noticing it more and more. i like to play retro video games but i don't actually do it that often. 5 years or so ago i got a SNES mini and a playstation classic and one of those anbernac handhelds in the span of a year or two, so I was spending a lot of time reading lists online of games people thought were notable, underrated, good games for genre newbies, etc.
i have been playing games again recently so i have again been looking up games and the difference in content you get now is astounding. five years ago if you searched something like "best nes RPGs" or "obscure ps1 games" you would find lovingly handcrafted lists and articles by people who were passionate about it and wanted to share, make readers laugh, or ignite interest in something. Now there's like 20 different sites that each have ai generated "best (genre) games for (system)" lists for every system and genre combination possible, with generic game descriptions, list orders likely cribbed from one of those ranking sites, and nonsensical filler copy ("every RPG enthusiast loves the N64" type words just mashed together)
photographs are also no fun to take or look at anymore, accelerated by new ai image generation but honestly ever since smartphone cameras started automatically editing the shot out of your picture before it even showed it to you.
when i was a kid i wanted to be an author, glad i just got depressed and useless and never pursued it, considering what that space looks like today.
internet was a mistake
That reminds me of how AI art is so samey looking. It's like everyone uses the same prompts and the same filters. I get that it was already creatively bankrupt but come on you have the power of the entire internet.
It's because most people using image generation aren't artistically minded, and aren't putting in effort to get a result better than "close enough" (and corporate ai tools have built-in prompts to give things the "ai look.") If you run an image generator locally you have more control over the output, with loras or whatever.
It can be used as a tool by artists to streamline mundane and repetitive tasks, but the most common and widespread uses really are just endlessly lazy and repetitive pandering slop (prompts like "yet another cyberpunkerino waifu" done millions of times over judging by the largest LLM communities) on such a wide scale and with such massive data centers dedicated to churning it out that it is already an environmental disaster.
I feel like even when/if it gets into art workflow, it'll eventually be like what procedural generation was for video games. The flaws would just be too obvious and people would end up steering away unless even the "AI" component is bespoke and human crafted. I'm thinking of how the procedural generation if D2 was carefully tweaked so there was some level design consistency.
More often than not, we'd have lazy garbage like Starfield, except treat printer edition.
Yeah sadly you won't get no man's sky, where they work to fix what is broken about the process.
Btw, I feel like the NMS arc is very similar to what ppl will have to do w AI slop. Like, you could take a prompt but then the amount of work to make it good is going to be massive.
Credit to those devs tho, they've really delivered (years later) a great space experience