Having working on a bunch of AAA games, having the same number of artists making a lot more assets is a way more likely outcome than having less artists make the same stuff as today - especially if you take in account the trends of making everything have huge worlds with lots of detail.
This is what I was thinking even though I’m totally outside the gaming industry. It seems like the appetite for good quality artwork in video games is absolutely insatiable.
If you can hack out unique stuff in hours, not days, suddenly every building in every city of GTA can have bespoke furniture and stuff that’s absolutely unimaginable to us right now as assigning a dev to spend three days modeling a couch used in one place is absurd.
This is how we get one step closer to actual realistic or extremely detailed environments.
I was playing God of War and the attention to detail in a room filled with treasure, how it reacts when you hit it with your weapon and coins fly everywhere, it was amazing.
Imagine what these same devs could do where their workflow takes 1/10th or 1/100th the time.
I think this is probably true in the short term, but in the long term I think the ability of AI to create art will outpace the need for more new assets. Right now there's definitely cleanup that needs to be done on AI-generated stuff, but the need for that will diminish quickly. I'd be shocked if by the end of the decade we still had artists cleaning up AI work.
Games may need 1000x the assets they do now, but if AI is 10000x faster at creating them than humans are, then you're still going to see a big reduction in the number of humans needed. Eventually we'll get to the point where the game's AI is procedurally generating assets during gameplay (and eventually you'll get AI just generating the games).
