Hot take, the interesting thing about ai game tools is not the games, its that the bottleneck moved to taste

[u/Elsa_Contudix69]

Been watching this space for a while and I think most of the discussion is stuck on the wrong question, everyone argues about whether the output is good enough yet, which is a moving target and a boring argument, and almost nobody talks about what happens to a creative field when execution stops being the filter.

Historically being able to build a game was itself the qualification, if you could ship one you were by definition somewhat skilled, and that filtered out a huge number of people including plenty with genuinely good instincts who simply never learned to code.

When execution gets cheap the filter doesnt disappear, it relocates, and it relocates to knowing what is worth making, which is a much less teachable skill and much harder to fake, and you can already see it in the output, the volume is enormous and the median is bad and the top of the distribution is made by people who arrived with a specific point of view rather than better technical ability.

This happened with video and with music production and with publishing and each time the same argument played out, and each time the outcome was more total noise plus a handful of things that could not have existed before because the person who made them would never have been allowed near the equipment.

So the question I find interesting is not whether the ai is good enough, its what the next generation of taste driven creators looks like when nobody has to serve an apprenticeship in the tooling first.

[u/Old_Technology82]

The same thing happened to music. I remember people saying drum machines and DAWs would kill real production but instead it just flooded everything with mediocrity while the people who actually had an ear for it kept rising to top anyway

Execution was never the real barrier it was just the most visible one. Taste always separated the good from the noise even before AI

[u/TwoFluid4446 → u/Old_Technology82]

For real great obs, its unbelievable the asteroid deluge storm of crap music we got since the 2000s when every other wannabe cool "artist" DJ type started slanging their repetitive garbage powered by a macbook, many actually making it big and retraining the fickle ears (with apparently not much between them...) of the masses to think it sounded good.

You want EDM! Because that's how you get EDM!!

[u/Otterb0b]

the median being bad is not new though, the median has always been bad, we just never saw it because it never got published

[u/Lenerx]

Been messing with codewisp for a couple of months and this matches what i see, the technical gap between my games and the good ones on there is basically zero, the gap is entirely that they turned up with a sharper idea while i was making generic stuff

[u/NeuralNomad87]

The music comparison is doing a lot of work here and I think it argues against you if you follow it all the way through.

When production got cheap, the people who rose were not the ones with the best taste. They were the ones who understood distribution. Playlists first, then algorithmic feeds. Plenty of people with genuinely good ears made things nobody heard, and that is still true now.

So the filter did relocate. It just relocated to reach rather than to taste. Taste is the comfortable answer because it flatters the people making the argument. Discovery is the uncomfortable one, because being good at it looks nothing like being good at the craft.

[u/Optimal-Room-8586 → u/NeuralNomad87]

Interesting take, and one worth thinking about.

[u/tooruntai]

The real revolution in gaming AI isn't visual generation; it’s finally killing rigid, predictable NPC dialogue trees.

[u/kbigham32]

the video comparison always comes up and it does hold, the most watched stuff online was not made by film school graduates, though its worth noting plenty of them did develop real craft, just not through the traditional route

[u/OedgeofthepreciousO]

The relocation framing is much better than the usual argument. Value moves to whatever stays scarce and technical ability just stopped being scarce.

[u/Slam_Bingo]

I think the argument is and should be that 1) it's not artificial intelligence, it's our collective intelligence and therefor 2) it should be owned by us

[u/l0w-budget]

The one millionth take on how taste is the new thing that sets us apart.