If you are worried about this (which I think is totally valid) then spend time learning and using the new AI tools. Someone who can keep up with all the changes and know which tools help with which problems will be super valuable over the coming years. So right now, use copilot, stable diffusion, and chatgpt. Learn python, colab notebooks, and HuggingFace. There's so much cool stuff to learn about and use.

I’m currently using chat gpt to help me with programming, but I will look at things that you writted, thank you for opinion

The world of transformers is pretty amazing. What if you became an expert on that?

Maybe I will😀

We invent things to make our lives better (in theory), not to guarantee specific jobs to people. Watch the developments and stay flexible--no one can tell you much more than that at this point.

Think about it this way: We used to "code" using binary code. Then things changed and got faster and easier. This is the same. You will be able to use this tools to do what you used to do only faster and easier.

I'm also interested in game dev and I see this in the opposite way. Right now I could either try to make it as a solo indie dev, or be someone's employee in the field. The first option is extremely hard while the second doesn't interest me. I rather do web dev if I'm gonna be an employee.

Thanks to AI this might change in a couple of years. If these tools keep evolving it might get to a point where I have a bunch of AIs doing everything for me, art, programming, music, etc. while I act as the designer and director. This would allow me to do stuff that's completely out of my reach right now, so I'm very excited about the future.

That is very good mindset about this and also it’s great point, I never thought of it that way.

I have a feeling that ever task over a certain cognitive complexity will be automated at about the same time. Software development is definitely in this group.

If you truly believe that there will be no need for software developers in 3 years (I think this is truly far-fetched), then you have to conclude that there will probably be very few jobs left in 3 years. So, you might as well pursue what interests you anyways.

Is there any point in doing woodwork at home when you can just buy furniture from IKEA?

Some would say no but there's a satisfaction from creating something yourself.

Make your games for yourself, not to compete with AI

I don’t think in exactly 3 years, but the point it will be up to 10 years for example. Somebody had nice opinion about that, but as you say I’m wondering if continue programming or no, but I think it’s great idea to learn work with ai and do stuff with that

As someone else said , AI will be a tool that gives you 'staff'. What you want to do is focus on being a producer of games. The 'programming' of the future will be the generating the prompts and tying all the responses together into a complete game.

If you look at the images AI is generating now the great output is really coming from people laterally thinking. I want a chicken in Armor kind of thinking. They are 'producing' the image. AI is just their staff.

The more lateral your game idea the more AI becomes a tool and not a competitor.

At least for now, lateral thinking , prompt programming and being to tie bits together , will be a winning formula

Welcome to the club, please take a seat right next to the artists and writers.

Tell me about it, I'm supposed to be finishing med school and there will probably be a language model capable of better diagnosis than any human doctor by the time I get my degree

Try to have fun, there was no point in anything initially.

I’ll be a pedantic prick and say we often invent things just because we can, too lol

Just think of it, YOU can be the one implementing AI into games through API's or learning how to code them into your game. You could do this in a creative way so it's still a unique game to you and for your players. Once AI can do it all on it's own, it's up to the creativity of the prompting that will set games apart depending on what kind of things they implement, so you'd definitely still be able to sell games, especially if you've made a few successful ones at that point (with or without AI in them) and because you'll have people who are loyal to you/your brand/your games they'll be much more likely to buy your new ones just because of that.

Besides, at that point, probably most people won't have jobs, so you absolutely won't be alone.

Lol I’m a voice actor so I feel this one hardcore.

I completely agree, excitment comes to mind with all these new tools.

You may need to introspect a bit on the “I really like programming and making games” - what is it you like? Is it having a vision and bringing it to life? Is it sharing your creation with others? Is it sitting in front of a screen banging keys? Is it that it pays your bills so you can buy and do other things you love?

If you love the output (bringing ideas to life & sharing your creation), AI will help you achieve more, faster, and even achieve things you couldn’t have imagined doing yourself. For example, indie dev studios may go from mostly creating 2D side scrollers to rich, immersive 3D/VR games that used to take hundreds or thousands of people to create.

If it’s having that creative outlet that you love, absolutely nothing changes, and likely you’re even more free to be creative with a virtual buddy to bounce ideas off of. If you weren’t doing it for commercial reasons, then who cares what happens to the industry broadly? Code whatever you want.

If you were looking at this line of work as a way to make a living, you may need to rethink aspects of it. Odds are humanity will become far more prolific as they leverage AI for accelerating creative efforts, making it hard to stand out amongst the crowd. Your best bet in that scenario is to embrace AI and become the very best at using it, and thereby achieve superior results relative to your competitors.

All of these scenarios require some degree of change, but in none of them is AI a “threat” unless you just don’t want to change. My advice would just be to understand what you really want, then go from there.

I understand your feeling, I feel the same way too. I honestly don't know what to do either. Right now here's what I think makes sense.

It is likely software development will be one of the first things to get disrupted along with art. You don't have replace everyone just increase productivity greatly. This is unfortunate as those who lose job need to fend for themselves till UBI.

(1) If financial security is an issue you must be at your job till you get replaced and learn to use AI as a tool and prolong the inevitable replacement as long as possible.

(2) Assess how good GPT-4 will be at coding. Given it will be heavily trained on code and openAI is offering foundry to companies, it must be the best model for a while.

(2a) If GPT-4 is poor at programming continue on till next big model.

(2b) If GPT-4 or any other new model is reasonably good at it. Do the following based on how well off you are.

If you have greater than 10X yearly expenses saved. Quit and enjoy life.

If you have greater than 5X yearly expenses saved. Quit and enjoy life at reasonable expenses with some odd jobs along the way.

If less than 5X but greater then 3X saved. Continue working till you get replaced but chill a bit.

Less than 3X saved then we don't really have a choice now do we.

Science fiction magazines are getting overwhelmed with short stories made by AI. They are more of a nuisance than something actually worth reading. Maybe in a decade this will change, but for now I think that you can't take it too seriously. And software development is more than just writing short simple functions. You need to write test code and documentation. Usually you need to go through several iterations with unclear user stories. AI is currently not flexible enough to handle that.

Here is the issue: when every single person on planet earth can be a game developer it's like saying everyone can have their own podcast on Youtube. That increases the competition from a few highly skilled people (programmers) to everyone on the planet Earth (or a really high percentage of people).

The market for people willing to play your game will be about the same, but the odds of you ever making a game that will generate you any money will be like winning the lotto.

The exceptionally creative (or maybe lucky) will be able to make a living, but most people will make nothing or so little that it doesn't matter (similar to creating content on YouTube).

It's not a linear change, it's an exponential. I am already shocked at how well large language models are doing. I will be shocked if it's 10 years. OpenAI has thrown an army of coders at the problem since the upside for Microsoft is pretty big to automate coding.

Here is an article: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/27/2023/openai-has-hired-an-army-of-contractors-to-make-basic-coding-obsolete

Stop trying to work to live and start looking to find what makes you happy when you do it.

AI can create quickly but creativity is where humanity shines, The emotional impact of a wrong note in a musical composition or the blending of multiple forms of art on one medium with emotional attachment, The ideas the creating, They are still going to need to be driven by humans.

AI is a friend, something to cooperate with, Not something to replace us.

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Can you explain your vision of the game you are developing in such detail that another programmer can create it as you envisioned it? No? Then what makes you think an AI can? It might be a competent programmer that can write games. But it's not you so it will not write your game.

If it becomes trivial to develop a game with AI that's great! The only thing that means for programmers is that you think bigger and better and expand the scope of what you hope to achieve.

I agree, I think the period of time where we'll be able to capitalize on this will be pretty short.

And behind the skeletons of telephone operators, elevator operators, bell hops, sky caps, and door-to-door electric meter readers who have been seated for more than 40 years. (and very old type-writer makers, workers in one-hour photo development labs, and Blockbuster employees who will become skeletons soon.)

And behind the dust of buggy-whip manufacturers, blacksmiths and bustle-makers who passed a century ago.

AI should be a tool that will help you. Only you can create the game you want. Not AI.

As a professional software engineer who has worked closely with AI and machine learning, especially lately, you have nothing to worry about.

Since the 50s, there have been a series of solutions nearly every decade year that we're all meant to "eliminate the professional software engineer." From languages that were meant to be so easy that business people could use them, to no-code/low-code solutions, to ML-powered coding solutions.

AI coding can be impressive, but it basically only works on pointlessly general, well-understood, extremely close ended problems. And even then, I've yet to see Chat-GPT consistently produce better than CS 101 algorithms without errors or shortcomings.

Even if it significantly improves, it'll just join the ranks of every other engineer killer tech as a reasonable support tool to allow business people to make basic software. We need to be talking about AGI before you need to be worried, and I don't care what the fan boys and hype men say, we're not even playing in the same ballpark as AGI for now.

You're definitely not the only one feeling that way. I totally understand where you're coming from and I think this is something a lot of people are going to have to face over the next few years, one way or another.

What the ultimate solution will be, I don't know. But for now, I suspect the healthy approach is to redefine your standards for success. Stop measuring the value of making games (or software in general, or anything in general) in terms of what you produce, and start measuring it in terms of what you achieve and how well you express yourself creatively. All the best games might be made by AI, but your game will still be the one you make yourself, even if some of the work you do feels redundant. So focus on that part and make that your goal. No one can express your own personal creativity better than you can.

We already have examples of this in other domains. Chess AIs have been playing at a superhuman level for over 20 years, but people still get satisfaction out of learning and playing Chess. People still paint pictures even though we have cameras that can take perfect full-color photographs. You'll never run a kilometer faster than Usain Bolt, or grow a garden better than the Gardens of Versailles, or write a better novel than Lord of the Rings, but that doesn't mean there isn't something for you to personally achieve in running, gardening, or writing. Hopefully programming can be like that too.

This is exactly it. I’m sure some other development will emerge that allows some to stand out from the crowd, but we’re all gonna be game designers soon enough. Personalized media is on its ways very swiftly.

This is like worrying that autocorrect is going to take your job, or an IDE is going to take your job, or a compiler is going to take your job. These things just make you more productive.

Yep

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Now all you do is be the creative part. With the ideas and what it should make.

Be a statistician or data scientist then It will be the last profession that will be gone in the coming era

think big then it will be the least of your problems. think about how many people are affected and how it transforms the world

We all need to just hold for another 30 years then we will have UBI.

They say "do what you love for work, and you'll never work a day in your life." And that is a complete crock of shit. If you do what you love for work, what you will do is turn what you love... into work. Don't burn out on what you love. Don't "dread Mondays" because you have to go do what you loved once. Don't gripe about how you really aren't being appreciated doing what you used to love, but now are kinda neutral on and, honestly, some days are having trouble remembering what it was you even liked about it. And so on down the spiral. That's what happens, mostly, when you start out doing what you love for work.

Just find something you can stand to do for a living, and do the stuff you love on the side. Not as employment, but because it's what you love. Then there won't be any burnout, AND the AI revolution won't eat you.

I used to love chess and drawing. seeing how much better ai is at these now, I definitely lost interest in improving my skills, now just see them as a mild entertainment

Hahahahaha that’s so optimistic.

You need agi to replace programmers. according to prophet kurzweil its happening in 2029. now go back to coding.

I agree with u/gantork i was about to comment the same, as an indie dev is great that all these tools are coming out. AA quality games in the future made by one solo dev may be possible.

> Here is the issue: when every single person on planet earth can be a game developer it's like saying everyone can have their own podcast on Youtube.

I get your point but my counter argument is how many of those people will actually want to make a game, and how many of those have interesting things to say/are good enough gameplay designers. Unless we are talking about an AI capable of designing games too, then we are fucked.

I'm 25 and a programmer also. You should be happy AI is becoming competent in programming. If you learn to use those AIs as a tool, it will be easier to bring your ideas to fruition. It can increase your efficiency.

Ok wanna make a bet with me ? within 5 years we will have a.i that will take more then 50% job opportunity from your profession.

You need to get GitHub Copilot up and running, it's OP.

That's what I mean. There will be ubi by the time one would run out of Money if they had 10x yearly expenses saved

When you say "make a game" it will be as simple as writing out for the AI what you want, describing the backstory, etc. It will just be prompt engineering. The AI will do all of the coding in the future.

It will be a much more advanced version of generative AI for pictures. The AI will have a really good idea of most of the genres and will probably be superhuman at playing all of the top games so it will understand the gameplay mechanics of all the popular titles.

For anything derivative the AI won't even need much human input. "Make a game that combines the gameplay of game X with a similar backstory of game Z but don't use any of the same names or violate copyright and make it more addictive."

The publishers will spit these types of games out non-stop, which will probably make truly unique and creative games more popular.

That means anyone with some level of creativity will be able to make a game lowering the barrier to entry to almost anyone. That doesn't mean that anyone will be able to make a good game, but the signal to noise ratio will change.

Just like with YouTube there will be a lot of noise. YouTube has millions and millions of videos that nobody wants to watch, but someone took the time to create the videos and post them.

My guess is there will be mountains and mountains of very bad games. And a very small subset of good to very good games. Eventually there will be a rating mechanism for games to become popular (similar to reddit comments and posts).

But it will be extremely difficult to make a buck at it. Unless you're super talented, but instead of having a small number of competitors you'll have an extremely high number. The cream will still rise to the top, but I think a lot of people who might otherwise make pretty good games will be turned away by the hassle of having to make a bunch of good ones before anyone notices.

People assume that it's simply a matter of talent. Plenty of extremely talented people won't have the patience of dealing with an avalanche of crap they have to wade through to get to the top. That will be a tiny subset of really talented and persistent people who probably would make games for their own entertainment regardless. This is likely true of a lot of the top writers who sit down and write regardless because that is something that is cathartic for them and not simply about making a living at it.

I would definately take that bet. Software development is not the job most people think it is, even at the junior level. The thing that most outside of the field dont know about is that the hardest part is figuring out what needs to be done, not how to do it / code it.

Ive seen some impressive and revolutionary stuff from generative AI.. and have been studying it and using it much longer than most here on Reddit, but what Ive learned is that generative AI is really not as job-destroying as people are hyping it to be. The ceo of OpenAI has said this -- GPT4 is going to let some people down, because its not an AGI.

Did the calculator kill all the jobs requiring math? No. It's just a tool for now and you're going to have to know how to use it for quite a while. I'm excited to sit back and talk to my computer letting it write code for me.

"It can increase your efficiency"

So you have a shop with 50 developers. But in a few years the new AI tools increase everyone's productivity by 10. So now you only need 5 developers to produce the same output that you had before. If you're lucky/smart/well-connected/charismatic enough to be one of the remaining five, great. But the other 45 are unemployed.

And if that phenomenon happens across the economy so lots of people are unemployed, i.e., recession, then the demand for whatever it is your shop made may also go down, so some of the remaining five may also lose their job.

My uncle was building his house, everyone said there's no point because Jesus is coming back soon.

Well, he build the house anyway, lived there all his life and died of old age. His kids grew up and had kids in the house. The grandkids sold the house and moved away. Then the Russians bombed the shit out of it.

Moral of the story, live your life to the fullest, whatever happens, happens.

Transformation and change are disruptive. When they happen really fast or on a massive scale people get scared and retreat into traditionalism and conservative thinking. All across the earth right now we're seeing the rise of right-wing nationalism and religious extremism and weird conspiracy theories. . Right now we're going through massive changes due to technology, climate change, changes in the status of women and gender roles, and shifts in global empires - Asia rising, the west struggling. Values, beliefs, traditions, systems of power and authority, are all shifting and changing super-fast and AI will accelerate that.

When things are in a high state of uncertainty and fear humans tend to circle the wagons and put strong men and dictators in charge. As I said, there are many changes happening now, but AI is probably the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Wishful thinking. The world is shifting to the right because people are scared of all the rapid economic, geopolitical, cultural and technological change happening. And the pace of change will only speed up, especially with AI. So the world will shift even farther to the right. UBI is a dream of the left. Ain't gonna happen.

Why do you think so?

Sure! Why not?

What is Gothub Copilot?

Alright meet me here in 5 years 27 Feb 2028, if A.I did not reduce job opportunities for your profession by at least 50% I lost the bet.

that said if it reduced it by 35% or more you have to at least concede it was better then you expected.

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GitHub copilot is a code auto-complete tool that uses a large language model (AI) behind the scenes. From personal experience it saves a lot of time programming.

I feel like the optimism towards the workers are misplaced. There are countless jobs displaced by AI. If 60% of all creative jobs are out of work due to optimization with automation, it's layoffs at a scale we have not seen before.

It's a weird place in history to sit. Pretty cool honestly.

You say you see no point creating games, because "there is a tool that can solve a problem in a split second"

Creating a game is not "a problem" to be solved. Your intention as creator matters. What do you want to say with your game (with the story, the aesthetics, gameplay mechanics, etc.)? What do you want the people playing your game to feel?

You need to have a vision. And only you can have a vision as a human creator. And vision is the most important part of the creative process.

During the creation, there are problems. How do I create a jumping mechanic? How do I design the physics of the world of the game? Etc. And for these problems, the AI will always be a helper.

But let's suppose there is an AI which is generating a fully featured AAA level game from text / image / video / whatever prompts that anyone can use. In that world, there is still the problem of vision. If Joe Gamer sits down and generates a game based on his prompts, there is no vision behind that. There is no artistic intention. There is no statement he wants to make with that game. There is no impact / feeling he wants to evoke with it.

Whereas you do have a vision, you do want to make a statement, you do have artistic intention. So even in this hypothetical situation (which might be reality in 3-6-10 years - whatever) still the "handcrafted" games represent a different kind of quality. Art is valuable no matter if anyone can generate anything. That game you work on (with the AI as "helper) is still yours. It is still your vision and your execution. And that will always be valuable. So keep it up!

My personal experience is that when i’m having a bad day it’ll drag me over the line on stuff I really don’t want to be doing but should be.

Actually, yeah, that is pretty OP.

Well, are you pursuing this career to program and do art or to make games? If there is a faster way to make games and your goal is to make games, you're aligned and can focus on exploration of gameplay, story, mechanics, etc. If you're interesting in being an artist and doing it the old school way, there are people who still make games for older systems and in older styles as a self expression form, Ai will kill neither.

Thats when UBI comes in

only a programmer who understands logic and concepts will understand the context of possibilities and what/how to make best use of AI.

maybe the traditional way of learning and implementing codes will go away in coming years but logic is not going away and you cant rely on gpt to write codes for you before you learn coding properly. after that it doesn't matter, i use it all the time. so make sure you understand coding and how ai models are trained.

Yup, I agree. People keep trying to compare AI to previous big developments, but it’s unique in its ability to replace humans, especially once we achieve AGI.

I feel you bro

Think of it this way, some potential technical barriers to your creativity are now unlocked. Think of all the amazing games people with wonderful, interesting ideas can now make that would have been hamstrung by not understanding the technical intricacies. Think of all the indie devs that got screwed by not having that big AAA budget that usually gets blown on a “safe bet” like Call of Honour Medal 5006 Intermediate Era Warfare. They can now put the same amount of polish on their cool and unique left field ideas that the big software houses can!

but if it becomes easier that means more people are able to do it, that's a problem if you want a high salary or make money from your game.

I agree with this. I'm a middle aged engineer and believe it or not there used to be a time when assembly was considered "automation of programming".

Before before assembly you would have to hot-wire individual 1s and 0s into the hardware to program which was a labor intensive jobs. You had to memorize the instructions and data sequence as strings of 1s and 0s.

Then assembly came along and suddenly a lot of the work was simplified to only writing a command that was equivalent to those instructions.

Then there was another big paradigm shift with "high level languages" like C and C compilers.

Essentially ever since C and other compiled languages existed most people haven't truly programmed anymore. Because essentially you're just communicating to a computer program what the computer program should actually program for you.

The C/C++ or Python code you're writing today? That's not actually programming. It's just you telling the computer what it should program for you.

In a way ChatGPT and other systems like it are just a newer higher level programming language. Because you're still communicating to the computer what it needs to program. But it's just in a more intuitive human way.

I don't think the job of programmer is going to go away at all. Just like Assembly didn't crash the occupation or C didn't crash the occupation. It's just yet another layer of abstraction on top of it.

As an old-school kind of guy I have to admit that I liked writing assembly more than C and I like C more than Python. And yet again I like Python more than typing into ChatGPT. But this is how software development has always been. You adapt to the new developments, you specialize into a very specific niche, or you exit the labor market and become a hobbyist.

Young people have too much anxiety about these things because the last ~15 years have been relatively stagnant in terms of big paradigm shifts within programming.

Big shifts like this used to happen every 2-3 years.

I think that will result in your and your 15 friends playing the game. If everyone can write a game, everyone will, and no players will be able to keep up with all those games. Then, the Epics of the world will create even more fantastic games that you won’t be able to create, and you are left behind again.

A rising sea raises all ships.

Sure, that's a problem for people making money out of it which is a very small % of people while the % of people who can benefit from using this by they own instead of paying is muuuuuch higher.

Yeah as I said in another comment I think there will be a short period of time to take advantage of this, where you'll still need technical knowledge to use these tools to make something as complex as a game, and being creative and a good designer will still give you an advantage.

Once AI gets so advanced that anyone can do it and big studios start fully implementing this tech, then yeah you'll be pretty fucked if your goal is to have a lot of people playing your game. But at that point no other job will be left either.

It will, my time frame maybe to short, but its coming. The world is not scared, conservatives are. Progress will never stop. It may wax and wane but it always moves forward.

When the conservatives start losing their jobs and they struggle to feed their kids due to AI they will get in line and run to the govt. Just like the always do when things get hard.

Happened during the Great Depression, happens during disasters, happened during 9/11, happening now with the rail disaster in East Palestine, OH. Conservative love big government as long as it benefits them. Even now conservatives overwhelmingly approve of govt. programs such as social security, medicare, veterans benefits, etc. This is true of conservatism across the world.

I know a key designer at a major game company. He says they use AI in all their work, today, and that individual game writers will have no ability to catch up. They will always be more informed, better funded, and have more people working on the project; they will always dominate the games in terms of market share, even after it’s democratized by independent game writers.

No, you are not alone. The point in pursuing programming is that you learn to think logically and how to state any problem in unambiguous language very close to mathematics. This means that, unlike people without such an education, you will be more likely to be able to tell the AI exactly what problem you wish to solve, in minute detail. And that, my friend, will be the most useful skill to have for the rest of the 21st century.

I don't fully agree with that, all the advantages of big studios that you described above have already existed for a long time even without AI, yet the indie game dev market is huge, from solo devs to small teams, because not everyone likes AAA games. They might dominate in market share (I don't know the actual numbers) but there's still a place to make a ton of money as an indie dev.

We'll probably still need people to manage AI.

Don't worry, your participation in the coming world wars will teach you to be a man and not worry about such childish trivialities.

You have to grow up sometime.

Until AI can start working on itself and improving itself.

The AI they are already using won’t just do code completion or even just write the code for the games, but direct & produce them, write the story lines, provide artists with starter ideas (both visual and audio artists), and provide smarter chattier responses for, say, non-player actors and adaptive generative scenery. And it’s super efficient, too, taking the effort levels from 1-2 years with 100s of people down to months (also with 100s of people).

Upshot: we should see a lot more games soon (yeah!) and potentially with higher quality.

Downside: big game companies like this are no longer profitable, and so must make their workplace more efficient.

This isn’t just in games. This affects all artists. It affects the creation of music, movies/TV, artwork, book/story writing. There was once a time we figured AI could help us and make our lives better but it seems like we’re so focused on destroying humanity by making it do everything humans can do but better. We’re literally driving humanity towards a cliff with the pedal to the floor doing 120mph.

Don’t be afraid. Embrace it. Learn it. Master it. People are probably already looking for those who can best utilize ai to hire them.

As an artist, it will be difficult to accept when A.I. will be able to write better songs, jokes, articles, and everything else than me, but at the same time it will be interesting to witness. I know it’s not exactly the same, but I do feel we will all re-adjust, and find other ways to create fulfilling lives for ourselves.

Nah, in this industry there is so much need for massive worlds and tons of content that there's plenty of cases where we need educated people steering the ai. Even if it would be 0.001% of raw dev tasks, that could still mean there's plenty of work in every aspect of the field.

RemindMe! 5 years

Watch "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio", Ray Dalio predicted it. there are always wars at this point of the cycle. it's a really good video