Fragging the talent - Animators beware, AI is after your job

By PENG Xin, XIAO Fang

GUO Xin used to spend most of his days arguing with creatives. His employer, a gaming company, outsources artwork to independent studios, and Zhang often has to send things back for changes. Even one tiny edit demands a 1000-yuan workday, and the artists get antsy after three rounds of editing. Now, Zhang does the drawing himself using generative AI. Type in a few prompts, and voila, he has a draft.

Much has been said about machines wiping out factory jobs, but now, creative workers who thought their jobs were safe are threatened. Generative AI draws faster, costs less, and does not complain.

Benefits for artists

Visual artists, who until recently had ridden high on the gaming boom, now realize their jobs are easily standardized and scaled up. Game art is labor intensive due to brainstorming, drafting, and executing details, all of which AI has proved itself capable of. Human artists only need to add a few final touches. Generative AI can increase productivity by at least 50 percent.

LIANG Qiwei, founder of S-Game, recently posted on Weibo four elaborate sketches produced by AI Midjourney. His only input was a short prompt asking ChatGPT to write detailed descriptions of four characters in a “punk aesthetic game featuring cold-weapon fights and a revenge plot,” which was then duly fed into Midjourney.

On another occasion, Liang marveled at generative AI’s ability to perform tasks it used to be not particularly good at, such as drawing hands.

Humans are stillneeded to conceive of and manage IPs (intellectual property) but generative AI will transform every step including drafting, coding and marketing. This will speed up development, shorten business cycles, and doubtless trigger another destructive price war, this time in the labor market.

Benefits for human workers

Gaming companies are already using AI to write plots and marketing material. The script may not be up to the standard of the most sophisticated games, but is good enough for simple ones, with simple players. ChatGPT can write as well as an average copywriter, but that’s not a very high standard.

AI accelerates workflow and lower costs in an industry that values speed and volume over real intelligence and user satisfaction. Studios claim to use AI to automate repetitive tasks so that human developers “have more time” to explore new ideas - something of an illusion.

The objective is not free up anyone’s time – it’s to get rid of as many staff as possible. Many of these people have trained for years at considerable cost to perform precisely the tasks deemed no longer necessary. People will be fired until all who remain will be the good (or the cheap) - those who already spend most of their time “exploring new ideas”.

“We looked at where generative AI can be applied,” said gaming startup Ourpalm. It tried AI in brainstorming, script writing, drawing, coding, and marketing, and found it “cheap, quick and creative” in all of them. AI is probably better at playing these games than humans, and that paradigm shift may only be a few steps away – AI designing games for AI to play. Humans can simply observe whatever AI they can afford with no need to literally raise a finger.

Benefits of increased leisure time

Automation will eliminate millions of jobs in the next few decades. Generative AI has forced the gaming industry to confront the future sooner than expected. One scenario predicts that unemployed game developers will make a living by playing games for the rich – gladiators or professional footballers who obey any whim their owners can afford.

Small numbers of new jobs will be created at the top end, fine-tuning algorithms and making AI-generated images look like art. Humans will soon learn how to best serve and service the bots and optimize the process. Gaming studios are already looking for artists ready to go over to the dark side and use AI to produce designs that might qualify for the description of “original.”

The next terrifying step is for game characters to be given intelligence. NetEase and Baidu are both trying to incorporate chatbots into their games.

Is everybody happy?

Game companies claim that artists, shockingly, are excited about the new world.

“Our internal chat groups for graphic designers are so active after ChatGPT,” gushed the Ourpalm spokesperson. Internal chat groups? Those groups of formerly happy employers who are now fighting for their survival?

“They are so excited to show off their collaboration with AI,” said Ourplam.

If they want any future in the company, feigned excitement is perhaps the best way to ensure it.