Are you drained? I am drained. It looks as if yearly we get a brand new principal villain. Final yr it was NFTs: apes, slurp juice, regardless of the hell Sq. Enix is doing and what-have-you. This yr? Synthetic intelligence is right here to threaten us all with ultra-processed sludge instead of human creativity.
And all of it appears so inevitable. NFTs felt like a form of an infection, a fever stemming from addled CEOs and shareholders attempting to wring one other buck out of their numerous franchises. They’ve not been defeated, however we as a folks had been not less than in a position to bully them to the purpose that sport firms had been much more reticent about them this yr.
However AI is as loud as ever. Governments are utilizing it, large sport firms are toying with it, websites that make use of AI-generated content material are nonetheless being caught out, and the brightest minds within the discipline of AI are alternating between telling us it’s going to be good for humanity and begging for somebody to cease them earlier than they kill once more on a bi-monthly foundation. AI feels as unavoidable on the finish of the yr because it did originally.
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There are many causes for that. The place NFTs had been a get-rich-quick scheme, a grimy solution to make a number of thousand {dollars} off a jpeg, AI is a bonafide labour-saving machine, a solution to shift the already lopsided energy stability between bosses and employees in a method that is little question fairly interesting should you’re within the enterprise of pouring a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} into video games that take the higher a part of a decade to make.
Plus, hey, in case your business obtained completely zooted through the pandemic and is now shedding bloody swathes of workers within the hangover, that makes AI much more enticing. You may by no means need to lay AI off on the finish of a undertaking. Unhealthy headlines begone!
The work AI generates is faster, cheaper, and would not depend on people who’ve annoying habits like complaining and unionising. So what if it is technically worse? Loads of the merchandise I can purchase on Amazon are in all probability of decrease high quality than those you possibly can purchase in shops 100 years in the past, however they price much less to make, are quicker to mass produce, and the individuals who assemble them did not want tough, specialised ability units that make them laborious to interchange and lend them a bit extra clout in negotiations with administration. Not laborious to see why the folks holding the pursestrings went this manner with it.
All of that mixes to make AI really feel like a foregone conclusion, and it means folks—significantly employees—who come out to criticise their substitute by very intelligent Xerox machines find yourself lambasted as Luddites, uselessly and annoyingly attempting to thwart the onward march of historical past.
However look, initially, the Luddites had some extent, so let’s clear that up. You do not have to look very laborious in 2023 to understand this entire “industrial capitalism” factor has include its justifiable share of luggage. Second, if there’s one lesson we should take from this yr’s Hollywood writers’ strike, it is that completely nothing about AI must be handled as a fait accompli. By organisation, writers in Hollywood had been in a position to put guardrails in place round AI’s use in screenwriting, guaranteeing—not less than for now—that the inventive course of stays underneath the course of the folks doing the work moderately than the folks paying for it.
A properly organised and properly unionised video games business has the facility to ensure the Bobby Koticks of the world do not get carried away with themselves
The lesson there, I believe, is that we should not let the C-suites of the world dupe us into considering any of their desired adjustments are inevitable. They don’t seem to be. They simply have the cash and advertising and marketing energy behind them to appear that method. Simply as in Hollywood, a properly organised and properly unionised video games business has the facility to ensure the Bobby Koticks of the world do not get carried away with themselves and switch all our favorite issues into the identical low-cost and environment friendly slurry.
My colleague Ted Litchfield referred to as 2022 the yr the dam broke on videogame unions, which I suppose makes 2023 the yr the empire struck again. But when we wish video games to remain good, I believe Hollywood has taught us we’d like to ensure the dam breaks additional. As a result of whereas I believe AI is form of cool in an summary sense, and definitely in a method NFTs and web3 by no means had been (I can go and kind “Sonic the Hedgehog addressing the Council of Nicaea” into Bing proper now and get 4 photos of it, and that is fantastic), I believe we might in all probability all agree that we do not need it put in control of the narratives or artwork course of the video games we love. It is a instrument, and instruments belong within the arms of employees, not bosses.
