I think you're making a lot of good points for the current SOTA.
That being said, it took us a few hundred years all in all just to work out paint, so if people keep working with this tech eventually a game designer could, in theory, lay out the skeleton of a game and tell an AI to do the rest, give it pointers and occasional original art to work into the system, and ship a completed playable game in days.
Whether it will be worth playing those games is an entirely different enchilada to microwave.
> lay out the skeleton of a game and tell an AI to do the rest, give it pointers and occasional original art to work into the system, and ship a completed playable game in days
"But, think of the indie game designer!" is getting to be quite the take.
We have a machine that produces slop and the selling point is how fast it produces it? And how more people should be using it to spend less time on creative aspects? Would the world be a better place if GRRM "finished" his most well-known work sooner rather than never?
Something about the phrase "tell an AI to do the rest, give it pointers" reminds me of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" from Fantasia. Not in the surface level dire-warning about laziness, automation, and losing control that story is telling but in that Mickey didn't spend any time thinking about what he was doing and the Wizard's disappointment at the end.
This whole attitude is just the attitude of tech demos. Nothing good or worthwhile will be "completed playable game in a couple days" actually making anything good takes a huge amount of time and effort and thought.
Empowering a small indie studio or solo indie dev so they could make something AA or AAA quality should be the actual goal.
If you have 4 people able to make a skyrim level game in a year or two that's an insane feat, that should be the goal. Not someone who doesn't give a shit throwing some prompt and making some slop game that is exactly like 500 other slop games people generate with one prompt.
Like with that tech what kind of games would say random solo developers plugging at it and refining it be able to make in 4 years, that is the extremely compelling stuff. One person being able to make some auteur AAA quality game on their own, even if it takes a long time that might actually be good. If there are AI games those are the ones I'd want to play.
That being said, it took us a few hundred years all in all just to work out paint, so if people keep working with this tech eventually a game designer could, in theory, lay out the skeleton of a game and tell an AI to do the rest, give it pointers and occasional original art to work into the system, and ship a completed playable game in days.
Whether it will be worth playing those games is an entirely different enchilada to microwave.