be hedging on overused at this point but: it's a sea of slop right now and curation is needed more than ever. That's not a future you get with more quality games coming out.

Steam is a great example because objectively you can assess some hard figures on if these are "quality". I'm not doing such a study, but I wouldn't be surprised if key metrics like revenue per game have cratered in the last decade in part because there's just so much generated slop that is getting very little attention, but accumulates to make browsing for new releases a pain.

People aren't biting per game, but it's so cheap that even a few purchases is enough for asset flip essque games to keep on going and roll the slot a thousand times over. This isn't a tastemaking assessment as much as a cold, hard assessment of how consumers are reacting to the current situation.

>Would a radical shakeup of the video game world really be such a disaster?

With current consumer sentiment: yes. Frustrated consumers who still demand quality will simply not buy new games without a lot of social momentum. Everyone loses out except the asset flippers.