‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers - Aftermath
‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers - Aftermath
AI slop can be bad but this Bradley doesn't understand that businesses exist to make money.
Bradley talking about his manager:
"He doesn't know that the important thing isn't just the end result, it's the journey and the questions you answer along the way”.
If Bradley is making art only for personal growth, he needs to quit and make his own indie game.
Because if you are working for someone else it's not the journey, it's the result. Get it done quicker and then slack.
The end result is often not important though. what is important is that someone understands the customer's business use case well enough to be able to judge if the end result is actually fit for purpose and to adjust the end result to accommodate later changes in the requirements. AI is particularly bad at both of those.
adjust the end result to accommodate later changes in the requirements.
That's the end result.
AI is particularly bad at both of those.
Bradley wasn't talking about delivering AI art. He didn't like that his manager used AI for prototyping to simplify describing what he wanted Bradley to create.
He wants the manager to describe his ideas to him, then spend hours sketching and inking the idea only for the manager to say, "that's not exactly right" and start it all over again. Bradley must be an hourly contractor because his argument makes no sense. A picture is worth a thousand words. Bradley wants more meetings and email exchanges instead of getting results.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
As in if you show it to 100 people each one will think of a different 10 words. But not as in "here, take these 1000 words and produce a picture that will put those 1000 words into the minds of anyone who sees it".
The other people interviewed answer those questions if you keep reading
“It really weighed on the creativity of my role, and again, spat in the face of my expertise”, [Ricky says]. “It wasn't just this though; the tool itself lacks the intent, context, and limitations of what we're doing. It doesn't have other aspects of the project, influences, references, or personal experiences in the back of its mind, because it doesn't have a mind. Whenever we design something for a game, it's drawn from somewhere, influenced by other things, and filtered through our own experiences as a human. These AI ideas lose ALL of that..."
“What follows from these discussions is me explaining why, usually over hours rather than minutes, that these tools have no place in a professional game development pipeline or production and actually hinder the development of visuals”, Francis says. “I also find myself explaining to them how the iteration and 'idea' phase of a project is where the best stuff happens, how exploring things through artistic labor is where your best ideas come to fruition, and why would we want an AI (that we don't even own) to do that for us with art that isn't ours to use?”
(Edited for formatting)
Sounds like he is in the wrong place then; his employees see it different. Go somewhere else and watch them burn.
So you don't want employees to learn how to get better at their craft along the way? Just ship broken junk, and keep making the same mistakes over and over?
If I needed a painting of a bird, it would be much easier to show the artist a photo of a bird and then describe how my idea differs from the photo instead of spending hours describing to the artist what the bird in my mind should look like.
Bradley didn't like that his boss wasn't standing over his shoulder describing everything while Bradley sketched the picture.
The other artists in the article had valid points.
Part of my compensation is the fulfillment and experience I get from my job. Taking that away changes the equation and I'm job hunting again.
So you would prefer lots of meetings, messages and redone work instead of someone showing you a picture that kind of represents what they want?
The problem is that the picture does not represent what they want. They want aspects a, b and c from the picture while someone else looking at it might see aspects x, y and z. Pictures are an incredibly imprecise form of communication.
It's not only a picture. It's a picture with a description. It's the starting point. You don't start a painting by going from blank canvas to finished product. You start with a sketch.
I see both points. You're totally right that for a company, it's just the result that matters. However, to Bradley's, since he's specifically talking about art direction, the journey is important in so much as getting a passable result. I've only dabbled with 2D and 3D art, but converting to 3D requires an understanding of the geometries of things and how they look from different angles. Some things look cool from one angle and really bad from another. Doing the real work allows you to figure that out and abandon a design before too much work is put in or modify it so it works better.
When it comes to software, though, I'm kinda on the fence. I like to use AI for small bits of code and knocking out boilerplate so that I can focus on making the "real" part of the code good. I hope the real, creative, and hard parts of a project aren't being LLM'd away, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's a mandate from some MBA.
wont we think of the corporations!
AI slop can be bad but this Bradley doesn’t understand that businesses exist to make money.
This is generally done by making a quality product, not a pile of shit.
You can get awry with selling people shit, if you charge shit prices. But the kind of assholes described in the article are gonna try to sell shit at AAA prices. Then they are gonna blame their team for not AIing hard enough.
But Bradley wasn't complaining that they were trying to sell AI. He was upset that his manager used AI to give him a rough estimate of what he wanted Bradley to create.
And explained that he was using AI to do a part of the job that needs to be done by humans, because it helps them figure is the solution.
It's get it done quicker and then do some more because it's all monitored. They do the same shit at my company.