Google Genie 3 generating explorable worlds from a text prompt is genuinely strange to watch, and the tech demo framing actually undersells what's happening. Even in its rough state, it's compressing something that used to take hundreds of people years of work into a single prompt.
Most of the conversation lands on whether games will look better or worse, whether it feels soulless, that kind of thing. But the more interesting question is what happens to the people who currently build this stuff for a living. Level designers, environmental artists, narrative designers who do worldbuilding. These aren't lowskill jobs that were always going to get automated eventually. They're craft jobs people spent years training for.
The cost efficiency argument keeps coming up with robotics and physical labor, but it's starting to apply to creative industries in a way that feels different because the output is harder to measure. With a factory robot you can count units. With AIgenerated game content the metric is engagement and vibes, basically.
Is there a version of this where the tools just expand what small teams can build, or does the trajectory pretty clearly lead toward massive headcount cuts at studios the moment the quality clears a certain bar? Genuinely not sure how to read it.
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