How AI is Taking Over the Gaming Industry and What It Means for You with Adnan Chaumette | 315

foreign [Music] what's up everybody welcome to another episode of Game Dev Unchained the number one game the podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof I am Brandon Pham and with me a special guest a once before guest Edmund chamele how do you see your last name all right how are you doing that Mom doing good man thanks for having me yeah so it's been a while since we talked to you and since that while a lot of things have been happening and I've been looking forward to talking to you particularly about the subject for those who haven't read the title uh with the AI World kind of taking over everything um coming from you being like a software a technical artist by trade you know

you're kind of used to building software uh to help artists and then this kind of came along uh quote-unquote to help artists right uh I would love to kind of hear your opinion but before we get into that could you give a quick intro about yourself to those uh that are joining us sure so um I'm Adnan I've been in the gaming industry for about uh eight years now and um I initially started as a 3D artist and then I got really frustrated with the 3D workflow and decided to be a tech artist um I've worked at quixel for a couple of years then they got acquired by epic games I worked there for six months before starting um polygon flow my own company who's which is basically doing um a plugins Library kind of like a tool kind of like Mega scans but it's just a whole bunch of tools that um aim to

solve very specific problems whether it's like you want to scatter you want to create pipes and whatnot and so yeah that's uh who I am and what I'm doing yeah as mentioned before uh AI is such a big topic for this year on the podcast for all artists it's having such an impact and it's happening pretty fast I I mentioned this many times it it felt like the last six months have been supercharged um in a way that I haven't seen new technology uh being thrown and embrace in the gaming uh or at least game development scene uh I guess to preface all this conversation when were you first kind of privy to this technology coming onto yeah um so for me uh I've been thinking about artificial

intelligence um with relation to like computer graphics for as long as Andrew maximov uh the founder of Promethean AI demoed his technology around 2018 which is specifically around making 3D kind of scenes and word building with AI and but since then the biggest Focus if you look at how all these big companies are investing so much money and the biggest Focus almost always seemed on content moderation and whatnot so it wasn't always obvious that you would just out of the blue start being like hey I can do amazing concept art I can have a chat boots to talk about uh my custom recipe or the nature of Consciousness and whatnot and um to me the huge kind of foreign shift happened sometime last year I

think there was an AI chat boat um a fairly average released that was using uh one of open ai's uh apis uh openai released Chad GPT which I'm sure we'll get to uh later on but essentially at that point when I saw it I was like okay this chatbot is really good it wasn't like chat GPT it was kind of meh to be honest but you could see the potential and so I started talking about it with a couple of people and most of the time it was like kind of like a gimmick you try it for a few hours and then you're like okay that was that was cool and um after that cooled down um most people kind of forget about it AI I mean I wouldn't say for forgot about AI but more like it went back to being like a research uh Thing versus a um this is actually happening thing and um but the

fascinating thing with with this topic is that if you look at the main technologies that are enabling this kind of huge boom of it AI uh research and products almost none of them is like a year or two old like uh the foundational Tech is somewhere between three to five years old most of the time and uh it's just been uh I think saw Sam Altman also said that with regards to chat GPT they just held on to the technology for that for like 10 months they didn't see the need to release it because it was so obvious to them that someone else is going to do it and only after they realize okay seriously no one is doing this that they decided okay let's throw around some prototype to see how people would uh react to it so it's been very uh shocking to say the least um I mean you know not just on the dolly

slash stable diffusion and mid-journey part but primarily on the chatgpt part because with Technologies like a mid-journey and whatnot there's kind of a I feel like it was obviously bound to happen because there's so much art out there and so many pictures out there um when when you when you're looking at all these ongoing discussions in the uh art industry about you know AI is using copyrighted images and whatnot that is true but you have to consider that AI takes every single frame of Avatar of every Disney movie of every movie you've ever seen which collectively is maybe probably billions of time more than individual art pieces and so AI feeds off of all of that so it's it's almost like concept art was the end I guess

photography was the absolute best use case and first Target for these new uh models so yeah I mean we keep hearing these arguments from the individual basis you know art station going through its thing and I think the last couple months to kind of backtrack what they originally said with that saying that well we do want to support artists after everyone kind of yeah kind of protest it right I believe that's the official stance now that they've made it so that you know you they have to Grant permission but yeah you did bring up a pretty good point that no one really talks about aside from the individual artists that are uploading which is an important part but probably a small fraction of this calculation yeah how how are these bigger companies uh cool with this you don't really hear Disney or these major Animation Studios or whatever actually are they invested in this technology they're cool with it in that

way and they haven't really said them much about it or they don't they don't yeah don't know too much about it so even a company like epic there's probably millions or hundreds of thousands of hours of uh fortnite being segmented for that gameplay being segmented into frames and analyzed by some AI companies somewhere and um I I remember Tim Sweeney uh talking on Twitter about this subject I asked him some questions about this and as soon as he answered it was just like I had this huge uh Avalanche of artists thinking like uh the the Epic is supporting this and they're probably investing in stable Division and whatnot and I think that's a legitimate question but the answer is basically no like uh if you look at mid-journey no big company like epic or

Disney has any stack in that uh in that business same thing with stable division it's completely open source anyone can use it um open AI they are like super independent besides some investment from Microsoft and whatnot so I would say it's probably a bit of two things number one it's just they're too slow to react to these new uh Technologies like they're not seeing it as uh as as much of a threat as the individual may see it I mean for Disney it might you could make the case that if people start making derivative content with AI it doesn't matter much because as it stands AI content is not copyrightable so for them it literally just means more marketing you can't go out there and start selling uh you know let's say you make an amazing comic book that relies

on takes a lot of the Disney look and sometimes even characters if all that does is just promote their IP is great but if you happen to be super rich around this then of course they're gonna see you it's kind of like obvious from that sense um but I think a huge part of it also is that it's a super big um gray area where you might go and make the case in court that um Technically when these kind of web scraping companies like uh the company that basically took all this content for stable diffusion and a couple of others is named uh lion 5B 5B means 5 billion images and um what you could go out there and say well they took all of my art and I didn't give them consent which is true but then if you try to build a really

strong court case around this other people are going to say okay but if that's technically true why do you have fan art on Art station because that's way worse since you actually Drew this by hand and Disney never explicitly gave to most people the permission to do it in fact most fan art just uh hinges on this idea of fair use but it's it's not uncommon for big companies to sue individual artists for derivative work when they feel like it so for big companies you you could really make the case that if they try to sue some AI company the AI company might just be saying uh like okay but what about those guys like Google takes all of this content online and kind of creates a mishmash of it to make search better if you're saying that we can't take all the pictures online sometimes through Google image then why are they doing it and then

you're bringing Google Into The Fray and now it's like a huge discussion where you can't really win a court case against Google with an argument like this without us effectively breaking the internet almost like it's a very very delic delicate um issue and I think in the art industry we're not appreciating that we're not appreciating the fact that you know so many authors and writers and bloggers have had their content stolen uh as well to feed to AIS like Chad gpg and whatnot there's not a similar backlash at least not to the same extent because for the most part it's just insanely hard to argue for or against I mean you could from an ethical point of view say that this is bad and I think it's really bad that you spend so much work creating amazing stuff AI steals it and then

anyone else can do what you've done I think it's not good I think um consent should have been asked but I can understand why big companies don't want to sue and why um to some extent most of us have been doing that quite a bit like I remember doing a fan art environment on Uncharted um I remember wanting to do a fan art on Secret of Mana so I'm super old Square Enix games like it's it's too tricky basically on that Avenue yeah yeah it is very tricky I mean I am aware at least one lawsuit there's like a tree of artists teaming up with uh with a lawyer to try to Sue mid-journey and stable diffusion and that's still ongoing and uh be kind of interesting because I think it's the first of its kind that we heard that is going up against the AI um and it's defensive it's interesting though and it's the first one I was seeing it uh Microsoft GitHub and open

AI I mean maybe not too interesting because Microsoft has a stake at open AI so it's like hey we don't want this right asking for it to be thrown away but the question is I think people are not looking into it like you are in a way where you know objectively uh we are artists we are in most cases making derivative work from what we see right and in a way you know mid-journey and stable diffusion the the the the the web scrapers uh kind of in a logical way try to recreate what a person absorbs as an artist right in in terms of references um and from what I know and maybe I need to look more into it they they're not really charging a fee for use right now right see if he's a mid-journey uh stable diffusion it's basically open source like you can run it on your own

machine if you want so they're not profiting from it they're just it's like marketing or they are okay so how exactly are they marketing from it because that's the question it's like because if from zero to to 100 their their web scraping they're providing open source Tech I know there's definitely a problem for those who are generating these art and then selling it right so how how are these guys uh these big guys making money from from from this technology right now yeah so I mean uh stability diffusion is kind of a one component of a bigger company called stability Ai and uh they have a whole bunch of businesses on the site including AI generators um that they're selling as well so there it's just they're making a lot of money right now undoubtedly same thing with mid-journey um they also have a subscription plan where you can get to generate more

images faster yada yada and I think open AI is the uh only one with Dali 2 where it's like just slow but it gives you results but um they're they're kind of in a special slash weird category where they've been very carefully doing a lot of their things and so you won't see a lot of uh like Delhi 2 isn't of the same grade for concept art style stuff as me journey and stability diffusion because it seems so uh it looks like they've built very carefully their data set to learn how to draw essentially um but yeah these businesses are definitely making a lot of money sometimes not even profiting directly but just if you have a business like this if you're mid-journey they were the

sir the biggest server ever on uh Discord at some point and uh you go out there to some Venture Capital firm and tell them this is our business right now we're not making a lot of money but just like Facebook and all these other companies it always starts that way and our focus is just building the biggest user base ever and then start figuring out the smartest way of charging them like just like that you're gonna get like infinite money I can't think of any investor that would ever say no to that pitch to be honest yeah for the um the encapulation of you know user base yeah so they're making it but as if like a like a social networking uh traditional social networking site right just acquisitions mobile site mobile game sites but I mean like I guess then there is some legitimacy then when people are complaining about like there is no consent right where how how

are you guys before it was for research purposes and for that reason it was okay but now there's profit after all this because there is no backstep right the data is already in it's taken right there's no giving back to it it's not like no one can go into code and delete line one to line 15. I'm not gonna even try it like there's no way of stepping back there might be a way to prevent more sourcing right in the future but whatever Zen is already in what what if we were to look because there is obviously an opposition with most artists about this what Outlook and outcome is there for them to keep resisting like what what is the desired outcome from from an artist and a standpoint because there's no stopping it right yeah um I've been getting into a lot of

fights without programmers over the last couple of months with this subject and um I think it's it's it's a very tricky question because first we need to look at um the kind of landscape of software in the art industry today um you have blender which is taken over most 3D softwares and it's free yeah uh you have Unreal Engine which is taking over most game engines and it's free you have Photoshop which is pretty cheap and it's free well not free it's really really cheap for most people of the world yeah yeah and um across the board also the substance kind of ecosystem also affordable Mega scans free if you're using Unreal Engine basically what happened in the software World essentially is and and I was seeing this a lot at quixel is artists

are just to really really not uh interested in investing in good software and uh or rather they don't they underestimate how much r d and work it takes to create the technology that they have today so if you look at blender today it's like okay they have this beautiful PBR viewport and whatnot it took billions of dollars from companies like Disney to invest and make papers and so on um and then you have epic thanks to fortnite they're not giving the engine for free to everyone basically you could go on Unity is mostly funded by ads Mega scan is funded by fortnite substance to some extent is funded by adobe's bigger products um it's it's a very weird situation like it's really really rare to be in a situation like this where there aren't that many artists to

create a situation like Facebook and Twitter where those services are free and you are the products uh in those in that case it makes sense because there are hundreds of millions of people and the analytics that you can extract is valuable but in the case of 3D and 2D software there's not that many people most of these softwares don't have good analytic systems at all yeah and so everyone like epic strategy is just if we give this engine for free we widen the market which means more people are trying to make games which mean more indie games are successful using our engine which means we get 12 or whatever it was from them but what that the problem here is as an individual artist I could go to Epic like what happened with the art station situation and just say hey epic I don't like what you did with um our station uh I don't like the no AI tag I want you to ban outright all AI

content and um epic could just say no and you can't do anything you can't you can't boycott them because they're not getting anything from you they're getting most of the revenues from kids stealing their mom's car to buy fortnite v-bucks and uh it and it's the same problem across the board like there's not a single big software that I can think of where a boycott in in the 3D or computer Graphics world could work because it's just funded by other people yeah so that problem was already really bad uh before AI came in but now that AI is into the picture what you have essentially is these companies were not prepared for such a huge AI um shift at least this like I can't think I think maybe substance uh is or allegorithmic is the only team that has an AI Department

uh that's like seriously committed to Ai and I've had it for some time where they're doing a lot of r d and so on epic as far as I know on the 3D game engine side the unity blender Maya none of them has it not Cinema 4D nobody and uh because of this all they can do is just look around and see what public API has some good use that we can take and then maybe commercialize the thing whether it's good or not we don't care it's not like the artist is giving us any money like it's it's just such a weird setting for artists to literally have no say or no bargain or no way to negotiate on how the technology should go so back to your question I think the big problem now is we we just haven't funded the people that could have given to artists a future that is suitable for them like for

Microsoft and so on releasing daily too it's not even about crushing artists or whatnot you often see a lot of discussions where artists say AI people disrespect us and whatnot I think it's just most AI these big air companies they don't even think of artists in that sense yeah we're not we're not even in there in their minds yeah yeah it for them it's just like okay you know writing is a problem that is not accessible for most people around the world it took decades you look at continents like Africa it took decades to get most people uh to a point that's where they were literate and the India as well they've been struggling a lot over the last couple of decades to really become the great country that they are today and a lot of it thanks to writing and teaching people how to use software and whatnot and uh drawing is kind of similar where

I mean the rationale is just that what matters at the end of the day isn't that you know how to make the most beautiful brush Strokes rather what story are you trying to tell so for a lot of these companies the idea isn't that we want to make a storytelling easier it's just if you have great stories but you don't know how to draw you should be able to tell your great stories anyway and so for a lot of artists what that means is you need to focus so much more on [Music] essentially what the heck are you trying to do with your life like are you just are you just gonna um pump out concept after concept on some random game um are you going to be a material artist a character artist good your main asset in the future is going to be how good are you at conveying stories but I really don't see a scenario where

within this decade at least a lot of the jobs in the computer Graphics industry aren't affected like I see the concept art World being cut by a huge chunk uh not because uh concept art is easy but because there's too much drawings and pictures out there to do good enough and uh good enough is good enough for most companies like you could be the best concept artists out there but if you don't have enough money to hire you just use AI and um yeah there's artists are right to be pissed uh I think it's just um tricky to know where to channel that frustration I don't think bringing it to court and whatnot is um the way to go because you know Microsoft right now just went like Hey we're now integrating chat gpg into Bing

and Google is like here's Bard our new AI that does chat both video image everyone is gonna do this and you have to be like insane to think that some small GoFundMe from some gaming industry artists are gonna break the whole thing and it's not even like a David versus Goliath's situation it's just that from a legal point of view these companies have really looked at the whole situation and made an assessment and then made Investments essentially and so for the artists to me the question is just okay if we suppose that this technology is here to stay if like you said earlier our data has already been stolen we can't do much about it at this point um what is the next step like should I start using it um should I start uh

maybe Focus not using it but focusing a lot more on giving a specific identity to my art style there's a lot of artists out there that have an amazing Style and I think it's going to make a lot of sense for them to just keep going because they have a lot to gain now more than ever and um yeah to be honest I think it's just going to be that uh more personal touch on your artwork and thinking about how to use AI in your work um I don't see a future where it's like uh there's a lawsuit that a court case that's been won it's not only all these companies are like okay we're backing off Microsoft goes like Oh 10 billion download the invest no it is um there's a lot of points that you made that made a lot of sense and

in in the simplest form I mean this train is already moving it's going into this direction and for a lot of people it's known and for those who are still resisting it it's the unknown um it is an age where we are either redefining or defining depending on what your perspective is what creativity really is right and for a lot of artists they weren't prepared for this and they're the ones that spent ten thousand hours to perfect holding the pencil right and now uh are kind of reminded that we are creating at the end and entertaining peace for profit and in most cases like you said good enough works just fine right and for those who are developing your own style or unique

enough you know that's great but we are at a point where it is keep feeding into the machine that will be able to replicate that style within a second um I agree with you uh there are a lot of artists I I the one thing I keep hearing people say is that yes there are a lot of people freaking out and they're comparing this to like the age of the calculator when mathematicians everywhere were upset that the calculator was invented right um it is more different than that obviously because creativity has always been a human uh imperfection right it was something that we own as a you know it was kind of like our thing that imagination and computer that computer can't replicate right but you know a programmer out in the distance said actually if I just take your your your your

process and Method I can replicate that um the same way and then you know times a million or trillion uh in terms of results in time in second right um and I agree with you like you know there needs to be a reevaluation of the self instead of trying to stop this train from going uh because like you said these bigger companies you know once the bigger companies already picked aside which they have they like AI they see it as the next evolution of search engines of Internet 3.0 whatever what they call it is it still 2.0 or 3.0 they keep changes they keep changing yeah it changes every day I was like are we at 2.0 or 3.0 but the next age of 3.0 right because you know the VR AI this is all part of the same uh technology that's supposed to drive you know uh Innovation to the next step

they're already on that side they like you said evaluated made their due process of making sure where this going and they said it's perfectly fine to put 10 billion dollars plus uh into this with no uh repercussions of it being you know deleted or have to retract right they are set to go um and even to the point where Google is like holy crap this is a crisis I had a red alert meeting and like we need to start jumping on this bandwagon uh of of the next big thing and so like yeah I agree with you know I don't think a few artists making some noise will do anything and I think if anything they kind of know that right it's more about what can we get out of this more so than we're gonna stop this whole thing from ever happening

um or making these very successful companies retract their technology and like I guess we got to do something else right so yeah it's a lot of to ask at this point from from what's going on right now I think a lot of it is just um a legitimate frustration that you know this thing happened without our say and um I think it's uh completely legitimate frustration and uh it's just that it's been a long time in the making you know the gaming industry or the computer computer Graphics industry is like the the graveyard of uh Tech startups where so many companies you know Autodesk most of their money does not come from their 3D software like their media entertainment Division division makes something like uh

represent 4.8 or something percent of their revenue in total I don't think Unreal Engine is even a blip into epics Revenue um and so it's just there's no you know you always need to have this delicate balance of there's a huge industry or huge consumer space feeding a bunch of companies to give them software and it's a good balance to have in this industry that just does not exist at all like you could you know substance uh if you look at substance painter in this day and age you literally cannot texture your 3D object without substance painter you could go to mixer eh qixel hasn't updated it since I don't know when you could go to Maori but hey that's just another Beast completely so it's like substance has the best terrible material creation software and the best texture

painting software if tomorrow if they weren't acquired by Adobe and they needed to push their pricing by five dollars there would be a huge uproar and a huge demand for boycott and whatnot and it's one of those things where you can understand it when you're selling to like the masses but this is a very small industry and most artists just don't understand that all the companies that um have been giving them to some extent their uh every technology that enables them to be artists whether it's from Photoshop to mind what not all of them at some point were hanging hanging in by a thread and then they had to get acquired or something had to happen for them to survive and so to me the biggest shift that needs to happen in the art industry Beyond like you said earlier redefining

what creativity is it's just thinking more deeply about how do you support the people that you think are building a future you believe in if it's epic great make sure that you are supporting that company make sure that you are supporting Unreal Engine if it's Unity blender whatever you just need to support your technology providers so that as AI continues to evolve they have every incentive to satisfy you because right now Microsoft has every incentive to satisfy 8 billion people and if 200 million people not even 5 million people are going to lose their job there for them it's like whatever so that to me is really the biggest um change that needs to happen in the

industry is just think like you can't be out there arguing every day you know we are artists who are being paid too cheap but then you have people at substance quickly I remember at quicksole we used to be talking with companies sometimes and uh they'd be like way late into their deadline have a big project and don't have enough people to make all the content they need and we could save them anywhere between 200 to like 500 plus thousand dollars where it's just we have all this content it literally would fit right into your project but getting them to move above five thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars to save hundreds of thousands of dollars was just an insane battle and sometimes even with individual artists getting them to pay I think was like 108 and 28 dollars or something for the engine model even there you still have people going like

eh it's too cheap to get 10 000 assets for 100 bucks like the and this is a problem where a lot of the people in the industry they won't a lot of the software people they won't talk about it because then there might be like a backlash that hey you know are you investing in AI like uh when Tim Swinney said art station is going to do this and that a lot of people are just like you're investing into Ai and whatnot like epic as far as I know have zero AI stuff it's just that you know they're just as lost as you and they don't have the they have the funds but on the fortnite side not on the unreal side like yeah yeah it is a it is definitely we've trained consumers uh into our fault I mean just naturally being competitive we kind of painted ourselves as software developers in uh game developers into a corner like

you're completely right like uh big companies only worry about the end result at the end of the day you know how much money I've been making out of this and how we get there is not really ever a priority and because of that software development or software that we use to kind of make these pieces have never been at the Forefront of even just game developers we don't even there's no united front that's that's the number one reason why there's never really going to be a fight against anything um among game developers ourselves not everyone is really resisting you know I think everyone have at this point tried mid-journey yeah save a diffusion and I can't say that no one's not here well no one's not impressed right I use it yeah it is a moment of like Clarity of like how did it just it's like magic almost right and then you start seeing potential uses immediately there isn't

like any type of resistance I think more the reason this comes from ethics and more about job security uh which is the same argument that people were having when they were in on the assembly line and we had robotics right and we were making things faster and better and of course there were protests but like just like any Industrial Revolution that blows over because the the end result is so immeasurable uh to to human uh input right um yeah and machines will always win yeah now I was just also going to say that full disclosure you know at polygon flow we are not working on some AI Lord thingy I I really you know the reason why I've basically refrained from touching me Journey or stable diffusion it's just that to me it's not even like the the soul artist thing I want to

preserve that I don't believe in that stuff it's just I don't think this is the way that art should be produced not from the you describe you get the thing but that this these Technologies right now it's too early it's too uh it's too robotic ironically uh because you're restricted to this weird process of describe what you want and it has become an art like prompting where you're writing this huge adding tags like octane uh John Travolta if maybe you're making a character all these weird keywords just to create some weird thing that ends up looking good I feel like to me the in an Ideal World these Technologies would start getting more and more integrated into Photoshop and uh this is happening uh thankfully uh depending on where you are into this

opinion and um kind of as it keeps evolving you're likely gonna start seeing like you can just paint uh away some objects and replace them with something you can paint a face and just like uh slide your mouse to make it look elsewhere uh literally like manipulating a puppet essentially is how I see this going down the line and the current iteration it really is like the most gimmicky thing ever it makes good stuff but it's just once it's a very programmer interface is the best yeah yeah it's a very very programmer interface but I think where things will get really wild is that you right now have a race of two technologies number one you have companies like Nvidia further improving stuff like real-time Ray tracing and whatnot with better gpus

every year it's getting harder and harder to make better Hardware because it's just it's getting too big uh too big too complex and uh so that's one race like let's say um in 2030 uh it's possible that you're gonna get like high quality v-ray render great stuff in runtime in Unreal Engine it's possible but if these if you have me Journey For example and these other companies also getting insanely fast at generating images then suddenly you don't need a 3D scene you're not playing a 3D game it's just an insane amount of images generated at runtime and um I was I I've been speaking with a couple of uh epic and Adobe and uh The

Foundry folks over the last couple of uh weeks about this where I feel like it's really likely that AI is just gonna get so fast at some point that all the 3D content is just not needed anymore because you know you can just say give me a video of blah blah blah and then if this button is pressed you know switch the video to tilt the camera to this angle and whatnot in a more descriptive way than prompting of course but yeah like mid Journey but run time giving you almost like a video or a viewport where every move generates another frame when you get there and again I'm saying this with Fascination but this is like a danger to my business obviously because I'm all about making 3D content easier yeah but it's just this is the reality that this is what's happening right now yeah yeah it's uh it's not just adapt or

die this is it uh capitalism never stops yada yada it's just there are so many people out there that are spending every minute of every day doing some of the most insane overtime you've ever seen just on improving these Technologies like and it's for them it's their like purpose in life even to be able to say you know I can generate two different frames of a character looking here and there without it being current I don't know if you've seen some of these ad videos but it's always the face is like twitching and changing when you convert a video to like a stylized version and whatnot it gives you like a blurry thingy essentially and a lot of people right now are just throwing their whole life at this problem how can I uh cause the interpolation phrase yeah frame interpolation and it's

all of these Technologies all of these challenges um if they get solved before we solve real time Ray tracing and Global illumination and whatnot then it's not just 2D that's in danger anymore it's also 3D um so it's it's a very I feel like the one thing that I hate about the AI conversation is that there is no angle I'm sure we're going to see a lot of people going like you know yes this is going to Aid artists and whatnot and I think it can but I really also believe that it's going to replace words yeah yeah like it's it's not going to be in either or it's just a project like uh I don't know Red Dead Redemption 2 happening for six seven plus years about 3 000 people working on it James Cameron's Avatar 2 happening since 2013 or 2012. like if today you Brandon you're like

um I would love to create an a movie of Avatar scale and um or me I want to do that you know we're just gonna be like yeah it's gonna be a good idea and then we go back to adjusting some vertices in our 3D software because the budgets are just insane to do that like it took James Cameron his whole life essentially to get to a point where today he can just make multiple movies in succession and getting budget budget approval before they're even out yeah and uh I think in the long term a lot of these companies like open AI me journey and Microsoft the future that they're working towards is one where you can sit down and work for a month to make a movie of that scale you're gonna hear people saying you can do that in a week that's kind of BS it's going to take a lot of time even if the technology enables you to do it in a week you're going to spend so much time reflecting you know maybe it's a

really yeah talking about some family member who had like an insanely extraordinary life and you want to do it justice and so you spend a lot of time iterating on how it went and yada yada like that can be a very fascinating evolution of the artistic medium at least digitally but it does mean you know Red Dead Redemption only needs 60 or 600 people um for this decade and then after that it could be just capped at like 50 where you have like three or most people are art directors essentially and uh yeah yeah it could mean exactly that I mean a lot of what um Ai and machine learning is enabling is just uh the amount of Labor it takes

to create a project uh and it could it's happening man like when I first heard and I first played with it is it's like all right this is the way it is and it and I'll just kind of go back to what you said about Hardware hitting and limitation I mean I just look at the Samsung Ultra 23 and it's exactly like last year so I was like you know they didn't even change the Cosmetics of it the camera in the front is actually lower pixelation it's mostly uh software that's making it better I was like all right we're hitting a wall like the 40 40 90 is barely fitting into people's PC it's like all right it's getting a lot tougher and it's gonna be like you said a combination of hardware and software which is what Nvidia does a lot now and right what they're doing uh to to improve quality right yeah um and it does trace all the way back to what they were doing you know what was that software where you

can kind of show the indentation of a tree and it gives you like you know full painting or something so like nvo has been trying to tell us for years where everything was going and then like that that interface is actually better than the prompting in my opinion because at least you're yeah it's more direct it's more artist friendly uh I've definitely see a bunch of memes I see a bunch of artists who are like like pub public facing in terms of like outcry about AI but like secretly using it and by like like you know accidentally prompting you as an art director you know people there is kind of like a shaming that's going on with the artist Community which is further dividing uh our our stance on this subject right yeah because I I do see more than people

are saying that they are using this technology but like it's not uh popular to be saying that right now so it's weird I don't think we've ever had a software like that where it's like oh yeah I don't I don't use AI but you know it's like dude he just suddenly became a really badass concert artist yeah I feel like the um the nft kind of drama gave a similar situation where a lot of people they just wanted to see how it works and then they were just told oh so you're for the destruction of the planet yeah yeah and um I I mean I don't want to go too deep into the shaming thing because it's it's just to me that has been one of the most frustrating thing with uh the art world and you know I'm someone who ever since I was 16 I've been doing plugins and

stuff just publishing them out there to help artists like my whole life revolves that's your whole company that we have exactly it just revolves around hey let me help you do art things faster yeah yeah and not in a like uh let me prompt you a way it's more like oh you want to fill a landscape with grass and you want to have like where it's close to the road it should be smaller that type of stuff here is a slider called like gradient scale you move that it makes them smaller near it's all about efficiency yeah exactly and uh it's just I'm having I mean I'm not into I haven't touched social media much over the last couple of weeks but last year it was just drama over drama of just like uh publishing some statement around Ai and a lot of people obviously giving their opinions and then in private having people reach out like yo I agree but I'm too scared to say this look at what I've

been doing on this AI thing and AI that and it's it was the same thing with the nft craze as well where a lot of people you know just publishing it out there some of them did money some of them didn't some of them lost money it it's just that weirdly the art industry has become insanely um it's a joke that's how I feel yeah well here's here's the funny thing right last year with nft it was all about how important digital ownership of artwork was and then this year the flip side of that is like suddenly digital ownership should be free for everyone and when people see that how we're reacting and how quickly we Embrace I can't help but feel that it was tied that the people who were movers right kind of knew that this

at the end of digital ownership was happening and was banking on it right because it pretty it ended pretty quickly I like as soon as NFD was not a thing anymore this this became a thing and it was like the opposite philosophy I've never seen anything like that in the art world where it was so quick in terms of flipping there was also a very to me the most fascinating thing about that Saga was that um so one of the leading voices around this uh ongoing um GoFundMe for like the AI court case and whatnot um is named Carla Ortiz and um when the nft thing happened she was actually like hey this might be interesting maybe we should give this a go and she was called names day and night every day by every person under the sun oh yeah you support global warming you support like it goes

all the way until you just get called the Nazi physically it just goes it just went nowhere and then today she is really giving her all fighting to make sure that and you know she's not like a I shouldn't be here to stare anything she's legitimately concerned that it's unethical to see an industry using other people's work to basically come into existence and that artists there should be and I agree there should be some form of compensation although I don't think it's going to be a penny but there should be some form of composition for all the work that's been stolen and all the jobs that in the future inevitably stolen because this this kind of initial uh jump start that happened last year is now encouraging billions of dollars

being invested into this industry like yeah I completely agree there but I guess the thing is that the art industry can it's a very it's the least diverse space I've ever seen in my life like I've only been in the wests for like since 2018 before that I was in Africa jumping between two countries like my whole life and uh coming into the US I was like okay this is going to be like a super especially in the art industry there's no more Progressive space than this but it's just been like this really hard and rigid almost dogmatic block where everyone thinks the same and uh you you don't have this um drive to improve the medium you don't have you don't have artists almost harassing developers telling them you know you need to texturing is nice substance painter you give us gravity to

do like rust leakages on your old metallic stuff that's great but you need to push further if you give me the like a crazy good unwrapping thing here's all of this money oh the brush system everyone today needs to go online and there's all these weird uh if you're painting to find like good brushes it's just all over the place you know going to the guys who are making like krita or any paint tools I even Photoshop you need a better brush management system and brush Discovery system um even note softwares you need tags because if you're using like Houdini blender geometry mode whatever you need to know the exact name of the node you're looking for they don't have tags and uh it you know it's just all of this uh there there could have been so much more energy pushed towards developers to tell them you need to give us better software and if you do we're gonna compensate you

that never happened the conversation there's no relationship and this is too this is too expensive like zbrush uh was funded by this um VFX award-winning guy for decades so if you bought it in like 2002 you would have updates until maybe 2015 2016 or something most people don't even recall ever paying for the software no and after all of these almost two decades of the software being free they get bought by Maxon and maxon's like Hey we're gonna charge you like 10 or 30 dollars more uh next year please buy it and everyone is like oh my God you're not who you used to be and so yeah there's there's just and it's such a huge group thing as well it's not even that there's a huge Battle of ideas it's just everything goes in the same direction in

general and um that doesn't create an environment like I said earlier where there's a good um diversity of thinking around how to solve problems you know there's no it it would have been nice if you had the AI debate ongoing and then the people let's say who are like we need to be fairly compensated they're also like let's have a GoFundMe to get two or three AI folks to just investigate on how this could be uh helpful for us beyond the prompting interface because it is possible to do that of course to improve the prompt interface there's none of that it's just heck no you know yeah there's no let's own this thing like the nft thing art station was like Hey nfts might be cool uh we're gonna offset our carbon Footprints we're gonna invest in them we're gonna give you the ability to own your artwork we're gonna do our best to

have some good copyrights so that you know your nft cannot be easily replicated and whatnot they were just blocked outright by artists and uh if that was like I said earlier if that was uh solved if artists essentially were like hey Art station we don't believe in nfts but you know we post all of our artworks on your platform it's not like you're deleting it it's not like you're charging us an insane amount of money for all of your services we're gonna trust you because we've been doing it uh basically for the last close to a decade now and we're gonna see where you go with this but in the meantime you know please offset your carbon footprint and whatnot if that had happened I think the conversation on AI today would be radically different I think the copyright laws uh and the end user license agreement even on our station would have been much much uh

different you know the at quixel I remember in 2018 in the office I used to be near the head of sales um amazing friend of mine and um we used to talk about AI here and there and uh at some points um we were talking about appending into the mega scan and usually the license agreement that when you when you buy a license of Mega scams whichever chair you have you are not allowed to use it as training data and uh platforms like art station could have done that as well and if the nft conversation uh was uh left to its own devices at Art station you know if they weren't harassed by artists in 2021 then the art industry would have been way ahead of the curve here where our positions like okay your thing is an nft we've we've updated our end user license agreement no one can copy your nft

without this and that there's an invisible Watermark that allows us to track it without ever losing its source problem solved literally all of these big companies won't be allowed to seal your artwork and if a big court case is one you get compensated because the engine is the license of agreement of our session will have literally said you are not allowed to do that hilarious so that's the best response is like did you nft your artwork when people are complaining about AI it's hilarious nfts had their own set of problems too many I remember talking with the investors like I'm doing a 3D they're like how can you put nfts on it there was some crazy stupid post pandemic money being thrown at it like that's undeniable as well right of course yeah it was you know there's always bad eggs in every yeah every industry for sure

um but I mean what it's hard to argue what you're saying that's the thing because everything you're saying is true when it comes to um or the consumer in our industry in terms of uh game developers or or even gamers are are trained unrealistically how how these are made and For the Longest Time games are fifty dollars a copy you know and we barely raise it to 60 70 because of yeah uh you know people outrage and uh most game nowadays finally are realizing the free-to-play model doesn't work there's so many Battle Royale games that just are shutting down the last couple of months like four or five right because we force games to a point where they have to offer it for free now for a chance uh to to survive which is a

ridiculous model uh for anything right because it's all about user acquisition and all this and that but like you know there's only like anything the top one percent that makes the money from it and they usually make 99 of the money available uh and so it doesn't work uh if everyone just suddenly makes things free right and I think that that that is kind of finally closing the free slave model uh where it's so saturated where consumers are kind of don't even hear about it or you are as interested anymore it's kind of like a uh kind of like a uh an expectation right that they don't really yeah look forward to anymore which is really bad um to your point because in the end who's going to be making these things so there's only one way to do it is that the cost of development has to go down through some kind of tool and in

our cases AI kind of answers that question because now we're taking the efforts of 50 people to possibly one right you're reducing the head count to possibly meet the same quality or good enough quality of the original intention right uh faster cheaper uh and and more efficient I do want to switch the conversation quickly to Jet chatpt how do you say it chat yeah so when mid-journey stable diffusion came out and it's like oh okay I mean the the making and the technical expertise of making art is already figured out in this term in the in this in this direction right this is the the ship has sailed this is where it's going it's going to get better prompting is going to be less dumb it's going to be

more visual aids uh in terms of the UI to to make artists and to make it more user friendly right what what am I doing in Discord typing like a madman all right yeah and I always make fun of those uh because I was in midterm just to check it out and it's like the most ridiculous it was the most anti-discore Channel I've ever seen in a Discord Channel because no one's talking to each other everyone's just typing like a monkey and you just seeing these weird images popping up and within seconds and uh there's no such thing as like uh social interaction no one's talking to no one's curious right I was like what are you making dude type less than that it's like the weirdest images I've ever seen so uh you know conclusively like most is like well I mean what as part of redefining creativity what is that it's like well it's the ideas right it's the it's the it's the story like it's the

it's the arrival of of what all this art content is made for and then I see chat GPT which is all about creating story it's all about mixing the history of the world and the voice of an author that you like and being able to have this brainstorming session that you can pick from uh in word form right and it's like and now you're seeing like a lot of people I don't even know what to call uh artists anymore it's it's people they're people that are prompting stories aided by air and they're and Publishing on Amazon books you know and it's like you know it's there's gonna be a point where we're going to go to a premiere of a movie and it's just this dude just

presenting a movie it's like made by AI you know we're reaching that point where that person is more like a a director right uh and yeah it's reaching a really report so I would love to kind of hear your thoughts about that other side of creativity there yeah um gave me an identity crisis um that scares you more than the uh the concept one man right yeah the the concept stuff to me it's just makes sense yeah yeah it makes a collage and it would happen exactly um but that oh man like you have no you know I spent every single day of my Christmas break sitting down in this corner just coding away brainstorming

away to kind of figure out okay how um do I need to change something in my business does this cause some danger to my long-term strategy yada yada um I'm glad kind of I answered those questions to myself but before that Jesus Christ and I I was talking to so many big big shots uh product directors and the vice presidents at all the big companies in the computer Graphics industry and everyone was like yeah this is scary and not in the sense that it's coming from my job or something but more like the this is clearly a turning points globally for everything that has a lot of text so if you're thinking about code for example we have a gigantic code based polygon flow of like a specific DCC Integrations and whatnot and because

we're startups a lot of the parts you know are kind of some of them are not documented some of them are like rushed for a release and whatnot if you have an AI like this you can essentially telling it tell it here's all of our code base documented and now explain it to me or make new notes or new tools based on what we've done so far and I've tried that I mean the technology at this point Chad GPT has been kind of like uh limited to the points to the brain to be honest like it's super basic because when it came out you could give it huge uh chunks of text and it would be able to consume it and then draw conclusions and give you content away from it so what I was doing essentially in uh mid December was just here are all the nodes that we have at polygon flow make me this new node that does something blah blah blah and it just did it like just like that and you

know sometimes there was uh there were always some airliner yeah but that's like a no-brainer yeah the cool thing is I mentioned earlier to you that node softwares don't have tags for example it's just you need to know the name and this is something that we have had to do we have about 200 nodes each one about with like eight roughly eight tags and we had to type every single one of them and here I could give it like all of our a tags and tell it give me instead of having eights I have like 30 and make them better like read the code to better understand what it's doing and then when you give me something gives me something I'm just like okay make it more artist friendly make it Dumber so that anyone could type those words and we're gonna know this is what they mean and that's exactly what it did so by by doing that I was like okay this this is crazy and um

I think not even like uh this is crazy right now but three years from now five years from now six years from now I don't think I don't think 2030 is gonna look like anything we've ever seen before I think it's just and this is what Chad Deputy to me really meant is that we have no idea about what's to come we really are not ready not in a like a bad or a good sense no clue where it's gonna go it's just so much of what we're doing relies on search so much of what we're doing relies on documenting content you know notion slack Google Docs all of these companies are born through the necessity of humans communicating together yeah and this thing just comes into The Fray and just breaks all those assumptions uh again not in a bad way just goes like okay you have this slack

um you know a big company like um epic might have like 3 000 or something people in their slack with five plus or ten years the history of just conversations that happened in public Channels with this thing you can just ask it hey uh give me a summary of the conversation that we had 3.5 years ago or three years ago something about the nanite Prototype I can't remember what we meant on here and it gives you that and then you can start if your colleagues are not there it can take the spot for them in a meeting because it knows everything in your company since you gave it access to the slack and it's like Jarvis yeah exactly it's kind of sorry yeah Brandon is not here but um I'm gonna he left some notes on the Arts that uh the our teams the character our team submitted so I'm just going to be giving you feedback on that and that's it and it's just there it's arguing like you would thinking like you would

because you gave it access to all your private conversations and whatnot and um it's I mean I could keep going on and on and on but my general sentiment around AI completely changed with judg and I think it's gonna keep changing every single year because there's like you said way earlier in this uh interview there's just no stopping this train and it's only gonna go much much faster down the road do you feel that even beyond the creators they know where this is going like does not does anyone know what the roadmap I mean I'm sure there are some drawing boards of potentials but like they're they're just branches right at this point there's no singular point of where they want there's like no end goal that everybody like these creators are are

thinking correct they're kind of just going along with it seeing where it goes so the technology that empowers uh this new AI systems are called large language models and their main ability is to take a huge amount of data texts or concept art or whatever and then translate it into a human readable format like merge it into a cohesive picture essentially and yeah that can give you great pictures or great text from Chachi Pichi and if you ask open AI what's your goal long term they're going to tell you AGI artificial general intelligence if you ask them 10 years ago well not 10 years ago or six years ago what's your goal long term they're going to say artificial general intelligence so John Carmack left meta to start a

company called King Keen AGI Keen artificial gel intention like everybody today is invested on that one goal and the idea around artificial general intelligence is that things like Chad jpg don't have the ability to reason they just have an insane amount of text and so when you're having a really intricate conversation with them it's not that they're reasoning with your life it's just that for most humans most conversations have happened before and it basically takes the reasoning that people took from there and some extra instructions like if you ask it to say something harmful open AI fine-tuned it to say never say something harmful under any circumstances and so it's not reasoning on its own it's just taking conclusions from its database and with artificial general intelligence the

idea is to have an AI that can reason with you without having knowledge of something that exists in the real world so essentially you could sit down with this Ai and create a new art style a new software a new um physics breakthrough if you want and it's going to be able to um it's not like a human or whatever the form I imagine would likely be like Chad Deputy initially where you converse with it like digitali or whatever yeah but that's the end goal of these companies is an intelligence intelligent agent that is smart enough to help humans discover new stuff like some Altman the CEO of um open AI his thesis is that I don't want to be like Elon Musk and try to bring us to Mars I or send Rockets or solve climate change or

anything like that instead I want to focus only on our social general intelligence because if I can fix that all of those problems are easy peasy can be solved yeah exactly like for him those problems aren't even for humans to solve to calculate yeah exactly and um yeah it's crazy you're right I mean at the very uh I think we all had a feeling that what we're seeing now is the infancy of where AI I think we can all agree which is you know sourcing and recreating or at the very best um uh anticipating you know uh what your your your uh input is it still needs human input human interaction to kind of mold the output the next step is to go beyond that to create something completely new and not come you know using references

or or making collages but like evaluing what they have and come up with a new concept come up with the new idea right yeah um and I think that you know we tend to be very worried we as a species about dystopias and so you have movies like Blade Runner predicting 2019 being this dystopic world where corporations own everything uh they they have Androids or as mercenaries or whatever like almost every Sci-Fi show always has this insanely dystopic angle where uh humans are under the boot of uh whatever big Mega Corp and today you could argue that you know Apple has an insane amount of power there are 30 percent um cut on every single app is just too much um Google dominates search and there's

no way to compete there is some truth to this dystopic world we've been so good at imagining um but at the same time you cannot look at any statistics in the World whether it's you know poverty hunger mortality rate everything is getting better like everything and there is no indication that you know in the next decade things are gonna go south in India or in Mauritania or whatever country it's just you know gradual growth with some bumps along the way and so and this to me actually has been the biggest frustration with the art world is if you go on our session people are amazing at building the most dystopic universes you could ever think for like start creating Arts of a world that you wish to see

you know give to all of these scientists um who are creating these ai's ideas of what tomorrow could be and um I feel like it's just there's no path where I can see AGI coming along and uh suddenly the world turning to or something I I don't think that's possible primarily because it just wouldn't a world like what you see in the Blade Runners and so on you can't sit down and analyze it and come to a good conclusion that yeah this makes sense actually that it would happen um because the opportunity for it to happen has been on since Microsoft was born and had the ability to basically own the entire software industry it's it it's just I'm not that pessimistic about Ai and the future and so on to me

it's just like I'm fascinated by the technology and neutral by the outcome like I said earlier my business is just at re as much at risk as your concept artist whose job tomorrow might be uh out of the picture and all I'm doing now is just thinking okay you know I've been creating all of these nodes I've been creating all of these systems to make uh essentially 3D content creation easier let me make sure that I keep pushing with this technology because AI loves data and once I feel like there's a good enough AI API like let's say gpg that I can access in Python then I'm gonna start saying okay I've been building my business which has an insane amount of data let me combine these together like to me that's how I make peace with it let's say of going like I'm gonna merge with it if AI ends up being a fad which I'm 100 sure it won't

be good I've been improving my business anyway and just going forward if it works out great I'm gonna combine it so I think for a lot of jobs out there they need to figure out what's the best strategy moving forward like they need to ask themselves would I advise my son or daughter to pursue the exact career that I have provided that the kid is five years or something and if the answer is no they need to think for themselves about you know should I switch jobs should I start learning a new trade [Music] um yeah it's it's just like especially in the creative industry I think it's wrong to assume that anything you're doing today is gonna be relevant in 10 years not that it's not going to be but just stay neutral you know don't camp on a position because again like I said earlier we we had no clue any of

this was coming a year and a half ago everyone was just raging on nfts in 2021 and then bam here's pictures with two words here's an AI that you can talk to about anything so my advice to artists and really anyone in the computer computer Graphics industry would be take a step back and think about the big picture assume that they succeed assume that they fail and weight both both outcomes to figure out where the heck you want to be in 10 years from now I think that's a perfect end point uh to to kind of uh stop the the interview I think in in the and I'll just add it where uh if you can't beat them join them and uh if you're not if you're not caught up with the AI art

um uh latest news you'll soon be written out of the picture what you're saying uh and I completely agree with you uh it is very I think anybody not just concept artist but anybody in this industry need to look seriously what the next five to ten years I mean you're completely right you know I have kids of my own would I advise them to do the same it's like it's so uncertain with what this means I don't think obviously game development will cease to exist for humans right but I will I do see that more and more Soul development it's already trending that way right um it's taking less and less artists to band together to create uh games that would take a larger team years ago to do right it's already I

mean we're we're hearing more and more about the sole developer and we're not talking about like uh a farming simulator top down we're talking about AAA quality that seemed impossible like as if someone's trying to make Avatar right now on their own happening every two three years right and I think that's the uh the only certainty I see with the game industry in terms of trend that it is taking less and less people needing to to present an idea uh completely without any sacrifice in quality and and uh Graphics right so absolutely I think if you're trying to uh to prepare yourself that that should be well within your your goals of what you want to do the next five ten years and that I think will make people more excited where they don't have to always form a bigger team to do things

and you can see how AI can play a part in part of the process but uh man thank you for coming on uh you opened my eyes up on a lot of parts of this subject making me think a lot harder than I planned to this morning over in California sorry about that no no but like this is uh I think uh people who are listening to this are are gonna treat these things a lot more serious I think people who are resisting are treating it seriously not to underplay them but I think they are thinking of it in the wrong terms uh and they're just delaying the inevitable uh and I think the faster you are to kind of stay neutral pay attention but I think the faster you are to kind of utilize what's there it's because in the end it is about competition right uh like any any type of entertainment does this help me or

hurt me to compete is kind of like the main question that everyone should kind of ask um not about ethics uh or or things like that uh because corporations don't care about that right so uh without further Ado I kind of want to point uh and shut the mic off on my side to let you have it to kind of tell people out there how to find you how to converse with you or how to support you right uh go ahead um yeah I mean I'm usually available on the polygon flow Discord um I'm also on the I'm on LinkedIn uh you can find you can message me at the founder at polygonflow.io if you have some questions um I tend to be these days very slow to get back to people because I have a lot of work to do but um I'll definitely get back to you and if if you're an artist

um curious frustrated worried about these things all I want you to know is that um on my end I'm really trying my best to make sure that there's a clearer kind of uh workflow let's say future to believe in I want to make more 3D art myself that's what I that's the reason why I came into this industry to just make art and uh now that I'm on the other end of trying to solve it with software um it just makes it all more exciting so I'd love to hear your ideas on what you want the workflow of the future to be and it would be great if you could talk to developers from any company that does one of your favorite softwares like just tell them you appreciate whatever thing feature they're doing give them great feedback uh tell them how you can see the 3D 2D whatever software technology

they're giving to you evolving in the next 10 years give them ideas as a developer developers aren't smart you know we tend to get lost the more we look at code instead of art so your opinion as an artist matters a lot on how the softwares that we make should be built and um yeah I'd love to hear your opinion on that all right well you guys here um uh all information will be listed in the show notes uh to eat for easy access but uh thank you man for coming on and uh looking forward to keep talking to you I don't want to be replaced before uh finding out the greatest and latest so let's talk some more before that happens sounds all right thanks [Music]

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