"If I could, I'd fix it.
What am I clinging to in the face of the AI avalanche hitting art?
The situation right now around AI applied to video games and to art in general is, above all, unsettling. Faced with something this massive, there's not much left to do but watch cautiously and sit with the anxiety of feeling marginal.
Even so, AI applied to art is a breath of fresh air. Oil painting didn't disappear when acrylic paint came along, and acrylic didn't disappear when pixels came along either. A medium is just a medium — it's the artist's job to figure out what can be expressed through it, what qualities are inseparable from a certain kind of texture, what it actually takes to create with each material. Every material has its own process. Painting in oil isn't the same as painting in watercolor. The ritual is like writing yourself a prompt.
AI is a tool — a questionable one in plenty of ways. I'm not going to get into the big debates here, things like AGI or human replacement, because that's not what I want to dig into.
Image, music, and writing generation models were built, in a lot of cases, on outright appropriation, and there's no arguing that point: anyone would be upset to see someone profit off their work without giving anything back.
The refuge, in an age of automation, has to be unnecessary creation. AI is a tool, and I don't want it drawing for me, I don't want it composing music for me. Why spend hours and hours writing a game's soundtrack if I can just prompt it into existence? First of all, because it wouldn't be fun. Because I don't want to flatten into a prompt something that is, to me, purely human and emotional. Because I'd lose out on the mistakes. Because it'd mean someone else doing the thing I love, instead of me. Because I'd rather skip sleep and hit the deadline with the work actually finished than spend my time fine-tuning prompts. It's cognitive sovereignty. Craft sovereignty.
That's why it's better to ask an AI to build the exact tool I need for how I work: nothing extra, nothing to distract me, just what I'm actually going to use. Unlike the thousands of programs out there trying to solve everything at once. Something like picking out materials at an art supply store that has whatever I could want, tucked away in a drawer until the moment I think of it. Something that gives me the freedom to do the work myself, so the only thing standing between me and my idea is my own inability to bring it to life — and to feel proud of what comes out of it.
I'm not turning a blind eye to the ecological cost of these models either. And there's a contradiction in that I haven't fully worked through: just as it unsettles me to have an AI draw or compose in my place, there are probably programmers who feel something similar when I ask an AI to build me the exact tool they could have written themselves. It's a tension I carry, not one I've solved.
Because humans have always made tools, and have always tried to push past their own limits. Because new eras bring new languages, and there are responsibilities we can't ignore as humans. One is making sure it doesn't tear through everything in its path, the way some people fear. The other is to keep making things that stand as a testament to who we are right now.
Obviously the debate is wide open, and AI is full of paradoxes. But in the meantime, before AI uses me, I'm using AI. To get my hands on the tools I always wanted — the ones that maybe never even existed."