Perfectly fine for placeholders for mock ups and helping convey what you want to an artist, acting as a form of interop between non-artist and artist. IE “Id like something like this”, but final art assets should be real ones made by real artists.
For UI, layout, UX:
Completely fine for mocking up, much the same as art. You can rapid prototype placeholder layouts to get passed blockers and start developing, and the actual artist can catch up after.
Coding:
I work as a software dev, AI given proper tooling and setup codes perfectly fine now, but still needs human review and guidance to keep it on the rails. You still end up with human developers steering the AI, they just do their job faster
It heavily benefits from “momentum”, the more good approved code in the system, the better the AI is at staying on the rails.
Theres a faction of devs that think even that can be automated away. I consider people who have gone that far to have drunken the kool-aid. I trust AI output as far as I can throw it.
Audio:
I have like zero experience on this, but every sample Ive seen comes across as very poor quality, its barely even good enough for placeholder mocks but maybe there are bespoke tools out there? I haven’t seen any though yet. IE SFX and etc.
Writing:
Honestly perfectly fine like coding, given once again a human is still steering it heavily and you have proper tooling to control it. However since this is “user facing” Id consider it a liability.
Also afaik AI writing is very prone to issues and being very bland, so I would not use it heavily.
Editting:
However for editting I can already confirm it’s splendid. Its good at sanity checking your work and catching stuff like plot holes, inconsistencies, etc that normal grammar tools don’t cover.
Its also good at helping catch stuff like using terms/words/phrases too much in ways normal tools wont.
You still want a real human editor, but the AI can help with initial sanity passes to cover a bunch of the “easy” stuff.
And its very good at applying the edits. Batch fixing mistakes, etc.
DevOps:
Its splendid. It can pretty quickly do things like convert requirements into technical requirements, rapidly discover negative tests cases, call out edge cases, manage tickets…
Greatly helps with keeping that stuff organized in teams.
I disagree that AI “art” is good to use for mockup assets. For mockups and placeholders, you want something that is obviously not complete, so you can tell at a glance what needs to be replaced. Think about how many studios put out complete games with AI crap and then claim “oh that was a placeholder we forgot to change”.
Meanwhile, FFXIV’s placeholder assets look like this:
You literally don’t need AI, you can make something in MS Paint.
(I’m 100% sure Square Enix is using AI in other places, but this proves you don’t need it.)
The key here is there are many assets, like textures, etc, where you want to better convey intent from the design team to the art team.
And, if you aren’t trying to actually sneak in AI assets and “cheat”, you can actually very easy make the AI assets visually obvious.
Like just slap a bright purple watermark on them that says “PLACEHOLDER” or etc
Thats very normal.
The companies claiming “oh whoopsie that asset accidently made it in” are just blatantly lying.
If they really wanted to ensure the assets didnt make it into the final build, its very easy to tag files, name them a certain way, watermark them, have a build pipeline that checks, etc to make it super obvious if you accidently included them.
You should just assume companies pretending this wasn’t possible are just lying. They thought theyd get away with it and got caught and hoped ppl would buy their excuse.
Not a popular opinion, everyone wants the answer to be “never, it’s terrible and useless”, but I’m inclined to agree with you on almost every point. AI is a powerful tool with guidelines and testing to constrain it, and smart human review. My only real point of contention is writing.
I find writing is like coding, in that a good story needs structure, pacing, a lot of elements to work on a macro scale, although with virtually no ability to bake that into the “good approved code” that the AI can work off. Perceiving that structure and pacing requires more context than any AI can handle. Honestly I think writing is probably the #1 area AI should be kept out of. I’d be pretty concerned that AI output feels good enough, but really poisons any story you let it influence you on. And a bland story is a pretty cardinal sin for a good game. I also find AI writing and patterns are much more obvious than a lot of people think, I’ve certainly seen coworkers wield it with undue confidence enough times.
I agree for the most part, but keep in mind theres decent chunks of “writing” in video games that are mostly filler and probably no one would notice or can tell if the line is AI vs an intern who wrote it.
Like… npc one-liners and stuff like that, item descriptions, etc. Stuff where its probably not even gonna be looked at by 99.9% of ppl anyways and the bar for quality is very low.
Whats critical here us understanding that you dont replace your writers here.
You just took a boring/monotonous task off their plate so that they can focus time/energy on more important parts of the game
Fair enough, constrained to trite variations of basic dialogue, I could see it being a pretty reasonable use case in a big game with lots of NPCs, especially if you’ve got a good corpus of examples to give it a baseline.
For Art:
Perfectly fine for placeholders for mock ups and helping convey what you want to an artist, acting as a form of interop between non-artist and artist. IE “Id like something like this”, but final art assets should be real ones made by real artists.
For UI, layout, UX:
Completely fine for mocking up, much the same as art. You can rapid prototype placeholder layouts to get passed blockers and start developing, and the actual artist can catch up after.
Coding:
I work as a software dev, AI given proper tooling and setup codes perfectly fine now, but still needs human review and guidance to keep it on the rails. You still end up with human developers steering the AI, they just do their job faster
It heavily benefits from “momentum”, the more good approved code in the system, the better the AI is at staying on the rails.
Theres a faction of devs that think even that can be automated away. I consider people who have gone that far to have drunken the kool-aid. I trust AI output as far as I can throw it.
Audio:
I have like zero experience on this, but every sample Ive seen comes across as very poor quality, its barely even good enough for placeholder mocks but maybe there are bespoke tools out there? I haven’t seen any though yet. IE SFX and etc.
Writing: Honestly perfectly fine like coding, given once again a human is still steering it heavily and you have proper tooling to control it. However since this is “user facing” Id consider it a liability.
Also afaik AI writing is very prone to issues and being very bland, so I would not use it heavily.
Editting: However for editting I can already confirm it’s splendid. Its good at sanity checking your work and catching stuff like plot holes, inconsistencies, etc that normal grammar tools don’t cover.
Its also good at helping catch stuff like using terms/words/phrases too much in ways normal tools wont.
You still want a real human editor, but the AI can help with initial sanity passes to cover a bunch of the “easy” stuff.
And its very good at applying the edits. Batch fixing mistakes, etc.
DevOps: Its splendid. It can pretty quickly do things like convert requirements into technical requirements, rapidly discover negative tests cases, call out edge cases, manage tickets…
Greatly helps with keeping that stuff organized in teams.
I disagree that AI “art” is good to use for mockup assets. For mockups and placeholders, you want something that is obviously not complete, so you can tell at a glance what needs to be replaced. Think about how many studios put out complete games with AI crap and then claim “oh that was a placeholder we forgot to change”.
Meanwhile, FFXIV’s placeholder assets look like this:
You literally don’t need AI, you can make something in MS Paint.
(I’m 100% sure Square Enix is using AI in other places, but this proves you don’t need it.)
So, I 100% agree.
The key here is there are many assets, like textures, etc, where you want to better convey intent from the design team to the art team.
And, if you aren’t trying to actually sneak in AI assets and “cheat”, you can actually very easy make the AI assets visually obvious.
Like just slap a bright purple watermark on them that says “PLACEHOLDER” or etc
Thats very normal.
The companies claiming “oh whoopsie that asset accidently made it in” are just blatantly lying.
If they really wanted to ensure the assets didnt make it into the final build, its very easy to tag files, name them a certain way, watermark them, have a build pipeline that checks, etc to make it super obvious if you accidently included them.
You should just assume companies pretending this wasn’t possible are just lying. They thought theyd get away with it and got caught and hoped ppl would buy their excuse.
Not a popular opinion, everyone wants the answer to be “never, it’s terrible and useless”, but I’m inclined to agree with you on almost every point. AI is a powerful tool with guidelines and testing to constrain it, and smart human review. My only real point of contention is writing.
I find writing is like coding, in that a good story needs structure, pacing, a lot of elements to work on a macro scale, although with virtually no ability to bake that into the “good approved code” that the AI can work off. Perceiving that structure and pacing requires more context than any AI can handle. Honestly I think writing is probably the #1 area AI should be kept out of. I’d be pretty concerned that AI output feels good enough, but really poisons any story you let it influence you on. And a bland story is a pretty cardinal sin for a good game. I also find AI writing and patterns are much more obvious than a lot of people think, I’ve certainly seen coworkers wield it with undue confidence enough times.
I agree for the most part, but keep in mind theres decent chunks of “writing” in video games that are mostly filler and probably no one would notice or can tell if the line is AI vs an intern who wrote it.
Like… npc one-liners and stuff like that, item descriptions, etc. Stuff where its probably not even gonna be looked at by 99.9% of ppl anyways and the bar for quality is very low.
Whats critical here us understanding that you dont replace your writers here.
You just took a boring/monotonous task off their plate so that they can focus time/energy on more important parts of the game
Fair enough, constrained to trite variations of basic dialogue, I could see it being a pretty reasonable use case in a big game with lots of NPCs, especially if you’ve got a good corpus of examples to give it a baseline.