Ai Is Good

Although ‘meh’ was the most common response in the poll, ‘yes’ wasn’t far behind. The idea that AI is good is entirely based around the idea that it is going to progress the world incredibly quickly by optimising tasks. This opinion on the matter is more prevalent in youth because they don’t have to deal with jobs, and the idea of AI taking jobs doesn’t scare them. AI taking jobs also doesn’t scare Jon O’Neal, a video game artist from the Austin area, but for a completely different reason. “AI is coming, there’s no way we can stop it” he said, “and so those who are ready for [AI], I think stand a better chance to kind of weather that storm.” Jon has known about artificial intelligence for over a decade, but up until recently he didn’t pay much attention to it. That was until art programs like DALL-E and MidJourney started coming out. It was “about two or three years ago, when we first started hearing about MidJourney…like, whoa, okay, now they can start doing some interesting stuff.” As an artist, he knew that he could either learn how to use it or get left behind. Now he works for a company called Monumental, where he works to figure out how AI can be used to enhance the speed of workflow. When making game art, there are a thousand different hurdles you have to go over, including concepts, rigging characters, greyboxing, user interface, and more. Now “that’s what I’m trying to figure out is where does all this AI fit in?” to make this process easier and quicker. A good example of this is in concept art. “You can take a team of like two or three concept artists, they make four or five different types of concepts. Then they run it through something like MidJourney, but in a closed system. And then they generate 50 or 60 different concepts just based on their own art.” This is different from normal AI art generation because it uses art the artist made as inspiration for the generated art, instead of random artists on the internet. This way artists aren’t losing jobs, but instead being more efficient by using AI as a tool. “If you can manipulate [AI] in such a way and augment your abilities, I think there’s some value there, I really do. But the key word, there’s a few key words in here from an artist standpoint, augmentation, not replacing”.

Although ‘no’ ranked much lower than the other two options, it is the far more popular opinion for the older demographic. The main argument that AI is a bad thing for society is that it’s taking people’s jobs. AI art programs, such as Midjouney, are making professional-grade art that would take artists days or even weeks, in seconds. Now, take game companies for example. Why would they hire a team of artists to make concept art for their games, if they could just hire one guy who’s good at using AI, especially considering that these programs can imitate the art style of any person, game, show, etc. This, however, is not totally correct according to Jesse Scoble, a Canadian game designer, who believes that the rise of Artificial Intelligence will only affect new people coming into the working force. Take writing for example, companies can hire five talented writers coming out of college looking for entry-level positions, or “they can start giving those tasks to non-writers, basically, people who are not trained in English, and instead AI. And it won’t necessarily be great text, but it will be okay, techniques that will be, you know, good enough.” Also a company would only need one of those because its writing is good enough, and a lot faster. Scoble thinks that “people who have kind of the experience in a field for years, you know, hopefully won’t have their jobs taken, but I think for juniors coming up, sometimes it’s really good to have these, you know, simpler tasks, these easier jobs to do for them to learn and to kind of get their feet wet. And it [AI] may take away a lot of those things.” This also brings up the age-old paradox: ‘How do I get experience without a job, and how do I get a job without experience’. Now with big companies deciding to hire AI specialists to do these simple tasks, “it’s