(The irony of using an AI generated featured image is not lost on me)
The subject of AI in art has been a hot potato recently. It’s a growing debate with proponents on each side of the divide arguing over ethics, creativity, and the impact on human artists. Some see AI as a tool for innovation, while others view it as a threat to artistic integrity and livelihoods.
In a recent interview with StealSpeaks, Sanctuary Producer and Director of parent company Enhearten Media, Mike ‘nine2’, broached the subject of using AI generated art in game cinematics. He said, “I was wondering what [the audience] think about the use of AI art in games. I’m not talking about in-game I’m talking about like cinematics. Right now we don’t have the resources to make cinematics so what we can do is pop up someone’s portrait picture and they say some words or something like that, and the words come up on the screen. But with the use of AI we could do animations and stuff so it could be like a kind of like a comic book… and what we would do is we would get AI to generate a character… and make interesting cutscenes.”
He goes on to say that the Sanctuary project doesn’t have the resources for human created cinematics, “We don’t have the resources for that. I know some people don’t like AI art but you know we have to scope our ambitions to the amount of money that we have right so can we use AI art? Anyway it would be great to hear in the comments what people think about that.”
I know that many people are dead set against AI generated art. They see it as plagiarism and infer that it is stealing the jobs of true artists. And that may be true, in the main, especially if you listen to the vocal minority.
However, Sanctuary is an indie project and it doesn’t have the same budget and resources as a AAA game studio. Its a choice between AI generated cutscenes or no cutscenes. No jobs are being stolen. No one is being put out of work. Sanctuary isn’t going to hire a cutscene artist – the money simply isn’t there.
It’s a question of whether to AI or not to AI. So what do you think about that? Stick your answers down below.
