AI/LLMs Where is the "Ideas Guy Revolution" of Creativity and Productivity?

I keep seeing talk that AI augments people's creativity and makes game creation and creative work more accessible to a broad audience.

We've had heavily subsidized OpenAI and Google models for a while now. Companies are basically giving away this marvelous and extremely expensive technology away for free to capture market share. It's been a while. These models can crank out thousands of pages per minute. Hundreds of picture perfect 4K art that put whoever WotC commissions for original art to shame. AI creators had the technological capacity to crank out 10^12 copies of Infinite Jest at this point.

Yet, where are those magnum opii? Where is the big AI american novel? Where is the Claude coded indie video game to break sales records? Where is the next big AI graphic novel? Where is the OSR iteration to fix AD&D for good?

Where are they?

aiouh said:

I keep seeing talk that AI augments people's creativity and makes game creation and creative work more accessible to a broad audience.

Click to expand...

Really? Where are you seeing this, other than from people trying to sell something?

I have seen some people saying AI helps them personally; I don't recall seeing anyone claim AI makes game creation accessible to a broad audience. As far as I can tell, it's pretty widely accepted that AI assists significantly in speeding up coding, as long as you already understand how to code. Who's out there saying it will enable you to write a novel, if you aren't already a skilled writer, or make a TTRPG, if you don't already understand TTRPGs? At best, it's promoted as something to assist with drudgework, editing and the like. Again, unless this is someone trying to sell you AI services, in which case they may have an ulterior motive ...

SableWyvern said:

Really? Where are you seeing this, other than from people trying to sell something?

Click to expand...

Everywhere because everyone is trying to sell AI. You are both right in that regard. Although the argument of "art will be accessible" is definitely outdated and rarely seen anymore, because - and that is what @aiouh is probably getting at - its naughty word.

But it was definitely a very common argument when gen AI entered the game.

Retros_x said:

Everywhere because everyone is trying to sell AI. You are both right in that regard. Although the argument of "art will be accessible" is definitely outdated and rarely seen anymore, because - and that is what @aiouh is probably getting at - its naughty word.

But it was definitely a very common argument when gen AI entered the game.

Click to expand...

Well, I conceded at both the very start and the finish of my post that these sorts of claims are going to be seen from people trying to sell you AI and AI services. That's not general "talk" though, that's "sales pitches".

I did hear on the radio that there is an AI musician that has a top 10 album now and like 3 songs on the top whatever. They played a bit and I could not tell. Although the digital voice stuff the recording people used for the last 30 years make all of them sound the same.

SableWyvern said:

Who's out there saying it will enable you to write a novel, if you aren't already a skilled writer,

Click to expand...

Oh, it will--and does. Just look at the glut of them on Amazon. They're not good novels. Or even competent novels. But they are novels, and you can buy them in their thousands. I haven't verified this myself, but I've heard that some 'writers' are putting out a novel a week, written by AI.

(ebooks, obviously--AI doesn't print and ship them for you... yet!)

I don't expect that we'll get anything that's better then what we are used to, just more, and usually not as good. Of course it's nice for for the individual person when they have the means to give their ideas a more or less professional luster with AI. But as I mentioned elsewhere, I think the great misunderstanding is the idea that it's about the ideas, and the implementation can be done by a machine. I suspect that this just won't work, ever. If your idea is just okay and has been there before a hundred times, LLMs will make it look even more derivative (on the other hand, if you expore your idea yourself, it might transform into something more, and more original). If your idea is really revolutionary and new, LLMs won't know what to make of it and turn it into something derivative. Either way, the only thing we get out of it is a greater number of mediocre products on a market that is swamped with them, anyway.

That's why, at this point, I'm pretty convinced that AI, or at least LLMs, won't really change the creative marketplace significantly. We had tons of mediocre stuff before, now we get megatons. Who cares? The only difference is that before, the mediocre stuff usually wasn't morally suspect, so you could basically tell everyone: "Great, do your thing, be creative, as long as you don't plagiarize!" Now we're supposed to accept large-scale plagiarization as the norm.

Morrus said:

Oh, it will--and does. Just look at the glut of them on Amazon. They're not good novels. Or even competent novels. But they are novels, and you can buy them in their thousands. I haven't verified this myself, but I've heard that some 'writers' are putting out a novel a week, written by AI.

(ebooks, obviously--AI doesn't print and ship them for you... yet!)

Click to expand...

That it can write novels is fact. But, again, is there any substantial group of people (who aren't trying to sell something) claiming they're good novels? I see a lot of people raging against AI slop, which feels like the exact opposite of what the OP says people are talking about.

"AI can be used to churn out prose that's just coherent enough you can potentially get people to pay for it, and the cost to effort ratio makes this a feasible way of making some money if you go about it the right way," feels, to me, like it's a long way from what the OP says people are talking about.

aiouh said:

I keep seeing talk that AI augments people's creativity and makes game creation and creative work more accessible to a broad audience.

...

Yet, where are those magnum opii? Where is the big AI american novel? Where is the Claude coded indie video game to break sales records? Where is the next big AI graphic novel? Where is the OSR iteration to fix AD&D for good?

Click to expand...

Again, I ask: outside of sales pitches, where is this talk? Who's out there claiming that using Claude to code your game will enable you to break sales records? Who's talking about how AI is going to enable someone to create next big graphic novel?

I find AI useful for generating some art for my private gaming group (but not for generating anything I see as being "my" work or which I'd be comfortable using commercially). I have a number of friends in IT who talk about the way it speeds up the process of actually writing code, allowing time and effort to be applied elsewhere. I have another friend who finds it useful for managing the administrative side of his business. I see some people in TTRPG communities talking about how AI helps them summarise session notes or generate ideas as starting points. But I can't think of anyone (again, other than people making sales pitches) claiming an AI augments creativity in a way that enables someone to generate a great work of fiction if they did not already have the talent to do so. AI prose, especially, is widely scorned, not praised.

aiouh said:

I keep seeing talk that AI augments people's creativity and makes game creation and creative work more accessible to a broad audience.

We've had heavily subsidized OpenAI and Google models for a while now. Companies are basically giving away this marvelous and extremely expensive technology away for free to capture market share. It's been a while. These models can crank out thousands of pages per minute. Hundreds of picture perfect 4K art that put whoever WotC commissions for original art to shame. AI creators had the technological capacity to crank out 10^12 copies of Infinite Jest at this point.

Yet, where are those magnum opii? Where is the big AI american novel? Where is the Claude coded indie video game to break sales records? Where is the next big AI graphic novel? Where is the OSR iteration to fix AD&D for good?

Where are they?

Click to expand...

I don't think this creative potential exists. AI augments people's creativity in a similar (but not identical) way to random tables. It isn't world changing. It is better in that it is easier to access and more specifically calibrated to your world, but worse in that the default outputs are going to be generic. That seems bad for creativity, unless used in a specific way.

Likewise, I don't think you can make a great novel because a novel isn't about technical skill. It needs to speak to being human which AI can't do.

The Claude coded indie game--I'm sure this is on the way. But the AI is doing the technical, not creative, lifting.

---

Some personal uses--these are basically all about transforming data from one for to another.

(1) I used a LLM workflow to do my taxes, which it did quite well.
(2) General computer programming for my job.
(3) Layout: I like pretty minimal character sheets. I used to make these in word. Now I have a LLM write them in LaTeX. I have some style preferences loaded, and it can pull spell text and such from SRDs &c.
(4) I've been wanting to run chainmail, but the rules are not well presented. I uploaded a pdf and got out a cleaned up rewrite of only the relevant stuff. It required an editing pass, but there weren't too many errors.

SableWyvern said:

That it can write novels is fact. But, again, is there any substantial group of people (who aren't trying to sell something) claiming they're good novels?

Click to expand...

No idea.