'I Don't Think Prompting Is Art': The Last of Us Co-Creator Isn't a Fan of Generative AI

This is what also drawers probably said about the first photographers and musicians about the first DJs. And most photographers today are not artists and most photos are not art, but there are exceptions. And we will see these exceptional AI artists pretty soon; not artificial artists, but real artists using AI.

"It’s difficult to even pitch the concept of this creature, because in my world, NPCs are AI," Straley says.

Yep, in the video game world npcs have always been AI.

In most open worlds I've always thought repeated faces with different skin tones and facial hair are the "bad" AI generated. I quite remember Guerilla saying Horizon uses some procedurally generated environment, isn't that AI....apart from replicating voice actors or concept artists which would be wrong, I feel games have always been using AI in some form...

One thing to look forward to is that, even in an AI future, there will still be creatives looking to do things the proper way, even if it’s harder. The organic food industry is worth a billion dollars, Studio Ghibili do mostly, if not all, hand drawn works, Bugonia filmed everything on a 70mm camera. Slop will always exist and probably be worse but high quality passionate entertainment will still exist, for sure.

@Max_the_German how would real artists use GenAI? Serious question, honestly.

''Generative art lacks the soul that makes human art meaningful''.

This is one of those lines that sounds poignant but ultimately means nothing. What is ''soul''? What is ''meaning''? Survey a hundred people and you'll get a hundred answers.

When I play eFootball 2021 I play against the computer or what is known as A.I.
The computer makes decisions programmed by a human that transfers into Artificial intelligence.
The same concept goes into all gaming calculations imputed into a computer by a human...or am I missing something.

@Max_the_German the difference is photographers take their own pictures and even though DJs might remix other songs they put new ideas and their own touch.

He said it in the article AI is based on information pulled in using other people’s art. It won’t continue to get better and innovate unless there continues to be new ideas.

@TheArt I assumed exactly what you said too.

@Number09 AI is a buzzword. We've had ''AI'' since the very first video games. That line that went up and down on Pong to react to your dot? That's AI.

I don't hate AI. I think that it can have many benefits for humanity if implemented well. But it will never fully replace human-made art. AI just pulls data from the internet, and because of that, it honestly never tells complete to me.

@47Levi

I think it will be mostly interactive art, on websites or in art museums. And I think it won’t be static prompts but prompt generators, created by the artists, which analyse the AI results and continually reprompt to modify the results automatically, with the results morphing into something surprisingly over time.

Think of the demo scene. Some of these people are genuine artists, no doubt, and their products can be stunning and inspiring.

His intentions are good, but the way he's presenting the argument is a bit flawed.

Calling generative art “soulless” misses the point. The issue isn’t spiritual, it's practical. Generative AI lacks creativity because it lacks agency. It does not form goals, or understand what it produces.

Its outputs are generated by optimizing patterns in existing data not by attempting to communicate or create new ideas.

@Max_the_German wouldn’t say I’m necessarily a fan of that but I get what you mean and respect your viewpoints.

@Number09 @LifeGirl I think there's some confusion here, which is what I think Straley is trying to get at when he points out that you cannot say "the most advanced AI companion" anymore without people assuming generative AI has been used somehow.
Traditional game AI, like pathfinding, decision trees, finite state machines, etc, is algorithmic. It’s deterministic and designed by programmers to simulate intelligence in NPCs. This is what Straley appears to mean when he says “AI programmers” and “NPCs are AI.” It’s been part of games for decades; the behaviour of the NPC paddle in Pong would have been controlled by such an algorithm.
LLMs like GPT or diffusion systems that learn patterns from massive datasets and generate new outputs (text, images, audio) rely on statistical inference, not handcrafted logic. A recent example is machine learning used by the developers of ARC Raiders to program the movement of the ARC robots.
Using AI as a blanket term is probably unhelpful these days. Straley's right to note there has been a shift among the public in their understanding of and use of the phrase "AI" though. Maybe the terms we use need to update with the times.

Of course it isn't "art" but what has that to do with anything 😄

@TheArt well, there is a major difference between what, for example No Man’s Sky did (handcrafting an engine and using real human artists) versus COD putting a prompt in a generator. The former is a creative choice, the latter is being lazy. Unfortunately, AI has been streamlined into one thing, mostly to please investors.

EDIT @StrickenBiged seems you explained it a lot better than I did

I have an ai opinion! I have an ai opinion! Me, too!

Absolutely sick of AI, and the main reason is that absolutely everyone is going on about it all the f***ing time and it has become another battlefield for people to fight on any time anyone even utters the words 🙃🙃🙃

@LifeGirl
Exactly my thoughts. Soul to me seems like an illusion in ourselves, and a placeholder for the deterministic actions we can’t understand in others. People are no less iterative in their use of external stimuli than AI, you just can’t look into their brains in the same way we can an AIs coding.