We're working on automating the labor too. Turns out art was just easier.

Hold your horses, making by hand another 1000 cheap ugly stock waifu gacha images is not art. It is and was slop.

Most j-games that have ads that reach me were slop since forever. Same story, same looking girls, same gameplay.

I mean, that makes perfect sense. Game development is mostly programming, so if you're an aspiring game developer these are probably inconvenient bits you want to get out of the way rather than what you're there for.

Where Winds Meet is a Chinese free-to-play RPG that was briefly popular earlier this year. The devs actually considered it a selling point that NPCs and sidequests were entirely LLM-driven. Look up a video if you want to see some of the most awkward and cringe-inducing dialog this side of Soulstorm.

i can barely find a gaming blog these days that aren't: written by AI, clickbait, or videos (also AI)

journalism is a lost art

Most national medias are running AI services to translate "important" international stories.

I wish they'd spend less time running international stories (I know it's for the boomers incapable of reading English) and more time on doing proper journalism

Is really sad

Having lived in Japan for over a decade, I think the west generally over-elevates/-mystifies Japan. Capitalists gonna capitalist. They can do more work with fewer people and make more money. Most Japanese consumers also do not care at all about generative AI. It's in the train stations, city offices, and everywhere else as a part of the normal.

There's a big difference between what's happening in the commercial world and art circles. I can't speak for food but with regards to the topic here, Japan has a huge creator market and that market responds very differently. A year back, their biggest creator fair had a few "artists" selling AI "art" but essentially no one was interested and they hardly sold anything while others had sprawling queues. This year there was pretty much 0 as a result.

Yeah, it does seem inconsistent with the view that anything AI touches must obviously look awful.

Maybe they have high standards for what they generate, use the models as "fillers" or "finishers" (broadly adding details or patterns to a base sketch, then touching up on any errors or ungeneratable details), or rely on models they've vetted for consistent quality? I doubt they're all using a piss filter chatgpt text to image gen.

Japanese creatives are now heavily split on LLMs. What with half taken to defend their work with watermarks and proofs of timelapses and manual processes, and there's fierce loyalty for Miyazaki et. al. While others are either playing with dozens of LLMs to produce even animations, churning out thirst traps by the dozen, and still others "enhancing" game screenshots of their player characters in poses and skimpy clothing.

Have you considered that wherever you're from is the weird place? They are much more optimistic about AI in Asia.

you might spend a small fortune on a couple of strawberries

Isn't that mostly because their farms are so far behind and producing such low volumes that they can only survive with artisanal hand picked/whatever products

Like every region, there's developers who love throwing up asset flips, and there's developers who make stuff out of passion.

I remember one of the favorite comparisons of AI generated art I saw in a video on the subject is as an expensive replacement for stock footage (and in game development I guess it would be stock assets).