“Replacing Talent” is not what AI is meant for, yet, it seems to be every penny-pinching, bean counting studio’s long term goal with it.
Yep AI at best can supplement talent, not replace it.
I’m not a developer, but I use AI tools at work (mostly LLMs).
You need to treat AI like a junior intern… You give it a task, but you still need to check the output and use critical thinking. You cant just take some work from an intern, blindly incorporate it into your presentation, and then blame the intern if the work is shoddy…
AI should be a time saver for certain tasks. It cannot (currently) replace a good worker.
As a developer I use it mainly for learning.
What used to be a Google followed by skimming a few articles or docs pages is now a question.
It pulls the specific info I need, sources it and allows follow up questions.
I’ve noticed the new juniors can get up to speed on new tech very quickly nowadays.
As for code I don’t trust it beyond snippets I can use as a base.
It’s clutch for boring emails with several tedious document summaries. Sometimes I get a day’s work done in 4 hours.
Automation can be great, when it comes from the bottom-up.
Honestly, that’s been my favorite - bringing in automation tech to help me in low-tech industries (almost all corporate-type office jobs). When I started my current role, I was working consistently 50 hours a week. I slowly automated almost all the processes and now usually work about 2-3 hours a day with the same outputs. The trick is to not increase outputs or that becomes the new baseline expectation.
I am a developer and that’s exactly how I see it too. I think AI will be able to write PRs for simple stories but it will need a human to review those stories to give approval or feedback for it to fix it, or manually intervene to tweak the output.
I do think given time, AI can improve to the level that it can do nearly all of the same things junior level people in many different sectors can.
The problem and unfortunate thing for companies I forsee is that it can’t turn juniors into seniors if the AI “replaces” juniors, which means that company will run out of seniors with retirement or will have to pay piles and piles of cash for people just to hire the few non-AI people left with industry knowledge to babysit the AIs.
It’s very short sighted, but capitalism doesn’t reward long term thinking.
The problem is the crazy valuations of AI companies is based on it replacing talent and soon. Supplementing talent is far less exciting and far less profitable.
Current AI*
I don’t see any reason to expect this to be the case indefinitely. It has been getting better all the time and lately been doing so at a quite rapid pace. In my view it’s just a matter of time untill it surpasses human capabilities. It can already do so in specific narrow fields. Once we reach AGI all bets are off.
Maybe this comment will age poorly, but I think AGI is a long way off. LLMs are a dead-end, IMO. They are easy to improve with the tech we have today and they can be very useful, so there’s a ton of hype around them. They’re also easy to build tools around, so everyone in tech is trying to get their piece of AI now.
However, LLMs are chat interfaces to searching a large dataset, and that’s about it. Even the image generators are doing this, the dataset just happens to be visual. All of the results you get from a prompt are just queries into that data, even when you get a result that makes it seem intelligent. The model is finding a best-fit response based on billions of parameters, like a hyperdimensional regression analysis. In other words, it’s pattern-matching.
A lot of people will say that’s intelligence, but it’s different; the LLM isn’t capable of understanding anything new, it can only generate a response from something in its training set. More parameters, better training, and larger context windows just refine the search results, they don’t make the LLM smarter.
AGI needs something new, we aren’t going to get there with any of the approaches used today. RemindMe! 5 years to see if this aged like wine or milk.
Yeah LLMs might very well be a dead-end when it comes to AGI but just like chatGPT seemingly came out of nowhere and took the world by surprise, this might just aswell be the case with an actual AGI aswell. My comment doesn’t really make any claims about the timescale of it but rather just tires to point out the inevitability of it.
https://www.cognition-labs.com/introducing-devin There are people out there deliberately working to make that vision a reality. Replacing software engineers is the entire point of Devin AI.
I saw this the other day and I’m like well fuck might as well go to trade school before it gets saturated like what happened with tech in the last couple years.
Yeah, the sad thing about Devin AI is that they’re clearly doing it for the money, they have absolutely no intentions on bettering humanity, they just want to build this up and sell it off for that fat entrepreneur paycheck. If they really cared about bettering humanity they would open it up to everyone, but they’re only accepting inquiries from businesses.
One single comment when I posted this on the technology community:
Not even that, it’s a tool. Like the same way Photoshop, or 3ds max are tools . You still need the talent to use the tools.
sed “s/studio’s/tech industry c-suite’s/“As an engineer, the amount of non-engineering idiots in tech corporate leadership trying to apply inappropriate technical solutions to something because it became a buzzword is just absurdly high.
Just make the modulus of elasticity more agile. Problem solved!
But that’s pretty much why AI is developed.
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The article doesn’t say much. So I checked the source for more information. It doesn’t say much more, but IMO in a much better way, in two concise paragraphs. In the sourced financial report, it is in the intro, two paragraphs:
An example R&D initiative, sponsored by the Innovation team was Project Ava, where a team, initially from Electric Square Malta, attempted to create a 2D game solely using Gen AI. Over the six-month process, the team shared their findings across the Group, highlighting where Gen AI has the potential to augment the game development process, and where it lags behind. Whilst the project team started small, it identified over 400 tools, evaluating and utilising those with the best potential. Despite this, we ultimately utilised bench resource from seven different game development studios as part of the project, as the tooling was unable to replace talent.
One of the key learnings was that whilst Gen AI may simplify or accelerate certain processes, the best results and quality needed can only be achieved by experts in their field utilising Gen AI as a new, powerful tool in their creative process. As a research project, the game will not be released to the public, but has been an excellent initiative to rapidly spread tangible learnings across the Group, provide insights to clients and it demonstrates the power and level of cross-studio collaboration that currently exists. Alongside Project Ava, the team is undertaking a range of Gen AI R&D projects, including around 3D assets, to ensure that we are able to provide current insights in an ever- evolving part of the market
The central quote and conclusion being:
One of the key learnings was that whilst Gen AI may simplify or accelerate certain processes, the best results and quality needed can only be achieved by experts in their field utilising Gen AI as a new, powerful tool in their creative process.
Which is obvious and expected for anyone familiar with the technology. Of course, experiments and confirming expectations has value too. And I’m certain actually using tools and finding out which ones they can use where is very useful to them specifically.
The overall point may be relatively obvious, but the details are not.
Which steps of which processes is it good at, and which not? What can be easily integrated into existing tooling? Where is is best completely skipped?
Yes, exactly. That’s what I was referring to in my last sentence.
Folks really didn’t understand how AI will work. It’s not going to be some big we’re dropping 1000 people.
It’s going to reduce demand over time.
And in that regard it’s no different than any other productivity tool or automation, I have seen software being bought that immediately Eliminated 80 odd jobs.
I’ve heard it as “No one is losing their job to AI, but they will lose their jobs to someone who is using AI.”
Think of AI like computers and spreadsheet software in the early 80s. I bet a lot of accountants were pretty freaked out about what this new technology was going to mean for their jobs.
Did technology replace those accountants? No, but companies probably didn’t need as many accountants as they did before. AI will likely reduce the number of programmers that a company needs, but it won’t eliminate them
Really I think it’s kind of the opposite. There are plenty of jobs awaiting higher skilled labor. Just as Excel didn’t hurt accounting, it gave many people who weren’t trained I’m accounting to take on more tasks than they would have.
Case in point: I’m using ChatGPT to help me write cover letters. I make sure to proofread them and sometimes it hallucinates my expertise, but it makes it a lot faster.
Also not going to happen. It’s massively overrated.
I mean that’s already happening at some big companies now.
Will it last? My guess is no, but they’ll enjoy saving the money that they would pay human beings in the mean time.
My hope is just that they’ll suffer losses due to a drop in product quality and start struggling, but let’s face it, the big tech companies are almost never the ones’ that are actually hurt by their decisions.
If you compared LLM outputs to even just a year ago you’ll realize how stupid your statement is.
It will start with going from 5 writers to 3, or going from 10 animators to 6.
Then 10 years from now as it gets more advanced we will be down to maybe 1 writer and 2 animators.
going from 10 animators to 6
It’s still crazy to me that like half of Across the Spider-Verse was AI generated
But that’s not how corporations view it because the people making the decision aren’t tec people, but beancounters.
Some slick but ignorant C-suite gets the bright idea that AI is The Way and makes the call to lay off a bunch of people.
I BET that is what Hasbro is thinking for DnD, and I am absolutely certain some of their recent content is AI, and that’s why they canned most of the real people involved.
You’ve just said all corporations view it this way. Think about what you said. You have taken articles from a few businesses and applied that across the board.
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It’s going to reduce demand over time.
At least in video games it’s probably going to be more that scope increases while headcount stays the same.
If most of your budget is labor, and the cost of the good is fixed, with the number of units sold staying around the same, there’s already an equilibrium.
So companies can either (a) reduce headcount to spend a few years making a game comparable to games today when it releases, or (b) keep the same headcount and release a game that reviews well and is what the market will expect in a few years.
So for example, you don’t want to reduce the number of writers or voice actors to keep a game with a handful of main NPCs and a bunch of filler NPCs when you can keep the same number of writers and actors but extend their efforts to straight up have entire cities where every NPC has branching voiced dialogue generated by extending the writing and performances of that core team.
But you still need massive amounts of human generated content to align the generative AI to the world lore, character tone, style of writing, etc.
Pipelines will change, scope will increase, but the number of people used for a AAA will largely stay the same and may even slightly grow.
Folks really don’t understand how AI will work. It’s not going to be
somebigwe’re dropping 1000 people.
ai automates the behavior of an average agent, not a talented one
No shit.
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Too many people see AI doing work as an either or thing. AI won’t replace people outright, it’ll just reduce the amount of people you need.
Which in turn replaces people. What happens if a person is 50 percent more productive with AI? Is the company going to let them simply have 50% of the workload they would before, or will they lay off the other unneeded employees?
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Duh.
The game will not be released to the public as it was just a research project, and Keywords didn’t provide any additional information about what type of 2D game it created.
So we just have to trust them on this? Yeah, no.
I am astonished by an established, commercial website having good structure.
It looks like a documentation website. Sidebar with clear categories and navigation. I really like it.
Huh, would you look at that.
“House made entirely of cement is a failure because you still need doors and windows and stuff.”
This is a quote that should end in ‘yet’. I am very confident in saying there will be an AAA game released that will be designed and implemented 95%+ by a machine. I am less confident in providing a timeline. If you consider the history of machine learning is ~70 years old (in one sense, one can argue other dates) and you plot the advances from tic-tac-toe to what machines can do today (chess being a prime example), it doesn’t take much vision to see that it won’t be but a matter of time before this is a real thing.
Sure it may produce a game but much of what makes a game good is making it fun and memorable. If we can eventually create a general AI then absolutely I think such a thing is possible. Otherwise it will be a copypasta mishmash and having a cohesive and fluent design is a huge if.
Well, I’m glad somebody did the experiment at least.
Add “, yet” to the headline and come back in a year or two.
Currently AI may fail to produce a video game, but so was the case for images, videos, and texts only a few years ago.
Failure is a good thing because it’s preceded by attempt.
Yeah. Just because it can’t do it now, doesn’t mean it won’t ever. And also refer to my other comment for how this is a bad study as they didn’t even provide any details on the game itself, let alone release the game. But anyone can do a similar study for themselves at home, since AI is free to use!
give it a few more years.
Just like self driving! In 2010 it was almost there, just needed a few more years…
Yes actually (except more than a few years).
Waymo is already operating a robotaxi service in 3 cities, now they just need to expand and find a way to make it not lose money.
Sounds like they just need a few more years…
Until what? 100% replacement of human-driven cars? Being rolled out for areas covering 50% of the population? Where is the goal line here?
We are already at the stage of commercial operation, with rides available to the general public - even though only in a few locations.
Sure, it’s far from being everywhere, but why pretend that progress has stalled, when it clearly hasn’t?
My point is that the ‘give it a few more years’ mantra gets repeated for decades
Go see videos of how well FSD V12 performs and you’re up for a surprise. Full self driving sucks untill it doesn’t. AIDRIVR puts up good content if you want recommendations.
