With the advent of artificial intelligence that’s smart enough to generate code and images, tech leaders have expressed concern on the risks AI poses towards society. In online discussion websites like Reddit, it’s also common for people sharing their worry of losing their jobs to automation. But this is actually happening in the videogame industry in China already.
Rest of World recently interviewed artists, illustrators and other professionals working for Chinese game studios. All of them, the nonprofit publication found, are going through the profound impact of AI-generated images on their livelihoods.
Freelance illustrator Amber Yu, for instance, shared that she used to make up to $1,000 for a single video game poster. But such high-paying opportunities just stopped coming as of February, and she has since been only receiving minor photo enhancing assignments that pay a small fraction of her usual rate.
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Meanwhile, illustrator Xu Yingying said that AI development is at a pace that far exceeds expectations. In the game art studio that she works for, five out of fifteen illustrators skilled in character design were let go this year. Xu believes this is because the studio had adopted AI image generators that made the typical work of ten people achievable by just two.
Indeed, with just a text prompt, anyone can produce intricate photos through AI. Several tools like DALL-E 2, along with apps powered by the text-to-image deep learning model Stable Diffusion, are already available online that can create images in seconds.
Chinese gaming giants such as Tencent and NetEase have also been investing in artificial intelligence, in part, to reduce development costs. And it seems to have paid off for these companies; recruiter Leo Li revealed to Rest of World that game illustration-related jobs have dropped by 70 percent in the past year.
Thanks for an interesting and entertaining post. This is a wonderful article. I am fond of technology because it is our progress and our future. And games are an indicator of how quickly we are developing.