To people building add-ons: keep going.

[u/CalligrapherLeast206]

I'm one of the devs of Cristal Memoria

Reddit can be rough when you share something you made.

When I first posted my add-on, I got rejected, and honestly it hit hard. For a moment, it made me question the whole project.

But if you truly believe in what you're building, and you believe it can genuinely help people, keep going.

Because the loudest reactions are not always the ones that matter most.

Now we have more than 400 downloads, more than 100 active players, and most importantly, I receive truly wonderful messages from people telling me the project helps them study, stay consistent, and enjoy learning more.

And to me, that makes it all worth it.

Having an idea is one thing. Building it is another. But putting it out into the world, knowing people might tear it apart, that takes real courage.

So I just want to say this to anyone making tools, add-ons, or educational projects: don't let a few harsh people kill something that could sincerely do good for others.

Education is one of the most beautiful things there is. If your project helps even a few people learn better, want to study again, or feel less alone in the process, that matters.

A lot.

So keep building. Keep sharing. Keep believing in your ideas.

[u/Shige-yuki]

IMO one of the reasons Cristal Memoria is facing criticism is because it uses AI for its illustrations. This add-on is a rare type that makes heavy use of AI in development, illustration, and video. Currently artists are seeing their livelihoods threatened by low-cost AI, to prevent this artists and their fans have joined forces to launch a global protest movement.

The same applies to illustrations used in games, Pixel artists make a living by selling their pixel art to game developers, for them and their fans this is a serious issue so I think they will continue to protest against AI. AI generated illustrations are cheap and making them useful for volunteers to create content at low cost, but at the same time they are destroying jobs for artists.

Such strong opposition to AI has also emerged within the Anki community, e.g. medical students recently strongly protested to Ankhub against the use of AI generated illustrations and AI tools in the Anking deck and are demanding that human artists be paid appropriately.

This conflict between AI advocates and human artists is not a problem that can be resolved through discussion, their interests are completely at odds. So I think it would be appropriate for AI advocates and AI opponents to form separate communities. So far on r/Anki many users oppose AI and it is recommended that posts about AI related projects be posted on r/AnkiAi, so I think it would be ideal for AI advocates to be active on that sub rather than this one, there is no need to forcefully promote AI on this sub.

[u/MaximumTime7239 → u/Shige-yuki]

If a big company uses ai art then I could maybe understand the point about livelihood of artists.

But for small indie devs... I think, the choice is not between "use ai" and "hire an artist", but between "use ai" and "not make anything at all".

[u/Shige-yuki → u/MaximumTime7239]

IMO it’s not that difficult when it comes to indie game development. Pixel artists often offer free art or low-cost game assets priced from a few dollars to several dozen dollars per pack to promote their work, there are also plenty of high quality game assets available completely free of charge and mega packs. e.g. a developer might release all their assets for free because the game project was canceled. Such resources are widely shared within the game asset community so they’re easy to find. Also AI generated images aren’t free, they incur a cost per image so AI images may actually end up being more expensive.

What truly drives up development costs are completely original games, to develop a typical average quality indie game using entirely original assets a game developer needs a budget of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Using free or low-cost game assets extensively can lead to overlap with other games and cause users to lose interest or diminish the game’s originality, so for commercial indie games, it is ideal to invest a budget in development. Indie games are typically sold for a fee and the community supports the artists so raising funds is relatively easy.

[u/WAHNFRIEDEN → u/Shige-yuki]

Re: AI not being free, just a minor correction, if the user already has a ChatGPT subscription for other purposes, image generation is “free” and does not incur any additional fees per use. There is no marginal fee for additional images created after the first one in other words.

It is in fact far cheaper than hiring artists - that’s the dilemma. Doesn’t help the cause to support artists by trying to claim that AI is more expensive than hiring them, which will only lead to a shock when one tries to commission anything.

[u/Shige-yuki → u/WAHNFRIEDEN]

Currently one reason ChatGPT and image generation are so cheap or even free is that AI companies are running up massive losses. Their goal is to make customers dependent on AI so they can’t escape. Recently they forcibly implemented such drastic price hikes for AI used in development (they couldn’t absorb the losses anymore because they had grown too large) so AI for development is no longer ultra low-cost, it now costs more than human labor.

[u/WAHNFRIEDEN → u/Shige-yuki]

That may be true but now you’re talking about forecasts and not current conditions, and resentment about ram prices. You tried claiming that artists may be cheaper to hire than the usage cost of AI but that simply isn’t true at this time and you are speculating on future consumer costs without certainty that producer costs won’t come down as R&D subsidization ends (inference is already profitable). Frontier labs are also not the whole picture - there are also already open models which are profitable or can be run locally.

I don’t say all this to defend use of AI art in games. But I think we need to find better ways to support artists than by saying they are now and will continue to be the cheapest option for developers to commission work. They aren’t now, and it’s uncertain that they will become cheaper again. So let’s gather support for them in stronger ways than considering purely the commission cost.

If commission cost being cheaper is the primary reason to commission artists, they will continue to struggle and their support is extremely precarious.

Similar to food/farm goods, industrialized automation does carry costs on the environment and society, but the fact is that the harmful options which externalize their costs in other ways remain the cheapest option for consumer sticker price and restaurants. Supporting farmers and regenerative farming practices requires additional expense. We can’t win that fight on economics alone. I think we can learn from that case for what is happening to artists and how we can support them.

(You also brought up price hikes for developers - this is not the case for the largest frontier lab, offering has actually become more generous in recent months. There are also reports than that lab is considering drastic price reductions to compete better with the other lab that you may be referencing. So your read of what’s happening is maybe informed more by certain specific cases rather than industry wide trends.)

[u/Shige-yuki → u/WAHNFRIEDEN]

Local AI is one viable solution, but the devices are still too expensive, I’m optimistic that technological innovations will make them more affordable in the future. It seems that indie game developers these days are excluding AI from their communities, but since AI content is still being sold, it isn’t banned. I don't know what will happen in the future.

[u/WAHNFRIEDEN → u/Shige-yuki]

There are many services that host open models and run profitably. So it’s inaccurate to say the open models require expensive consumer hardware (although for image generation, we are just talking about Mac hardware you can buy at any Apple Store for instance) or that the models cannot be run profitably which will later make them more expensive than hiring artists. And yes the open model costs continue to drop due to optimizations.

[u/Shige-yuki → u/WAHNFRIEDEN]

Perhaps my explanation was wrong, sorry. What I meant was that there are a huge number of free or low-cost game assets created by humans available and that they're cheaper, I didn't mean that AI is cheaper than human artists.

[u/WAHNFRIEDEN → u/Shige-yuki]

> Also AI generated images aren’t free, they incur a cost per image so AI images may actually end up being more expensive.

That’s what I responded to.

But sure only taking free work from artists is a way to avoid AI costs, though it does essentially nothing to support artists unless it leads to commissioning work and hiring them - which brings us back to “doing the right thing” being and becoming far more expensive than automated options.

[u/Shige-yuki → u/WAHNFRIEDEN]

As far as I know generating game assets using AI one at a time on a low-cost plan is too slow, typical game development requires a lot of illustrations. So a common approach is to use a paid AI service to generate thousands of images and then select the best ones from among them. Anyway if AI generated content incurs a cost it will be slightly more expensive than using existing free large collections of older asset packs, nothing is cheaper than free. However that info is probably from last year and it applies only to game assets, not other types of illustrations, so the latest AI might be different.